Having traced the major ways that children transitioned into adult life in the Middle Ages, I’ll describe briefly what it was like to live and grow old in each of these life pathways. Since I was just talking about becoming a monk, I’ll start with the monastic life.
The monastic life was one of incredible sameness, day to day and year to year. Most monasteries were Benedictine, the original order. The whole point of an “order” was that it provided a Rule and life was to be governed by that Rule no matter what. The Rule left little for innovation. It told which hours to pray and sing, which hours to sleep or rest, which to work and which to hold meetings. The whole point of monastic life was to set aside one’s personal will and do what the Rule said; this obedience was itself the service to God.
Monks held prayer and singing services around the clock. They lived in a walled community called the cloister, from Latin claustrum, enclosure. Some of what they needed was imported from outside the walls, but they were as self-sufficient as possible. Since the purpose of the community was to support prayer and celebrating Mass, the first duty of the community was to provide for what these tasks needed: candles, wine, bread, and books. At certain seasons, the church must be decorated with certain flowers. Additionally, monks needed shoes, haircuts, and basic meals. Like any medieval kitchen, the monastic one had to provide bread and ale, in addition to bean stews and fish.
So first, they had to keep bees for the wax. Honey was a cash crop. Climate permitting, they had to plant grapevines so that they could make wine for sacramental use. They needed to grow what vegetables and herbs they could, especially legumes and vegetables like onions, cabbage and beets. With medicinal herbs, they grew a lot of roses and lilies, the flowers dedicated to Mary and needed in church. (And holly, of course, for Christmas.) They had basic farm animals like cattle and pigs, and usually a fish pond. The monastic cemetery usually doubled as an apple or pear orchard and flower garden. Small monasteries did not have the acreage or manpower to grow their own grain or raise their own sheep, but if they had to buy wheat and wool, they had workshops to make their own cowls and shoes. Wheat went to the community’s bakery and brewery, for bread and ale. Robes, sheets and towels had to be laundered. Books on loan from other communities had to be copied; books may also have been a cash export.
This gives you an idea of what the monks did when they were not praying or in chapel. Every monk was apprenticed within the cloister to learn one of these key skills. Additionally, every monk was in charge of his own cowl mending; he had to own a needle and use some of his rest time to stitch up holes. He washed his own stockings, if his order permitted socks, and hung them on a line in the cloister. Every monk borrowed a book from the library at the beginning of the year; it was a saint’s life or work of theology. He studied it during his rest times.
Monks kept very clean, too. They had weekly baths and washed face and hands more than once a day. (Wealthy cloisters had running water in the cells, piped in from a roof tank.) The cloister itself was spectacularly clean, with a neatly-trimmed patch of grass. For anyone who didn’t crave adventure, it was a pleasant place to grow old.