Hello, this is to you about health and

today I'm going to talk to you about health and safety in medieval monasteries. Now I don't know about you but generally

I don't really imagine the medieval world as a place particularly concerned with

health and safety. Do you? Not medieval. No. No I to me I imagine it's just like just no

concern for people's health get on with it if you die it is God's will

to be honest I think a lot of people are just thinking, I quite fancy this being over and done with anyway. If I fall off this and land on my neck, so be it means I'm no longer going back to my mudheart and eating

turn it it's fine take me on the surface compared with many environments at that time

the monastery did seem to be quite a safe and healthy place.

However, if you dig a little deeper, you discover basically the medieval monastery was in fact

a health and safety nightmare.

It's really quite funny, okay? So if you wanted to sort of live a long

and safe life, you did not want to be a monk in a monastery. As a general point,

I'll give you some sort of overarching themes here. Monks constantly complained, and this is in records, of sleep deprivation,

overwork, illness, physical disablement, mental distress and of injury.

And if they were ever allowed any time off by the Abbot,

there was kind of very clear rules about how they were supposed to spend that.

So this is what it says in one Cambridge, Priory's rulebook.

It says they may walk in the gardens, they may take

their meals with those in the infirmary, they may absent themselves for a short time from

study and from cloister, and so by repose diet and recreation regained before long their former state of health.

So they were allowed little breaks from this slightly arduous life, but it had to be in a very strict confined manner.

But the question is, and this is what I'm going to talk about today,

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