Medieval Lives (2004) s01e02 Episode Script

(Choir singing) once upon a time, far from the turmoil of the busy world, there lived a monk.
He dedicated himself to a life of prayer, of hard work poverty self-denial and silence.
- Lovely day.
- shh.
His life was shut away from the temptations of ordinary mortals.
He dedicated himself to God in a life that was literally out of this world.
But if monks in the Middle Ages really were like this (Man screaming) .
.
why did so many people come to hate them so much? At the abbey of Bury st.
Edmunds in 1327, the last thing the monks had on their minds was the contemplative life.
For the entire year, the monastery and the townsfolk had been locked in a series of pitched battles which culminated in the abbot being kidnapped, bundled into a sack and carted off to London, where his eyebrows were shaved off.
And Bury t Edmunds was not unique.
it was an age when abbots had their own armies, bishops ran brothels, and archbishops often ran the country.
Maybe even a monk's life wasn't quite what we imagined either.
The idea of living a life cut off from your fellow men in order to worship God didn't really get going in the west until around 500 AD when an italian by the name of Benedict decided to escape city life and hide himself away in these mountains.
Benedict hadn't liked Rome.
For his taste there was far too much eating, drinking and sex and generally having a good time.
What he was looking for was a nice cave, with no fitted carpets and no plumbing.
♪ Hallelujah ♪ so he moved in here.
He preferred his food to be lowered down to him in a bucket and only once a day.
And he didn't want any oyster sauce or deep-fried wontons.
in fact, he didn't want anything he could enjoy.
As far as Benedict was concerned, God placed us on this world so we could refrain from enjoying our time here and concentrate on thanking him for placing us here.
it's a curious philosophy but one which seems to have had a lot of appeal.
My soul doth magnify the Lord Benedict just couldn't keep a good thing like this to himself and soon there were lots of other would-be hermits joining him so they could not enjoy themselves in solitude together in the company of the great man.
if there's one thing hermits like Benedict can't stand it's overcrowding.
And within a few years, he had so many followers sharing his solitude that he decided to organize them into separate communities.
Monasteries.
And he wrote a book of rules for monks to follow.
According to Benedict, his rules weren't that strict.
But he wouldn't let his monks eat red meat and you weren't supposed to talk at meal times.
However, Benedict did allow his monks to make a sign if they wanted something like, salt - that was the sign - and we know what these signs were because the monks compiled dictionaries of their sign language.
For example we know that the sign for king was this.
And God wasking in heaven.
While the sign for martyr, you may be surprised to learn was this.
And fish was simple.
But for some curious reason, herring was this sign.
And for some even more curious reason trout was the sign for herring followed by this which is the sign for woman.
What Benedict hadn't envisaged was that these simple signs would blossom into an entire language of their own.
The same signs were used in monasteries all over Europe, a sort dumb Esperanto.
o whatever country a monk found himself in, he could always convey to a fellow monk exactly what he wanted.
Benedict's book of rules became famous and his monasteries flourished.
in the 13th century one was built on top of Benedict's actual cave.
The monastery of San Benedetto perches halfway up the sheer rockface where Benedict sought solitude.
i was shown round by the unlikely figure of an Australian monk who came here 41 years ago.
so Father Giovanni, can you tell me about - this painting over here? - Yes.
An episode of the life of st.
Benedict.
- What's he doing? - in one of the monasteries founded by the saint in this valley, there was a lazy monk.
He didn't want to stay in the chapel during the prayer.
it was the devil who was pulling him out, see? on the right you see st.
Benedict who cured this lazy monk with a stick.
(terry ) He beat him? Not a popular method today, is it? there's st.
Benedict during a temptation.
- see the devil there? - He's breathing some fire, isn't he? Exactly.
there's a third devil here.
- Let's have a look.
- that's the main devil.
Behind bars, he's meant to be kept in prison, is he? Yes.
(Laughs ) - Benedict has got him in jail.
- Exactly! How when the monastic movement has really Monks are taking themselves away from the world, how is it they've had any effect on the world? oh, they take themselves away from the world to conquer the world.
solitude, silence, that's the method, eh? the main work of the monks is prayer.
ora et labore.
You know, prayer and work.
The monks had to support themselves and supply their own needs so they could keep their distance from the world.
But keeping away from the world, was to prove the one thing that monasteries weren't very good at.
The unworldliness of monks just wasn't destined to last.
And ironically, it began to break down because of people's belief in the power of prayer, and in the idea that the purer and simpler the life you led, the more likely God was to listen.
