A night in a medieval monastery

Compline: from the Latin completorium, the completion, the last prayer of a monastery's day. A winter night in an abbey around the year 1100, told to you, a young brother of the house: the bell that wakes the dormitory at two in the morning, the stone night stairs, psalms sung back and forth in the dark church, a book copied by lamplight, a cat that once walked across a page... Inside: a sign for bread, the warming room fire, a traveller at the gate, sixteen beds of herbs. Saint Benedict will be there too. Chapters: The bell · The night office · The cloister · The book · The dawn · The chapter · The work · The table · The warming room · The gate · The infirmary · The evening · Compline · The night again. Sources: the Rule of Saint Benedict, the Cluny sign lists, the Plan of Saint Gall. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

A single candle burns at the far end of a long, dark room.

It stands in a little iron holder on the wall, and it has been burning all night. Its flame barely moves. Below it, in two long rows, the brothers of the house lie on their straw mattresses, in their robes, belted, exactly as the Rule tells them to.

And somewhere above, in the cold air of the tower, a bell is about to ring.

Embers of History. Episode three... a night in a medieval monastery.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is a winter night, around the year eleven hundred, in an abbey in the north of France.

The abbey stands on a low hill above a river, a little way from the nearest village. Around it, a wall. Inside the wall, a great stone church, a square cloister beside it, and around the cloister, the rooms where the brothers live: a dormitory above, a chapter house, a refectory where they eat, a kitchen, a warming room, an infirmary for the sick and the old, a guest house near the gate, a garden, a mill by the water, a few barns.

About sixty men live here. Some came as boys, given to the abbey by their families. Some came as grown men, from farms, or from the households of lords. A few can read three languages. A few cannot read at all.

And you are one of them.

You came here at fifteen. You are twenty now. You have taken your vows. You own nothing... not your robe, not your shoes, not even the little knife you use at the table. Everything belongs to the house, and the house belongs to God.

Everything that happens here, every hour of the day and the night, follows one small book.

The book is called the Rule. It was written about six hundred years earlier, in Italy, by a man named Benedict, on a mountain called Monte Cassino.

It is not a long book. Seventy-three short chapters. It says when to rise, and when to pray, and how many psalms to sing. It says what to eat, and how much to drink. It says how to treat a guest, how to treat the sick, how to choose an abbot, and what to do with a brother who comes late to dinner.

Its very first word is a single instruction.

@bm_george Listen.

"Listen, my son, to the master's instructions, and incline the ear of your heart."

For six hundred years, in hundreds of houses across Europe, men and women have been listening.

Chapter one. The bell.

The night is not dark everywhere in the abbey.

In the church, a lamp burns before the altar. In the dormitory, the single candle burns on the wall, because the Rule says a light must be kept there until morning. And up in a small room near the tower, one brother is awake.

He is the one who wakes the others.

There is no clock in the abbey. Not the kind that ticks. So he keeps the time in other ways. He watches the stars move across the narrow window, and he knows which ones rise at which hour, in which month. He watches a candle marked with lines, burning down. He knows how long it takes to say certain psalms under his breath, and he counts them.

On winter nights, the Rule says, the brothers rise at the eighth hour of the night. In this season, that is somewhere around two in the morning.

When he judges the moment has come, he climbs, takes hold of the rope, and pulls.

The sound rolls out over the roofs, over the cloister, over the frozen garden and the dark river. In the village below, a dog lifts its head, and puts it down again. The villagers do not wake. They have heard this bell every night of their lives.

In the dormitory, the brothers rise.

There is very little to do. You are already dressed. You slept in your robe and your belt, as the Rule says, so that you are ready the moment the bell is heard. You put your feet into your night shoes. You pull your hood forward. Around you, sixty men do the same, in near silence... the rustle of wool, a cough, the creak of a board.

The Rule even thinks of this moment. It says the brothers should gently encourage one another, because the sleepy ones are always looking for an excuse.

At the end of the dormitory, a door opens onto a flight of stone steps.

