Conclusion

Summary

Despite the fact that it is notoriously ‘a weighty and responsible task for a historian to sit in judgment upon monastic worth’, few historians have been able to resist exactly that temptation. During the many centuries since the dissolution of the English monasteries, successive generations of antiquaries and scholars have generalised with surprising confidence about a way of life for which they have rarely felt much personal sympathy. As is well known, their verdict has normally been a highly critical one: and it remains axiomatic among the great majority of modern historians of the late medieval church as of the Reformation that the religious life practised in fifteenth-century England was vitiated by fundamental flaws and inadequacies. At worst, we are presented with a veritable desert interspersed by only the occasional fountain of living water; at best, the relaxation of rigorous monastic observance had allegedly led to ‘an indefinable spiritual rusticity’. Such considered judgements cannot be easily cast aside. Yet it is often hard to resist the conclusion that the posthumous reputation of late medieval English religious houses has suffered the worst of all possible fates. To be judged by the ideal standards of their own religious order and to be found wanting is, after all, the natural outcome for most monks at most times. Much more seriously, fifteenth-century monasticism has continuously been assessed by twelfth-century standards, the latter a product of a very different age as reflected in a very different type of historical source.