Monastic Vows of Chastity
A monk’s vow of chastity was reinforced not just by rules and supervision, but by a genuinely rich body of cautionary stories and imagery — some of it surprisingly vivid, all of it designed to hammer home the same basic message to impressionable young novices.
At Worcester Cathedral Priory, cloister glazing depicted a famous episode from the early life of St Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, who reportedly threw himself into a bramble bush to physically quell his lust when a young woman threatened to make “a shipwreck of his chastity.” A surviving stained-glass panel from a German Cistercian abbey shows St Bernard of Clairvaux, in bed, shouting “Fures, fures!” (“Thieves, thieves!”) after a promiscuous innkeeper’s wife tried to seduce him. Meat was banned from the ordinary refectory partly on the theory that it stirred up physical desire, and homosexuality was treated as a genuinely serious offence, with senior monks specifically deputed to patrol the dormitory and latrines at night to prevent misconduct.
Despite all this institutional anxiety, the actual surviving disciplinary record suggests real transgressions were considerably rarer than the sheer volume of cautionary art and literature might imply: across the entire religious houses of Yorkshire between 1347 and 1540, only fifteen recorded cases of sexual impropriety survive. It’s a genuinely useful corrective to any lurid modern assumption about rampant medieval monastic misbehaviour — the fear and the imagery built up around chastity were clearly disproportionate to how often it was actually, demonstrably broken.
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