The Carthusians: Medieval England’s Hermit-Monks
If the Benedictines represented the comfortable, wealthy end of medieval monasticism, the Carthusians stood at the opposite extreme: monks who chose voluntary isolation and an extraordinarily rigorous ascetic life. They were widely admired for it, precisely because so few people could endure it.
The order was founded around 1080 by monks seeking a solitary life of severe self-discipline, modelled on the first Christian hermits of the desert. Each Carthusian lived alone in a small cell and saw his brothers only at certain daily services; contact was so restricted that monks left their cells together only for a special weekly walk known as the spatiamentum. The first house was established in the French Alps at a place called Chartreuse, which gave the order its name — and the English word “Charterhouse.”
Nine Charterhouses were eventually founded in England. The first, at Witham in Somerset, did not impress everyone: one 12th-century visitor described it as “a horrible place, an empty solitude, where only wild beasts and fowls of prey dwell.” Even devout monks found the life hard going. One Rochester monk wrote of the London Charterhouse, “I cannot bear the discipline of the order.”
Carthusian houses stayed small and austere throughout the Middle Ages; even the largest, Sheen Charterhouse in Surrey, housed only thirty monks. They were also the only order that refused meat to its members even when they were sick or weak — for fear that monks might otherwise fake illness just to get a decent meal.
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