Colleges and Monasteries in Late Medieval England

Summary

The medieval college has long remained in the shadow of the monastery. Historians have devoted much more attention to communities of monks and nuns, even for the late medieval period when the college was a conspicuously more popular kind of foundation. This relative neglect results in part from the perception that the college was an inferior kind of monastery. David Knowles considered that ‘both in its religious and material framework it [the college] was, so to say, the lowest term to which the monastic idea could be reduced’, adopting ‘liturgical and other regulations which were neither so strict nor so comprehensive as those of the monastic life’. In the light of this negative comparison, one could probably make a good case for ignoring monasteries altogether in this volume, which seeks to understand the character and role of the college on its own terms. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the fact that the history of the college and the monastery is in many ways intertwined. Indeed, the strong similarity between the two institutions has been stressed by a number of writers. The greatest historian of the medieval college, Alexander Hamilton Thompson, wrote of late medieval chantry colleges that ‘in an age when monastic discipline was considerably relaxed, the constitutional differences between such establishments [colleges] and houses of canons regular were slight’. And more recently, Benjamin Thompson has argued that the main problem monasteries faced in the later Middle Ages was their great similarity to other kinds of religious foundations: ‘The religious houses of later medieval England look, therefore, as if they were interchangeable with secular churches of a similar size, a possibility reinforced by the easy transition which a few of them did in fact make to secular status.’

Alongside this tendency to view colleges and monasteries as inherently similar, even interchangeable, sister institutions is the perception that they – like many siblings – were natural rivals, competing for patronage and lay recognition. Indeed, the history of colleges and monasteries is often presented in confrontational terms, with alternate monastic and collegiate superiority achieved at the expense of the other. In tenth-century England, several minster churches were forcibly converted into monasteries during the ‘monastic revival’, a process that was reversed following the death of Edgar in 975.