Episode 2 Saints and Sinners: Britain's Millennium of Monasteries

When we think of monasteries in Britain,

we think of Henry VIII and the Dissolution.

But their story stretches back 1,000 years before Henry was born

to the most remarkable of beginnings.

The monastic system that would be torn apart by Henry

began as a cult of extreme isolation

on rocky islands and in desert caves.

From these origins,

the monasteries grew to dominate every aspect of public life.

The story of Britain's millennium of monasteries

is one of devotion and faith,

but also of ambition,

violence and greed.

As the monks grew in power

they transformed society,

but they also absorbed its corruption.

The difference between their original austere ideals and this,

the palatial opulence

of a high medieval monastery, is breathtaking.

It's a contradiction they would never fully escape,

and one that would eventually lead to their destruction.

In this episode...

..monasteries go from the shattered victims of Norse destruction

to the guardians of medieval society.

Massive new monasteries transform the skyline,

as over 10,000 monks and nuns

spread across the nation.

In their hands, art is re-awoken,

scholarship is saved,

and music is transformed,

and the monks spill beyond their monasteries

as pioneers of business and social care.

Yet the more influence they gain,

the more they drift from their principles.

Finally, their power becomes their weakness,

and the monks are set up for a brutal fall.

At the close of the 8th century,

Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast,

was home to one of England's greatest monasteries.

For over 150 years,

its monks had dominated the spiritual lives of the local people,

all the while growing wealthy from trade from the sea.

Yet on the 8th June 793,

they had an unexpected arrival.

Unfamiliar longships appeared in these shallow waters.

The occupants leapt out,

splashed up the beach,

and headed for the monastery.

This was northern England's first Viking raid.

It was a monk, Alcuin of York,

who gives us the only contemporary account of what happened.

"Never before has such terror been seen in Britain.

"Behold the church of St Cuthbert,

"splattered with the blood of God's priests, robbed of its ornaments."

A chronicler tells how the monks were butchered, enslaved,

or thrown into the waves to drown.

Their sacred treasures were ripped from the monastery.

And this was just the beginning.

From Lindisfarne in Northumbria

to Iona in the Hebrides

to Skellig St Michael off the west coast of Ireland,

Vikings tore into the rich and almost defenceless monasteries.

Previously central to trade, learning and art,

this once great network was left in tatters.

Many monasteries fell into ruin.

In a land harried by raiders,

it must have seemed like the monks would never return.

The next 50 years were a dark time.

Soon, almost a third of the mainland had been settled by the invaders.

In the absence of monks,

the Saxon church was left in the hands of priests.

They were sworn neither to chastity nor poverty,

and some are thought to be leading disreputable lives.

Yet in the middle of the 9th century,

a new ruler appeared.

King Alfred fought back against the invaders.

And under his successor, a new nation - England -

gradually started to take shape.

As the invaders retreated,

the stage was set for something that seemed impossible

a few years before.

The monasteries were about to enter their golden age.

In the 10th century, the most important cathedral in England

was Winchester's Old Minster.

Its outline can still be seen today.

In the year 964,

armed men appeared at the Minster

and threw the Saxon priests out of their own church.

It seemed like the violence of Lindisfarne was happening again.

But the armed men that came here to Winchester were no Vikings.

The man in charge was an English bishop.

And their mission was not to slaughter the priests

but to replace them with monks.

The bishop in command was called Aethelwold.

A steely-eyed zealot,

he had a particular loathing for regular priests.

A biography written at the time said he had an especial hatred

for the clergy here at Winchester, who were

"involved in wicked and scandalous behaviour"

and "constantly given up to gourmandizing and drunkenness."

For Aethelwold, what this church needed was monks.

But before the monks could be brought back,

Aethelwold had to turn these forgotten holy men

into a movement fit to save the nation's souls.

Fortunately, he had a secret weapon.

The Rule of Benedict was a set of strict instructions

for monastic life,

laid down in the 6th century by the Italian St Benedict of Nursia.

The earlier Anglo-Saxons had known its ideas,

but by now it had faded from view.

By reintroducing the rule,

Aethelwold believed he could create a breed of purer monks,

in newly disciplined monasteries.

