1On an excursion in 1975 to visit wall paintings in Danish village churches with Richard W. Southern, the distinguished Oxford historian, I received a memorable lesson in Scandinavian elites. We looked first at Sæby church in Western Zealand, with a great Byzantine-inspired Christ in majesty, surrounded by the four evangelists in their symbolic forms.1 This twelfth-century composition was made from the most expensive materials and for Southern reflected aristocratic donors who wanted their church decoration to compete with the international style of romanesque art.

2From Sæby we traveled northeast, about 30 kilometers to Mørkøv church, whose fifteenth-century wall paintings tell the story of salvation from the Annunciation to Judgment Day. These decorations are much more humble in the materials they use, while at the same time they try to fix themselves on the memory by telling stories that would have been familiar to the peasant population, as in showing the miracle of the fast-growing wheat crop, an apocryphal tale associated with the attempt of King Herod to kill the infant Jesus and the flight into Egypt.2 As Southern pointed out to me on that dark late October afternoon, while we struggled to make out the images in the gloom, here we meet the world of the peasants, whom the clergy encountered by making the Gospels easily understandable in these wall paintings.

3Today I would take Southern’s observations one step further and speak about a process of Christianization that is reflected in these wall paintings. The solemn Christ in majesty reflects the world view of an aristocratic Christianity of the twelfth century; the lively tales from the Gospels and associated legends reflect the way the Church in the later Middle Ages sought to make its message clear for peasants—or, to use the expression of Paris chancellor Jean Gerson, les gens simples.3 In between, a transformation of Christian belief and life took place that we can only begin to perceive in the sparse written sources that we have from the Danish medieval kingdom. In what follows I will limit myself mainly to the monks the aristocrats sponsored, especially the Cistercians, and try to see how they entered into and participated in the Scandinavian elite that was responsible for the Christ in majesty in the apse of Sæby church.

4Sæby is associated with the great aristocratic family, Hvideslægten, the White clan, whose members not only built churches but also founded the monastery of Sorø in Central Zealand.4 Here on a virtual island surrounded by lakes and marshes, this rich and powerful family, which was based nearby at the estate of Fjenneslev, established a monastery under the traditional Benedictine observance. Probably about twenty years later, in 1161, the most prominent family member of his generation, Absalon, then bishop of Roskilde, convinced the young Cistercian house at Esrum in Northern Zealand to send a contingent of monks to refound Sorø as a Cistercian monastery. From 1178 Absalon was archbishop of Lund, but for a number of years he kept his bishopric in Roskilde and continued to benefit the monks of Sorø. On his deathbed in 1201, he made his testament at Sorø and made generous bequests to the monks.5

5Sorø is representative of the development of Cistercian monasticism in Denmark and in Scandinavia in general during this period: in the twelfth century the monks were dependent on the generosity shown by members of elite society. They could not have become established without the material support and political backing that they received from members of the aristocracy.

6The monks themselves, however, cannot be considered as part of this same aristocracy, for their own self-understanding insisted on their marginalization from society. Later, however, and certainly by the fourteenth century, the Cistercians accepted a role as part of a Scandinavian elite and at the same time came to participate more closely in the religious life of the common people. It is this development, from being beneficiaries of an elite to becoming members of it, which the following pages will sketch.

The Cistercians in their own self-definition

7One of the earliest documents to express Cistercian identity is the Exordium cistercii. In describing the departure of the first monks from Molesme, the Cistercians claimed that they were concerned with living in a poverty described as “fruitful mother of a virile stock” (de paupertate fecunda virorum cogitare ceperunt).6 Here, as in other early Cistercian documents, poverty appears as an important theme, an expression of human nobility. The Cistercians of the first half of the twelfth century imagined themselves to be poor and humble, and thereby noble in spirit, in following Christ. They worked hard and experienced great difficulties but in so doing wished to imitate Christ in his own sufferings: multos labores ac nimias difficultates quas omnes in christo pie vivere volentes pati necesse est.7

