Well, thanks so much for this opportunity to contribute to this very interesting symposium, which I've actually been looking forward to for months.
And I'm so sorry that family circumstances mean that I can't be joining you in real time.
I hope this pre-record will do, which is very much in the past.
Make two amends. Spirits of 20/20 elders speaking today about two of my great loves, Cistercian monasteries and ghost stories.
I aim to show how 12 ghost stories written by a monk by Island Abbey,
Yorkshire and around fourteen hundred have enormous and hitherto neglected potential for interpreting this internationally important monastery.
It's recently been turned into two free to enter site, and I think the visiting public read can get something from these stories.
I want to show how the stories opened up wider questions concerning mediaeval beliefs about death, commemoration and the afterlife,
and how an exploration of these questions and the roles of the monasteries and wider society can really bring them a life for modern day audiences.
The next slide, please. Well,
we all have reasons why we've chosen our scholarly specialism and this man is at least partly responsible for me becoming a mediaeval art historian.
I'm sure you do recognise him without the caption as Montague Rhodes, James the Great Cambridge mediaevalist.
Now, I'd like to claim that I was as precocious as James,
and it was my reading as a teenager of these apocryphal New Testament additions or his catalogues of eliminations that set me on my path.
But no, it was his ghost stories for which she's most popular to this day and best known to this day,
which I first encountered as an impressionable teenager in the early 1980s.
But as anyone who's read them will know, these stories were often inspired by mediaeval themes such as cathedrals and monasteries,
choir stores and tombs, illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows.
They are all very much the stock trade of my day to day work today.
And I have the next slide, please. Well, I have to be honest.
No, it was actually due to his ghost stories, but which he is most famous to this day,
which I first encountered as an impressionable 13 or 14 year old one Halloween tied in the early 1980s.
But as anyone who has read them will know, James,
it was inspired to write his stories by a number of historical and specifically mediaeval themes being cathedrals and monasteries,
choir stalls and tombs, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows and ruined Templar preceptors.
Next slide, please. It was James who first brought to Scally attention the subject of my talk today.
The island happy ghost stories. His transcription of them and a brief discussion was published in the English Historical Review in 1922.
The stories are written in Latin. On Page is in a 12th century manuscript from Highland's Library.
They dates to the turn of the 15th century and James described the language of refreshing.
And I think that means that Latin was bad. And even a polygrapher as talented as James found the handwriting difficult.
And looking at the leaf I'm showing here, I think you can understand why.
And I'm rather glad it was James who found them and not me that I was spared the task of transcribing the next slide, please.
Almost all the ghost stories are in the village is fields and lanes surrounding by island.
It's very much North Yorkshire collection. And the store is a lend authenticity by the writer making comments such as the old people say
and and surnames occur in the stories which were common in the region until modern times.
As I said in my introduction, the stories provide a valuable source with which to explain not only the belief systems of the mediaeval world,
but they also provide a prism through which to interpret the life of the violent monks,
their relationship with the outside world, and the art and architecture of the monastery before doing any of this.
I think we need a little bit more context. Appropriately enough, given the subject of my talk.
The monks arrived at the island and the vigil of the Feast of All Saints in eleven seventy seven.
The monastery soon prospered and at the end of the 12th century was regarded as one of the three shining lights of religion in the north.
Now, the importance of bylined and the development of sister Persian architecture.
Indeed, early Gothic architecture more widely has long been recognised.
Our current English heritage interpretation of the site is provided via a guidebook only.
There are no site panels, though this will soon.
Change is, by and large, focussed on the importance of buying land in the development Cistercian architecture,
especially in the 12th and early 13th century. It's argued that Highland's buildings show the vigour of this reforming order.
The period after 13 hundred is given, scant attention is more or less treated as one of decline culminated in the Abbeys suppression in 15 30A.
It's not a view I subscribe to. To be honest, the ghost stories currently all mentioned are all.
And I think that's an important oversight. Can have the next slide, please.
Well, that's partly because the violence stories are far from being a one off, mediaeval monks were great recorders of ghost stories.
Indeed, by the time the anonymous monk scribe bylined penned his tales, there was already a centuries old tradition of monastic ghost story writing.
And this is stations excels at this.
Some particularly fine examples were set down in the early 13th century by a German Cistercians as areas of heister back.
Now, this ghost story recording wasn't simply because the monks enjoyed a Keesing terror, a spine chilling tale of the supernatural.
I think they may. What? Oh, I don't know.
Rather, the stories get to the heart of mediaeval belief about death and the afterlife, the fate of the soul after death and how to secure its safety.
Salvation in heaven. The avoidance of how and the shortening of time in purgatory.
When when souls were cleansed of sin.
Now, in many respects, the monastic vocation was a selfish calling, a way of securing personal salvation as a great Cistercians,
Bernard of Clairvaux explained, life in a Cistercian monastery was an opportunity to live the unchallenged to life on earth.
And the great buildings of bylined need to be interpreted in this context,
in the words of the 12th century monastic chronicler William Wansbrough, the Cistercians provided for them monks.
The surest road to heaven. But monks and nuns, I should add, weren't guaranteed a place in paradise.
They could be tempted by sin and many monastic tale of the supernatural tales of the tormented souls of error in religious
returning after death to make good for an uncompressed sin or request highest per services such as prayer and masses.
Indeed, one of the bylined stories features the spirit of a labour of the Revo,
another the tormented soul of a canon of the nearby Augustinian monastery, Newberg Priory.
Next slide, please. Stories can also be used to explain the place of the monasteries in wider society.
Why did nobles like Ireland's founder, Roger Timmo Brick, invest so heavily in religious houses?