Beginning in Winchester,

they would take back the spiritual guardianship of the nation.

Professor Sarah Foot explained what happened next.

So, what happens here, and it happens here at Winchester,

is it's often called the monastic reform, or the monastic revival -

but I think really we should call it a monastic revolution.

It fundamentally changes the nature of the religious life

for monks and nuns living inside monasteries,

all of which now have to follow the Rule of St Benedict exclusively

and very rigidly, but it also changes the way of life for those clergy

who decide they don't want to do this,

-who get driven out of places like Winchester.

-Interesting.

So, it really is a revolution - it's a revolution in terms of the

transformation of the religious life at this stage.

It is. It means people who are going to call themselves monks or nuns

have to live inside community -

they're going to be walled away from the outside world,

they're going to follow their strict rule of life which determines

their social organisation, the kind of food they can eat,

when they can eat it, and which radically alters the amount of time

they spend in prayer,

especially in formal liturgical worship inside the cathedral.

So this variety which we've seen in Anglo-Saxon monasteries -

-that's ending?

-Yes, that's gone.

So what you find now is a uniformity of observance.

All monastic house were following the same rule in the same manner,

so if you're in Winchester, if you're in Worcester,

if you're in Ely or Peterborough,

at six o'clock in the morning, they're all saying the same office,

the same way, together. And it's always this central unifying idea

that one right rule of life will govern all monks and nuns,

the whole church, the whole nation.

So it does feel revolutionary, doesn't it?

It's removing some freedoms and imposing quite rigid rules.

Very much imposing rules. But there were plenty of English people

who thought this was a really good thing, and who then flocked

to these communities that Aethelwold reformed.

Aethelwold's hostile takeover was a spectacular success.

Not only did he reinstate monks here at Winchester,

but his act rippled out across the country

in an astonishing rebirth of monastic life.

And the monasteries weren't just revived -

Aethelwold had set them on course to become the religious

and cultural powerhouses of the Middle Ages.

Following the Winchester revival,

the Benedictine revolution spread across southern and central England

in the 10th and early 11th centuries.

Cathedrals like Winchester were converted into monasteries,

while a wave of new monasteries were also founded.

Anglo-Saxon aristocrats donated land and money to the monks,

and a new network of monasteries was soon growing in power and prestige.

The new funds, and the revived sense of mission,

led to an artistic reawakening.

The skill of illumination was reborn,

with exceptional manuscripts like the Benedictional of St Aethelwold,

in which vibrant colour and gold leaf testify to the new confidence

and wealth of the monasteries.

Yet the nobles who donated money to the monks

were getting something in return.

Under the Benedictine Rule, the monks had to worship together

eight times daily.

They would pray for the souls of their benefactors,

and as well as offering silent prayer,

they would come together to sing.

The more beautiful the singing,

the more powerful, and valuable, the prayer.

With better organised choirs, and patrons to impress,

the stage was set for a breakthrough

that would transform Western music.

# Hallelujah... #

For centuries, monastic music

had meant a simple single melody or chant.

But now a new sound was born.

THEY SING

Known as polyphony,

it added new musical layers

of increasing complexity and beauty.

SINGING CONTINUES

And it was perfected in the English Benedictine monasteries.

THEY SING

This music wasn't heard for 1,000 years.

Professor Susan Rankin

was responsible for bringing it back to life.

At Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,

she explained how it lay hidden in one tiny but astonishing book.

Susan, what is this beautiful little manuscript?

It's a Troper, a liturgical book,

a book of liturgical music,

which is an absolute treasure chest of Anglo-Saxon music

made at Winchester in the 1020s, 1030s.

And what makes it so special, then?

-It's the oldest surviving collection of two-part music, full stop.

-Gosh.

And this is the music for two voices,

which was an incredibly new thing to hear at the time,

and this is what makes this book exceptional.

So what am I looking at here?

You're looking at the chant for a whole series of different ways

of singing Kyrie Eleison,

which is what is sung at the beginning of the mass,

and that's how you would sing it if you didn't have a second singer,

and it's perfectly self sufficient.

HE SINGS

But what you find later on in the book

is a second voice

to put with that.

So you marry up the original single voice with this later voice.

