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Were Monks Really Gardeners?

By Anthony Lyman-Dixon

'Were monks really gardeners? Were Cadfael and his mates all that they were cracked up to be? For centuries ecclesiastical writers have promoted their cause at the expense of the empiricists who, with a largely oral tradition, lacked the same facility to bequeath their ideas to posterity.' Anthony Lyman-Dixon raised that question in an article entitled 'Hortae Monasticae - Myth or Reality' in the autumn 1997 issue of Herbs.

'History is written by the winning side,' we're told, and the battle between the traditional healers and the Establishment -- was fought with ever-increasing venom throughout the Middle Ages -- the Establishment won a decisive victory which culminated in the burning of the witches... It was not until the present generation of academics started to take an objective interest in archival material that the Church's role in the history of medicine came to be questioned in detail.

Poor gardeners

For centuries monks were incompetent gardeners who sent their lay brothers out into markets to buy the herbs they required...their bluff was called with the realisation that the Brothers had not the remotest idea what it was that the collectors had brought home in their baskets. As the natural world was seen as the realm of the Devil, monks with the collecting abilities of Walahfrid Strabo [9th century] were few and far between. Rarely allowed out of the grounds, the monks never saw the plants growing, they lacked pharmacognostic skills, and the herbs in their beautifully illuminated manuscripts bore ever less resemblance to the real thing, as copies were made from copies.

Rabanus Maurus (left) presents his work to Otgar of Mainz.
Rabanus Maurus (left holding book) presents his work to Otgar of Mainz.

From Cassiodorus (487-583) through Rabanus Maurus (c. 780-856) to Giraldus of Wales, monks were vainly enjoined to study the herbs they were using for healing, rather than boiling up any roadside weeds. But even if the information contained in the Greek texts in their libraries had been accurate in the first place, which for the most part it wasn't, the librarians did not want the monks handling their precious scripts with grimy fingers. Moreover since both text and illustrations were corrupted to the point where neither bore the remotest resemblance to the plants they were describing, it went against the odds that the leaves brought in by the collectors could be identified, let alone have any advantageous effect.

Many working monks could not have read the texts anyway: they were deliberately kept illiterate so that they would slavishly serve the word of the Abbot rather than developing ideas of their own about God's preferences... Aware that the purest reservoir of ancient knowledge lay in the East, the Church did occasionally despatch token monks to bring back new information. The results were extremely patchy. Adelard of Bath became an authority on propagation for instance, but Constantine the African, one of Salerno's luminaries, if he really travelled at all, apparently learnt nothing.

Sickness is Divine

A further obstacle was the view that sickness was a punishment from God and that tampering with the course of an illness was thus a sacrilege. Although knocked on the head by Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), this nonsense remained widely accepted and provided a useful excuse when one of the imaginatively prepared concoctions killed rather than effected a cure. When a cure did occur, it was believed that the herbs had simply assisted God's healing grace and the victim would have recovered without them, albeit less quickly. "Do not put your trust in herbs or seek cures in human advice, for although we read that medicine was established by God, it is He who makes the sick whole." (Cassiodorus in de Medicis) Several authorities have pointed out that the invocations chanted over herbs to 'potentise' them were identical whether used by Christians or alternative healers, the difference being that the followers of the old religion believed that the ritual chants helped the herbs and not the other way around.

In spite of all this, monks did achieve some notable accomplishments in the field of medicine, which were recognized and richly rewarded by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (742-814). In this he and his successors were well served by the Quadrumvirate of Heito, Benedict (of Aniane), Strabo and Alcuin, based variously at St Gall and Aniane. If these names come so readily to mind, it is perhaps because there were so few of them. St Bernard was inclined to mumble, "Remember thou art a priest not a physician" on the grounds that healing distracted from devotion. For the same reason there were no monastic medical schools, or even a system of apprenticeship, so that any knowledge possessed by a monk almost certainly had been acquired prior to his noviciate.

Slowly, as the Dark Ages brightened into Medievalism, monastic medicine became increasingly discredited whilst the gardens became finer... lay collectors were also banned from monastic precincts [outsiders were no longer medically treated] and monks started growing their own herbs. Ironically, freed of undesirable external influences, the monks became less interested in the visionary ideals of their founding fathers than in the culinary and aromatic properties of their plants. The once wholly vegetarian brothers acquired wealth and farms and became gluttonous meat eaters, needing herbs to aid the digestion and improve the flavour, so that the Hortulus came under the Cellarer in the monastic hierarchy. The Sacrist, who grew the flowers and aromatics to decorate the chapel, became ever more important and, like the abbot, often had his own garden whilst the planting of the cloisters owed more to aesthetics than devotional iconology.

