Custumale Roffense, c.1235
/Dr Christopher Monk introduces the ‘Custumal of Rochester’, a thirteenth-century customs book from the Cathedral Priory of St Andrew full of vivid details not just of the lives of the monks but also offering valuable insight into the servants of the priory.
A cover-to-cover facsimile of the Custumale funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund produced in 2013 by The University of Manchester Library is available through the John Rylands Medieval Collection portal.
The opening of the account of the various lay servants at St Andrew’s Priory, starting with the Millers, folio 53r.
In Custumale Roffense Rochester Cathedral has a little gem. The sixty-eight folios of this admittedly plain-looking book sparkle with historical insights. It is not the grandest of medieval books – there are no illuminated paintings and it would be a stretch to call the script elegant – but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in substance.
This may seem a rather optimistic appraisal. After all, a custumal is, fundamentally, just an institution’s record of its means of income and its expenditure, and it might therefore seem to promise little by way of the lively detail alluded to in my title. However, for those of us interested in medieval cultural history (the attitudes, behaviours, habits and practices of medieval people), the Rochester customs book proves to be an unexpected delight.
Liber IIII de gsuerid et redditus
>Every manor had probably of old
EH[?] own Custumale. J. Sommers Treatise of Gavelhynd page 74.<
>John de Westerham1 obyt
1320. Willelmi de Dene<
Liber Eccliesie Roffensis
Liber > IIII < quarumdam conseutudinum, >maneriorum et tenencium ecclesie Roffensis,
per Fratrem J. de Westerham monachum dicte
ecclesie. quem qui alienaverit, vel hunc
titulum in fraudem deleverit five jura
monachorum contenta in eodem minuerit,
partem habeat cum Iuda Proditore, nisi
ad emendacionem ante finem pervenerit. Fiat.
Fiat. Amen. Lata est ista sententia sin-
gulis annis a toto Conventu.
Custumale
Per Johannis de Vesterham, Monachum et Priorem
Suit hic proxim >prior< pofe hamone de hythe qui 1314
plac fact apostoa factus est episcopy Roffensis
civitas anno domini >1321< >anno Regis Edwardi
decime[?] 14.<
Translation
Book of the church of Rochester
Book 4 of customs and rents
>John of Westerham died 1320. William of Dean.<
Book of the church of Rochester
Book >4< of certain customs, >manors and tenants< of the Church of Rochester, by Brother J. de Westerham, monk of the said church. He who changes this book or obliterates fraudulently the rights of themonks contained therein shall in the same way be diminished, and share with Judas the Traitor, unless he makes amends before the end. So be it, so be it, amen. Such a sentence was issued each year by the whole monastery.
Customary
By John de Westerham, monk and prior
Here is the next >prior< priest, Hamo of Hythe who in 1314 was made a bishop by the decree of the Apostles in the year of the Lord >1321< >in the 10th year of the reign of King Edward
Yes, this custumal is so much more than a book about monastic revenue. The intent of its compiler, John of Westerham, one of the senior Rochester monks, was no doubt to preserve a searchable record of produce, commodities, and the pounds, shillings and pence needed to sustain the Benedictine community of St Andrew’s Priory (which is fascinating in its own way). In carrying out that purpose, however, he (along with a few later contributors) left for us a vivid portrayal of, what I like to call, everydayness.
A few examples of the texts beyond the revenue lists should suffice to illustrate this:
A significant proportion of the book is dedicated to a record of the priory’s paid servants, who were recruited from among the laity (see image 1, above). Obviously, it was important for the monks to understand their outgoings as well as their income, and so it is here that we find out the servants’ wages. But in also offering an account of each servant’s role, we are additionally gifted with wonderful details about their everyday lives.
What is revealed, I would suggest, is a sort of beauty of the mundane. There is a curious delight in reading about the wives of the cooks turning up at the cellarer’s door to collect the left-over offal from the meat prepared for the monks’ table; and the hirelings in the cloisters – probably local Rochester lads – shaking out curtains, skins and cushions ‘in the sunshine’, and receiving ‘four pennies for drink’ as recompense for their labours.
