8 - Agriculture and economies

Summary

Like many new religious groups of the central Middle Ages the Cistercians had origins in the late eleventh-century eremitical reformers who questioned the comfortable lives of those earlier monastic communities that had held lordship over villages, rights to tithes, churches and other revenues. Instead, these Cistercian reformers embraced a reputation for foundations ‘far from cities, castles and human habitation’. Taking literally such self-descriptions by the Order’s monks, earlier economic historians saw them as twelfth-century ‘pioneers’ whose clearing and draining of new lands led to an enormous acquisition of wealth derived from ‘bumper crops’ on ‘never-before cultivated lands’. More recent studies have shown that although many Cistercian abbeys became wealthy, they were not the pioneers once imagined. Cistercian wealth derived from providing meat, cheese and other animal products along with the usual agricultural products to neighbouring towns where they were sold free of tithes, tolls and market dues. Their pastoralism became famous especially in Britain, where they produced wool for export. Their attempts to revive the early simplicity of the Rule of Benedict included a reduced liturgical practice that allowed time for manual labour in the production of their own food and the gradual introduction of lay brothers and lay sisters as labourers.

While the earliest Cistercian communities may have lived on the produce of their little gardens, Cistercian grange agriculture would be based on large, compacted granges or farms created by reconstituting fragmented holdings of previously cultivated lands into large compact ones. Although Cistercian abbeys and granges might be sited on recently cleared lands (assarts or, in southern France, artigues), such land coming into Cistercian hands was almost entirely already settled and cultivated. It was extremely rare for Cistercian abbeys to clear and drain land. Although abbey and grange sites might give the appearance of recent wilderness, such land had features of earlier development such as roads, pathways, mills, farm buildings and established place-names. Acquisitions often had as their core the land given them by early donors and patrons, but large sums were needed to consolidate land rights into granges, using hundreds of contracts.