During the Black Death in 1348-1349, Benedictine monks at Westminster Abbey faced unprecedented mortality, with 40% of England's clergy dead by year's end; monks died at twice the rate of the general population because their religious vows obligated them to care for the dying in infected houses, and the plague spread rapidly through monasteries where monks lived, ate, prayed, and slept together in close proximity, making these communities particularly vulnerable to epidemic spread.
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What Was It Like Being A Monk During the Black Death? | Medieval London 1348 | Day 2 of 7Added:
[music] >> By the end of 1349, 40% of England's clergy are dead.
Not wounded, not fled, dead.
The priests, the monks, the friars who went into the infected houses because their vows told them to, who held the hands of the dying, who administered last rites, who heard confessions in rooms where every breath was a risk, they died at twice the rate of the general population.
The people most obligated to stay were the people most likely to die for staying.
Of all the communities in medieval England, the monasteries were hit hardest.
Monks lived together, ate together, prayed together, slept in the same dormitory, shared the same infirmary.
When the plague arrived in a monastery, it did not pick off one man at a time.
It moved through the community like [music] fire through dry wood.
It is November 1348.
Westminster sits 2 miles upriver from the city on the north bank of the Thames in its own walled precinct.
The Abbey has stood here in one form or another for 300 years.
It is one of the wealthiest, most powerful religious houses in England.
Its monks are Benedictines, followers of the rule of Saint Benedict, one of the oldest and most demanding codes of monastic life in the Christian [music] world.
And today, on day two of a week in medieval London, you are one of them.
Using AI trained on monastic records, medieval chronicles, and the surviving accounts of Benedictine life in 14th century England, we've reconstructed what one day inside Westminster Abbey actually [music] looked like in November 1348.
Not the stone and the stained [music] glass, not the coronations and the royal tombs, the real Abbey, the cold dormitory, [music] the sick men in the infirmary, the prayers that get harder to believe the more people you watch die. [music] From matins before dawn to compline after dark, this is what it was actually like.
This is day two of seven in medieval London.
And today, you are a monk.
Let's step back 676 years.
The bell rings at 2:00 in the morning.
You are already half awake. [music] Your body has learned the rhythm of the canonical hours the way it learned to walk.
Not by understanding, [music] but by repetition.
The bell for matins rings at 2:00.
You get up at 2:00.
This is not a choice. This is the rule.
You sleep in the dormitory with 30 other monks.
A long stone room above [music] the cloister, cold enough in November that your breath shows in the dark.
The straw mattress is thin.
The blanket is adequate.
You have learned not to want more than adequate.
You dress in your habit, the black woolen robe of the Benedictines, [music] and file out in silence.
Silence is the default [music] state of Benedictine life.
After two years, it has stopped feeling like a restriction and started feeling like weather.
Simply the condition you exist in.
Westminster Abbey Church is enormous.
At 2:00 in the morning, lit only by candles and oil lamps, it is a world of shadow and stone, and the faint smell of incense from vespers still hanging in the [music] air.
You take your place in the choir stalls.
The abbot begins [music] the office.
The monks respond.
The psalms move through the cold air in Latin. Voices blending and separating.
And for 20 minutes or 40 minutes, time measured in psalms rather than minutes, the only things that exist are the rhythm of the words, and the cold, and the candlelight. [music] This is what Benedictine life is built on.
Not personal mysticism, but the communal recitation of the divine [music] office.
Seven times a day, every day, without exception.
Matins at two, lauds at dawn, prime at six, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline.
The purpose is to make the entire day an act of worship.
To make [music] work and prayer and sleep and eating all part of the same continuous offering.
You have been doing this for two years.
Most of the time [music] it works.
After the dawn office, you go to the infirmary.
The infirmary is a long stone building on the east [music] side of the precinct. Normally it houses six or eight men. The old and the chronically ill.
>> [music] >> Monks who can no longer manage the full rigor of the rule.
There are 14 now.