Well, the answer is that they often done horrible, horrible violent deeds.
And as a consequence of this sin, they feared for the everlasting safety of their souls.
Now, the cook stories also show the efficacy of prayer and specifically monkish prayer for the release of souls from the pains of purgatory.
In many monastic ghost story, the restless spirits want nothing more than the saying of prayers or commemorative masses for their souls and pylons,
cut tularaemia summary of its charter's detail and its landed in Darwin include multiple grants
of land stating that these were made for the health of the soul of the hapless benefactor.
A well into the 16th century. The monastery was receiving requests for spiritual services, especially the saying a private requiem masses.
Now, all of this helps explain the cathedral like size of the church of Vineland, what it was first constructed.
It was the largest Cistercian church in England and its multiple altars,
which you can see along the East End and there in the transects and also in the nave were used by the monks with the saying of these private requiems,
masses for the soul of the Abbe's benefactor's. And a like is often for the monks occupied.
Very, very important role in the religious life of northern society until the very moment of its suppression.
Membership of the Abbe's confraternity or Labour overheard, was valued by middling sorts and aristocrat since the 16th century.
That happening to me seems numerous bequests in the 16th century also for the saving of masses.
Next slide, please.
Well, as I've said, the majority of the ghosts in the Bible and tales, one, nothing more than pious services so their souls can rest in peace.
Well, one of the Bible inspectors is a supernatural being of another sort.
He's a revenant, one of the restless dead. He takes solid bodily form.
He neither seeks nor is appeased by pious services. The monks have no option but to annihilate is evil remains.
Indeed, it's been argued that this corporeal ghost is the inspiration for several of the ghosts and James's supernatural tales.
And the story concerns one. James Tanksley is a local clergyman who was buried before the entrance to the
Chapter House Island as a very prominent and prestigious place to be buried.
Indeed. And it is normally reserved to location, normally reserved for important people.
Tanksley didn't deserve this privilege. Rising at night and one during the day, Ole's ultimately gouging out the eye of his former conky pine.
Well, it's a chilling tale, but it also enables me to discuss how burial within the precincts of a Cistercian monastery,
indeed any monastery was a much sought after privilege.
And the graves of benefactors and monks were strategically located so as to maximise
on the intercessory opportunities afforded by the daily liturgical life of the monks,
such as a seeing of masses, the singing of the offices, office and processions.
Thank you. Next slide, please. Night stairs from the dormitory to sing the night office of Matins,
and I also imagine that many of the visitors will be surprised to learn that the island had its own same second T.S.A. a B arts.
It's the blessed Roger who had led his community to buy land and who was associated with
the miracle on the deathbed of the Great Northern Cistercians say already have reaver.
Rochus Feast was celebrated by the Cistercians on the 30th of March.
Perhaps his in-tray. It remains and relics were enshrined in the Monasteries chapter house,
likely also the place for a cenotaph for the monasteries found Rochard a Mowbray.
I can have the next slide, please.
The stories also show how well integrated the Playland monks were into the religious mainstream of the late Middle Ages of their religious vitality.
In several of the stories, the holy name of Jesus, the IHS or YHA monogram on the left of the site is its most common mediæval
iconographic depiction is evoke all the wounds of Christ shown there on the right.
Now, both were emerging cults at this time,
and their popularity in northern England was partly attributable to the role the Cistercians played in the early development and dissemination.
Another of the stories concerns a northerner who made the pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostella in northern Spain.
And that was one of the greatest of all pilgrimage destinations of the late Middle Ages.
And it gives an idea that people were going on pilgrimage to not just it was a kind of holiday, but to secure their spiritual salvation.
In summary, I think they show that the late mediaeval church was truly international.
It was dynamic and it was vibrant. And that applies to pilot Abbey to.
And next slide, please. Well, I'll conclude by talking about the suppression.
Wellington, the 50s, 30s. Local people were still interested in the Bible.
The monks with the salvation of their souls.
But the Abbey, like monasteries across the land, fell victim to Henry, the eighth disillusion of the monasteries by-lines and coming in 50 38.
Ghost stories are more specifically the manuscript containing them provide a hook to
discuss these dramatic events and show that the monks were not part passive participants.
This is shown by the extraordinary efforts of the last prior Rabbi Lynch preserving tact, his monasteries, libris,
and this has parallels other northern religious houses such as Monk Breton,
Barnsley and Kirk Stolte and other evidence shows that this wasn't because the monks were doing this.
First of all, Prophet, they hope their monasteries would come back one day and this became a reality.
Six monasteries in and around London during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary,
while the monks who wrote Chumby, for instance, coalesced as a community.
So did those who suffered during a is rain and a monk or simply a fact that a cop hit out at the back of a missile, he'd say, from his monastery.
Prayers for Mary's successful pregnancy. What was it to be Mary died childless and 15, 58.
And was succeeded by her Protestant half sister and the belief systems of Elizabeth Church were very different from those of the Middle Ages.
There's no purgatory. There's no press with dad. And good works have no role in salvation.
Secured by faith. No.
But from foundation to disillusion the Bilin ghost stories of the dead, wholly and otherwise rarely do bring to life is internationally important.
Monastery. And I'll be exploring all the themes I've talked about in much more detail in a podcast I recorded for the English Heritage website,
which maintain in my James Ghost Stories Christmas tradition will be released at any time around.
Now, I think. But please do contact me if you have any thoughts or questions, what I've been talking about today.
Thanks again for listening to me. And I'm so sorry I can't be with you in person.
And best of luck for what promises to be a remarkably interesting event.
Thank you so much.