8In an early illustration we see the first Cistercians engaged in hard work. A young man, clearly from an aristocratic background, is high up in a tree and is hacking off its branches. He is dressed in a rich red garment and wears pointed shoes, inappropriate for the hard physical labor that he in his former life would have left to peasants and servants.8 Although we have no contemporary images of the Cistercians who came to Scandinavia, we can assume that many of these monks came from such a background. They could have been recruited from families belonging to the social elite in Burgundy, Champagne and the Low Countries.9 In joining Cîteaux or Clairvaux these young men had given up their aristocratic background and had become, in the words of the Exordium parvum, “new soldiers of Christ, poor with the poor Christ” (novi milites Christi, cum paupere Christo pauperes).10

9After a period of great expansion and growth, the Cistercians in Denmark, as elsewhere in Western Europe, felt called upon to defend the rights and privileges they had acquired. They had thus ‘joined’ elite society and associated their own identity with membership of the aristocratic elite. The language of poverty and self-deprivation was replaced by a discourse of dispute with other members of aristocratic society who failed to recognize Cistercian rights and privileges.11 The offspring of the twelfth-century aristocrats often refused to acknowledge the gifts that their fathers and grandfathers had promised the Cistercians, and now the monks felt obliged to use the legal system to get their inheritance. From the 1240s the monks were also confronted with diocesan bishops who made new demands on them and did not respect their prerogatives as houses exempt from episcopal jurisdiction. The result is what I once called a “process of definition” that corresponds to the recourse to legal measures taking place all over Europe.12 Now I would add that this process also meant that the Cistercians had to give up their claims to be downtrodden and underprivileged. Instead they asserted their ‘birthright’ as part of a privileged elite.

10What does it mean to belong to a social elite? Certainly members of such a group in society would believe that they partake in a rich inheritance, something that no one can take from them. The first Cistercians made no material claims but accepted what was given them as a gift of God. They insisted that they were not interested in the kinds of rights and possessions that their predecessors in the Benedictine tradition had spent so much time in acquiring and administering. As the Summa carta caritatis expressed the matter:

“Churches, altars, sepulchers, tithes from the labor or husbandry of another, rural domains, serfs, land rents, revenues from ovens and mills, and other such things contrary to monastic purity are excluded by virtue of the institution of our name <as monks> and our Order <as Cistercians>.”13

11By the end of the twelfth century, however, monasteries all over the Order were reconsidering the development of their foundation and taking stock of what had been gained. The result can best be seen in new statements of how the Cistercians had begun. For the Order as a whole, the Exordium magnum cisterciense looked back on the first century and tried to reassert what were thought to be traditional values.14 The same was done in the Exordium carae insulae, the foundation account of Øm Abbey in Central Jutland, written shortly after 1200.15 Both narratives indicate an awareness that the world had changed since the mid-twelfth century, when the Exordium parvum had emphasized poverty and non-possession. The Øm Abbey account attempted to defend the rights and privileges of the monastery, especially in the face of the bishops of Århus who were not as sympathetic or generous as their predecessors had been. The Exordium magnum is less legalistically inclined and more hopeful that the Cistercians could continue to exist apart from the rest of society, but even here there are indications that the compiler, Conrad of Eberbach, was aware that the Order was not what it once had been.16

12After the middle of the thirteenth century it became even more apparent that monks could no longer operate as ‘privileged poor’. In England King Henry III, according to the monastic historian Matthew Paris, did his best to get his hands on Cistercian incomes from the wool trade. One abbot said the monasteries existed in order to offer prayers, not money, but the king replied that he wanted both prayers and money!17 At Clairvaux a dynamic abbot tried to bring the Cistercians into contact with the new needs of society by establishing a college for the brightest of them at Paris.18 At Øm in Denmark abbots protested against the demands made by the bishops of Århus. In so doing the monastery began a battle that lasted for almost two decades and brought the institution to its knees.19 But the monks, as seen so clearly by the witness of the Øm Abbey Chronicle, felt they had no choice. They had to make use of their resources and the social networks at their disposal in order to assert their membership of elite society.

