Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience

"Barbara Harvey is one of those old-school academics, very rigorous and with a keen attention to primary sources. I don’t think she cites a secondary source in the entire book! For me, it’s about her scrutiny of the documents and the ways they could be used—and by documents, I mean those generated by the monks of Westminster Abbey and their staff. They include a lot of accounts, but also manuals and procedures. How did the monks live within the Abbey? It’s a very rich archive and she goes into it in painstaking detail. For example, she gets a statistician to use all the figures she’s collected from the registers of novices and acolytes—the young monks—until their deaths, to calculate life expectancy within the Abbey. Now, since the Abbey was very wealthy, most of the monks came from high-status families, and there was no risk of them being killed in battle, you’d have thought they would live much longer lives. Abbots frequently did live to very advanced years, but when you look at the monks as a whole, a remarkable fact emerges, which is that if you went into Westminster Abbey, you’d probably live five years less than the man in the street. So at a time when life expectancy at birth in society in general was about 35, life expectancy at Westminster Abbey was 30. This statistical approach to the documentation blew my mind. You wonder, ‘How can this be?’ Then you realize that all these monks were sleeping and eating and sharing all sorts of things together. It was a hotbed of disease because the monks were exposed to every infection that came to town. They didn’t have the means to understand contagion, and even if they did, they couldn’t really isolate the sick. So that’s Barbara Harvey’s approach to finding out how they were living and she goes across many different areas. What did the monks like to eat? Why was it that they introduced the misericord, a place where some monks could go off furtively and eat meat on certain days of the week, when they weren’t really meant to according to the rules of St Benedict? They really liked bacon and eggs, so that was a real indulgence. But despite these proteins, they really were suffering more than most members of society, because of their vulnerability to disease. So that book was very exciting for me, because it gave me exactly what I was looking for—a vision of what really was happening, based on primary sources with exactitude—and yet telling this fantastic story that I would not have otherwise known."