|
You are here:
Expansion: footnotes
- Abbot Serlo of Savigny approached
the General Chapter seeking the absorption of his congregation
which was experiencing financial and administrative problems;
his request was accepted in 1147, and this brought fourteen houses
in England and Wales within the Cistercian family. Each of the
newly affiliated houses was surveyed, checked and 'illuminated
with the Cistercian way of life.'
- J. S. Donnelly, Changes in the grange
economy of English and Welsh abbeys 1300-1540, Traditio
10 (1954)
pp. 399-458, at p. 409.
- Brut
Y Tywysogion,
or, The Chronicle of the Princes,
trans. and intro. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1955).
- Bernard of Clairvaux, The Letters of
St Bernard of Clairvaux, tr. B. S. James, rev. B. Kienzle
(Stroud, 1998), letter 385.
- Turning
the monastery, the cloister as well as the church into
a fortress against God, they stored
thirty heads of cattle, slaughtered and salted down, under
the dormitory. They fortified the dormitories both of the
monks and lay-brothers with great stones, stakes, spades,
spears and arms according to the custom of their people.
They stored large amounts of grain, hay, flour and other
necessities in the church and they placed vessels and containers
adequate to hold water in the cloister; in addition they
strongly fortified a shelter above the altar with provisions
and weapons so that they could live in it as if it were
their keep. Finally, they brought thirty head of cattle on the
hoof into the cloister, grazing them on the grass there
and
on hay stored in the church
each one of the monks
and lay-brothers equipped himself as best he could with
weapons prepared especially for him, excepting the old
monks and
some of the more prudent who left the monastery lest they
become involved in such crimes,
[Stephen of Lexington, Letters from Ireland 1228-9,
tr. B. O'Dwyer (Kalamzoo, 1982), ep. 89, pp. 188-91 at p. 188].
- Letters from the English Abbots to the
General Chapter at Citeaux (London, 1967),
pp. 13-14; see ibid. ep. 89 Memoranda of Marmaduke Huby,
1495, pp. 181-3.
- In the twelfth century a nun of the Gilbertine priory
of Watton (who had been there since a girl, but was said to
have had no vocation for the religious life) fell in love with
a lay-brother of
the community -or perhaps a canon - who had been sent to work
in the nuns' quarters. The girl soon fell pregnant and was,
as a consequence, beaten up and imprisoned by the other nuns.
She was then forced to castrate her lover and once the drastic
deed had been done one of the other nuns thrust the severed
parts, 'befouled with blood', into her mouth. The nun was returned
to her fetters. A miracle was then reported, and it was said
that Henry Murdac (who
had placed the girl in the community in the first place) appeared
to the nun in a vision along with two women who cleansed her
of any traces of her pregnancy, leaving her once again pure;
one of her fetters then fell away. Aelred
of Rievaulx was called to assess the authenticity of these
reports and concluded that they were indeed, miraculous.
See
G. Constable, Aelred
of Rievaulx and the nun of Watton: an episode in the early history
of the
Gilbertine Order, in ed. D. Baker, Medieval Women (Oxford,
1978), pp. 205-26; also see B. Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham
and the Gilbertine Order (Oxford, 1995), pp. 33-8.
Cistercians in Britain Bibliography
|