'Will You Still Feed Me When I'm 64?' by Karen Maitland

You can’t open a British newspaper at the moment without finding some article about retirement

Old Age Pension Book Postal Order from 1909

pensions – how the newly retired are suddenly going to start blowing their pensions pots on cruises, drinking and gambling, or the pension schemes that are going to collapse. One newspaper recently printed an illustration of pensioners queuing to get what the newspaper called the First Old Age Pension introduced in 1909. (Depressingly, it looked much the same as the Post office queue today) But in fact pensions are not a 20th century invention.

During the Middle Ages abbey, monasteries and nunneries realized there was ready money to be made by selling corrodies. A lay-person would pay a lump sum of money or sign over a parcel of land to a religious house. In return, the monks or nuns would undertake to care for that person when they became aged or infirm, either by housing them in special lodgings within the monastery, or by delivering meals, fuel, clothing and medical treatment to them in their own homes. Just like modern annuities, they tried to calculate how long a person would live and therefore how much it would cost to keep the corrodian, and set the price of the corrody accordingly.

Employers would often reward a faithful servant by buying a corrody for them or even promising a corrody in lieu of proper wages. Better-off individuals, such as merchants, would buy one for themselves and their spouses when they were in their prime, as an insurance against their old age. Of course, the corrodian would gamble on living long enough to get back far more than the sum they had originally paid, while the religious houses prayed the corrodians would die quickly, so they could make a profit.

Religious houses often used corrodies to raise money for building work, to buy a new relic or even to replenish the abbey’s wine cellars, only to find themselves crippled by the cost of providing for dozens of elderly people some years later. Since, not all the monks and nuns were quite a saintly as one might have hoped and it is not hard to imagine that this might have led to a few of the infirm and elderly being helped into the next world, before their appointed time, if abbey coffers were running low.

There are many accounts of widows and widowers becoming nuns or monks in their old age ostensibly to prepare their souls for the afterlife, but a welcome bonus would have been the care they would then have received within the religious community. For some this was the start of a whole new career after retirement and they rose to become abbots and abbesses before they died.

Although many people died young in the Middle Ages through disease, accidents and warfare, others lived to a ripe old age especially in the religious orders. Gilbert of Sempringham (1083-1189), who founded the Gilbertine Order, must have been still pretty lively for he was 85 years old when some lay brothers accused him of serious sexual crimes, accusations against which which he robustly and successful defended himself.

Another form of pension open to a lucky few, were the alms houses endowed by the wealthy in which housed and provided for a set number of poor men or women of good character. John Estbury founded one for men in Lambourne, Berkshire before his death in 1507. In return for bed and board, the beadsmen had to undertake not only to recite daily prayers, psalms and the Office for the Dead in the parish church, but also to gather round Estbury’s tomb at noon every day after Mass and say the Paternoster, Ave Maria and pray for his soul – the medieval equivalent of the modern old-folks home sing-along, ‘It’s a long Way to Tipperary.’


Of course, one of the terrible consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII was that not only did many former monks and nuns, lay-sisters and lay-brothers find themselves destitute in the old age when they had always believed they would have life-long care, but those ordinary citizens who had invested in a corrody for their old age, suddenly found their pension pot had vanished. Some monks and nuns, if they renounced their vows and signed over their religious houses to the state, were granted a stipend, but often lay-brothers were dismissed with nothing.

Those who found themselves in this position might well have prayed to St Antony of Padua for help, for despite dying aged only 36, he is the patron saint of the elderly because of his devotion to the starving and needy. By a happy chance, St Anthony is also the saint you pray to in order to ask him to restore lost things, because a novice once borrowed his psalter without permission and was haunted by frightening apparitions until he returned it. So, St Antony might be persuaded to haunt a few pension fund managers for you.

St Antony preaching to the animals

Going to Heaven in a Handcart by Karen Maitland

It’s been a particularly soggy winter in Britain, though not quite as bad as in the year the Black Death struck in 1348, when according to many independent records of the day, it rained every day from Midsummer’s Day to Christmas day. The saint we usually associate with rain is St Swithun, but today is the Saint’s Day of another rain-maker – St Cuthman.

Cuthman was 7th century Anglo-Saxon shepherd boy who became a mendicant hermit, travelling the roads to beg and preach. His mother was paralysed, so he put her in a wheelbarrow which he dragged or pushed along wherever he went, by means of a rope round his shoulders. It certainly can’t have been a comfortable ride for the poor woman, being trailed through the mud in rain, wind and snow or bumped over frozen ruts on rough tracks.

Inevitably, the wheelbarrow couldn’t take the jolting and fell apart at Penfold Fields in Steyning, Sussex and Cuthman’s long-suffering mother was pitched out, much to the amusement of the field-hands nearby who were hay-making. Legend has it that, in his rage at being mocked, young Cuthman cursed Penfold Fields saying that from then on whenever anyone tried to harvest hay there it would rain and destroy the crop. The curse seems to have drifted out far and wide, because eventually the superstition grew up that whoever cut grass on St Cuthman’s day would cause it to rain. An excellent excuse for not cutting the lawn today!

But the accident was a blessing for Cuthman’s poor mother, for the young saint took it as a sign he should build a wooden church at Steyning together with a hut for his mother, which must have been a great relief to her. In 1939, Christopher Fry wrote a play about St Cuthman, called The Boy with a Handcart.

Cuthman’s method of provision for his aged mother may have been unusual, but the problem of taking care of the elderly has been exercising all our minds recently as we all worry about our future pensions and who will pay for them. They had exactly the same concerns back in the Middle Ages. In medieval times pension provision took the form of a corrody, a single lump sum of money paid to a convent or religious house. In return the convent promised that when the corrodian became old and infirm they would provide lodgings, food and fuel for that person until their death.

Sometimes the convent guaranteed to give the person a regular annual fixed income to buy these necessities, otherwise the convent would provide the lodgings, food and fuel itself.

Employers often bought corrodies for valued employees. The religious houses used the insurance scheme as a means of obtaining ready cash especially in times of financial hardship -and they gambled that the old person would die quickly, so they could make a profit. But if the corrodian lived longer than expected, the religious house would end up losing money and there were a number of complaints from almoners in the convents or monasteries at the time that the elderly were living too long and proving too expensive. It seems little has changed!

Sculpture of St Cuthman by Penelope Reeve, created 2000, on St Cuthman’s field. Photo attribution - Pam Fray [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons