10 - THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITIES OF THE DURHAM MONKS

Summary

At no time have the general mass of Benedictines been learned. But they have tended to produce at all times individuals reincarnating the type of Ven. Bede.

The importance of the role played by the university-educated monk in late medieval religious life is now a familiar theme. The concept of ‘le moine universitaire’, a phrase apparently first coined by Dom Ursmer Berlière, has been applied to England for over forty years and to great effect by Dr W. A. Pantin in a series of studies of monk scholars and monastic colleges. More recently, the results of Dr Pantin's researches have been absorbed and developed by Professor Knowles in his three volumes on the Religious Orders in England. The significance of the university monk is not, moreover, merely that of an academic backwater. In an age when visitation records so often speak of monasteries ‘ tam in spiritualibus quam in temporalibus multipliciter collapsi’, it has proved rewarding and refreshing to consider monks who were scholars if not saints. Professor Knowles once compared English monasticism in 1300 to a tree that had ceased to blossom. Pleasure at finding later bloom has sometimes led to some exaggeration of the beauty of the flower, some failure to consider on how few branches it occurred at all. But of these branches Durham was probably the most important. ‘Perhaps more than any other monastery Durham came to be governed and administered by university monks.’