English Benedictine Reform

The English Benedictine Reform or Monastic Reform of the English church in the late tenth century was a religious and intellectual movement in the later Anglo-Saxon period. In the mid-tenth century almost all monasteries were staffed by secular clergy, who were often married. The reformers sought to replace them with celibate contemplative monks following the Rule of Saint Benedict. The movement was inspired by Continental monastic reforms, and the leading figures were Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, and Oswald, Archbishop of York.

In seventh- and eighth-century England, most monasteries were Benedictine, but in the ninth century learning and monasticism declined severely. Alfred the Great (871–899) deplored the decline and started to reverse it. The court of Æthelstan (924–939), the first king of the whole of England, was cosmopolitan, and future reformers such as Dunstan and Æthelwold learned from Continental exponents of Benedictine monasticism. The English movement became dominant under King Edgar (959–975), who supported the expulsion of secular clergy from monasteries and cathedral chapters, and their replacement by monks. The reformers had close relations with the Crown, furthering its interests and depending on its support. The movement was confined to southern England and the Midlands, as the Crown was not strong enough in northern England to confiscate property from local elites there to establish Benedictine foundations. The movement declined after the deaths of its leading exponents at the end of the tenth century.

The artistic workshops established by Æthelwold reached a high standard of craftsmanship in manuscript illustration, sculpture and gold and silver, and were influential both in England and on the Continent. In his monasteries, learning reached a high standard, producing competent prose and poetry in the elaborate hermeneutic style of Latin favoured in tenth-century England. His Winchester school played an important role in creating the standard vernacular West Saxon literary language, and his pupil Ælfric was its most eminent writer.

All surviving medieval accounts of the movement are by supporters of reform, who strongly condemned what they saw as the corruption and religious inadequacy of the secular clergy, but historians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have increasingly seen these accounts as unfairly biased against the secular clergy.