And since monks were supposed to lead purer and simpler lives than anyone else, their prayers were seen as a hotline to God.
Hallelujah Rich folk and warriors begun to pay monks to do all the praying they were too busy to do for themselves.
Prayer became a commodity.
it gained a commercial value and that was to prove the undoing of the whole system.
it was a pretty rough world outside the monastery wall.
After all, fighting men were professionally engaged in the business of breaking commands, especially that one that said, ''Thou shalt not kill''.
A warrior's soul was not an easy one to save.
in fact it required a strenuous effort by a significant number of people to pray his way out.
After the Battle of Hastings, for example, the Church demanded 120 days of penance for everyone killed.
William the Conqueror in his lifetime must have been responsible for something like, mmm 10,000 deaths.
That's about 3,300 years of penance.
He wouldn't have finished yet, not until the year 4366.
However, if the work was split up amongst a couple of hundred monks, William could have his soul cleansed in less than 18 years.
he founded a string of abbeys to pray for his soul.
in fact anyone who had any money would deem it only wise to invest a bit of it in the innocence of monks.
And far from living lives of extreme poverty and discomfort, monks began to find themselves as rich as priests.
the monks of the abbey here benefited so much from various kings that they owned the entire county of West suffolk, as far as the eye can see, in every direction and further.
they built this town of Bury st.
Edmunds and you can still see how the abbot carefully planned it on a grid, just like New York.
Every single commercial transaction involved a cut for the monks.
Whether you ran a barge on the river or a stall in the market or sold fish or supplied building materials.
the abbey administered justice and pocketed every fine it took.
it ran the Royal Mint.
Being abbot of Bury st.
Edmunds was literally a license to print money.
the abbey even owned the very horse droppings on the street and the monks took their cut of that.
Every abbot jealously guarded his monopoly.
take Abbot samson, for example, who ruled Bury with a rod of iron in the late 12th century.
one day he heard that his dean, Herbert, had built a windmill without his permission.
the abbot was more than a little miffed.
in fact, his biographer tells us, ''samson boiled with fury ''and could hardly eat or sleep.
''He summoned Herbert and said, 'i thank you as much '''as if you had cut off both my feet.
By the faith of God, '''i will never eat bread until that building is destroyed.
'''' Well, it was a subtle enough hint, but Herbert took it and destroyed the mill immediately.
As a rich landowner, the Abbot of Bury was supposed to marshal a small army for the king.
Well, Abbot samson had no problem with that.
in 1193, he personally donned armor and led his troops in the siege of Windsor.
Fighting for Richard i against his brother John.
But poor old st.
Benedict and his rule book must have been turning in their graves.
There was this paradox at the heart of medieval monasticism.
one of the driving forces behind monasticism was the idea that as monks led purer, simpler, more austere lives, their prayers were worth more than other folks'.
of cause the purer, simpler, more austere a monastery was, the more it attracted wealth from rich clients anxious for it to say their prayers for them.
the irony was that the wealthier a monastery became, the less pure, simple and austere its lifestyle became and hence less valuable its prayers.
- it was a vicious circle.
- Exactly! Exactly! a new breed of monk would take monasticism back to basics.
Here on the North Yorkshire moors, a group of monks arrived from the French abbey of Clairvaux in 1132.
these monks had come to get back to the basics of st.
Benedict's rule and enjoy lives of abject poverty, vegetarianism and strict discipline.
they called themselves Cistercians and wore white robes to symbolize purity.
they also wore no underpants to symbolize i'm not quite sure what that symbolized, but st.
Benedict hadn't mentioned anything about underpants and so the Cistercians would have no truck with the things.
some call it bare-bottomed piety.
these Cistercians were determined to worship God not only without underpants but in the most remote and uninhabited places.
At the start there were just 12 monks and an abbot living here in wooden huts, but within 2o years the wooden huts were a distant memory.
They named the new monastery Rievaulx, and many more were soon to follow.
the Cistercians were more than a religious movement.
they were a brand.
they invented a sort of Mc-monasticism, a worldwide franchise in which uniformity was the key.
the same books, the same food, the same customs, the same clothes, the same architecture.
it's said that a blind monk from scotland could find his way round a Cistercian monastery in scandinavia.
Archaeologist Glyn Coppack has been examining Cistercian monasteries all over Britain.
He explains how the neighboring Fountains Abbey was constructed.
Glyn, how were the Cistercians getting back to basics? Well, they were simplifying their architecture.
they spent a long time getting it right.
so you have simple pillars with pointed arches and to add to the austerity the whole thing is painted white.