Medical recipes for strangury and ulcers, folio 4r.
Custumale became a book to keep local medical knowledge alive. Two therapeutic recipes were appended at the front of the book (see image 2, above), probably late in the thirteenth century, some years after the bulk of the manuscript was written. One is for ulcerated skin, the other for male bladder problems. Rather than seeing these texts as oddly placed in a book about money, they actually bring to our attention other direct concerns of the monks: worries about particular health problems common to the brothers, perhaps, and even their anxiety over the vagaries of aging.
Copy of entry from Domesday Book, folio 7v.
Two copies of entries from Domesday Book also found their way into Custumale, probably in the early fourteenth-century, and were added no doubt because the Rochester monks were anxious to nail down their claim to the two estates mentioned therein, which happened to be some distance away in the county of Buckingham.
As the cartulary (the collection of charters) of Rochester’s more famous medieval book, Textus Roffensis, shows, there was a good deal of stress involved in establishing and maintaining the rights to one’s land and livelihood. A farmed estate could be lost in a competing but fraudulent claim, or a charter outlining a gift of land may be stolen. Certainly, by the thirteenth century, St Andrew’s Priory has a well-documented history of fighting for its land at court, and so the appearance of these two Domesday entries in the customs book underscores such history and tension.
We can see from just these few brief examples that Custumale Roffense is a book with great potential for expanding our understanding of the local cultural history of Rochester. Now, though, for a few more detailed highlights.
Food, clothing, health: highlights from the text
In a short essay such as this it is only possible to offer a few textual highlights, though there are many. The passages below, translated from Latin, focus on three areas of everyday monastic life: food, clothing and health. Each is drawn from the detailed account of the role of waged lay servants in the community, found on folios 53 to 60.
Food
Food is mentioned in different contexts within Custumale, including food-rents (payable by the tenants of the various estates of the monastery), the daily allowances of bread and ale for servants, and the treats which individuals and the community enjoyed on special festivals and anniversaries.
Harvesting wheat in the Queen Mary Psalter © British Library Board. London, British Library, Royal 2 B.VII (Westminster, London or East Anglia, between 1310 and 1320), folio 78v. By permission.
My particular food highlight relates to the millers – or, more accurately, the miller-bakers – who, along with upwards of thirty other servants and seasonal hirelings, formed the paid workforce within the monastery’s precinct.
The master miller oversaw the production of the core staple for medieval monastic life: bread. He worked along with four other miller-bakers: the so-called ‘second-rank’ miller, who shared some of the master’s duties and also supervised the milling and weighing of flour; and ‘the other three’ millers, who worked both in the mill-house, grinding and refining the flour by a process known as bolting, and in the bakery, heating the ovens and forming the dough into loaves.
The master, however, held the most trusted position, ultimately responsible for ensuring quality and standards, as we see here:
The master of the millers must see and feel the wheat in the sacks at the door of the granary. If he is able or not to make for the monastery the best and finest bread, indeed by his mouth he should accept or reject it. He weighs the bread. Moreover, he must agree upon all the bread at the storeroom of the cellarer; and, after, he will have one monk’s loaf, and at Easter time a flan. His wages are 7 shillings. To him it belongs to mix and knead the monastery’s dough.
The image of daily life here is captivating. We can imagine the miller standing seriously and resolutely at the granary door as a cartload of wheat is delivered, then feeling the grain and checking its colour, before selecting a few individual grains to chew. He would have done this to test the hardness of the grain, and possibly its milling potential. Likely he would have chewed the grains long enough to form a tiny ball of dough in his mouth, and then used his fingers to stretch the dough in order to evaluate its strength (the process of chewing the grain is described in R. J. Henry and P. S. Kettlewell [ed.], Cereal Grain Quality (Chapman & Hall, 1996), p. 337). A thirteenth-century master miller evidently needed a good set of teeth!
Such conscientiousness continued throughout his duties. His weighing of loaves is particularly interesting, for it ensured the monastery’s compliance with the Assize of Bread and Ale, a thirteenth-century law governing the price, weight and quality of bread and ale produced in towns and villages.