Here is the second voice for this Kyrie.

THEY SING

So this practice of polyphony would have been taking place

-throughout monasteries?

-I think it would have been sung in many,

many monasteries. If you think about the fact that monks had to sing

the Opus Dei, so the work of God, every day,

in order to celebrate God on behalf of king and country,

the monks were doing this not for themselves but for everybody else.

Susan, it must feel wonderful to think you've uncovered

this lost sound, you've brought it back to life.

Well, the music was not heard from probably the late 11th century,

and the moment when I heard that music was amazing,

because it's wonderful music.

And if this one book hadn't survived, we wouldn't really know that much.

It transforms the history of early medieval music.

THEY SING

Only in monasteries, where talented individuals had time and money

to push the boundaries of their art

could such an harmonic breakthrough have taken place.

SINGING CONTINUES

Yet, within a few short years,

the monasteries were shaken by another great upheaval.

In 1066,

William the Conqueror's Normans

crashed into the Anglo-Saxon establishment,

wiping out its power and swallowing up its land.

Yet if the invasion brought destruction to the nation,

for the monasteries, it was a godsend.

Because the Normans didn't just keep the Anglo-Saxon monasteries,

they rebuilt them on an epic scale.

In the process, they created the vast stone monastery,

the city of God, that we know today.

The most incredible example of all stands in Durham.

Under the Anglo-Saxons

this green was Durham's market.

But the Normans threw out the market and replaced it with a military

religious complex. They built their castle here and they built,

within the same protective enclosure,

an astonishing vast new abbey.

Just as their castles stamped the secular authority of the Normans

on the country, their monasteries, or abbeys, larger than any buildings

ever seen in the British Isles,

declared that this invasion had been blessed by God.

Garrisoned by monks, each abbey was a Christian fortress.

The key to the new monasteries lay in architectural ideas

the Normans brought over from the continent.

Monks were engaged in an unending fight against evil,

and their new fortresses were to surround and protect them

as never before.

These new ideas can be seen in a remarkable document,

the only European architectural drawing to survive

from the fall of Rome to the early Middle Ages.

It includes the earliest surviving example of the structure

that was to define the monastery more than any other - the cloister.

Dr Giles Gasper from Durham University explained how this plan

was the template for all future monastic buildings in Britain.

Giles, this looks incredible. What are we looking at?

We're looking here at the plan of the Abbey of St Gall,

which is a great Swiss monastery from the 9th century, from the 830s.

It's a wonderfully detailed plan

of the whole monastic complex.

What it seems to be is an idealised version

of what a monastery should look like.

If we start from the outside

-we have animals...

-Pigs...

Pigs, sheep, goats. We have a little house for chickens here,

a little chicken egg,

and we have a vegetable garden.

The cemetery.

Then we get into the beating heart of the monastery,

the reason for this other activity.

So, the main monastery church and then this four-sided shape,

the cloister, so this is both for monastic living,

monastic sleeping - importantly - so that they can serve their church

and get on with their monastic job, which is effective prayer.

And the cloister seems to be a peculiar invention

of the Middle Ages and is taken on from the 9th century,

the date of this map, on into the high Middle Ages and becomes really

a characteristic feature of medieval monasteries in the western world.

And it really is contained, isn't it?

If you look at where the more sort of general, worldly sections are,

the animals, the plants, you can actually see that the cloister

-is almost entirely cut off.

-Yes.

This is very different to earlier monastic sites that we see,

Anglo-Saxon sites, where it's all a bit haphazard, it's evolving,

you've got your industry, your trade, your agriculture -

-but this is really ordered, really formalised.

-Yeah.

-So it's a body, a spiritual body, with its beating heart.

-Exactly.

In the building campaign the Normans unleashed across England,

the idealised blueprint of St Gall

became a physical reality.

Regular stone cloisters spread across the country.

Giles took me to see the example here at Durham,

still on the template the Normans laid down nine centuries ago.

So what we're seeing with the Normans, and with the evolution

of these sorts of building complexes,

is a much more rigorous treatment of the monks,

the monks are being much more controlled.

It's an expression of order in stone.

Absolutely. There's a wonderful phrase which has been used

to describe this period - "a struggle for right order in the world" -

which encapsulates that struggle for religious and political power.