Three of them have the pestilence. You know it when you see it.
Everyone in the abbey knows it now.
[music] The swellings in the neck or armpit or groin. Hard and black-edged and hot to the touch. The fever that climbs fast.
The way a man who was upright on Monday is delirious [music] by Wednesday.
You wash your hands in the basin outside the infirmary door before you enter.
Not because you believe it will protect you. The physicians say the pestilence comes from bad air, from miasma, and no amount of [music] hand washing changes what you breathe.
But because it is a ritual.
>> [music] >> And ritual is what you have.
Brother Edmund is awake.
He lies very still. His hands folded on his chest like a man already practicing for [music] the position.
His face is gray.
His eyes, when they find you, [music] are clear.
You sit beside him. You give him water.
You ask how he slept.
He says, "Poorly."
You say, "I will pray with you."
He nods.
You say the psalm for the sick.
Blessed is he who considers the poor.
The Lord delivers [music] him in times of trouble.
And Edmund moves his lips with you, barely audible.
The words so deep in him after 20 years that they come up even now, even like this, without effort. [music] Then you move to brother Simon, who is feverish and not entirely conscious, [music] and who calls you by the name of his father.
You answer to it anyway.
It does not seem like the moment to correct him.
After morning prayer, the community gathers in the chapter house.
This is where the abbey's business is conducted.
The reading of saints' feasts, the assignment of work, the hearing of faults.
It is also where news moves through the community.
Today, the prior reads a letter from the Abbot of St. Albans, a large Benedictine house a day's ride north.
The letter is factual in its language and devastating in its content.
Of 47 monks at St. Albans, 19 >> [music] >> are dead. The Abbot himself is sick.
They have been unable to perform the full divine office for 3 weeks because there are not enough voices.
No one speaks for a moment after the prior finishes reading.
You count the faces around the room without meaning to.
There were 31 monks at matins this morning.
Last month, there were 36.
Before the pestilence, there were 39.
Your work this morning is the scriptorium, a long room off the east cloister, high windows designed to maximize daylight, >> [music] >> writing desks along the walls.
Your current task is copying a section of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written more than 600 years ago.
You work in a careful Caroline minuscule.
Each letter formed with the same deliberate strokes practiced since your novitiate. [music] Your hand cramps at the base of the thumb, as it always does after an hour.
You flex it, rest for 30 [music] seconds, continue.
Bede, writing in 731 AD, describes a great pestilence that struck England in 664.
One that killed monks in numbers that emptied entire communities.
He writes, "The pestilence raged so furiously that it carried off the greater part of the people of that country."
You copy these words out in your careful hand. [music] You do not comment on them.
You have stopped commenting on coincidences.
There have been too [music] many.
In the middle of the afternoon, a messenger arrives from the city carrying a letter from the Bishop of London.
The prior reads it aloud at the afternoon chapter.
It contains an instruction that has never been given before in the history of the English Church.
Because so many priests are dead, and because so many of the dying have no priest available to hear their confession before death, the Bishop is granting a dispensation.
The dying may confess to a layman.
"If no priest is available, [music] a man may confess to another man, even a woman," the letter states, "if no man is present."
The sacrament [music] of confession, the exclusive preserve of ordained priests for centuries, is being opened up out of sheer necessity.
There are simply not enough priests left.
This is a theological earthquake in miniature.
You can see on [music] the faces around you what you feel yourself.
The deep unease of a world whose rules are changing faster than anyone can follow.
The prior says, "We will send two brothers to St. Giles in the Fields, >> [music] >> which has lost its priest and has sick people with no one to tend them."
He looks around the room.
He asks for volunteers.
You raise your hand.
So do four others.
He picks Brother Thomas and Brother Hugh, older, already survivors of illness this autumn.
He looks at you for a moment. He says, "Not yet."
He says it quietly, [music] without explanation.
You lower your hand.
Vespers at 6:00, the church again.
