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The same level of technological achievement could have been
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observed in practically all of them.
Although the world of classical antiquity had not adopted
mechanization for industrial use on any considerable scale, the
medieval world did so on an enormous scale, a fact symbolized
and reflected in the Cistercians use of waterpower:
Entering the Abbey under the boundary wall [writes a twelfth-
century source], which like a janitor allows it to pass, the stream
first hurls itself impetuously at the mill where in a welter of move-
ment it strains itself, first to crush the wheat beneath the weight
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34 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
of the millstones, then to shake the fine sieve which separates
flour from bran. Already it has reached the next building; it
replenishes the vats and surrenders itself to the flames which heat
it up to prepare beer for the monks, their liquor when the vines
reward the wine-growers toil with a barren crop. The stream
does not yet consider itself discharged. The fullers established
near the mill beckon to it. In the mill it had been occupied in
preparing food for the brethren; it is therefore only right that it
should now look to their clothing. It never shrinks back or refuses
to do anything that is asked for. One by one it lifts and drops the
heavy pestles, the fullers great wooden hammers . . . and spares,
thus, the monks great fatigues. . . . How many horses would be
worn out, how many men would have weary arms if this graceful
river, to whom we owe our clothes and food, did not labor for us.
When it has spun the shaft as fast as any wheel can move, it dis-
appears in a foaming frenzy; one might say it had itself been
ground in the mill. Leaving it here it enters the tannery, where in
preparing the leather for the shoes of the monks it exercises as
much exertion as diligence; then it dissolves in a host of streamlets
and proceeds along its appointed course to the duties laid down
for it, looking out all the time for affairs requiring its attention
whatever they might be, such as cooking, sieving, turning, grind-
ing, watering, or washing, never refusing its assistance in any task.
At last, in case it receives any reward for work which it has not
done, it carries away the waste and leaves everywhere spotless.23
THE MONKS AS TECHNICAL ADVISERS
The Cistercians were also known for their skill in metallurgy.  In
their rapid expansion throughout Europe, writes Jean Gimpel,
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HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 35
the Cistercians must have  played a role in the diffusion of new
techniques, for the high level of their agricultural technology was
matched by their industrial technology. Every monastery had a
model factory, often as large as the church and only several feet
away, and waterpower drove the machinery of the various indus-
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tries located on its floor. At times iron ore deposits were
donated to the monks, nearly always along with the forges used
to extract the iron, and at other times they purchased the
deposits and forges. Although they needed iron for their own use,
Cistercian monasteries would come in time to offer their surplus
for sale; in fact, from the mid-thirteenth through the seventeenth
century, the Cistercians were the leading iron producers in the
Champagne region of France. Ever eager to increase the effi-
ciency of their monasteries, the Cistercians used the slag from
their furnaces as fertilizer, as its concentration of phosphates
25
made it particularly useful for this purpose.
Such achievements were part of a broader phenomenon of
technological achievement on the part of the monks. As Gimpel
observes,  The Middle Ages introduced machinery into Europe
26
on a scale no civilization had previously known. And the
monks, according to another study, were  the skillful and unpaid
technical advisers of the third world of their times that is to say,
27
Europe after the invasion of the barbarians. It goes on:
In effect, whether it be the mining of salt, lead, iron, alum, or
gypsum, or metallurgy, quarrying marble, running cutler s
shops and glassworks, or forging metal plates, also known as
firebacks, there was no activity at all in which the monks did
not display creativity and a fertile spirit of research. Utilizing
their labor force, they instructed and trained it to perfection.
Monastic know-how [would] spread throughout Europe.28
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36 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
Monastic accomplishments ranged from interesting curiosities
to the intensely practical. In the early eleventh century, for
instance, a monk named Eilmer flew more than 600 feet with a
29
glider; people remembered this feat for the next three centuries.
Centuries later, Father Francesco Lana-Terzi, not a monk but a
Jesuit priest, pursued the subject of flight more systematically,
earning the honor of being called the father of aviation. His 1670
book Prodromo alla Arte Maestra was the first to describe the
30
geometry and physics of a flying vessel.
The monks also counted skillful clock-makers among them.
The first clock of which we have any record was built by the
future Pope Sylvester II for the German town of Magdeburg,
around the year 996. Much more sophisticated clocks were built
by later monks. Peter Lightfoot, a fourteenth-century monk of
Glastonbury, built one of the oldest clocks still in existence,
which now sits, in excellent condition, in London s Science
Museum.
Richard of Wallingford, a fourteenth-century abbot of the
Benedictine abbey of Saint Albans (and one of the initiators of
Western trigonometry), is well known for the large astronomical
clock he designed for that monastery. It has been said that a
clock that equaled it in technological sophistication did not
appear for at least two centuries. The magnificent clock, a mar-
vel for its time, no longer survives, perhaps having perished amid
Henry VIII s sixteenth-century monastic confiscations. How-
ever, Richard s notes on the clock s design have permitted schol- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]