The daily round
Many people know about the abbey at Shrewsbury because it features in the Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, and is the home of the eponymous monk. But apart from the church, itself much truncated after the dissolution, little remains of the buildings of Cadfael’s monastery. The church is surrounded by roads, one of which slices its way through the site of the cloister, where the domestic buildings of the monks would have been sited.
This is one tantalizing fragment that has survived. It is a pulpit, and was originally part of the monks’ dining hall or refectory. Monks were expected to eat in silence, the only sound in the refectory being the voice of one brother, who would climb the stairs to the pulpit and read to the others as they ate. The lives of the saints were favoured for mealtime readings.
The ornate pulpit was built in the early-14th century. It is vaulted inside and carefully designed with broad openings, so that the reader could be heard, and small carvings to inspire those who looked up towards it. Cadfael, however, had he really existed, would not have known this delicate piece of stonework – he was a monk of the 12th century. He would probably have known a much plainer, round-arched pulpit, but the regular ritual of readings, like the continuous round of liturgy in the church, would have been the same.
10 comments:
Shrewsbury seems such an unlikely place to spend a huge fortune on gorgeous religious and secular architecture. So it leads me to ask if they were trying to
protect against the rebellious Welsh or proactively attract the Welsh to convert them.
Helen: As far as the secular architecture goes, Shrewsbury is a river town that attracted merchants, who could carry goods along the Severn as well as by road into and out of Wales when conditions allowed. There were markets and fairs, and it was worth merchants' while building themselves rich houses here in spite of the threat of violence.
The abbey's case is interesting. As a Benedictine house in a large market town, they would have been well endowed - not at all unusual in the Middle Ages (think Tewkesbury, Gloucester, etc). The abbey held the relics of the Welsh saint Winifred, so there would have been pilgrims from Wales too.
I took the boys here a few years ago. Although the abbey was lovely, it was this lonely pulpit which did it for me.
Wartime Housewife: As is often the case, it's the small things that make the deepest impression.
I have spent far too much time staring at this while waiting for certain shops to open early mornings as part of a job I did some years ago. Thanks for sharing. Great post as always.
I'm fascinated by bits of architectural salvage that end up having incongruous new lives. In a Market Harborough park there's the cupola bell tower from Symington's Corset Factory next to the tennis courts, and I think I saw an odd spirelet from Gloucester Cathedral sitting at the side of a footpath.
Peter: I too like these architectural odds and sods, left abandoned like the pulpit or displaced like the cupola. I think the fragment in Gloucester is the tip of the spire from one of the city's churches - I'll have to check.
A number of years ago,I spent a few days in retreat at a Franciscan friary in Dorset. The ritual of the refectory hasn't altered much.
Martin: I must do a post about the friars some time. Meanwhile, for more about the monastic life, I can recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor's short book A Time to Keep Silence, about his time among the monks of France and Cappadocia. In fact I think I'll reread this book soon...
Thanks for the tip.I have sourced a very reasonably priced copy from a second-hand bookshop in Oxford.I look forward to reading it.
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