The candles, the psalms. You are standing in the choir stall between Brother Matthew, who has been here since he was 12, and the empty [music] space where Brother Edmund used to stand before the infirmary.
You notice the empty spaces more [music] than you used to.
There are six empty stools now.
A month ago, there were none.
Somewhere in the middle of the evening psalms, the words do something different.
>> [music] >> They become less like a container and more like a door.
And on the other side of the door is something you can only call presence.
Not a vision, >> [music] >> not a voice, nothing dramatic.
Just the sense that the room is more than stone and candlelight and men's voices.
That the prayers are going somewhere.
That the somewhere is not indifferent.
This happens sometimes, not often. You do not talk about it.
You just stand there in the cold with the psalms moving through you [music] and try not to lose the thread.
After the evening meal, the monks walk the cloister, the one hour [music] the rule permits for quiet talk before the final silence.
Tonight, >> [music] >> a monk named Brother Richard tells you that the burial ground at East Smithfield is receiving bodies now.
The trenches are open.
>> [music] >> The wagons are coming out of the city gates at night.
He says it quietly, [music] as men say things they are still trying to believe.
You listen.
You do not [music] say what you are thinking, which is this is just the beginning.
If the pattern holds, and you have read enough chronicle accounts of previous pestilences to fear that it will, this is not the worst of it.
Not yet.
Compline, the last office of the day.
The prayers of Compline are for [music] protection through the night, against darkness, against death, which the medieval [music] church does not separate clearly from sleep.
The prayers push it back, or they try.
>> [music] >> You walk back to the dormitory in silence.
In the quiet, you think about why you are here.
You came to the abbey at 14, sent by your father, a minor landowner who had three sons and not enough land for all of them.
You did not choose God so much as God [music] was chosen for you by a man trying to solve an arithmetic problem.
And yet, two years in, you are still here.
The gates are not [music] locked.
Novices run. It happens.
You have not run.
And the prior did not say never.
He said not yet.
You lie down on your straw mattress.
Outside, [music] distantly, the city bells are ringing.
Three from St. Mary le Bow, two from a church [music] further east.
The dead toll moving through the November dark over the river.
You say the prayer for the dying, for Brother Edmund, for Brother Simon, for the priest from the city whose name you never learned, for all the people across the river dying without a priest, confessing to their neighbors by the bishop's new dispensation, hoping God is paying attention regardless.
You say it for yourself, too.
Not because you think you are dying, because in November 1348, saying the prayer for yourself feels less like morbidity and more like honesty.
In 4 hours, the bell will ring for matins >> [music] >> and you will get up and the day will begin again.
You sleep.
What the Benedictine monks of medieval England understood, what the rule of St. Benedict is built around, is that the ordinary is the sacred.
Not the miracles, not the visions.
The cold dormitory, [music] the Latin psalms, the bowl for the bloodletting, the sitting beside a man who is dying and staying there.
The showing up.
Day after day, office after office, in the cold and the silence and the growing list of empty stalls.
By the end of 1349, Westminster Abbey had lost more than a third of its community.
The offices continued. The bells kept ringing.
The monks who survived got up at 2:00 in the morning and said the psalms because that is what the rule requires and because the psalms were what they had.
3,000 years before any of this, a writer in a different language wrote something that medieval monks copied out by hand in scriptoriums across England.
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, [music] for you are with me."
They believed this. Most of them, most of the time, they believed [music] it.
That belief is not a small thing.
Not in November 1348.
Tomorrow, day three, you will wake up [music] not in a dormitory, but in a house near Walbrook in the heart of the city.
Your husband left for Flanders 3 weeks ago.
He does not know what he will come home to and you are about to find out what a merchant's wife does when the city starts falling apart and there is nobody else to hold things together.
Thanks for watching Time Warp Cities.
If you're enjoying the series, subscribe so you don't miss day three and drop a comment [music] below.
What surprised you most about life inside a medieval monastery?
As always, [music] we'll see you in the past.
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