Where are the monks?

When our visitors are told our cloisters are the largest in the UK it is reasonable that they immediately ask “So where are the monks now?”

The standard guides’ answer is “We never had monks because our cathedral was secular, not monastic.”

The problem is that this just generates a whole lot of extra questions:

• What is the difference between a secular and a monastic cathedral?
• Why did they have a mixture of secular and monastic cathedrals?
• Why do you have cloisters if you don’t have monks?
• Is the head person in a monastic cathedral a monk or a bishop?
• Were there any monks in Salisbury?

This may take a few posts to answer, and I’ll revise these posts if I get things wrong (please comment).

Let’s pick somewhere to start.

For administrative purposes, England and Wales are divided up into geographical areas called dioceses.  Each diocese is given a bishop by the central church organisation.  The bishop runs the diocese and the priests and churches in it.

One of the churches in the diocese has been chosen to site the bishop’s seat (the cathedra).

Because monks stay in one place, they have the time and the money and the land and the motivation to build large lovely churches/abbeys, and when these are in a decent sized town (Canterbury, Winchester, Durham) they make a great place to base a bishop.  In other cases (London, York, Exeter) the bishop – whose role would include plenty of land and income – could build a large church himself.

This church is then called a cathedral church.  Which means by the way that “cathedral” is actually an adjective, not a noun.  Anyway, in common parlance this “cathedral” includes the building and the people who work in that building and the activities that go on in that building, and it is run by the Dean.

In a monastic cathedral, the cathedral is run by the head monk, the prior or abbot, taking on the additional job of Dean. In a secular cathedral, the Dean is the most senior priest.  “Secular” nowadays means not-religious, but back then (when everything was religious) meant not-choosing-to-be-a-monk, so the Dean was a proper priest but had chosen not to join one of the monastic orders.

When our story opens, there were around 20 dioceses in England and Wales, mostly set up in the 600s (yes! things did happen in the UK between the Romans leaving and William the Conqueror arriving!) and the bishops’ seats were in a fairly even mix of monastic and secular cathedrals.

The dioceses of Sherborne and Ramsey were merged to form the new diocese of Salisbury and in 1078 Osmund (about whom more later) became its first bishop. Previously the cathedra had been in Sherborne Abbey, which was monastic.  Osmund was learned and chaste and very keen on order but he was not a monk. His cathedra was going to be based at (Old) Sarum, and so he led the project to build a fine new secular church for it.

One of the things that he did do, which is very important to our story, is that he documented the Rite of Sarum which spelled out the various processions required in different services.  And some of those – yes! – required the cloisters, so the cathedral churches at Old Sarum and then at New Sarum were built with cloisters.

I think that has answered most of the questions except “were there any monks in Salisbury”, which will repay a bit more investigation.

PS I hope you like the caption of the map “..at the close of the Middle Ages”.  I have a mental image of a committee back in maybe 1499 meeting and saying “Can we declare that the Middle Ages have finished now?”

PPS It is entirely coincidental that the cloisters are the perfect shape for pancake day races.