These are the night stairs. They lead straight down from the dormitory into the church, so that no one has to cross the cold cloister in the dark. You go down them in a slow line, one hand on the wall, the stone cold beneath your shoes.

In a few abbeys in England, stairs like these still stand today. At Hexham, the steps are worn into hollows... shallow cups in the stone, shaped by hundreds of years of feet, going down in the dark, to sing.

Chapter two. The night office.

The church is enormous, and almost entirely dark.

A few lamps hang in the choir, where the brothers have their places in two rows of wooden stalls, facing each other across the aisle. Beyond the lamps, the nave stretches away into the black, longer than you can see, up into a ceiling that no one can see at all at this hour. The air is colder than outside. Your breath shows faintly in the lamplight.

You take your place. The brother beside you is old, and his hands shake a little on the edge of the stall. You have stood beside him every night for five years. You have never had a conversation with him.

Then, out of the silence, a single voice begins to sing.

The night office is the longest of the day. In winter, it can last an hour, sometimes more.

It is made almost entirely of psalms... the hundred and fifty ancient songs of the Bible. The Rule arranges them so that every one of them is sung, in order, in a single week. Every week. Every year. For the whole of a life. A brother who lives here for forty years will sing the whole book more than two thousand times.

Most of them, after a while, know every psalm by heart. They do not need the books. They need only the first words, and the rest comes by itself.

The two sides of the choir take turns. One side sings a verse... a long, slow line on a few notes... and then pauses, and the other side answers. Back and forth, across the dark aisle, like two halves of one breath.

Between the psalms, a brother goes to the lectern, and by the light of a single candle, reads aloud. A long passage from the scriptures. A sermon by one of the old fathers of the church. In winter, the readings are long, because the nights are long.

And there are rules for this, too.

The Rule says that if a brother arrives after the first psalm has begun, he does not take his usual place. He stands at the end, apart, where everyone can see him. A gentle shame. And then it adds, with a practical eye, that it would be worse to let the latecomer go back to his bed, because then he would only fall asleep again... or sit outside, and chatter.

Six hundred years, and the same small weaknesses.

When the night office ends, it is still dark. Hours of dark remain.

In winter, the Rule gives this time to study. The brothers who do not yet know all the psalms by heart sit and learn them, by the light of a small lamp. Others read.

You stay. You have a book to finish.

Chapter three. The cloister.

Outside the church door, the cloister waits under the stars.

It is a square garden, open to the sky, with a covered walk running all the way around it... four long galleries of arches, one on each side. In the middle there is a well, and a patch of grass, silver now with frost.

In daylight, this is where the brothers read, and walk, and think. Each of the four walks has its purpose. The one beside the church is for reading. The one beside the chapter house leads to meetings. The one beside the refectory leads to meals. They are not really corridors. They are more like the rooms of a house with no walls.

You walk along the north side, your shoes quiet on the stone, past arch after arch, each one filled with a square of starlight.

Somewhere beyond the wall, an owl calls, and another answers from the trees across the river.

In this hour, there is a particular silence over the abbey.

The Rule asks for silence at all times... not as a punishment, but as a kind of room in which listening becomes possible. But at night, the silence is deeper. From the last prayer of the evening until the morning, no one speaks at all, except in true need. In later centuries, people will give this a name. The great silence.

So how does a house of sixty men live, almost without speaking?

With their hands.

Over the generations, monasteries develop their own sign language. It is not a full language, the way spoken words are. It is a practical one. A vocabulary of everyday things.

At the great abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy, a monk writes them down... more than a hundred signs. For bread, you make a circle with your two thumbs and your two forefingers, the shape of a round loaf. For fish, you move your hand the way a fish's tail moves through water. There are signs for cheese and eggs, for beans and wine, for a book, for the abbot.

A new brother must learn them all.

And of course, being men, and young ones among them, they sometimes use them for things the Rule never intended. The old customs have to keep reminding the brothers that signs, too, can be a way of chattering.

Chapter four. The book.

Off the cloister, in a long room on the east side, there is a place with large windows facing south.