It's something the Normans, I think, with their access to wealth

that they have with the conquest,

so we see the buildings from the 1060s through the 1070s,

1080s, 1090s, just absolutely massive.

They're building on a huge scale.

If you could work out the GDP ratio, this would be absolutely enormous.

You're seeing these buildings as an ideological statement.

They are the landscape of power, they're the landscape of order.

The immense new Norman monasteries

soon changed the face of towns across Britain.

So many of the great cathedrals and abbeys that still define our skyline

were first built in their current epic form under the invaders.

Canterbury, Durham, Norwich, Ely -

all went up in during this spectacular wave of construction.

What's more, every one was built as a community of monks.

For the Normans, stone meant power,

and the most lasting expression of this belief wasn't their castles -

it was their monasteries.

New Norman monasteries soon rose across the land,

from Wales up into the north of England.

Areas that hadn't been reached by the Anglo-Saxon revival

now received monks of their own,

creating an immense and far-reaching monastic network.

But what was life actually like for the monks?

Monastic communities could range from 5 to 100 members,

from adolescence upwards.

Recruits had to make a financial contribution to their monasteries,

so were usually drawn from wealthy families.

Their new life under the Benedictine Rule was strict.

One of the most severe regulations banned talking in church,

at night or at meal times.

Yet, as well as being obedient,

medieval monks were resourceful and inventive.

ROOSTER CROWS

They soon found an ingenious way around the strictness of their rule.

Dr Deborah Banham explained how they became masters of sign language.

What sort of signs can you show me, Debby?

Well, there's this one.

-Looks like a fish.

-Yes, absolutely.

And the later signs have far more different kinds of fish,

-so you always start off with this...

-OK.

..and then one of them adds this.

Any idea what that is?

Well, it's actually the sign for a woman.

-Oh, that's the sign for a woman.

-Yes.

And that's a specific kind of fish.

I just want to say lady fish but I don't know!

In fact, it's a trout.

Oh, a trout! No!

-"Lady fish."

-Which is supposed to be female, for some reason.

Then we get the phrase "old trout."

Yes, it comes from that, presumably.

And what about the different people within a monastic community,

do they have signs for those?

Yes. One that I really like, it's a kind of double sign.

It starts off where you point to your two eyes with your two fingers,

and then you hold up your little finger.

Ooh.

-See if you can figure out what that is.

-A teacher?

Putting your hand up?

Actually, yeah, but not for that reason.

-This the sign for "look" - pointing at your eyes.

-Yes.

And this means "small."

-Oh, "looking after the little ones."

-Exactly.

-Little finger is always for small and thumb for big.

-Oh, right!

Sign language began as a means of following the strict

Rule of Benedict.

Yet for some monks it soon became a means of flouting it.

When the historian Gerald of Wales ate at Canterbury Cathedral Priory

in 1180, he complained,

"There were the monks, all of them gesticulating with fingers,

"hands and arms and whistling to one another instead of speaking so that

"I seemed to be seated at a stage play or among actors and jesters."

I think we get a glimpse of real life

amongst all this gesticulating and whistling.

These monks weren't the fanatics of the early days of monasticism,

they were real people with a need to communicate.

The Benedictine Rule couldn't be broken,

but it could be creatively stretched.

In the new Norman monasteries,

sign language wasn't the only creative outburst.

With a country to carve up,

the invaders had made the monks landlords on a massive scale,

meaning immense wealth from rents and tithes

began flooding into their coffers.

This cash was soon converted into opulent art.

Among the handful of survivals

is the exceptional Gloucester Candlestick.

Made for Gloucester Abbey at the start of the 12th century,

its writhing forms depict the struggle of sinful man

to reach the light at the summit, representing Jesus.

In the monasteries, such glittering works were joined by rich tapestries

and gloriously painted church interiors

in a great rainbow of religious finery.

The point was clear -

monasteries could bring you the riches of heaven.

And to prove it, they were rich.

And yet, how could the monasteries justify such wealth?

The desert fathers who had inspired the first monks

had preached a life of simple poverty.

And early monasteries had offered a retreat from the world.

