Medieval Colleges and Charity

Summary

In their magisterial Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, handbook of the researcher into the religious institutions of medieval England, Knowles and Hadcock categorise the hospital and the college as separate species. They are placed after the main religious orders, followed only by academic secular colleges and various anomalous institutions: relatively insignificant, not organised into orders and thus not collectively powerful. Where the monastic orders have had continuing members to recover and proclaim their self-evident importance, like Dom David himself, and his predecessors the Maurists, the colleges have not. The university colleges have had their individual historians, but not, saving the ghost of Alexander Hamilton Thompson, the movement as a whole. Over the last ten or fifteen years hospitals have been rediscovered; exploration of their contribution, or otherwise, to attitudes to charity, to poor relief in the Middle Ages, to religious life and to architectural form has become a significant aspect of the field. Finally, with this collection, the poor neglected colleges get their time in the sun.

Clive Burgess has argued elsewhere in this collection for not making too many rigid distinctions between different kinds of institutions, and Martin Heale has made a similar claim for the overlap of colleges and monasteries. This essay will argue for the overlap of the categories of hospitals and colleges. How far were these different kinds of institutions? They did after all have rather different purposes: hospitals were for the poor and sick; colleges for the work of prayer and intercession, perhaps with an additional educational function. Yet there were also marked similarities.

Conventionally colleges have been seen as a product of the fourteenth century, growing in numbers up to the time of the Reformation. John Blair, however, has explored the Anglo-Saxon origins of the collegiate form, and this essay, too, will explore some older colleges as well as the late medieval foundations. Hospitals have a similar history, in existence in Britain from at least the end of the eleventh century, and probably in some form from the tenth. Indeed, the earliest hospitals almost certainly had their origins in collegiate institutions. Similarly, it has been argued elsewhere that the hospital and its variant forms, the almshouse and the maisondieu, constituted a significant part of the religious landscape. Many late medieval hospitals were founded in association with a chantry, and thus had an intercessory function.