This is the scriptorium. Here, the books are made.

In daylight, the room is full of brothers bent over sloping wooden desks. Now, in the dark before dawn, there are only a few, each with a small lamp beside him, its flame shielded from draughts.

You sit down at your desk. In front of you lies the book you are copying... a commentary on the Psalms, written long ago by a bishop in North Africa. It has been lent to the abbey by another house, three days' ride away, and it must go back before the spring. Beside it lies your copy, half finished.

Everything on this desk was made by hand, here, or near here.

The pages are parchment. Not paper... in this part of the world, paper is still almost unknown. Parchment is skin. The skin of calves, or sheep, soaked in lime, scraped clean of every hair, stretched on a wooden frame, scraped again, and dried until it is thin and pale and smooth. A single large book can take the skins of a whole herd.

The ink is made from oak galls... small round swellings that grow on oak trees, where a tiny wasp has laid its eggs. The galls are crushed and soaked, and mixed with a little iron salt, and a little gum from a tree, and the mixture turns from pale brown to deep black as it touches the air. Ink like this bites into the parchment. Nine hundred years later, it will still be there.

The pen is a feather. A long flight feather from a goose, its end cut to a point with your little knife, and then split, so that the ink flows down the split as you write. Every few lines it grows soft, and you cut it again.

Before you write a single letter, the page has already been prepared.

Along its edges, someone has pricked a line of tiny holes with a sharp point. Between the holes, faint lines have been drawn, ruled straight, so that every line of writing will lie level, and every page will match the last.

Then you begin.

Letter by letter. Word by word. You look at the old book, hold a few words in your mind, and write them down. Then you look back, find your place, and take the next few. The writing is slow, round and upright. Each letter has its own shape, its own small order of strokes. A good scribe can copy a few pages in a day. A whole book can take months. A great Bible can take years, and more than one pair of hands.

The lamp hisses quietly. Outside, the wind moves along the cloister roof.

It is cold work.

In winter, the scriptorium has no fire. Fire and parchment do not belong in the same room. The ink grows thick. Your fingers stiffen, and you blow on them, and go on.

The scribes do not always suffer in silence. Sometimes, at the end of a book, or in the margin of a page, they leave a small note for whoever reads it after them.

One old saying turns up again and again, in different hands, in different countries.

"Three fingers hold the pen... but the whole body works."

Scribes in Ireland complain in their margins that the ink is thin, that the parchment is hairy, that the day is dark. And one scribe, at the end of a long book, writes a little rhyme in Latin: "Now I have written the whole thing... for Christ's sake, give me a drink."

And there is a book, copied about three hundred years after this night, in the Low Countries, that has a large stain across one of its pages. In the space below, the scribe has written a note.

Nothing is missing here, he explains. A cat did this, one night.

He drew a little picture of the cat, too.

Chapter five. The dawn.

Slowly, the windows of the scriptorium turn from black to deep blue.

The stars fade. The roofs of the abbey appear, one by one, out of the dark, edged with frost. In the garden, the shapes of the beds and the paths come back.

And the bell rings again.

This is the office of dawn. In Latin it is called Lauds... the praises... because its psalms end, every morning, with the last psalms of the book, which are all praise. Praise him with the trumpet. Praise him with the harp. Praise him with strings and pipe.

The church is different now. The great windows at the east end, behind the altar, are beginning to fill with grey light. The columns of the nave appear, row after row, going back into the shadows. The faces of the brothers across the aisle, which were only shapes a few hours ago, are faces again. Tired, unshaven, familiar.

Outside, the first birds are waking in the hedges.

Then comes the next short prayer, and the next. The day of a monastery is measured out by them, like the notches on a stick.

Lauds at dawn. Prime at the first hour of daylight. Terce, at the third hour. Sext, at the sixth, around midday. None, at the ninth, in the afternoon. Vespers, as the light goes. And Compline, before the night.

Seven times a day, and once in the night. The Rule takes the number from a line in the psalms. Seven times a day I have praised you... and at midnight, I rose.

