The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, c.1270–c.1420, by Joan Greatrex

Abstract

The monastic cathedral was an English anomaly, a singular facet of the clerical establishment which reflected the (largely) episcopal origins of regular (and especially Benedictine) observance in the province. Secured in the Lanfrancian reform to serve as an instrument of regular and pastoral renewal, the nine cathedral convents of Black Monks became established as the keystones of monastic England, providing that large and diverse constituency with leadership, intellectual power and an unrivalled experience of life on the frontier between the cloister and the world. Their unique position, and the continuity that it afforded them at the Reformation, has also served to set them apart in the historical record: with the possible exception of Westminster Abbey (at any rate briefly a cathedral chapter) these are the best documented of all England’s medieval monasteries, retaining not only a fair proportion of their fabric, a sizeable fraction of their libraries (sometimes still in situ) but also many of their administrative records—among them complete chronological sequences of the compotus rolls of the obedientiaries, the only documents which can offer a comprehensive view of life within the monastic enclosure. Joan Greatrex has mined these records for more than thirty years, and surely there is no other current researcher who can match her perspective on the internal dynamics—and the personalities—of these eight communities. Some fifteen years ago, she captured the human dimension in her compendious Biographical Register, which recorded the life-histories of the men who made their profession at the priories between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The present work is intended as a companion volume, providing a comparative survey of the monastic life of the priories in the period when their independence and influence was greatest: before c.1270 they could scarcely secure a superior unhindered; after c.1420 they were challenged by the external pressure for reform and, internally, Greatrex suggests, by a pervasive, existential ennui.