About the Chronicle

Melrose and the Cistercians: a brief introduction

Melrose Abbey (Licensed by Culture and Sport Glasgow, Records of the
Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN), Edinburgh, Scotland)

The Cistercians

(For a very useful introduction to the Cistercians, see this website. Below is a summary derived from it.)

The religious order to which Melrose belonged began in Burgundy in 1098, when Abbot Robert of Molesme led a small group of monks into the woods south of Dijon in search of a stricter and more disciplined monastic life, built on a literal reading of the Rule of St Benedict. There, they founded a community at what is now Cîteaux, subsequently inspiring the name of a new order, the ‘Cistercians’.

Known as the ‘White Monks’ for their undyed woollen habits, the Cistercians aspired to simplicity in their clothes, diet, buildings and liturgy. Settling in remote, uncultivated places, they aimed for self-sufficiency through their own labour rather than income or rents, relying on outlying farms and granges worked by ’lay brothers’ and becoming especially known for the production and trade of wool. Their churches, all dedicated to the Virgin Mary, were deliberately unadorned – a stark contrast to the richly decorated Benedictine churches of the period.

The growth of the Order was extraordinarily rapid. Initially only male communities were permitted, but from the thirteenth century nunneries were brought into the order. By the mid-twelfth century some 300 Cistercian abbeys stretched across Europe and the Middle East, rising to more than 1,500 houses across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century.

The Order was held together by a strong system of governance. Each community’s mother-house was to visit it annually, and a General Chapter of abbots met every September at Cîteaux to oversee discipline. From 1157, Scottish abbots were permitted to attend the General Chapter every four years – a journey that could amount to at least three months on the road. The Chronicle provides plenty of examples of Melrose abbots travelling to and from these meetings.

Eventually, there were eleven Cistercian houses in what is now Scotland: Balmerino, Coupar Angus, Culross, Deer, Dundrennan, Glenluce, Kinloss, Melrose, Newbattle, Saddell and Sweetheart. There were also at least eight nunneries, among them Berwick, Coldstream, Eccles, Elcho, Haddington, Manuel, North Berwick and Abbey St Bathans. (On the nunneries, see R. Andrew McDonald, ’The foundation and patronage of nunneries by native elites in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Scotland’, in Women in Scotland: c.1100–c.1750, ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (East Linton, 1999).)

Melrose Abbey

The Chronicle tells us that: ‘In the 1136^th year the abbey of St Mary’s of Melrose was established on the Monday of Easter’, i.e., 23 March (Faustina B IX, f. 18r) and that ‘In the 1146^th year the church of St Mary’s of Melrose was dedicated, on Sunday 28 July’ (Faustina B IX, f. 18v).

Melrose was a daughter house of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. Though not stated in the Chronicle, the founder was David I, king of Scots – his first, but not his only, Cistercian foundation. His establishment of a community at Melrose is thought to have been driven by a combination of piety, power, politics, and personal connections to Cistercians in England.

The name and initial location of the community was based on an early medieval site (‘old Melrose’), associated with St Cuthbert. The monks later migrated 4km west along the River Tweed to the current site. Though closely tied to the Scottish royal family, at the time of its foundation the monastery was not yet considered to be in ‘Scotland’ but rather within an older, greater Northumbrian region. (For more on this, see Broun, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, pp. 2–3 and 10–12.)

During the period when the Chronicle was active, Melrose received a great number of donations by a range of benefactors, from local landholders to the royal family. These can be explored via the People of Medieval Scotland database: https://poms.ac.uk/record/person/75/.

Melrose later became mother-house to several monasteries, as can be seen in the map below. As such, it was certainly one of Scotland and northern England’s pre-eminent Cistercian houses in the Central Middle Ages.

Most of the current building is datable to the fifteenth century. Records of archaeological excavations at the site can be found on trove.scot.

From 1541, Melrose was placed in the hands of a series of commendators. The abbey was finally secularised (i.e., made into a temporal lordship) in 1609. (For more on this, see Ian B. Cowan and David E. Easson, Medieval Religious Houses Scotland, with an Appendix on the Houses in the Isle of Man (London, 1976), p. 76.)