What is really engaging about Custumale’s account of the millers (and the other servants) is the way it attends to the details of everydayness. Subsequent sections of the record show that the master had the same daily allowance of food as the second-rank miller, that is, ‘a loaf of bread, a gallon and a half of ale, and a single dish of pottage from the kitchen’ (perhaps they didn’t drink the ale in one sitting, and it may have been quite weak).
The three others had ‘in common one loaf and three gallons of ale’ and ‘a pie from a one-pound monk’s loaf’ (some kind of filled bread trencher, it would seem), as well as a further ‘four guest loaves’ between them after they had carried the bread to the cellarer, the monk in charge of food supplies. Plenty of bread and ale, then!
The master miller, however, gets singled out for a treat. His token of honour is a flan at Easter. The flan, typically known in the English of the time as a ‘flawn’ or ‘flathon’, was in essence a dairy and egg custard tart.
During Lent, dairy foods were forbidden, so a flan was a suitable and presumably delicious way of marking the end of abstinence. I imagine the master miller taking it home to his family, his children getting a little over-excited as they were handed a piece of it by their mother, rather like the way children today get a little giddy over Easter eggs.
Clothing
‘De lavitoribus et quid facere debeant’ (concerning the launderers and what they must do), folio 59v.
Clothing of one sort or another finds its way into various passages in Custumale. We see, for example, those close to death being laid upon a haircloth inside the monks’ infirmary; the church attendants dressing the altar and lectern with curtains or tapestries; and the chamberlain (one of the senior monks), accompanied by one of the tailors, going off to London or Winchester to buy both ‘white and black cloth’.
For my highlight, however, we visit the laundry house (see image 5, above):
In the laundry house there are two servants, one master and also a second rank servant. Whenever the sleeves of undershirts are torn, it belongs to the master to receive new ones from the chamberlain. If the body of an undershirt can be re-used, the second rank servant must store it, and he will have the old sleeves. Likewise, he will check if undershirts and under-breeches, after they have been washed, cannot honestly be made serviceable, before they are handed over to show to the chamberlain and put at the beds of the brothers by the sub-chamberlain. Their wages: to the master 4 shillings, to the second rank servant 3 shillings. […] The master also sews the names of the brothers in their undershirts and under-breeches. These two have a Christmas fire for the Nativity, just like the tailors.’
Is this not just incredible? We even get to know what the brothers wore under their habits! More soberly, we can see that though life was relatively comfortable in Rochester’s thirteenth-century priory, the Benedictine vow of poverty precluded waste. Patching and repairing underwear was most likely a daily routine for the launderers; and it would seem that they never doubted that an old sleeve might usefully be redeployed.
The most exquisite detail, though, is surely that of the master launderer, evidently with some level of literacy (at least the capacity to memorise name-forms), sewing the names of the monks into their underwear. Apparently, as with us today, it was not desirable to share one’s ‘unmentionables’.
Health and hygiene
As mentioned above, medical know-how is preserved in Rochester’s custom’s book in the form of medical recipes. There are other texts, too, that focus on physical wellbeing, including a record of ‘what is owed the sick brothers’ at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Rochester, which was supported by daily supplies of leftovers from the monastery’s kitchen and refectory, as well as a sizeable annual donation of grain from one of the monastery’s estates.
For my final highlight, however, I’m going to return to the laundry team:
And when the brothers go to bathe, they [the two servants in the laundry] ought to have ready everything for this which is necessary. They supply soap for the brothers for shaving. It belongs to the lad-servant to make the lye. His role is to make the fire before which the brothers must be bled, and to summon the blood-letter, in order that he may be prepared to bleed the brothers.’
Contrary to the common misconception that everyone in the Middle Ages was smelly and dirty, clearly, the brothers of St Andrew’s Priory knew what soap and water were. Soap-making was evidently an important task for their laundry servants, requiring lye, a caustic material obtained by leaching wood ash, to be prepared by the junior member of the two-man team. The result may not have been on a par with our pampering body washes with added moisturiser, but evidently this lye soap provided the monks with the means for cleanliness, that prerequisite neighbour to godliness. Moreover, we should also note that elsewhere in Custumale it is made clear that the brothers always washed their hands in fresh water before a meal.
