Education and Preaching

History » Background Information » Education and Preaching

Learn about the black friars' contribution to education and their passion for books and preaching.

Why was education important?

As we will see, preaching was the channel through which the black friars hoped to place the fruits of their learning at the disposal of the laity. In fact, there were many outstanding Dominican scholars.

Study and learning were the indispensable tools of an effective preacher – furnishing the subject matter of his sermons and making him more persuasive.
From the beginning of the Order, learning assumed great importance; together with religious duties, studying usurped the place given in older Orders, such as the Cistercians, to manual labour. Indeed, the Dominican Constitutions make abundant provision for education among the friars.
In 1335, the General Chapter (a monastic general assembly) of the black friars commanded each province of the Order to maintain two centres for the study of the arts, two for natural philosophy (the study of nature and the physical universe – the precursor of ‘natural sciences’ such as physics) and two for theology.
By the end of the fourteenth century, there was a designated and approved studium theologiae for Dominicans at Norwich.
This period also witnessed the rapid development of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge – the only two universities in medieval England.

How important were books and did Norwich Blackfriars have a library?

The Dominicans were considered the most intellectual of the four main Orders. Indeed, an indispensable part of their friaries was a collection of books and a library to house them.
Because of their vows of poverty, individual friars could not theoretically own books, but they were able to borrow them.
The friars’ thirst for books was insatiable. One of their critics, Richard de Bury (Bishop of Durham 1333-45), thought that they were: 'Like ants, ever preparing their meat in summer or bees continually building their cells of honey'.

The original site of the library at the Norwich Blackfriars was possibly on the first floor of the south range, above the cloisters. As Humbert of Romans (1200-1227), the fifth master general of the Dominican Order declared, the library should be located in a good and safe place, ‘well-protected against rain and inclement weather, and well-ventilated for the preservation of books’.
Humbert also insisted that the library should be provided with ink, pens, pumice-stone, lead, rulers, knives for sharpening the pens, candles for night reading, and similar things necessary for writing or studying.
The Norwich black friars built themselves a new library with the aid of a bequest in 1459. It was ‘a long building from west to east, near the north side of the chancel of their church’. It was later demolished.
At the Dissolution, Henry VIII sent his servant, John Leland, around the religious houses to catalogue and retrieve the best of the books. When he reached Norwich Blackfriars, he found only three books (the others had been removed to safety): Distinctiones theologicae, by William of Lincoln, and two books on the apocalypse and the Psalms.
From 1608, the rooms in the porch above Becket’s chapel were used for a few years to house the City Library, one of the first established municipal public libraries in the country. The collection of the original City Library is still held by the Norfolk Library and Information Service today.