Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Maps: The Dependent Priories of the Monasteries of Medieval England (England and Wales)
- Introduction
- Part I The Dependent Priory as Daughter House
- 1 The Foundation of English Cells
- 2 The Constitutional Affairs of English Cells
- 3 ‘A Source of Weakness’? Mother Houses and their Daughters
- Part II The Dependent Priory as Small Monastery
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Other Volumes in Studies in the History of Medieval Religion
3 - ‘A Source of Weakness’? Mother Houses and their Daughters
from Part I - The Dependent Priory as Daughter House
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Maps: The Dependent Priories of the Monasteries of Medieval England (England and Wales)
- Introduction
- Part I The Dependent Priory as Daughter House
- 1 The Foundation of English Cells
- 2 The Constitutional Affairs of English Cells
- 3 ‘A Source of Weakness’? Mother Houses and their Daughters
- Part II The Dependent Priory as Small Monastery
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Other Volumes in Studies in the History of Medieval Religion
Summary
To modern eyes, the possession of a family of cells has usually seemed a considerable burden to a monastery. The financial strain of preserving the fragile existence of a small dependency, the unrelenting contentions with bishop, patron or the cell itself, and above all the enormous potential for disciplinary problems at tiny isolated daughter houses; these disadvantages, it has always been thought, must surely have outweighed any benefits the ownership of a cell could have conferred. Professor Knowles' judgement that the vast majority of dependencies were inevitably ‘a source of weakness to the house that owned them’ has rarely if ever been questioned. The spiritual dangers faced by monks with no eremitical calling, required to leave the supportive communal atmosphere of the mother house and to dwell in often remote cells with only one or two companions are indeed obvious. Any practical advantages a dependency might have brought to a mother house would have seemed hollow if service in its cells systematically corrupted the community. The question of discipline is therefore paramount in any assessment of the value of daughter houses to their parents.
Little favourable has been written about the standard of observance in small monasteries since the preamble to the 1536 Act of Dissolution denounced the ‘manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living… daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons’; and because they were the smallest houses of all, dependencies have usually been considered the worst.
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- Information
- The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries , pp. 114 - 156Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004