Remarkable, too, in the context of cleanliness, is the matter of bloodletting. Certainly, today, we know there are safer and far more reliable methods of healing and preventative medicine, but it is nevertheless intriguing that the text implies the monks knew it was important to carry out the procedure in clean conditions. A somewhat crazy, medieval medical practice, then, but with a dash of what we tend to think of as modern common sense.
If doubts persist over whether the monks understood and observed basic hygiene, then it should also be observed that Custumale informs us that the attendant in the infirmary who served the meals to patients was expected to avoid handling bed clothes and other items which had been in contact with a dead body: ‘He will not wash anything of the deceased because he serves the healthy at mealtime.’ Good to know!
Bloodletting in the Luttrellpsalter. British Library Board. London, British Library, Additional 42130 (Lincoln, 2nd quarer of the 14th century), folio 61r, detail. By permission.
As we turn the pages of Custumale Roffense, I think it is fair to say that we may move beyond what we might term the formulaic aspect of a customs book – its lists of what is owed: by whom, to whom, and when – into the living, breathing world of medieval men, women and children, a world upon which I have, in this short essay, but lightly touched.
With our imaginations engaged, we will have further opportunities to explore the monastic precinct and observe the lives of real folk from Rochester’s medieval past, be they toiling, making merry, worrying, arguing, getting sick or even dying. In doing so, we will find ourselves wondering at both the resilience of such people and the vivid everydayness of it all.
Dr Christopher Monk
Index of contents
1r-8r. Title pages and notes
1r (select folio number to open facsimile)
The first folio features the typical inscription of a manuscript from Rochester Priory. Beneath this is a drawing of two male figures, one larger with a pleasant smile and the other (or possibly the inner) apparently moans in frustration.
An inscription at the top of the folio reads:
Liber Eccliesie Roffe[n]sis
2v Blank folio.
3r A further brief annotation including ‘Ego …’ (‘I, …’) is difficult to decipher.
The next folio reveals this was the fourth book of customs. None of these other volumes are known to be extant. A J. Sommers has added a note in English.
3v Two fourteenth-century notes
4r-5r Medical recipes and calendars
6v Two names: Thomas Anscall of Halford and William Absolan of Stoke
7v Domesday record of land in the hundred of Stone
8r Domesday record of lands at Haddenham
9r-28r. Customary
This begins what we might refer to as the ‘custumal proper’, i.e. the contents of the original, planned custumal. It is likely written by one scribe (late 13th-century). Much of the customary has yet to be translated.
9r-10r Customs of Southfleet2
10r-10v Sulungs of the manor of the monks and Bishop of Rochester3
10v-11r Customs of Frindsbury4
11r-11v Customs of Denton5
12r-12v Customs of Stoke6
12v-15r Customs of Wouldham7
15v-21v Jurors and customs of Darenth8
23r-23v Jurors and customs of Haddenham9 and of Cuddington10
23v-27r Customs of our land in Elham11
27v The Assize of Bread12
27v-28r The Wine Custom
28r How rents ought to be acquired
28v-50v. Revenue and expenses
Important historically for Rochester priory, this is the beginning of the lists of sources of revenue for each of the major offices within the monastery. Each office would be responsible for its own accounts.
28v-33r Rents of the Sacrist
34r-39v Rents of the cellarer
36v At the Mandatum of the Poor
39v-40r Food rents
42r-44v Rents for the Community
45r-47r Rents for the Almoner
47r-48r Provisions for the sick of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital
48r-48v Rent in remembrance of fathers and mothers
48v-49r Rents for altars
49v-50r Rent for the Choir
50v-52v Rent for the Chamberlain
53r-60v. Duties and Wages of the Lay Servants
The final sections appears to have been written by a different scribe from the foregoing. Though the style of script is similar, the hand is rounder; the ink is lighter; and the rubrication (red ink headings and letters) is generally more decorative.
