Monasticism & Place Making
by Lena Van Wyk
This is adapted from an article featured in the Winter 2021-2022 edition of The Table magazine. If you’d like to see this article as it originally appeared in the magazine, you can find it here.
I have a confession to make. I have a reality TV addiction. Not all reality TV, but one particular series of shows produced by the BBC that reenacts historical farming communities: Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm, and (my favorite) Tudor Monastery Farm. These shows got me through the first month of my baby’s life. Sleep deprived with an inconsolable baby, I spent hours rocking and feeding her while losing myself in the details of how to build a coppiced, woven fence for keeping sheep in 16th century style.
Tudor Monastery Farm is amazing fodder for an Anglican community trying to recreate ancient ways of being a land-centered parish that farms together and builds community rooted in place. The show demonstrates how British monasteries, before the Reformation, established sustainable agrarian communities by regulating how common space was used and shared. The church owned all the land and its parishioners farmed it, but not in a privatized way like we now think of farming. The community farmed together and church leaders stewarded wild spaces (woodlands, streams, fisheries, pastures) together so that no individual took more from the land than it could sustain over generations. The monasteries were not perfect or without corruption, but on the whole, historians agree that they preserved a stable way of rural life for many centuries.
This deep tie to place in British Christianity began in the first centuries of the church on the British Isles, in the 5th and 6th centuries, where evangelist monks often lived very close to the land in hermitages and monasteries in wild places, like the Isle of Iona off of the coast of Scotland in the case of St. Columba, or on rocky coastal cliffs in England in the case of St. Morwenna. Many of these saints were said to have miraculous interactions with animals and the rest of creation. One of the best books I read this summer, Seven Holy Women: Conversations with Saints and Friends, recounts how St. Morwenna was one of the first evangelists to Cornwall. As a way of establishing a church there, she lived on a seaside cliff in a hut. Every morning, she would travel down a treacherous path to the sea where she gathered rocks, which she put on her head and carried back up to the top of the cliff, where she built a church stone by stone--by herself! Now that’s a dedicated woman of God. One day, when she stopped to rest halfway up the path, a new spring gushed forth: a miraculous sign of God’s living water refreshing her and anointing the place.
As Michael Northcott chronicles in his book Place Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities, Celtic Christianity was deeply tied to the creation of sacred space from the very beginning:
“For the Celts, as for the desert fathers, this work was not primarily for mortification of the flesh but a post-Edenic recreation of a paradisaical state in the wild lands where they created self-sufficient dwellings. […] As Harold Massingham puts it, the Celtic churches of Britain took up a ‘sanctification of the entire world of nature,’ which provided as true an echo of the rural Christ of the gospels as could be found anywhere in Christendom.”
For almost ten centuries, the lands of the British Isles were shaped and formed by church-based communities. Monks and lay people worked together to develop farming techniques, care for local coppiced woodlands (a method of harvesting wood without killing the tree), and tending to pastures, waterways and fisheries. The church calendar and the agricultural calendar were deeply intertwined, with feast days connecting the biblical story and saint days to the rhythms of the agricultural year.
Though the birth of Anglicanism and other reformational expressions of the Church during the 16th century brought needed new life to the church, the political ramifications for the British Isles were not a wholly blessed thing. King Henry VIII resented the power that monasteries held, as they owned a third of the land in his kingdom, so he had them destroyed. Though there was corruption that indeed needed correcting, the utter destruction of this ancient system of religious and community life was unwise. As Northcott argues, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries, begun in England by Henry VIII and his chancellor Lord Wolsey between 1536 and 1541, was the seminal event in the breaks between nature and religion, food growing and urban living, town and countryside, that are implicated in the modern ecological crisis.”
Essentially, after the crown took much of England’s and Scotland’s arable land away from the monasteries, it transferred it into the hands of aristocratic families, who converted it from small-scale farms that supported many families to vast estates for sheep grazing to make profitable wool. Thousands of rural people had to move off the land and into cities. This effect continued for centuries, referred to as “The Enclosures,” and precipitated great migration into urban areas (fueling the industrial revolution) and to the Americas. This shift in agriculture also caused great ecological degradation due to deforestation and overgrazing, converting much of the United Kingdom into what ecologists call a “wet desert” devoid of much biodiversity.
As modern-day Anglicans, we have a chance to glean wisdom from the ancient roots of the Celtic Christianity that so shaped Anglicanism. We have an opportunity to form our own expression of church-based place making. As we have become a pro-cathedral of our diocese, we have an opportunity to learn from our ancestors and practice the art of creating sacred space in a way that fosters ecological life and agricultural abundance.