The hours between the prayers are not empty. They are for work, and for reading, and for the ordinary business of keeping sixty men alive.

Chapter six. The chapter.

After the early prayers, the brothers walk in a line along the east side of the cloister, into a square stone room with a bench running around its walls.

This is the chapter house.

Every morning, in this room, one chapter of the Rule is read aloud. That is where the room gets its name. A chapter of the book, in the house of the chapter... and, after a while, the brothers who meet there are called the chapter too.

The abbot sits at the head of the room. He is not young. He was a brother like any other, before the others chose him. The Rule tells him he must be a father to them, more loved than feared. It tells him to adjust himself to every kind of character... to coax one, to reprove another, to persuade a third... and it reminds him, with some severity, that one day he will have to give an account of every soul in his care.

The day's business is done here.

The work is given out. Who will help in the kitchen this week. Who will go to the mill. Who will sit with old Brother Anselm in the infirmary, who has been ill since the feast of Saint Martin.

Then the faults. A brother who broke a bowl. A brother who was late to the night office. A brother who spoke in the refectory. Each one stands, or kneels, and says what he did, and the abbot gives him a small penance... a psalm to say, a place at the end of the line, a meal of bread and water.

It is all done quietly. Nobody shouts. Then the book is closed, and the brothers go out into the day.

Chapter seven. The work.

"Idleness is the enemy of the soul." That is what the Rule says, and so, every day, there is work.

Some of the brothers go to the garden. Some to the scriptorium. Some to the kitchen, to the bakehouse, to the brewhouse. Some go out through the gate, to the fields and the mill and the barns, where the abbey's lay brothers and its tenants do most of the heavy farm work.

You are given the garden this morning, under the old gardener, Brother Gerard.

In winter there is not much to do. The beds lie bare, covered with straw, with a skin of frost on top. You carry baskets of old straw to the dung heap. You mend a wattle fence where the deer broke through. You turn a bed of earth with a spade, slowly, because the ground is still hard.

But even in winter, you can see the shape of what the garden will be.

There is an old plan of an ideal monastery, drawn on parchment some three hundred years earlier and kept at the abbey of Saint Gall, in what will one day be Switzerland. It shows every building a monastery could need... and among them, a small garden of medicinal herbs, laid out in sixteen neat beds.

Each bed has a name written in it. Sage. Rue. Rosemary. Mint. Fennel. Lovage. Iris. Pennyroyal. Cumin. Lilies. Roses.

Your own garden is not so neat. But it has many of the same plants. Sage for a sore throat. Fennel for the stomach. Mint for the head. Rue, which smells so bitter that the brothers say it keeps away more than just insects. And in the summer, along the wall by the infirmary, roses and white lilies, which are grown both for medicine and for the altar.

Brother Gerard knows the use of every one of them. He has never read a single book about plants. He learned them all from the brother who was gardener before him.

Chapter eight. The table.

Around midday, the bell rings again, and the brothers wash their hands at a long stone basin in the cloister, where water runs in through a pipe from a spring above the abbey.

Then they file into the refectory.

It is a long, high hall, with tables along the walls and benches beside them. The brothers sit in order: not by age, not by birth, but by the day they came to the house. A lord's son who arrived last year sits below a miller's son who arrived the year before.

At one end, raised up a little, there is a pulpit. A brother climbs into it, and begins to read.

All through the meal, someone reads. The Rule insists on it. A passage from the Bible, a life of a saint, a chapter of a history. The reader takes a mouthful of bread and wine before he begins, and eats his own meal afterwards.

And no one else speaks.

If you want the salt, you make the sign for salt. If you want more bread, you make the circle with your thumbs and fingers, and a brother passes the basket. The Rule says that whatever is needed should be asked for by a sign, rather than by a voice.

The food is simple. The Rule allows each brother a pound of bread a day, and two cooked dishes at the main meal, so that a brother who cannot eat one can eat the other. Today, it is a thick soup of beans and onions, and a dish of boiled cabbage with a little cheese. There is fruit, when there is fruit. There is no meat. The Rule forbids the meat of four-footed animals to everyone but the sick.

