7 - Conversi, granges and the Cistercian economy

Summary

Monks of our Order should derive their means of subsistence from the work of their hands, from farming, and from animal husbandry. Accordingly we too are permitted to own for our own use streams and lakes, forests, vineyards, meadows, land distant from populated places, and animals other than those which more ordinarily provoke curiosity and show vanity rather than serve any useful purpose – such as deer, cranes and others of this sort. In order to operate, cultivate, and administer all these, whether close at hand or at a distance – though not farther off than a one-day journey – we may have granges, which are to be managed by lay brothers.

The monastery’s survival depended on the development of a sound economy to support the community’s needs. The Cistercians are typically regarded as great accumulators of land and able agriculturalists who were efficient if at times aggressive in exploiting their holdings. Even those who were critical of the Order’s practices acknowledged its effectiveness. The satirical account of the Cistercians by Walter Map (d. c. 1210) describes how they would secure a plot of valueless land from a rich donor ‘by much feigning of innocence and long importunity, putting in God at every other word’ and duly convert this into a productive unit:

The wood is cut down, stubbed up and levelled into a plain, bushes give place to barley, willows to wheat, withies to vines. ... and so all the whole earth is full of their possessions; and though the gospel does not permit them to take thought for the morrow, they have such a reserve of wealth accruing from their care that they could enter the ark in the same spirit of security as Noah who had nothing left outside to look to.

The picture painted by Walter and other critics of the Order has coloured the historical reputation of the Cistercians as pioneers – somewhat ruthlessly – growing rich through acquisitiveness and the extension of cultivable land. Research suggests, however, that the situation was rather more complex. The early Cistercians may have transformed the landscape by bringing wasteland into cultivation, clearing forests and draining marshland; and likewise monks who acquired desolate border lands or expanded into northern England where areas were still barren after the ‘Harrying of the North’.