Cistercian identity after about 1250: Sharing in a social elite

13Perhaps the most striking illustration of how Cistercians in Scandinavia coped with the increasing challenge from lay aristocratic society is seen in the frieze of shields that in its restored form to this day decorates the nave and transepts of the former abbey church at Sorø. At the end of the thirteenth century the monks chose to display the family crests of their donors and thus ignored traditional prohibitions against decorations in Cistercian churches. They must have done so because they felt a great need to remind the successors of their twelfth-century benefactors that noblesse oblige.20

14In trying to understand this development of Cistercian bonds with the rest of society, it is helpful to look to a recent study of twelfth-century Denmark by the Swedish historian Lars Hermanson.21 He sees the functioning of aristocratic society in terms of networks of friends and relatives who helped each other out. Hermanson rereads the narrative of Saxo in terms of such bonding. Although I would criticize him for failing to take into account a possible emotional or affective element within friendship and considering it as a purely political phenomenon, I think Hermanson’s characterization of Danish medieval society can help us to understand the Cistercian development. In order to protect their own material acquisitions that came through the generosity of the elite, the monks felt obliged to join the same social group.

15After the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians could no longer assume that their very identity as monks made them the beneficiaries of this elite. Now it was a question of impressing secular magnates with the duties and obligations its members owed to monks who had both money (or land) and prayers. In the course of a few decades the Cistercians in Denmark had developed away from their status as pauperes and had become participants in privileged society.

16Other recent studies by both historians and archaeologists enable us better to understand the consequences of this new orientation. The historian Jan O. M. Karlsson has shown how the Swedish Queen Katarina, married to King Erik Eriksson, was buried after her death in 1252 in the lay sisters’part of the abbey church at Gudhem in Vestergötland.22 In the twelfth century the Cistercian General Chapter tried to limit burials of lay persons in their churches, but in the thirteenth century there was much more receptivity to rewarding patrons with burial sites.23 Karlsson shows how the entire lay sisters’church was converted into a burial chapel for Katarina, whose tomb is the most impressive and perhaps most beautiful grave monument surviving from medieval Sweden. The Cistercians at Gudhem thus remade their church to give a special place to a royal figure, surely both to honor her and to secure the support and patronage of Katarina’s successors.

17The same eagerness to embrace royal patrons is shown at Sorø in the fourteenth century, where King Kristoffer chose the Cistercians for his burial place, rather than the Benedictines at nearby Ringsted, where generations of Danish kings had come to rest. It is only because the bishop of Roskilde in 1413 robbed the grave of Queen Margrethe I that Sorø did not continue for the last medieval centuries to be a royal burial site.24

18The nuns at Gudhem and the monks at Sorø thus made themselves available to their respective monarchies. By the end of the thirteenth century many monasteries had extended their spiritual benefits to a much larger segment of the lay aristocracy. As the Swedish archaeologist Elisabet Regner has shown in a recent doctoral thesis, “By opening the abbey to seculars and making lay people a part of the Cistercian brotherhood, the monks adapted a traditional structure to changing circumstances.”25 Cistercians had long done their best to keep a distance from lay society and had gained prestige and recognition for doing so. Now they ‘joined’ lay society by creating confraternities for lay patrons and by allowing some of them to be buried in their churches, and also by letting them into their churches, at least in the areas that had been meant for the lay brothers or lay sisters.26 In so doing, the monks were taking their place as participants and members of a Scandinavian elite, with all its privileges and commitments.

19This transformation did not necessarily take place painlessly. Although our monastic narrative literature for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is much poorer than what we have for the two preceding centuries, we at times are allowed glimpses of protest against the development toward what we can call a monasticism for the elite. We know that at Alvastra in Östergötland, the presence of Birgitta Birgersdotter (later Saint Birgitta of Vadstena) living near the monastery precinct caused some consternation. A brother Gerekin questioned the fact, and he was quite right to do so, for the earliest Cistercian legislation had banned women from the monks’houses. Gerekin, however, was told in a vision that Birgitta’s presence was pleasing to the Lord and there was no reason to worry.27

20When Birgitta’s husband Ulf Gudmarsson died in 1344, he was buried inside the monastery church, in a special chapel whose foundations can still be seen in the abbey ruin.28 Birgitta’s presence brought the very top layer of Swedish society within the perimeter of Alvastra. The literature that grew up after her death and whose purpose it was to establish her holiness also reflects the content of monasticism at Alvastra. There the monks experienced her presence as controversial, but they came to believe that it was a blessing and not a threat to the spiritual life of the monastery. Birgitta as a member of the Swedish elite could be allowed, even though she was a woman, to become part of the monastery’s everyday life.