You can still see looking around us where the weather hasn't taken it off 'cause it's very, very fragile.
But the whole thing would have shone inside.
so this is kind of symbolic purity.
oh, absolutely.
And in the windows, plain glass, no colored glass.
How do you know they had plain glass? Well, we've got some.
Here's some Coincidence.
.
.
we found earlier, you see it's just a plain green glass, yes? - No color in there.
- Yeah.
And you don't see very many of these.
this is a processional cross.
this would normally be gold or silver.
this is iron.
it's as simple as you can get.
Now why are they doing it? Who's this going to appeal to, this sort of, kind of austerity? Well, the simpler the religion, the harder the life, the more powerful the prayers.
And the people they are appealing to are those who need the salvation more than most.
the military classes, professional soldiers.
The mill, the brewery, the kitchens and the latrines of the monastery were all fed by a sophisticated water supply.
And in fact when you go to the cloister, water comes out of there in taps like this.
- A tap! - that's a tap.
it's got a little Celtic beast's head there.
Actually in the hole there.
i see, so the that's off and then to get water coming through you just turn it like that and the water flows through.
And then when you've finished you turn it up back and it stops.
that's brilliant.
so what date is this? that's about 1170.
Now this is the sort of thing that many of us didn't have until about 192o in our own homes.
The Cistercians weren't poor monks who arrived in Yorkshire by chance.
The whole thing was run to a centrally coordinated business plan and they were ruthless with anyone who happened to get in the way.
one critic wrote, ''They raze villages and turn out the parishioners ''who are reduced to poverty.
'' The Cistercians were natural businessmen.
At Fountains they bred a supersheep, which produced the highest quality wool in Europe.
At Rievaulx, they moved into heavy industry.
Another archaeologist, Gerry McDonnell, is trying to work out just how advanced their technology was.
What are you actually doing here? What we've built here is a furnace that's based on one of the ones that we excavated further to the north up Bilsdale and it's basically an early type of so-called ''bloomery furnace'' that was the dominant method of producing iron in the 12th and 13th century.
so what are they doing with it? they need their own supply quite clearly.
Just to build the abbey itself you need the steel tools, the chisels, the saws, et cetera.
But also for example, to shear the sheep, you need sheep shears which were steel-edged tools.
But the quantity that they're producing and the granges that they've got must have been producing far in excess of what they needed so they were actually selling it on into the open market.
the advantage of the Cistercians is they have a good European network and so the ability to for technological transfer within that group is very, very good and so we know they were competent engineers and so i'm sure that they were at the forefront of technology.
As the Cistercian monasteries grew wealthier so their architecture got more elaborate and decorated.
By the 14th century they'd be picking out these arches with lines of red paint and by the 15th, they were even throwing in the odd sculpture.
Heavens above.
And of course no well-to-do monk wants to share a dormitory, so they all moved out and established individual bachelor pads, each private room with its own fireplace.
You can see it's cut into the wall here.
And a bedroom upstairs complete with an en suite lavatory.
(Terry ) And remember t.
Benedict's diet? His monks weren't supposed to eat the flesh of four-footed creatures.
Monks, however, could eat meat if they were ill.
so meat was available here in the infirmary.
so little by little the brothers gave up eating in the refectory and started to take their meals here instead.
Cistercian logic for you.
(Terry ) it was another loophole just like the one that allowed monks to get around the ''no talking at meals'' rule by using sign language.
in fact, most of the signs were about food which isn't surprising because in a monastery there was a lot of food to talk about.
Here in Glastonbury, for example, the abbot's kitchen was one vast chimney.
Every week contained at least one feast day in which the poor monks might have to deal with something like 16 courses.
The monks were equally serious about their booze.
Alcohol accounted for something like 2o% of their energy intake.
Nowadays it's about 5%.
Well, maybe a bit more in my case.
of course, you've got to remember that it wasn't safe to drink the tap water, but still it's a long way from Benedict's bucket.
Gluttony was not the only sin that monks fell prey to.
Records for 1447 note a brothel in Westminster, the Maiden's Head, that was much frequented by monks.
And with 12 pounds pocket money a year, any girl's going to be glad to see a monk coming through the door.
The fact is, that as the time went on the monasteries were just coining in money.
After all, they held the keys to heaven and everyone wants to get there, so there were plenty of ways to part the leaders from their cash.
For example, the medieval Church advised that everyone go on pilgrimage at least once in their lives.
it was good for the soul and it made the church a lot of money.