Now, some breakaway monks wanted to return to these simple origins.

In the year 1132,

some Benedictine monks here in York

saw an extraordinary sight.

A group of French monks passed through the town,

and they were like nothing that had been seen before.

The French monks didn't wear black habits, like the Benedictines,

they wore white ones.

And this whiteness seemed to infiltrate their whole being.

They were spiritually pure,

they rejected personal possessions,

fine art and ostentation.

The York Benedictines were so overwhelmed by the purity

of the newcomers that they deserted their own order and followed them.

The Cistercians had arrived.

The Cistercian Order had been founded in 1098,

near Dijon in western France.

A group of French Benedictines,

sickened by the flaunting of wealth by their own brothers,

had set up a splinter monastery in a marshy wood,

deliberately echoing the very first monks

who retreated into the desert.

The white monks passing through York were headed here -

the valley of the river Rye in Yorkshire, known as Rievaulx.

The area was described as "a horrid and vast solitude."

In other words, it was perfect.

Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132

as the Cistercians' headquarters in the north of England.

The intricate honeycomb of the monastery still survives...

from the Chapter House, where the monks gathered daily,

to hear a reading from the Rule of Benedict...

to their immense church.

Just being here gives you a feeling

for the exceptional singularity of mind of the Cistercian Order.

The core of this magnificent church

went up just 30 years after the foundation of Rievaulx

in this deserted place.

Benedictine churches were orgies of red, green and gold -

covered in lavish decoration.

But this place was plain, stark,

and as spiritually cleansed as the Cistercians themselves.

These radical ideals of austere isolation

live on today at the Cistercian monastery of Mount St Bernard.

The Abbot is Farther Erik Varden.

There is a radical element to dedicating your life

to becoming a monk.

It says in the constitutions of our order

that our life is obscure,

laborious and ordinary,

and it's a true statement.

The crucial experience of monks,

and the experience that you discover

fairly early on in your novitiate,

is not an experience of power,

but an experience of radical poverty.

Has some of the asceticism maybe passed away?

The fundamental ascetic practice

is the same, and that is the...

abandonment of self will.

The total surrender of oneself,

of one's future,

and of one's aspirations.

Our fundamental ministry

is our life of prayer,

which is a life that we pursue

not only for ourselves,

but for the entire church, indeed for the entire world.

Tell me, father, what do you think a monastery is for?

In some ways I'd say a monastery isn't for anything.

A monastery is fundamentally useless.

It doesn't exist to perform a particular function,

whether it's some kind of agriculture, or some kind of craft,

or even providing charity

and hospitality for the poor.

A monastery exists purely, really, for the worship of God.

But a monastery will also aspire to be a conduit for the grace of God,

of calling down God's mercy

and love on his people.

Are the roles of monks, then, to look after the eternal life,

the afterlife, of yourselves and your community?

The monastic contemplative life is the life in which the monk...

..seeks every day

to see the face of God.

The monastic life is a preparation

for the life of eternity

and, for the monk,

the life of eternity has already begun here.

So you are constantly contemplating and working your mind but you work

your bodies, too, you do physical labour as part of your order?

Certainly. We endeavour to be as self-sufficient as we can,

and, like any other human beings, we need to earn a living,

so we try to do honest work

in order to provide for our needs.

This emphasis on manual labour and self-sufficiency

is a defining characteristic of the Cistercians.

And 800 years ago,

it enabled this austere order

to afford their towering medieval monasteries.

Because the early Cistercians turned out to be brilliant farmers,

above all of sheep.

Their choice of remote areas meant that vast tracts of territory

were opened up for their flocks.

They recruited lay brothers, men from poor backgrounds

who lived a simplified monastic life

and worked the land for free.

The revenues were soon huge.

By 1300, Rievaulx's neighbouring Cistercian abbey, Fountains,

was the largest producer of wool in England, and even had its own ship.

Today, the largest sheep farms in the country

rarely go above 8,000 animals.

Fountains Abbey had 18,000.

This was truly industrial farming.

But like all corporations,

the Cistercians were to discover that success has a price.

Before the 12th century was out,

they'd already attracted a reputation for greed.

And there's some truth in it. More Cistercians than any other order

were found guilty by the courts of moving boundaries

and forging charters to gain more land.

