To explore how the various economic assets described in the previous chapter were administered in order to secure a financial basis on which monasteries could survive is not easy given the nature of the source material, and in particular the absence of account rolls, before 1215. However, this chapter aims, on the basis of charter and narrative sources, to construct a picture of the exploitation of monastic estates. In the case of the three independent Black Monk houses, this investigation is aided by the survival of vacancy accounts in the Pipe Rolls from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As in the previous chapter the major debating point must be: was there any distinction between the methods used by different houses and groups or orders, and if so, was the divergence due to ideological or geographical factors?

Lords of the Manor

Despite the debate about the chronology of the Cistercian documents that outline the thinking of the order on economic matters, it is clear that by the time the expansion of the order was under way in England, the White Monks were developing an economy based on direct cultivation of lands using the labour of conversi. This, by implication, ruled out the possession of manors and manorial rights, even if the rejection articulated in the ‘1134’ capitula was not indeed framed until nearly two decades later. Manorial exploitation was the antithesis of what came to be seen as classic Cistercian practice.