21Another attempt to combine Cistercian life with elite society can be seen in the already mentioned decision to establish a Cistercian college at Paris. The abbot of Clairvaux, Stephen Lexington, went ahead with his plans and managed to get the approval of the General Chapter, but the move remained so controversial that he was eventually deposed from office. The historian at the English Benedictine house of Saint Albans, Matthew Paris, provides us with a contemporary evaluation of Stephen’s decision. Under the year 1249 he has the following notation:

“In these times Cistercian monks, in order to avoid the contempt of the Dominicans and Franciscans, as well as of learned secular priests... sought a new privilege. For this purpose they provided noble residences for themselves at Paris and elsewhere where schools flourish, so that through the training of the schools, they could more freely study in theology, canon and secular law, and thus avoid being inferior to the others. For the world is puffed up by arrogance and despises the way of life of monastics and vies to despoil the religious of their own goods. And so because of the vices of the world, the austerity of the monastic world is partly weakened. For we do not read of such a thing in the Rule of Saint Benedict, who is said not to have abandoned in any way the spirit of all the saints, according to the witness of the holy Gregory. For it is of him <Benedict> we read and sing that having left the pursuit of learning, he decided to seek the desert.”29

22In spite of this judgment, Matthew Paris was not completely unsympathetic to the Cistercian decision to found a college for monks at Paris. When the General Chapter chose to depose Stephen Lexington, Matthew Paris wrote sympathetically of him as a good and humble monk.30 The chronicler was perhaps influenced by loyalty to a fellow Englishman, but his hesitation about monks at school is indicative of an old guard concern that the Cistercians were accommodating too willingly to the needs and requirements of lay society. A similar unease can be seen in the narrative of the abbots at the great Cistercian house in Brabant, Villers:

“When the lord abbot of Clairvaux wanted to found a house at Paris to organize studies, he asked our abbot for a sum of money as a subsidy. Our abbot was amazed at this novelty and marveled. For he knew that the Order had been founded in great simplicity and had persevered until this time in its humility and purity and had done well in spiritual and temporal affairs. It had not previously been customary that monks left behind the discipline of the cloister, something that befits completely the vow of their profession, in order to dedicate themselves to study...”31

23Such a development may seem a long way from Scandinavia, where we find no evidence of monks going to houses of studies before the fifteenth century. But the Cistercian commitment to learning at Paris in the thirteenth century was part of the same involvement in elite society that we find in the Øm Abbey Chronicle, with its inglorious narrative of how the monks fought for the right to avoid excessive demands on their hospitality.

24The monks who had founded their houses in order to live in poverty and keep a distance from secular society discovered that in acquiring material riches they had to find ways of coping with the demands of bishops and other magnates. In the twelfth century the monks could suffice with being the poor of Christ, while now they felt obliged to be well educated and to use the legal machinery required in order to defend their privileges.

Joining the elite: An inevitable development?

25In considering the Cistercian compromise with the requirements of membership of elite society it can be asked to what extent this development is inevitable, especially in a society where elites make use of religious language and need religious groups to legitimize their actions. If we consider monastic development in terms of a model where monks are ‘bound’ to conform to the requirements of those who have power in society, it might seem as if the Cistercians acted in a situation where they had no choice.