Plants not Prayers

The Benedictine sister houses swapped plants amongst themselves, and the inspectors from the Cistercian headquarters frequently complained that the monks were more interested in horticulture than prayer. However it was realised that giving them an interest, particularly in this notoriously harsh order, would stop them straying into the outside world. The Christian philosophers Ramon Llull, Robert of Marlaix and, later, Louis of Blois, all claimed that flowers provided a spiritual ladder to the divine presence. Long before the end of Medievalism monastic healing had withdrawn in on itself. Gifts from grateful patients, cured more by their faith in God than in monkish potions, as the healers themselves would have been the first to agree, had led to charges of covetousness. As far back as the councils of Rheims (1125) and Lateran 2 (1139) attempts were made to separate physical healing from the well-being of the spirit.

Ramon Llull Christian Philosopher

Meanwhile, unconcerned by the rarefied debates in Canterbury and Rome, the people appreciated, that the prescriptions of the village wise women not only worked more efficiently but were obtainable without the hassle of attending mass. The brief ascendancy of schools based on those of Salerno and Montpelier spread Byzantine and Arabic methods based on classical lore that had been lost to the West centuries before. Whilst it may not have successfully treated many specific ailments, its holistic approach was widely recognised as beneficial. Monks were forced to acknowledge the deficiencies in their medicinal practices which demanded outside assistance and both Kieckheffer in Magic in the Middle Ages (1989) and Riddle in Theory and Practice in Medieval Medicine (1974) point to the interchange of information between the new physicians and monastic foundations.

Clergy or Wise Women?

A women healer helps a mother to give birth

In 1240 it was sourly noted that the monks had ceded their abilities to barbers "who, although illiterate were at least skilled". As the monks left the field, chaos reigned in the resulting vacuum as medicine, surgery and the provision of plant material became a battleground in which the apothecaries fought grocers, spicers and doctors over the right to supply herbs, and barbers squabbled with women over who should perform operations. The universities with regulations framed by the secular clergy, sought to prevent the practice of medicine by those unable to speak Latin in an attempt to rule out women healers, already barred from education by reason of their sex. Although popes between 1325 and 1350 supported the pleas of the theoreticians, as academia swung closer to astrology, one of the most useless of the newly fashionable Arabic imports, ground was being lost the empiricists. Urgently the church endeavoured to liberalize its prohibition on the clerical practice of medicine, but it was too little, too late, since the populace as a whole tended to favour the wise women, who were to suffer the vengeance of the Establishment pyres of the following centuries.

One is justified then in asking what monasticism did do for medicine during the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance. The answer is compassion. Its motivation may have been entirely selfish being, as so many cynics have suggested, a means of bypassing limbo on the way to the Paradise of the hereafter, but it was undeniably better than the appalling callousness of the Roman civilisation that preceded it. The scriptoria, however inaccurate their copies, prevented many classical texts from becoming lost to posterity. Finally it provided a tenuous continuity of literacy from ancient Rome to the introduction of printing -- a continuity which would have been all the more effective were it not for the virulent internecine feuds which characterised medieval Christianity. Coulton in Medieval Panorama (1938) pays tribute to the part played by the Church in the development of the medieval hospital system, but let him have the last word, "The belief that monks and friars were the doctors of the Middle Ages is a gigantic delusion ... formal ecclesiastical legislation ought to have been sufficient to cast the gravest doubts upon this legend."

Main references:

Coulton CG, Medieval Panorama, 1938, Cambridge University Press.
Kieckhefer R, Magic in the Middle Ages, 1989, Cambridge University Press.
Meuyvaert P, The Medieval Monastic Garden, 1986 Harvard University Press.
Riddle J, Theory and Practice in Medieval Medicine, 1974 Viator 5.

Anthony Lyman-Dixon is a member of The Herb Society and owner of Arne Herbs, Limeburn Nurseries, Chew Magna, Bristol BS40 8QW. He has studied the history and folklore of plants and has written articles and lectured about the myths and realities of them. His book, Your Herb Garden (SGC Books, 1997) has more anecdotal information and practical gardening advice.

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