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338 12. land, labour and settlement
By the fifth and sixth century, major monasteries were also accumulating
sizeable and ever-increasing landed endowments. The monastery of the
Holy Cross founded in Poitiers by Radegund apparently housed, at the time
of her death in 587, some 200 nuns, many of whom were of high social
status and so unquestionably in need of a substantial troop of servants. All
this required a large endowment, and when in 589 the nun Chlothild ejected
the rightful abbess, unsurprisingly she is recorded to have appointed her own
ordinatores (presumably stewards) and to have seized the villas monasterii. 47
It is clear that, as in later periods of history, church estates were vulnerable
to encroachment from the great and powerful: Theodore of Sykeon,
while bishop of Anastasiopolis, only managed to eject a local magnate from
some of his church’s estates with the help of villagers in armed revolt. 48
The insistence with which hagiographers like Gregory of Tours stressed
that the saints would protect their own property and strike down intruders
is only explicable in the context of a world where abuses of this kind happened
all too often.
The boundaries between ecclesiastical and secular landholding may on
occasion have become blurred. The man that Theodore expelled was not
only a local aristocrat, but also held an official appointment as administrator
of the episcopal estates. Was this a purely professional arrangement that
Theodore now wished to undo, or had it been an act of patronage by the
bishop of Anastasiopolis, wishing to buy the favour of a local magnate?
For monasteries in this period, we know remarkably little about any continuing
relationship between them and the families of their aristocratic
founders and benefactors. This may, however, only reflect the limitation of
our sources for late antique monasticism (dominated by saints’ Lives and
Rules, rather than the land-deeds and books of commemoration that
survive from later centuries). That they could serve as places of family commemoration
and burial is shown by the mosaic inscriptions discovered in a
small sixth-century monastery at Scythopolis (see Fig. 11). This was built for
a monk, Elias, but was also intended as the burial place for one of its
patrons, a certain Mary, and of any of her family ‘at any time’ who wished
to rest there. 49 That families might not lose all control of the lands of one
of their foundations is revealed in the exceptionally well-documented world
of Egypt, where we learn of the small monastery of the ‘Holy Christ-
Bearing Apostles’, founded by the entrepreneurial land-manager Apollos of
Aphrodito. Here Apollos himself became a monk, without by any means
fully retiring from business; and here his son Dioscorus served as guardian
47 200 nuns: Greg. Tur. Gloria Confessorum ch. 104. Chlothild: Greg. Tur. Hist. ix.41. For the lands of
the great ‘White Monastery’ in Egypt, see ch. 21c (Keenan), p. 620 below.
48 Theodore: Life ch. 76 (ed. Festugière (1970); English trans. Dawes and Baynes (1948) 139–40).
49 Fitzgerald (1939). Another patron, John ‘the ex-prefect’, and two of his brothers were also commemorated
in inscriptions (and an excavated tomb is thought to have been John’s).
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