26Such a model for development, from early enthusiasm and relative independence to later acceptance and dependence on the elite, was not the only one available in medieval society. The Cistercians could have followed a different path if they had been less concerned about the material success of their foundations and more dedicated to the original ideals of their founders. Such a path was indeed followed by their sister order, the Carthusians, who managed to maintain a distance from the outside world and to maintain for centuries the original impulses of their foundation. Even in their transition from foundations in the countryside to houses in the midst of medieval towns, the Carthusians kept a distance from social elites. They accepted the gifts offered them but did not seek a place in elite society.32

27Perhaps the ‘secret’ of Carthusian success was the eremitical way of life. The individual brothers lived very much on their own, cultivating their own gardens, writing their own books, and refusing to go out into the world. There could never have been a Carthusian house of studies at Paris, for Carthusians imbibed their learning in their hermit cells—and became some of the most learned individuals in late medieval Europe. They communicated with others through their books, not through legal cases, and though their foundations became wealthy, they did not become participants in elites.

28In Scandinavia the Carthusians had a presence for only a few years in the 1160s and then went back south.33 The reasons for the Carthusian abandonment of the North have never been apparent, but the result is that in Scandinavia monasticism had no model for keeping apart from the elite. The Cistercian presence in Scandinavia became part of the ‘normal’ monastic landscape, with no attempt to distance themselves from those who had power in society. But at the same time as the monks accommodated themselves to the elite, to some extent they also made themselves available to ordinary people. In their last medieval centuries the Cistercians entered into the popular religious culture that Richard W. Southern found reflected in the wall paintings of Mørkøv church. Some of the monks who came to serve in parish churches did preach the Gospel to the peasants—and would have made use of the same stories from the Gospels found on the walls and ceiling of Mørkøv church. We know at least that the bishop of Roskilde in 1305 gave the monks in Sorø permission to care for souls and to perform the work of priests in his diocese “because in your monastery, where the angelic profession of the Cistercian Order is observed in a praiseworthy manner in devotion of spirit and with fervor, such brothers can through the grace of God be found who shine with the treasure of wisdom.” The charter argues that the Cistercians were obliged to share their wisdom and understanding of the Gospels through preaching.34

29When the Protestant Reformation came, the Cistercians were allowed to remain in their monasteries. No new monks could be recruited, and so it was inevitable that the institution in the course of fifty years would die out.35 This gradual and gentle death might be explained in terms of the fact that the monks in the countryside did not threaten the Reformation preachers in the way that the friars in the towns could have done. But I think such an explanation is incomplete: the monasteries may have been allowed to remain because they continued to have supporters, both in the elite and among the common people. The Cistercians had managed to adapt themselves to local conditions and even to the new times, as can be seen in a book list from Øm Abbey, where the second-to-last abbot had a fine library of both Catholic and Protestant theology.36 Even when it was clear that the monastic age was over, some monks apparently did their best to make use of their time and to come to terms with the society around them.

30Cistercian monasticism in Scandinavia is often described mainly in terms of initial foundations and final dissolution.37 What came in between, from the end of the twelfth century and until the beginning of the fifteenth, can easily be ignored. What I find in the intervening centuries could be seen as a meeting with both elite society and with the common people. The monks probably recruited from both groups and succeeded by 1200 in making themselves part of the ethnic landscape,38 instead of continuing as outsiders in the way that probably was common in many North German monasteries, which failed to gain new members from the local population. The Cistercians in Scandinavia became a monastic elite dependent on a secular elite, especially after the 1260s, by which time it became clear in the wake of the conflict at Øm Abbey that the monks no longer could count on their international bonds for support and defense.39

31The Cistercians became the beneficiaries—and victims—of the very elite society that had discovered and embraced them. Behind their mostly hidden lives in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I think they harbored a strong belief in the power of monastic prayer—and in monastic incomes. Belonging to a world of prayer and money, the Cistercians in Scandinavia as elsewhere muddled through troubled times and took their place in elite society. Even though the monastery of Øm by its own account from the 1260s looked as though it were on the verge of total destruction, the foundation survived the troubles and later, at the end of the fifteenth century, was prosperous enough to launch a new building program to complete the cloister.40 According to our friend Matthew Paris, some Cistercian monasteries in the England of the 1250s were so heavily taxed by the king that they had to sell even their cowls in order to raise the necessary revenue.41 If this account is true, then some houses came to experience the same poverty with which they had begun their lives. But in the midst of such troubles, the Cistercians remained part of a social elite. Even the king in his angriest moments acknowledged that he needed the monks and their contribution to his rule.