5 - Varieties of monasticism

Summary

‘Monasteries’ have often been referred to in the preceding chapters. But what were they like? In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Latin word monasterium, and its Old English derivative mynster, covered a wide range of religious communities that supported themselves from the surplus produce of estates free from most royal taxes and obligations, lived by some common rule under an abbot or abbess, worshipped in a common church within the monastery, and probably provided the surrounding laity with the services of a priest or priests. The broad usage of the terms monasterium and abbas was attacked at the time by Bede, in his polemical Epistola ad Ecgbertum:

There are innumerable places, as we all know, allowed the name of monasteries by a most foolish manner of speaking, but having nothing at all of a monastic way of life … Numberless people have been found who call themselves abbots and at the same time reeves or thegns or servants of the king.

Moreover, when a monastic community moved elsewhere (or disbanded), but provided a priest to minister to its former monastic church, no doubt laymen continued to call the church — the most important element from their point of view — the mynster, broadening the usage still further.

Some students of the early period distinguish ‘monasteries’ from ‘minsters’ in the sense of major churches served by groups of secular clergy living a communal life though not under Benedictine monastic vows. Such a distinction is anachronistic before the late Anglo-Saxon period.