53r-53v Duties and succession of the Millers
54r-54v Duties of the Cooks
54v-55r Duties of the Stewards
55v Duties of the Cellarer’s Doorkeeper
55v-56r Duties of the Grangers
56r-57r Duties of the Infirmary attendants
57r-59r Duties of the Church Attendants
59r-59v Duties of the Tailors
59v-60r Duties of the Launderers
60r-60v Common Terms and Wages for the Servants
65-68r. Miscellaneous records and addenda
60v-63v Tithing dues to the Bishop13
63v-64v Rochester Bridgework List14
64v-65r New rents in exaltation of the Holy Cross
65r-65v Total annual rent arranged per 13 months
65v The arrangement of manors which owe rent
65v-66r Granary measures and rent measures
66r Feudal tenants of Frindsbury who were producing oats and groats
66r-66v Concerning offerings to St Andrew’s15
66v-67r Almsgiving in remembrance of Bishop Gundulf16
67r Concerning salmon which are paid to the refectory
67r 67r Almsgiving in remembrance of Bishop Ernulf17
67r-67v Almsgiving for deceased brothers
67v-68r Customs owed by the Archbishop of Canterbury
68r-68v Requiem Masses performed for benefactors
Footnotes
1 John de Westerham, the monk attributed as the author or compiler of Custumale Roffense, eventually became prior of St Andrew’s in 1320, dying in 1321, not in 1320 as claimed in the annotation.
2 The village of Southfleet is near Gravesend.
3 A sulung is a measurement of land used during the medieval period in the area of Kent. The term originates from the Anglo-Saxon period but obviously continues into the later medieval period. A sulung was approximately twice the size of a hide, the typical land measurement used elsewhere in England. The modern equivalent to a sulung is about 60 acres. Dictionary of Medieval Terms, ‘sulong’.
4 Frindsbury lies on the opposite side of the River Medway to Rochester.
5 Denton is a village near Canterbury.
6 Stoke is a village on the Hoo Peninsula. A further heading in red ink: Concerning the Shepherds. The opening line announces the agreement for land to be held by the shepherd’s heirs: The heirs of Wluric of Bertune hold pasture for 15 cows for 5 shillings for as long as we wish. The role of shepherd was evidently very important as can be seen by the promise of the monastery to allow land to be held at a fixed price indefinitely.
7 Wouldham is a small village on the bank of the River Medway.
8 Darenth is a village near Dartford. The names of the twelve members of the jury are given followed by a subheading: Rents of Darenth. The dues are chiefly monetary.
9 ‘Hedenham’ is written in a modern hand.
10 Cuddington is the neighbouring village of Haddenham.
11 Elham is a small village lying between Canterbury and Folkestone. This item lists all the tithe donors to St Andrew’s priory in both the archbishopric (Canterbury) and the bishopric (Rochester).
12 The Assize of Bread was a statute which regulated the price, weight and quality of bread manufactured and sold in towns, villages and hamlets. Ale was similarly regulated. These assizes, or statutes, were the first in British history to regulate the production and sale of foodstuff.
13 Concerning the lands in Cobham (61r), Great Delce, Little Delce (61v), Nashenden, from the heirs of Eustace in Borstall, from the land of William of Dene in Borstall, from Chelsfield, from the land of John of Godinton in Chelsfield, from the Archbishop in Northfleet (62r), the land of Ifield, the land of Winivalle (apparently, Winfield Bank). There follows what we must have from our lands written above. The lists then begin again with Duna (possibly Dunbury), Stroud, Stoke, Henhurst, Srembroke [?], Gillingham, Bertreia [?], Dagenham, Wicham, Cockelstone, Stoke [again], Dudindale [Possibly Dundle or Durndale], Elham, Geddinge, Colinges [?], Hamwold, Buggeleia [?], Pole in Southfleet, Acol, and Bechenecurt [?].
14 A latin version of the same charter recorded in the Textus Roffensis.
15 The estates named are: Frindsbury, Denton, Wouldham, Southfleet, Stoke, Haddenham and Darenth.
16 This details the dues to be paid as alms to the poor on the anniversary of Gundulf.
17 Ernulf (1115-1124) was the ruling bishop when Textus Roffensis was produced.
