Saint Aelred (1109-1167), one of our local saints, was the son of a Saxon priest. (In those days priests were married). His grandfather had been parish priest at Durham Cathedral. He was educated in Durham until the age of 14 when he went to Roxburgh which became the capital city of Scotland when King David 1 established his court there. Aelred spent several years at the court, eventually becoming Master of the Household. He was in charge of all the court’s domestic arrangements, an important and influential position which could have seen him set up for a very comfortable life. At that time, however, the North of England and the Borders with Scotland were wild places and King Henry I of England and King David planned to build a monastery in Yorkshire to be a civilising influence on the region. They funded the building of a monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire on behalf of the Cistercian order of monks and recruited talented men to make it successful. Aelred, at the age of 24, was one of these recruits.
The Cistercian way of life was (and still is) austere. It follows the Rule of St. Benedict to the letter. The Rule sets out the routine of daily and communal life in a monastery. The most obvious element of this life was manual labour in the fields on very unpromising, even waste, land. In Aelred’s time, the Cistercian monasteries scattered across Europe were at the forefront of agricultural innovation and technology as their activity transformed their remote locations and made them productive. Rievaulx’s mission was to reform and colonise the area. Its success would bring trade to the North and settle the land.
King David sent Aelred on an errand to see Archbishop Thurston of York. Aelred saw the collection of wooden huts that formed the infant
monastery at Rievaulx and resolved to join it if his friend would join too. Within four days they were both members of the community.
The skills Aelred developed at King David’s court were used in 1142 to found a new monastery in Lincolnshire. With a team of thirteen monks and some lay-brothers he transformed the deserted hamlet of Revesby on the edge of the fens into one of the richest and most productive monasteries in the country. Five years later, even though he was still relatively young, Aelred was brought back to Rievaulx to become abbot there.
Aelred spent the rest of his life as abbot of Rievaulx. This involved travelling extensively to the other Cistercian houses in England, Scotland and France despite his poor health. He suffered from gout, arthritis and kidney stones.
When he was not travelling, Aelred used his considerable skills to develop and maintain a wide network of friends. His chief characteristics seem to have been his niceness, his charm and his essential goodness. He was a good friend and his example of how to manage close friendships set an example of charity and chastity that led Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order, to invite him to write The Mirror of Charity. He also wrote Christianised versions of ancient Roman books on virtue.
Aelred is counted among the saints because of his tender and kind nature. He managed to combine hard work, a regular routine of prayer, all the petty politics of intelligent people confined in communal life, and a punishing routine of overseeing the development of the ethos of Rievaulx in other places. He wrote extensively about relationships and how they could contribute to the spiritual life. He was severely critical of the church’s lapses in pastoral care of people who were not particularly successful in living moral lives. His example brought many more into the Cistercian Order making the monastic life very attractive.
Author: C B Whittle