‘Overall, it can readily be appreciated that Melrose interacted on a number of levels which brought it into contact with different kinds of people and different places. As the recipient of royal and lordly patronage it had deep and enduring links across the south of the Scottish kingdom; as an exporter of wool it belonged to trading networks along the east coast of England and across the North Sea to the Low Countries; and as a Cistercian house it shared a closely-regulated standard of religious life with monasteries spread across Latin Christendom, and particularly with its mother-house of Rievaulx and its own daughter-houses in Scotland and Cumbria.’ Broun, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, p. 7.

Map illustrating the spread of the Cistercians into Scotland

Cistercian communities: size, roles and duties

In order to found a Cistercian monastery there needed to be at least twelve monks plus an abbot. Once established, communities could grow much larger than this. In the mid-twelfth century, Melrose’s mother-house, Rievaulx, was said to be home to about 140 monks and 240 lay brothers (source). It is difficult to ascertain a precise number for Melrose, though it may have housed as many as 200 monks at one point in the later Middle Ages (source). By the sixteenth century, the convent seems to have numbered around seventeen monks (Cowan and Easson, Medieval Religious Houses, p. 75).

Cistercian communities were headed by an abbot and served by a large number of other officials, known as ‘obedientiaries’. A rotation system meant the monks were assigned different duties each week, helping in the kitchen, guesthouse, refectory or elsewhere in the church. Lay brothers formed a separate group within the community, undertaking the majority of the abbey’s agricultural and industrial work – as shepherds, cowherds, blacksmiths, cobblers, masons, weavers, skinners, tanners or bakers, for example. They had their own living quarters, clothing and daily schedule of work and prayer.

The Chronicle gives us some insights into these individuals and the expectations of their role. We are told, for example, of the glowing deeds of Abbot Matthew (1246–61): ‘For it is through this Matthew, a good, devout, and most generous man, that the house of Melrose has several possessions and many allowances for the monks as a result of his facility for acquisition; because of him we have pittance-breads on Fridays in Lent when we are fasting on bread and water; he also built our large houses at Berwick; and moreover, he constructed both many shelters for cows and oxen as well as a great chamber for the abbot, which is on the bank of the river, together with the addition of not a few other buildings.’ (Faustina B IX, f. 62v) We are also told of a fatal incident involving a lay brother: ‘On 17 October, by the carelessness of a badly fixed candle, one of the better granges of Coupar, full of grain, was burnt, and in it the granger, a lay brother.’ (Faustina B IX, f. 32r)

To help picture the community of people who might have interacted with the Chronicle, here is a list of the main roles in a Cistercian abbey like Melrose. A description of these roles and duties can be found here.

• Abbot
• Prior and sub-prior
• Porter and sub-porter
• Novice-master
• Guestmaster (hosteller)
• Sacrist
• Cantor (precentor) and succentor (sub-cantor)
• Cellarer and sub-cellarer
• Refectorer
• Infirmarer
• Novice
• Monk
• Lay brother

Who were the scribes of the Chronicle?

It is not clear who was responsible for the Chronicle of Melrose – either the drafting or the writing of it. Reading was certainly part of the monastic day, and monks were encouraged to meditate on prescribed texts. An abbey’s library could easily have held hundreds of books in the period in which the Chronicle of Melrose was active, mostly theological works (see further discussion of this here). A Cistercian abbey like Melrose also had a growing archive of letters and sealed documents which they carefully produced and kept. Given the number of hands seemingly involved in the Chronicle, we might imagine that a significant proportion of the community had access to it (though not the lay brothers who were not literate). This might have included some or all of the obedientiaries described above as well as the broader community of monks and novices. (The only scribal profile in the Chronicle that can with some confidence be attributed to a known individual is Scribal profile 16, which was very likely the antiquarian John Leland (d. 1552) who added a series of signposts.)

Author: Jo Tucker
Last updated: 18/08/2026