And there is a small measure of wine, though the Rule adds, with a kind of sigh, that wine is really no drink for monks... but since monks today cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree not to drink to excess.

When the meal is done, the reader stops. The brothers rise together, and go out, in order, in silence, to the church to give thanks.

Behind them, in the empty refectory, the servers of the week clear the bowls, and wipe down the tables, and sweep the floor. On Saturday, they will wash the feet of every brother in the house, as the Rule asks. Every week. For six hundred years.

Chapter nine. The warming room.

There is one room in the abbey where a fire is always allowed to burn, all through the winter.

It is called the warming room.

It is a plain, low room near the refectory, with a wide stone hearth. The brothers may come in here, for a short while, when the cold becomes too much. To warm their hands before going back to the scriptorium. To thaw their feet after the night office. To grease their shoes, so the leather does not crack.

You come in out of the wind, in the late afternoon, and stand near the fire with three or four others.

No one speaks. You hold your hands out towards the flames. The skin of your fingers, stiff from the cold and stained black at the tips with ink, slowly loosens. The logs settle with a soft sound. A spark jumps out onto the stone floor, glows for a moment, and goes dark.

Next to you, a brother is mending the strap of a sandal with a long needle. Another is simply looking into the fire.

This is the only luxury the abbey has. And for a few minutes in the winter afternoon, it is enough.

Through the narrow window, the light is changing again. The short winter day is already ending. The sky above the cloister roof turns pale gold, and then a soft grey, and the first star appears over the bell tower.

Before Vespers, though, there is a knock at the gate.

Chapter ten. The gate.

Beside the abbey's gate there is a small room, and in it lives the porter.

The Rule is very particular about him. He should be a wise old man, it says, who knows how to take a message and give an answer, and whose age keeps him from wandering about. He should have his room by the gate, so that anyone who comes will always find someone there. And the moment anyone knocks, or a poor man calls out, he should answer at once, "Thanks be to God," or "Your blessing, please."

He is that old man. He has kept this gate for twenty years.

The knock comes again. The porter slides back the shutter of a little window in the door, and looks out.

On the road outside, in the last of the light, stands a traveller with a horse. A merchant, by the look of him, on his way to the fair at a town two days to the south, caught by the early dark. His cloak is wet. His horse is steaming. Behind him the road goes down the hill to the river, and on the other side of the river, the forest is already black.

The porter opens the gate.

The Rule says that every guest who arrives should be received as if he were Christ himself. It is one of its most famous lines.

And so it describes, step by step, what to do. The guest is met with every courtesy. He is brought to pray. Then he is given the kiss of peace. The abbot himself pours water over the guest's hands, and the abbot and the brothers together wash his feet.

In a great abbey, with many guests every week, much of this is done by the guest master. But the spirit of it remains. No one who knocks at this gate after dark is sent away down the hill.

The merchant's horse is led to the stable, and given hay. The merchant himself is taken to the guest house, a warm building near the gate, with its own kitchen, so that the coming and going of visitors does not disturb the brothers' silence.

There, a brother brings him bread, and a bowl of hot soup, and a cup of wine. Here, unlike the refectory, there is talk. The merchant tells the guest master about the road, about the price of wool, about the floods further south. The guest master listens, and nods, and remembers. Tomorrow, some of this news will quietly find its way around the cloister.

For many people in this world, an abbey is the only safe place on a long road. A house where the door is always answered. Pilgrims stop here, and messengers, and knights on their way to somewhere else, and poor people with nothing at all. The poor, the Rule says, should be received with special care... because the rich, it observes dryly, have a way of making sure they are well received anyway.

Chapter eleven. The infirmary.

On your way back across the cloister, you stop at the infirmary.

It stands a little apart from the other buildings, with its own small chapel, its own kitchen, and its own garden of herbs beside it. Here, the Rule changes. Care for the sick, it says, must come before everything else. The sick may eat meat, to recover their strength. They may bathe as often as they need. The brother who looks after them must be attentive, and patient, and kind.

