20 Bizarre Jobs Medieval Monks Actually Did

A Circator, or Roundsman in Benedictine and Cluniac monasteries, patrolled the cloister, dormitory, and work halls at irregular intervals, looking for rule-breakers. He recorded the monks caught dozing during study sessions or speaking when they ought not to, but did not reprimand them directly. He “proclaimed” the transgressors before the community at Chapter the following day, where the abbot imposed their punishment.

In medieval times, people thought that blood flowed around the body in equal parts with other “humors” such as black bile or yellow bile. When they were out of balance, a person became ill. For this reason, bloodletting, known as minutio, was performed throughout Europe as a standard form of preventative medicine. The monk-phlebotomist would prick open a vein with a small knife a few times each year and send his brother back to the infirmary for a few days’ rest, more food, and lighter work. There was no fear in this. It was a welcome relief.

Once the Cistercian order had been established in 1098, its monasteries required a constant supply of clean water to drink, work with, and dispose of. The monk engineers provided it with working plumbing. They constructed canals and dams to carry water first to the kitchen, then to waterwheels which drove flour mills, cloth-fulling machines, and forge-hammers, and then into channels which constantly flushed the abbey’s latrines. It was multi-stage plumbing centuries before most of Europe could dream of it.

Parchment was so costly that a single large Bible may have required hides from hundreds of animals, so many scriptoria in Europe instead opted to recycle old manuscripts rather than purchase new animal skins. This meant a monk known as the palimpsest scraper would wash the written surface with a mild acid such as milk and scour it with a piece of pumice stone to erase the old text. With modern imaging techniques, we’re now able to read that erased layer to recover the original, which included ancient Greek and Roman texts that monks had scraped away to cut costs.

Monks took vows of poverty and could not purchase their own clothing, so the officer known as the Chamberlain arranged for it. He went to local trading fairs to purchase cloth, contracted cobblers to make their leather boots, and distributed two wool habits per monk. He also arranged for communal baths to be heated three or four times a year, often timed prior to major celebrations such as Christmas or Easter. They were not filthy. They just didn’t bathe on a daily basis.

In the hierarchy of the monastery, the Cellarer stood immediately beneath the abbot and prior. The 6th-century book The Rule of Saint Benedict describes his duties as the monastery’s chief logistician. Since abbeys were expected to be self-sufficient, the Cellarer acquired, managed, and distributed supplies, including food, fuel, and equipment, to meet the needs of the entire monastery. One English abbey had over 30 workers under the direction of its Cellarer in the 14th century, according to records.

Catholic law prohibited the eating of warm-blooded meat for over 130 days each year, and inland monasteries needed a consistent source of fish, so the monks developed one. They constructed a system of linked ponds, filled with water drawn from nearby streams, to raise carp, pike and bream all year round. This was true aquaculture, not simply fishing. It was distinct from the catching of wild eels that some abbeys also employed to pay rent in kind for land or stone. The fasts meant that monks became fish-farmers.

The act of decorating sacred texts was regarded as a kind of prayer in itself, and the monks who performed it, known as illuminators, used truly valuable substances, such as beaten gold leaf and finely ground minerals such as the deep ultramarine blue obtained from lapis lazuli imported all the way from Afghanistan. The artists painted ornamental letters and elaborate pictures over entire pages. The Book of Kells, completed around 800, shows just how far they were willing to go for a single page of scripture.

Each manuscript written in a monastery began as an animal skin, but preparing a skin for use as a page, known as vellum, was its own complicated process. A parchment maker would soak skins from sheep, goats, or calves in lime water to loosen the hair, then scrape the flesh off with a curved knife. He would stretch the hide over a wooden frame to air-dry, then buff it smooth with pumice. One enormous Bible, produced c. 700 in northern England, required skins from over 500 calves.

Beer was consumed as a safer alternative to drinking water and was therefore brewed almost daily at monasteries throughout northern and central Europe from the 700s on, providing monks with both calories and a source of potable water. Although beer wasn’t invented by monks, they were responsible for refining it. In about 1150, Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess, described hops’ ability to prevent spoilage in beer and increase its bitterness. Monastic brewers introduced hops to other regions in Europe, laying the foundation for many of the most modern brewing practices of quality control.