The Cistercians were already rich from the wool trade,

but they were just as happy to fleece their neighbours.

The Cistercians had further professionalised

the medieval monastery,

showing how monks could lead the way in agriculture and business.

Yet, as this austere order had interacted with the world,

its ideals had become corrupted.

It was a pattern that was to be seen again.

By the 13th century the Cistercians weren't the only new monks around.

And if THEY had headed for the wilderness,

their new rivals did the exact opposite.

The occasion was the rapid spread of cities and towns across Europe.

The new towns meant more wealth,

but also bigger crowds of urban poor,

all clamouring for spiritual attention.

In response, many monks chose to pursue their mission

outside the cloister.

These urban newcomers were known as friars.

The most famous, the Dominicans,

arrived from France in 1221,

and the Italian Franciscans three years later.

Monks had been rural landlords,

but the friars chose not to own property

and lived instead on charity.

If monks lived off the land,

friars lived off the people.

And their spiritual message was aimed at the people, too.

Up till now, monks had prayed in their monasteries

on behalf of other people.

But the friars reversed that -

the preached in open spaces

and encouraged members of the public

to look to their own spiritual salvation.

Their motivation was the example of Jesus,

who had lived a life of itinerant poverty

and urged his listeners to individual conversion.

It was a message many wanted to hear.

For centuries, monasteries had been elite institutions,

staffed by and prioritising the needs of the wealthy.

But the friars also served the poor

and the urban middle classes.

They might hear your confession,

teach at your child's school,

draw you up a legal document,

or conduct your marriage service.

The friars were soon everywhere,

meaning that a single town could have a bewildering range

of different monasteries and friaries

all serving the same population.

In the early 13th century, if you wanted the services of a monk

or a friar in Oxford, you could come here to the Augustinian Friary.

Or the Black Friars, who were just down there.

The Grey Friars were here.

The Friars of the Sack were in there.

The Crutched Friars, they were in there.

Your Benedictines were in there

and your Carmelites were down there.

More Benedictines.

The Austin Friars were here.

More Augustinians were here,

and then further outside the city were the Hospitaliers, the Templars,

two nunneries and, just so they didn't miss out on the fun,

some Cistercians, too.

That's 15 monastic communities

for a population of less than 7,000.

In towns across the country,

friars wove their way into the already established

monastic network, joining the Cistercians and other new arrivals

in a massive web of monasteries.

By 1300, there were more than 500 monasteries

and over 10,000 people in monastic orders across the British Isles.

It had become a land of monasteries.

In the process, the monastery was changing

from an inward-looking refuge

to an outward-facing centre of bustling urban life.

And there was one area where their work was truly life-changing.

In the spring of 2015,

Bart's Hospital in East London will open its new heart centre.

Costing £250 million, it's the latest addition to a hospital

that serves a population of 2.5 million.

Yet it all began with fewer than ten monks.

Hidden behind the modern-day Bart's is the Priory Church

of St Bartholomew the Great.

The Priory and the hospital were founded in 1123 and staffed by monks

from anther recently formed order, known as the Augustinians.

This makes the complex of St Bart's one the oldest hospitals in Europe

still on its original site.

Professor Carole Rawcliffe explained how, with hospitals like St Bart's,

monasteries transformed medical care in the Middle Ages.

So, Carole, who's running these hospitals, then?

Well, the largest ones, the ones we know about, like Bart's,

St Thomas', for example, St Leonard's in York,

are run by monastic orders

and often by the Augustinian Canons because they have

a rather less elaborate liturgy.

They're more geared to practical work, to pastoral work,

in the wider community.

And, Carole, what sort of help are the Augustinian Canons providing

in these sorts of hospitals?

What you get is a clean environment,

clean sheets, you're warm, you get a good diet

and you get that spiritual care and the feeling of being safe.

You know, if you've been tramping on the road,

just to be in a safe environment is something.

But Bart's is quite unusual because it also looks after pregnant women,

and many hospitals refused to admit women at all,

and certainly not pregnant ones

because they're likely to be women of ill-repute.

And perhaps even to tempt the Canons, who knows,

but here there's a maternity ward.