Old Brother Anselm lies in a bed near the fire.

He came to the abbey as a boy of seven, more than seventy years ago. He has sung the night office more times than anyone could count. His eyes are almost closed now, and his breathing is slow, and he has not spoken for days. But when the bell rings for Vespers, his lips move.

The infirmarian is sitting beside him, with a cup of warm water in which fennel seeds have been soaking. He wets the old man's lips with a cloth. On a shelf behind him stand small jars and pots: dried sage, dried mint, honey, a little oil of roses.

The infirmary is busy in other ways, too.

Several times a year, every brother in the house comes here to be bled. A small cut in a vein of the arm, a little blood let out into a bowl... a practice that the doctors of this age believe keeps the body in balance. Afterwards, the brothers who have been bled are allowed a few days of lighter duties, and better food: an egg, a little wine, a piece of white bread. Some of the young ones, it is said, look forward to it.

On the bed by the window, a brother who was bled this morning is sitting up, eating an egg, with a look on his face of great contentment.

You stand for a moment at the door, and then the bell begins to ring from the tower, and you go.

Chapter twelve. The evening.

Vespers is the prayer of the lamps.

As the brothers enter the church, the sacristan is lighting the candles in the choir, one by one, with a long taper. Good candles of beeswax, here, in the church, where they burn clean and bright and smell faintly of honey. The ordinary candles, in the rest of the house, are tallow... animal fat... and smoke, and smell of the kitchen.

The singing begins again. The same slow back and forth across the aisle. The same psalms that are sung at this hour, on this day of the week, in hundreds of churches across the land. In a house in England, in a house in Germany, in a house on a mountain in Italy, at almost the same hour, other brothers are singing the same words to almost the same tune.

Outside, the last of the daylight goes. The windows at the east end of the church turn from grey to black.

After Vespers, a light supper. Bread, a little cheese, the rest of the soup. Then, in the cloister walk beside the church, the brothers gather on their benches, and a brother reads aloud by lamplight for a little while... something calm, the lives of the old desert fathers, who lived alone in the deserts of Egypt long ago.

And then, the last bell of the day.

Chapter thirteen. Compline.

Compline is short, and it is sung almost entirely from memory, in the near dark.

The same few psalms, every night of the year. The same quiet hymn. The same prayer, asking for protection through the night. The candles in the choir are fewer now. The faces of the brothers are mostly in shadow. Their voices are low, and the church takes their sound and holds it, high up in the stone, long after each line has ended.

At the end, the abbot gives a blessing. And then, without a word, the brothers turn, and climb the night stairs again, in a slow line, one hand on the wall.

From this moment until the morning, no one speaks.

Chapter fourteen. The night again.

The abbey settles into the dark.

In the church, one lamp burns before the altar. In the dormitory, one candle burns on the wall. In the infirmary, a brother sits beside old Anselm, keeping the lamp trimmed, a little cup of fennel water within reach.

In the scriptorium, your desk is empty. The pen lies across the inkwell. The old book lies open beside your copy, at the place where you stopped... in the middle of a sentence, a sentence that you will finish tomorrow, and that someone, eight or nine hundred years from now, may still be able to read.

In the warming room, the fire has burned down to a bed of red embers, glowing softly under a crust of grey ash. Every few minutes, one of them settles, with a faint, small sound.

Outside, the frost is coming down again over the garden, over the bare beds of sage and rue, over the roofs of the cloister and the dark shape of the tower.

Up in his small room near the bell, the brother who keeps the time is watching the stars turn slowly across his window. He knows which star will rise above the roof of the church at the eighth hour of the night.

When it does, he will climb, and take hold of the rope.

And so it goes on. Night after night, year after year. Some of these abbeys will last for centuries. Their bells will ring for the night office long after every person in this story is gone. In a few of them, they ring still.

The last word of this night is the name of its last prayer.

Compline. It comes from the Latin completorium... the completion. The prayer that completes the day.

Embers of History.

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