The Size and Shape of Durham’s Monastic Community

Horror! That is one way in which one could describe the Black Death.

It was a disease that took the lives of countless numbers of individuals during the Middle Ages. It affected entire communities as well as entire nations, and saw the dramatic decrease in the population of Europe. One of the communities that the Black Death affected was the Durham monks whom were located in Durham in northeast England. Author A.J. Piper wrote an article about the massive mortality rate of the Durham monks during the Black Death. In this review I will first be going over the purpose of Piper’s article, which is what he is trying to address or argue in his writing, next I will explain the methods and sources he is using to argue his point, and finally I will be giving my own critical evaluation of Piper’s argument in his article. Beginning his article Piper describes the social and financial environment that the Durham monks found themselves in in the late 1200s going into the early 1300s.

He describes how in “the summer of 1297 war broke out between England and Scotland” which took a toll on the Durham monks economically. Due to the war the monks lost much of their land possessions in southeast Scotland. In addition to the war Piper describes how the Black Death also played a major role in reducing the size of the Durham monks. After starting off the article describing the Geohagan 2 situation just mentioned, Piper goes into detail about how the population size of the Durham monks fluctuated between the late 1200s and early 1500s.

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Throughout the rest of his article he argues about how reliable, or not reliable, the primary sources from the Durham monk’s monastery are. Now, the main chunk of Piper’s article about the Durham monks is going into detail about the primary sources that are provided to present day people that give evidence, or the lack thereof, about the number of monks that were involved in Durham’s monastic community throughout the years that the Black Death swept over England. In order to get a good calculation about the fluctuation in population of the Durham monks during the years of the Black Death, and the years following the Black Death up into the early 1500s, the method.

Piper used was to take the primary sources that give head counts of the number of monks in the Durham monastery and use those to calculate a precise as possible number of how many monks were in the Durham monastery in the years between the late 1200s and early 1500s. Some of the primary sources Piper used were references to Durham monks that were found in “accounting material…from the early fourteenth century”. In addition Piper describes, in his opinion, how good the primary sources are for giving reliable information about the number of monks in the Durham monastery between the 1300s all the way up to the early 1500s. Piper states that due to the “impact of catastrophes and changing economic circumstances on the size of the monastic community can Geohagan 3 be assessed thanks to the wealth of data…that makes it possible to achieve a close estimate of the number of Durham monks year by year from 1300”.

Throughout his article Piper does a fine job at taking the primary sources that are available to him and using them to calculate, as precise as possible, the number of monks that were in the Durham monastery in the late 1200s up into the early 1500s. Of course there could be some flaws in his calculations, such as missing a good number of monks that the primary sources themselves don’t mention; however, that is something, unfortunately, that any good historical scholar will deal with when it comes to trying to figure out exact numbers to any specific thing in historical periods that are far removed from our present day. In my opinion Piper’s calculations and argumentation for how to figure out the size and shape of Durham’s monastic community during the years before, during, and after the Black Death is quite well done. From the late 1200s to the early 1500s the number of monks in the Durham monastic community fluctuated, sometimes not drastically and other times quite drastically. A.J. Piper showed, by using the primary sources, the number of monks that were in the Durham monastic community in the years leading up to, during, and after the Black Death. Piper did a masterful job in his article using the primary sources to give precise numbers of the late medieval Durham monks.