The Monks and the medieval industrial revolution

During the Middle Ages, the monks were the great stimulators of industry, commerce and technical advancements.  Standardise forms of writing, the use of Hindu numerals in place of cumbersome Roman numbers were vital to the transmission of ideas and concepts, not to mention maths and science.  Practically as well, the monks were the great distribution channels of industrialisation.

The Cistercians for example were famous for their skill in metallurgy and agricultural technology.  Every monastery had a model factory, larger than the church itself usually, using waterpower to drive the complicated machinery on its floor.  Machinery on this scale had never been seen in industry, at any time in history. 

Iron deposits were mined and sent to the monks to be forged into iron implements using such technology.  Cistercians organised surplus market sales of iron and were usually the leading producers of iron tooling in any given region.  Slag from the furnaces were used as fertilisers, given the phosphates contained in the waste.  Agricultural yields increased accordingly.

The monks were involved in mass industrialisation.  The mining of salt, lead, iron, alum, gypsum, or metallurgy, quarrying marble, running cutler’s shops, producing glass works, metal plates, forging, all were subjected to the monks energy, research and skill.  The monastic ‘network’ allowed such innovations to be rapidly distributed throughout Europe.

In the early 1000’s a monk attempted man flight (Eilmer), flying some 600 feet in a glider.  In the late 1600s a Jesuit, Lana-Terzi, was the first to describe how vessels could physically fly through the air, using geometry and physics as theoretical proofs.  The first large clock on record was built by the future Pope Sylvester I in Madgeburg in 996.  Richard Wallingford an abbot at Saint Albans created the first mechanical clock in the late 14^th century.  In addition to accurate time-keeping this close could predict lunar eclipses.

At Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, the Cistercian monks were on the verge of building the world’s first blast furnace, interrupted by the confiscation of monastic property and assets during the reign of King Henry VIII.  These furnaces had the heat to produce large scale cast iron - a feat that would need 300 years to be repeated.  In essence these monks may have been able to usher in the industrial revolution, centuries earlier than it occurred.  The impact on society and development would have been tremendous. 

The unknown secret about the Catholic era is that there was a massive industrialisation from about the 11^th to 15^th centuries.  This created in part, the ‘agricultural’ revolution, which textbooks still admit occurred dating from the 11^th to 13^th centuries.  This agricultural development went hand in hand with the industrialisation of Europe. 

The more productive use of land and soil was due to the monks’ innovative iron tooling, and also to field rotations, crop rotations and the planting of crops better suited to the environment, soil and climate.  Massive areas of forest and wild lands were cleared, ploughed and developed.  Irrigation was promoted, drainage developed, fertilisers and phosphates used, husbandry bred, and the resulting output of meat, grains and cereals allowed the population to expand, wealth to accrue and cities to develop.

It is a clear and obvious fact that without the monks and the Catholic Church, Western civilisation would never have industrialised or ‘agriculturalised’ and would have been rendered at the same low level of socio-economic development as that of the pagan Roman empire.