Then I remembered how the Venerable Bede, towards the end of his life, was always worrying about so-called false monasteries.
I had imagined that these false monasteries were really just an Anglo-Saxon tax avoidance scheme – get your family estate declared a monastery & be spared the expense of keeping any bridges on your land in good repair and be freed from all obligation to provide men to go off & fight for the king.
I took down The History of the English Church & People to look for a quote, & realised that the World Classics edition also contains his Letter to Egbert, the bishop of York, probably Bede’s last surviving work, written 734, which I have never read before.
Bede was indeed concerned for the future, afraid that “with the diminishing of our military forces those who should defend our borders against barbarian incursions disappear.”
But he also feared that religion could come to an end, because the people in these false monasteries provided no pastoral care whatever. Even worse
There are … laymen who … give money to the kings & obtain lands under the pretext of building monasteries, in which they can give freer rein to their libidinous tastes … also with equal shamelessness they obtain places where their wives may construct monasteries …Nor can these be dismissed solely as the rantings of a man who was ill & possibly fearing his own death; in a passing reference in his great history of the church & people he tells the story of the fire which destroyed the abbey at Coldingham, which Bede uncritically reports as divine retribution for the immoral behaviour manifest in the fact that the nuns were reputed to entertain the brothers in their rooms. Further proof of laxity was provided by the nuns practice of 'weaving elaborate garments'.
Double monasteries rather than female-only convents were the norm in that still unstable, violent age, and Bede was far from being the only church official to express this sort of concern. Bede however was proposing an extraordinary remedy – he wanted the charters – the deeds of ownership - of unsatisfactory monasteries to be torn up & the property given to others, because
There is nowhere that the sons of the nobles or retired soldiers can take possession of. In consequence, wandering & without a spouse, & having passed the age of puberty, they live without commitment to continence, & in consequence they either leave their homeland for which they ought to be fighting in order to go overseas or, with even greater wickedness & lack of shame, because they lack intention of being chaste, they give themselves up to indulgence & fornication
These are not the sturdy, democracy-loving Anglo-Saxons I learned about at school! But it does explain how abbots could have descendants