Monastic institutions up and down the land vied with each other to attract the most visitors.
the best bet was to have a really first-class relic.
Canterbury cathedral made more than £1,ooo a year out of pilgrimage.
of course the big attraction there was the skull of Thomas Becket, the turbulent priest who'd challenged the power of King Henry ii.
You could see where his head had been split in two.
(splat) But the monks of Canterbury had plenty of other relics to be proud of.
there was Aaron's rod.
there was some of the stone on which the Lord was standing shortly before he ascended into heaven.
there was part of the table off which the Last supper was eaten.
they even had some of the clay out of which God fashioned Adam and some of the Virgin Mary's knitting.
And we know all this because a writer in the 15th century carefully noted it all down.
The monasteries and the medieval church itself had become by the 14th century one vast commercial enterprise and the corporate HQ was here in Avignon.
This was the seat of the popes from 13o9 to 1377.
And it was to here that the vast wealth of Christendom flowed in an endless stream of tithes, fines, bribes and backhanders.
the pope must have been presided over the greatest accumulation of wealth in the western world and he also had a lot of enemies.
i'm pretty certain he didn't sleep easily in his bed at night.
in fact you can tell from his palace that he didn't.
it's more like a fortress than a palace.
A palace of paranoia with a dark secret at its center.
this is where the pope would hold great banquets.
the carver would cut up everybody's meat for them behind big screens just about here which you think might be very kind of him, but in fact nobody was allowed in the pope's presence with a knife, so cutting up their meat for them wasn't a convenience, it was a security precaution, rather like having plastic cutlery on airlines nowadays.
this is where the pope would make his public appearances.
Now, in Rome he'd appear on the balcony of st.
Peter's and wave to the assembled masses below.
in Avignon he'd stick his head out of this window here.
You can see he's covered to his left and if he spots any trouble in the crowd to his right it's easy to duck out of the way.
(Crowd cheering) this is the grand treasury, where the pope's accountants would get busy checking all the money that poured into the papal coffers.
And now we're getting closer to the great secret at the heart of the papal palace of Avignon.
i'm going into the holy of holies, the lower treasury where the pope stored all that prodigious wealth.
this is where the tithes and offerings from people all over Europe ended up, deep in the bowels of this closely guarded fortress.
But even this isn't the great secret.
the great secret is where they kept the real treasure.
this whole room has a false floor.
this is the grubby secret at the heart of Christendom in the 14th century.
And it was here under his floorboards that God's representative on earth stashed the real treasure, the gold plate, coins and jewelry.
it's odd to think that if you or i were looking at this site 6oo years ago, we probably wouldn't leave this room alive.
Wealth and power are inevitable bedfellows and in the Middle Ages, the popes became rulers, great princes, vying with kings for territory and influence.
the power struggle between Church and state wasn't just something that passed by the monastery walls unnoticed.
it caught up the abbots, the priors and the monks and it carried them along with it.
As the power and wealth of the Church and its monasteries grew, resentment amongst the laity also gathered momentum.
in Bury st.
Edmunds in 1327, a group of townsfolk assembled here in the guildhall and swore an oath to destroy the power of the abbey.
the next day, almost the entire adult population turned out fully armed in the market place here.
they attacked the abbey, they beat up the monks, stole their habits and went running round the town in them.
it was a conflict which was to last a year and which saw even priests and friars leading armed assaults against the monastery.
During the riots, the gatehouse to the abbey had been destroyed, so the monks built a new fortified one complete with portcullis and arrow slits.
But it didn't do them much good.
in 1381 there was a national uprising and Bury, along with other monasteries, was sacked and looted.
the prior was executed and his severed head was stuck on a pike in the great market.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was beheaded by the mob.
The Church's response was to adopt a program of zero tolerance.
From 14o1, anyone who dared to criticize the church, faced the prospect of being burnt at the stake.
The story of the monasteries came to an end when Henry Viii made himself head of the Church in England and destroyed them, confiscating their wealth.
All we have now are these fairy ruins.
A monument to an ideal of simplicity and piety that became corrupted on a magnificent scale.
it seems to me, looking back through the monks' story, that once prayer acquired a monetary value, the game was up.
the monasteries, the prayer factories, became commercial enterprises and once that had happened, there was just no way they could fulfill their original function.
the monks couldn't really cut themselves off forever from the wicked world.
No matter how hard they tried, they were part of the wicked world, and what's more, very often they ran it.
Next time on Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, the damsel in distress.
i meet real medieval women who fight in wars, run businesses, and even run the country.