Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c. 1070–c. 1250 (review)

Henry VIII’s suppression of more than 800 religious houses in England in the late 1530s severed the tradition of Christian hospitality to travelers and pilgrims extending back more than a millennium to late antiquity. While the early centuries await attention, Julie Kerr’s Monastic Hospitality addresses the period when monasticism reached its peak, c. 1070 to 1250. Few aspects of medieval monasticism are more appealing to us than the open-handed welcome it offered to strangers. Yet, surprisingly, Kerr’s is the first comprehensive study of the subject. A model of wide learning, her book will also delight readers with its engaging intelligence and with detail rich in human and institutional interest.

Kerr shapes her book from the surviving documents. The most useful are monastic customaries, a number of which have appeared in new and revised editions in recent years. Even so, the scattered mentions of hospitality are piecemeal and often proscriptive, and one of Kerr’s major achievements is to build a convincing narrative from them. Given the chronological limits, most of the documentary material comes from men’s houses beginning with Lanfranc’s Constitutions written c. 1077 for the community at Christ Church, Canterbury; the evidence from women’s nunneries emerges mainly from the late-thirteenth century forward. The best collections are those from the large Benedictine abbeys of southern England such as Abingdon, Reading, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and Canterbury. Except for the last, these have few archaeological remains relating to Kerr’s subject, thereby denying us the ideal of a dialog between the documentary and the archaeological. For Canterbury, Kerr has to depend on Willis’ brilliant analytical work of 1847, although his phasing concerns are not as helpful to her as modern archaeological examination could be. At Bury, Kerr can use Jocelin of Brakelond’s famous Chronicle (c. 1201–02) detailing the early years of Abbot Samson’s rule (1182–1211). As the guestmaster and possibly the cellarer of one of England’s richest institutions, Jocelin had daily to deal with the division of visitors by rank; provide them with candles; negotiate their varied expectations of access to cloister, church, and inner court; and arrange appropriate escort.

The book’s six central chapters are organized by topic: the impulse underlying monastic hospitality, its administrative structure, the reception of guests, their provisioning, the interaction with the community (including entertainment), and the supporting finances derived from endowments and gifts. For each, she breaks new ground and the chapters teem with detail on such related subjects as medical care, sleeping arrangements, length of stay, attendance in church, guided tours of the monastery, stabling for horses (including provisioning and shoeing), and the welcome of women visitors (travelers as well as relatives of those in the community).

Visitors to monastic institutions ranged from the poor and pilgrims at the lower end of the scale, to churchmen and religious, and then, at the top, distinguished guests. Assessments of rank were readily made. For those who came on foot, hospitality was dispensed in the communal hall, one-star accommodation at best; for those with fewer than thirteen horses (namely, a retinue), bed and board came in the guest house, three-star at least; for those with fourteen or more horses, the abbot provided lodging, with possible five-star treatment. Such distinctions go back to c. 800; the tituli on the plan of St. Gall detail seven separate locations for visitors and those charged with their care. Three hundred years later, social change saw a much greater number of travelers, and this added to monasticism’s rapid development, involved more complex domestic arrangements administered by a rapidly devolving monastic hierarchy.

Monastic Hospitality’s approach is admirably interdisciplinary. There is much for virtually every medieval specialist and bountifully so for those with interests in material culture. General readers will also be fascinated as Kerr opens a broad window...