For me as well, all these ideas are challenging those established

notions of what a monastery does because this is quite modern,

quite forward thinking, the idea that they are places of health

and medicine and maternity care.

Yes. And by the time you get to the late 14th, early 15th century,

there's a priest who lives in this precinct here,

at Bart's, called John Mirfield, and he produces two encyclopaedias

about health and he talks about fresh air, a healthy diet,

and exercise in a way the viewers to this programme will find curiously

modern because he says, well, you know,

"You're Canon, so you can't go jogging around the streets of London

"or having your personal trainer in the park," as people do now,

-so you fit your cell out in an appropriate way.

-Like a personal gym.

Yes, a personal gym. So you can have weights,

and you have ropes, and you can exercise yourself to keep fit.

Weight training monks. This is brilliant!

But they're not supposed to do it to be vain

and to have gym-honed bodies, but maybe some of them were.

They're there to be effective instruments of God

in serving the poor, in staffing the hospital,

because monasteries at this time are becoming centres of medical knowledge

so they're a wonderful vehicle

for transmitting all these new medical ideas.

Their massive network of monasteries,

and their dedication to the latest medical thinking,

meant that the monks offered an extensive medieval health service.

Yet medicine was only one of many branches of monastic knowledge.

Centuries earlier, as barbarians overran the Roman Empire,

it was the monasteries who had kept the flame of ancient learning alive.

Now, the exceptional dedication and organisation of the monks

had created a Europe-wide network of learning.

And monks didn't just preserve ancient knowledge,

they were making new discoveries, too.

Many of the most intellectually ambitious

and passionately curious people of the age, were monks.

The great philosopher Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican.

The pioneer of the scientific method,

the Englishman Roger Bacon, was a Franciscan.

As was the philosopher William of Ockham.

Rather than being shut off from the world,

medieval monks had an omnivorous hunger for all knowledge.

One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence for this

can be found at London's Royal College of Arms.

This is the Polychronicon.

The Benedictine monk who wrote it was called Ranulf Higden,

and apart from the fact that he entered the monastery at Chester

in 1299, we know virtually nothing else about his life.

This is surprising, because contained in here

is so much other information that it's almost mind boggling.

The name Polychronicon means "many chronicles"

and it's a staggeringly ambitious attempt to pull together

the history and the geography of the known world.

It begins with a virtual global tour, as Higden whirls his readers

round exotic sites from Constantinople to Egypt.

The journey ends with Britain,

which occupies a third of the tour.

The headline status was deliberate.

In centuries gone by Britain had been a backwater,

but by putting it at the heart of his text,

foregrounded by the great places and events of the world,

Higden is asserting that it's now a major nation.

Higden patiently unfolds the story of his homeland,

and isn't afraid of controversy.

In one section he tackles that famous British leader, King Arthur.

Unlike some of his predecessors,

Higden questions whether Arthur had really lived at all.

Arthur had been a heroic leader to previous historians

like Geoffrey of Monmouth.

But here Ranulf is questioning

whether he really was this massive figure.

If he really did defeat the powers of France and Rome,

then why is there not a single reference to him

in any of their histories?

The scepticism feels surprisingly modern.

And before long, Ranulf Higden's desire to map the limits of

the known world was brought to life by other monks in his monastery.

The Evesham Map was created 20 to 50 years

after Higden wrote his chronicle.

It's thought to derive from a map

originally included in the Polychronicon itself.

To us it appears upside down,

with the Middle East at the top

and Britain at the bottom.

This map really is just an incredible work of art.

In some respects it's a traditional medieval Mappa Mundi,

a map of the world,

and you can see all the important sites of Christendom

complete with Paradise, the Garden of Eden up there.

You can see Adam and Eve with the serpent wrapped around

the Tree of Knowledge, biting onto the apple.

You've got the Tower of Babel,

you've got Jerusalem shown here

as this lavish Gothic tower,

then there's the Red Sea here,

and cutting straight through the Red Sea you can see the passage

of the Jews out of captivity.

It is possible to navigate your way around this map

and recognise the specific countries,

but it's not in proportion, it's not an exact reflection of the world.

