4 - Cistercian Clothing and Its Production at Beaulieu Abbey, 1269–70

Summary

The Latin account of the keeper of the wardrobe (vestiarius) for the Cistercian monastery at Beaulieu, Hampshire, in 1269–70 contains important English woollen textile production cost information for the later Middle Ages, and considerable detail concerning clothing for the abbey's monks and lay brothers. The following analysis of Cistercian clothing derived from this account complements Barbara Harvey's study of Benedictine monks' clothing at Westminster Abbey in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The only other late-medieval cost data on English woollen cloth production so far discovered have been the few scraps of production information at Westminster Abbey's manor of Laleham, Middlesex, from 1294–95 and the costs derived from a claim made in the Colchester court of pleas by a weaver, William Okle, in 1388. For broadcloth production costs, English economic historians have had to rely on continental records or isolated costings for individual processes. This 1269–70 set of accounts predates the voluminous cloth cost information in the Datini archives at Prato near Florence by more than a century.

THE CISTERCIANS

The Cistercian order was founded in the late eleventh century by a Benedictine abbot who wished to follow the Rule of St. Benedict literally, setting up a new monastic order at Cîteaux in France in 1098, substituting the undyed, white/grey/brown habit—symbolic of humility and repentence—for the Benedictine black. The Rule emphasised the simple life of work, love, prayer, and self-denial.