Monasteries throughout Europe cultivated their own medicinal gardens. A ninth-century architectural plan of a Swiss abbey even features a 16-bed herb garden built for the express purpose of healing the ill. Using the works of ancient Greek and Roman medical writers such as Dioscorides and Galen as guides, the herbalist monks cultivated plants such as sage, mint, poppy, and belladonna and processed them into salves, syrups, and teas. They healed ill monks and townsfolk from the surrounding villages, effectively keeping medical knowledge alive and in use.

The Rule of Saint Benedict directed that monks take care of sick and aged members of the order with genuine charity, and the Infirmarian carried out that instruction within a special winged hospital. The Infirmarian prescribed remedies of herbs, kept the fires going, and supervised recovery. The Rule even permitted a meat-eating exception for monks who were ill, so the Infirmarian could feed recovering patients meat from four-legged animals, which was otherwise off-limits to healthy monks.

Often wealthy donors would leave monasteries money in their wills in return for prayers for their souls, and the Pitancer oversaw these particular funds. He would keep track of them and spend them on extras such as fish, eggs, cheese, and wine, as a treat during feast days. The modern word for a small amount, pittance, stems directly from this post. For the monk who received one, though, it meant something very different: a bonus over his usual allowance.

Benedict’s Rule instructed monasteries to treat the poor and strangers as though they were receiving Christ in their midst, and the Almoner was responsible for carrying out that instruction at the gate. He collected scraps from the refectory, took old garments from the Chamberlain, and administered charitable endowments to give food and clothes to the needy around the monastery. Centuries before modern government welfare programs, the Almoner’s door would have been the only safety net a poor traveler had.

Medieval European monks maintained straw hives, known as skeps, at many of their abbeys and benefited from their work in more than one way. Honey was the primary sweetener of the age and was used in medication, and church regulations required clean beeswax, rather than foul-smelling animal fat, to make the altar candles. Monastic beekeepers would also tend fruit trees, providing the official in charge of church paraphernalia with the wax that made the church shine.

Mass was served with unadulterated grape wine, and wine was a highly prized commodity, so the monks of many European monasteries, from France to Germany to southern Europe, took winemaking seriously. In 1336, Cistercian monks enclosed a vineyard in Burgundy called Clos de Vougeot and started testing the soils, studying the microclimates and classifying which plots would grow the best wine. The meticulous work they did to identify the perfect conditions for producing grapes became the basis for what we now know as some of Europe’s great wine regions.

The Armarius, a monk, was the librarian. He protected the monastery’s hand-copied manuscripts, kept in wooden armaria, from being stolen, from the damp, and from vermin. According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, the librarian was required to give each monk one book at the beginning of Lent for him to read completely during the course of the year. The librarian also maintained a catalog of the abbey’s holdings and lent manuscripts to other monasteries. Without him, the books wouldn’t have survived.

Hand-copying sacred scripture or classical texts with a quill pen line-by-line was a very tedious, arduous process, but monastic scribes maintained it throughout Europe until the invention of the printing press around 1450. Given that a stray candle flame could set off a fire that might destroy an entire hall’s worth of precious texts, candles and open fires were strictly forbidden in the scriptorium. Scribes wrote during daylight hours only, in unheated rooms, and occasionally penned complaints about their frostbitten fingers and sore backs in the margins.

In Medieval Europe, there were no commercial hotels. If you wanted a safe place to stay, you sought refuge at a monastery, and that’s where the Hosteller came in. Following the rule set by Saint Benedict, in which he instructed monasteries to be welcoming to travelers, the Guest Master (or Hosteller) was tasked with keeping two distinct groups happy under one roof: rich, noble patrons who expected fine dining and service, and humble pilgrims who merely needed a meal and a place to lay their heads. The abbey’s guesthouse was Medieval Europe’s inn.

The monasteries required accurate timekeeping in order to awaken the monks for midnight prayer and to schedule the eight daily prayer services. That necessity drove monk horologists to develop water clocks and later, fully mechanical versions. From 1327 to 1336 the English Benedictine monk Richard of Wallingford, abbot of St Albans, designed and constructed an astronomical clock that accurately showed the positions of the sun, moon and planets. It was among the most advanced machines built in medieval Europe, designed and built by a man whose primary occupation was prayer.

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