If you look at the scale of other countries, you can see that Spain

is just this small section here,

and in comparison England's huge -

it spreads right the way across the bottom of the map.

You can see major towns and cities all picked out.

So you've got Dover here with this tower,

and London similarly a fortified tower.

But then there are two churches that are depicted.

One is Canterbury, the archbishopric,

and the other is Evesham,

not perhaps such a major town but important because this is the site

at which this incredible work has been put together,

so the monks of Evesham are literally securing their place

on the map.

Works like the Evesham Map and the Polychronicon

show how monks were obsessed with gathering

and expanding our knowledge of the world.

Far from being blinkered scribes,

they were the intellectual pioneers of their age,

and it was monasteries that gave them their freedom.

Yet although the 12th and 13th centuries were a gilded age

for the monasteries,

fundamental flaws in this vast system were starting to emerge.

The more prestige they gained, the more they built,

locking them into a draining cycle of expense.

At the once mighty Rievaulx,

the Cistercians were in trouble.

The Cistercians had overbuilt.

Even their great wool income couldn't save them.

Twice in the 13th century they had to be granted royal protection

to prevent complete financial collapse.

Other disasters landed on their heads - heavy rains,

poor harvests, famine, and violent attacks by Scottish raiders.

In the mid-14th century the plague scythed into Rievaulx's inhabitants,

and their model system never recovered.

By 1400, this mighty abbey,

which once housed over 600 members,

now had just 14 monks,

three lay brothers and one abbot.

And finances weren't the only problem.

Britain's vast monastery network

was starting to show other signs of decay.

The most worrying decline of all

affected not their buildings, but their morals.

BELL TOLLS

Throughout their history,

monasteries had been subject to inspections by senior churchmen.

In 1437, the officer assigned to visit the abbey here in Peterborough

was one Bishop Alnwick.

Peterborough was a thriving abbey,

whose west front was one of the glories of European architecture.

Unfortunately, its community of monks wasn't quite so exemplary,

as the report made by the visiting bishop shows.

Following his visit, Alnwick gave strict orders

on how the monastery was to be reformed.

These give a little window onto the sorts of things that were going on.

"None of the monks for any cause whatever

"shall drink or eat in the town of Peterborough,

"until the last day of March next to come,

"and that they dance not with any women in the same town

"or bring in any women within the monastery."

It seems that the monks were straying a little bit from the path.

Nine years later, Alnwick was back to make sure things had improved

at the Peterborough monastery.

But that isn't quite what had happened.

In the interim, the monks had been getting involved with

"so-called light women",

the sacristan had got mixed up with a local boy,

and the abbot, it was alleged, had three mistresses,

one of whom was strutting around town in a fur coat, quote,

"beyond her husband's estate."

When examined, it turned out that was the very fur coat

that the abbot's predecessor had left to the abbey in his will.

And, perhaps most interesting of all,

the abbot got off with nothing more than a warning.

Alnwick's toothless reports

had failed to correct the Peterborough monks.

And these sinners weren't alone.

Across the country, monastic morals were crumbling.

How had the monks, once hailed as the spiritual saviours

of the nation, come to this?

The truth was that, by the 15th century,

the medieval monastery had been transformed.

It had turned itself inside out,

becoming active in the world, while neglecting its own spiritual core.

As they became increasingly entangled with the world

outside the cloister,

many monks fell victim to its temptations.

Yet if this was the monasteries' fatal flaw,

the beneficiary had been medieval Britain itself.

Monasteries redrew the map,

as new towns clustered around their great abbeys.

They transformed the skyline

as their churches soared higher and higher.

They were a health service, an education system,

pioneers of technology, saviours of scholarship,

and the inspiration for the greatest art and music of their time.

Though in decline,

the monasteries still basked in the fading light of their golden age.

Their continuing domination of so many social spheres

made them feel invulnerable.

They couldn't see the cataclysm that lay just beyond the horizon.

The monasteries still believed they were too big to fail.

Monasteries had begun by rejecting the world,

but soon the world couldn't do without them.

It seemed like things would stay this way for ever.

Next time...

as many monasteries descend into extremes of decadence

and corruption, religious reforms and a rapacious monarch

conspire to bring about their brutal and systematic liquidation.