Welsh Journals

David H. Williams, The Cistercians in the Early Middle Ages [Gracewing, Leominster, 1998]. 479 pp. ISBN 0 85244 350 1. Price £ 60. Many readers of this journal will doubtless be familiar with the researches of David Williams on the Welsh Cistercians, his two volume study (1984) and his Atlas of Cistercian Lands in Wales (1990) as well as his many articles. The work reviewed here is much more ambitious in its scope: the author's (coincidental) contribution to the nine hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Citeaux is no less than a study of the Cistercians in Europe from 1098 to the Black Death. This survey of Cistercian history, institutions and influence includes a treatment of the foundation and growth of Citeaux itself, and the spread of the order (including incorporated houses); the order's administrative machinery-exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, the general chapter, visitation, and the constitution; the monastic community and the seculars who came into contact with Cistercian monasteries in a whole host of ways; cultural activities; debt, dispute and litigation; abbey sites, and the physical environment of the White Monks; landed property, economic assets and the exploitation of Cistercian estates. Finally a short section (pp. 401-14) is devoted to the Cistercian nunneries. The author demonstrates an enviable command of detail, and, while much is derived from secondary works (for instance the Victoria County Histories), there is also wide- ranging use of primary works, especially cartularies. In a book this size it is not surprising that a few errors of proofreading have slipped by: for example, at p. 31/line 8, 112/35 is not readily apparent, and p. 397 refers to a recent excavation of 1896. There are 31 plates (between pages 244 and 245) and four unnumbered ones at the end of the book. These are of varying quality. The references are presented as endnotes of chapters, rather than footnotes, and many are so abbreviated as to be difficult to recognise: the reader has constantly to turn not only to the notes at the end of each chapter, but also to the bibliography. This is not very 'user friendly'. For instance the reference on page 44, note 351 is given (p. 51) as CDU 285, but CDU is not in the list of abbreviations/bibliography of printed sources (p. 422), and not easy to guess! It may seen churlish in a work of this size and scope to point to gaps in the bibliography, but there are surprising omissions in the scholarship on nunneries: with regard to England, for instance, the works of Sharon Elkins and Sally Thompson, as well as Roberta Gilchrist on the spatial organization of nunneries, could have been noted. These are only minor quibbles. David Williams has produced a comprehensive and thorough study, which achieves a balance between detailed analysis of land transactions for instance, with intensely human stories: the poor who were stifled to death in the crowd of people which gathered outside the gates of Fontfroide for food in 1322 (p. 119), the monk of Jouy who in 1227 threatened to set fire to the abbey, and placed a sharp razor in the abbot's stall (p. 60), and the unnamed Scottish abbot and the abbot of Calder for whom attendance at the Annual General Chapter brought the dread of a sea voyage (p. 38). David Williams is to be congratulated on producing such a wide ranging account. BOOK REVIEWS JANET BURTON University of Wales, Lampeter