Did Monks Actually Do Manual Labour?
Did medieval monks actually do manual labour, or did they leave it to servants while they got on with praying? It depends on which order you ask — and which century.
St Benedict’s original rule required monks to do physical work, partly to keep idleness at bay. By the 10th century, however, the great abbey of Cluny was hiring servants for most of these tasks, and in the 12th century its abbot, Peter the Venerable, regarded the idea of educated monks being “begrimed in dirt and bent down with rustic labours” as distinctly unsuitable.
The early Cistercians tried to resist this slide towards comfort, putting their monks to work gardening, doing maintenance, and helping with the harvest. But they also relied heavily on a separate class of religious servants known as lay brothers, or conversi, who lived apart from the monks and did most of the practical work as cooks, brewers, beekeepers, porters, and farm labourers. At some abbeys, lay brothers far outnumbered the monks: Buildwas had twice as many lay brothers as monks, and Rievaulx in the late 12th century had around 140 monks to some 500 lay brothers.
The Black Death finished this system off. Meaux Abbey had ninety lay brothers in the mid-13th century and none at all by the end of the 14th, and by the time of the Dissolution, Cistercian abbeys relied entirely on paid servants. Some monks did continue to do skilled work of a different kind, above all copying manuscripts by hand — and scribes copying a book borrowed from another monastery sometimes reproduced even the style of the original handwriting.
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