A Monastic Landscape
A history by Andy Warner
Lady Alice de Rumeli’s dilemma
It is the year of our Lord 1195. A noble lady kneels in front
of the altar in the small rather gloomy chapel of her castle.
Something is weighing heavily on her mind, and she prays
to Sancta Maria for guidance. Her great worry is her soul.
She is rich, she owns much land, and she holds a great deal
of power. But one day judgement will be passed on her,
so what is to become of her soul? Purgatory? Damnation?
The thought makes her shudder, and she prays harder still.
Then the solution suddenly comes to her, like a revelation.
The Lady is Alice de Rumeli, heiress to the Barony of
Allerdale. The lady was actually very pious, she may well
have already been the benefactress of the rebuilding of
Crosthwaite Church around 1180, but was that enough?
It clearly was not, for in 1195 she granted lands at
Crosthwaite, Watendlath and Stonethwaite to the great
Cistercian monastery of Fountains Abbey. On the one
hand it was a very spiritual act, hopefully safeguarding
her place in heaven, but was it not also a hard-headed
business decision?
The beautiful lands of Borrowdale were granted to the great
Cistercian monastery of Fountains Abbey
What had Lady Alice inherited? The lands in the five
townships around her castle at Cockermouth had been
settled and cultivated for many centuries. The yield was
plentiful and would pay her well in taxes. In contrast her
lands around Keswick were incredibly poor. Borrowdale
had only been settled relatively recently, when an influx
of Norse settlers from Ireland and the Isle of Man pushed
up into the wild mountain valley looking for summer
grazing for their cattle. Unlike other valleys, at that time
(about 900 AD) Borrowdale had not been settled at all.
The terrain was still a densely wooded wilderness, remote,
isolated and largely uncharted. But the Men of the North
were used to this, and their transhumance agriculture
(moving cattle to summer pastures) suited it. They started
to make clearings (tveites – thwaites) in the woodland
and they named the various features in their own dialect.
Fell, Tarn, Force, Longthwaite, Stonethwaite, Seatoller,
Borgerdalr, all Norse names. As their families grew, so a bit
more land would be taken, and eventually the valley would
have been settled year round. But the land was incredibly
poor, giving a subsistence living that barely supported the
tiny population – never mind paying taxes to a remote
feudal overlord. So by gifting some of her mountainous
waste to Fountains, maybe she was looking after her soul,
but she may also have been cutting her losses. The plan
seemed to have worked, for in 1209 she sold the rest of her
Borrowdale estate to another great Cistercian house, this
time Furness Abbey. It cost them £156 13s 4d. Not a bad
days work, and surely now her soul was safe.
The worst wool in the realm
What the monasteries brought to the valley was a
determined sense of purpose. The barony might have
given up on Borrowdale, but the monks certainly would
not. One of their underlying creeds was that austerity
and hard toil brought you closer to God, values that
would be much needed if the valley was to become more
viable. One of the first things they did was to change the
emphasis of farming away from cattle, and on to sheep.
From an agricultural point of view this would make better
use of the land. It has been the same ever since! In the
valley bottom the “thwaites” were enlarged, and the land
was drained. Town fields were developed close to the
settlements allowing farmers to work strips of land to
grow basic crops, a precursor of today’s allotments. By the
time of the Dissolution the floor of the valley would look
pretty much as it does today. The main commodity from
all this industry was wool, one of the great currencies of
medieval England. Borrowdale’s wool was not brilliant, a
statute from 1380 describes it as the ‘the worst wool in the
realm’. A network of packhorse trails were developed to
transport the wool out to the monasteries, and these have
become the bridleways that fellwalkers now use to access
the hills.
The abbeys had granaries, at Grange in Borrowdale for
Furness, whilst Fountains maybe had two, at Watendlath,
and at Monks Hall in Keswick. These possibly also
functioned as the main administration units where
monastic law was dispensed, rents and dues paid, and
petty disputes settled. Early in their history the lands
nearer to the actual monasteries were worked by the
lay brethren, who would return to the Abbey at night or
after a short period. This could not be the case with the
Borrowdale holdings, which lay scores of miles away. As
the monastic lands expanded (all those pious souls to
save!) it is probable that the order adapted to the change
by altering their management to suit the circumstances.
The record books for both houses show that by the late
15th and early 16th centuries the farmers held the land
with tenant rights. We also know that in 1418 a Royal
Survey of Borrowdale for Henry V gives details of 41 farms
granted to Fountains Abbey. They had an average of 3
acres of enclosed land for which a total rental of £28.10s.
per annum was paid. Today the same area is worked by less
than 10 farms.