9 - THE DURHAM CELLS

Summary

Let an enquiry be made concerning those monks who reside in cells, to discover whether they live honestly and according to the Rule.

In their mother house of Durham the monks of Saint Cuthbert were able to maintain the level of religious life at a standard which was rarely scandalous, sometimes edifying and nearly always respectable. The position of the monastery's dependencies in the later middle ages was usually much more depressing. All of the cells, except Durham College, Oxford, had been founded or re-founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries during a period of private benefaction and general good-will, ‘when the old orders were still lords of the ascendant’. This early optimism proved not to be entirely warranted and the later history of most of these small houses, like small monasteries everywhere in England, is one of financial decline and occasional crisis as well as of a somewhat chequered spiritual life. In retrospect it might well seem that the priory of Durham would have lost little, either in the worldly or the spiritual spheres, if it had been deprived of five or six of its nine dependencies. Yet the Durham monks, with their obsessive interest in the traditional liberties and possessions of Saint Cuthbert's church, were naturally devoted to the preservation and not the liquidation of their cells; in particular, they were prepared to fight a century-long and almost ruinously expensive campaign to retain their control over Coldingham in Scotland.