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Excavations at the Cluniac priory of Castle Acre, Norfolk, England

This plant was placed south-west of the Priory claustral buildings on a slight slope down to the the River Nar, a small river that provided the priory with the greater part of its water supply via the monastic drain. The buildings were placed around three sides of a courtyard with the open side towards the east. On the accompanying map you can find the locations of the Priory and the surrounding archaeological features with the grain processing complex and the monastic drain that runs alongside it to the north marked with letters A-E. At the start of the excavation the buildings appeared as scrub-covered mounds with only one structure recognisable. This is marked B on the map and survived with some its walls still standing to some four metres high because it had been used as a cowshed up to about a hundred years ago.

This was the first building to be excavated and proved to have been a two-storey structure with the wooden upper floor supported by six massive wooden pillars. These had long since rotted away but the stone bases for them were still in position. Outside the southern wall were the footings for a flight of wooden steps that led up to the entrance to the upper floor. External buttresses built with some architectural pretension shows that it was no mean building. Windows in the northern and southern walls provided a free flow of air that kept the ground floor well ventilated while the northern-eastern corner of the building was built on a massive flint platform alongside the monastic drain. This was puzzling since there was no obvious need to build on the edge of the drain, the site could have been placed several metres further south.
An analogy for this building at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England is much smaller but it still stands complete and dates from much the same time. It too is a monastic building and has a pillared upper floor, in this case stone pillars, and originally did not have a fully walled ground floor thus allowing a free flow of air beneath the upper floor. It was a garner (granary) as was the building at Castle Acre.
To the west of the garner at Castle Acre Priory was a structure some fifty metres long that had been remodelled on two occasions so its latest phase was narrower than the first. It is marked C on the plan. The main consideration of the builders in each of the phases was to maintain a junction with the building to the south, marked D. In the final phase a little corridor was placed between the two.
C had a plaster floor in each of its phases, one of only two such floors in the plant to be so favoured. All the other floors were earth. On its latest floor lay the northern gable of building D on top of tiles from the roof. It was surprisingly undamaged by its fall: all the elements of its construction lay in their relevant positions despite having crashed through the southern wall of C. After some days' thought, it became plain that this could only have happened if C had no upper wall to speak of and this proved to be the case for building C was half-timbered, its stone wall standing originally, as it still does in some places, to the full height of some 1.2 metres and above that was a timber-framed and wattle-and-daub construction which was no real obstacle to the gable fall.
D housed a grain-drying kiln, its brick base still in position. It is clear that the grain, still in sheaves, having first been carried into Building C, was threshed there on the smooth plaster floor and then passed through the junction between C and D to be dried, sacked up in the lower part of D and then carried across the courtyard up the steps to be stored in the upper floor of the garner.
The building to the south was a combined malthouse and brewery. At the western end and alongide the southern wall were the bases of two malting kilns, neither shown on the plan, which were used for drying the malt which was steeped and dried to the correct condition on the upper floor of the brewery. This floor has not survived but is assumed to have been the other smooth plaster floor. After malting the malt was placed in the mash tun and steeped in hot water. We still use the term 'mashing' in some parts of England to describe the process when tea is allowed to stand in the pot after the boiling water has been poured onto the tea leaves. After mashing the liquid was placed in a copper and boiled with flavourings which after the fifteenth century were hops and before were various hedgerow plants like 'alewort'.
After boiling the beer was rapidly cooled in vats which have not survived and then casked up in barrels made probably in the small annexe beside the brewery to the south. This would have been the cooperage.
Only the bases of the mash-tun and the three coppers have survived. The vessels themselves, being made of lead, would have been speedily salvaged after brewing ceased along with the pipes and pumps used to move the liquid around the brewery.
To the north of the garner was the priory drain which carried a stream of water from the river, through the priory enclosure, and back into the river further west, a journey of nearly a mile. Excavation of this drain discovered a sluice gate north of Building C and a basin to the north of Building B. The drain had been deepened and canalised and the reason why Building B had been built on the edge of the drain was to allow sacks of grain and barrels of beer to be slung out of a doorway overlooking the drain down into boats moored below. These boats passed through the sluice gate when there was sufficient head (flash, the local term) of water, down to the River Nar and thence to King's Lynn, a major North Sea port at the time. From there it is possible that the beer, at least, crossed the North Sea.
Commercial activities were common in monasteries. St Gall, in Switzerland, had three breweries, only one of which brewed for home consumption, while elsewhere in Europe, there is evidence at St Trond and Corbie.(1) In England, Westminster, a great Benedictine house, was a brewing monastery, while Welsh Cistercian abbeys were engaged in beer production. Strata Florida and Llantamarn sold theirs retail in local pubs! Other Cistercian monasteries involved themselves in wool, timber and iron production as a means of maximising the incomes from their estates. (2)

(1) Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat: History of Food (p. 181)
(2) David H Williams: The Welsh Cistercians (1984)

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