Originally Posted by kerry

I'm not saying they weren't true believers in their calling. I'm saying that the religious description of their lives belies the economic components of monastic existence. They couldn't have built their abbeys unless they were doing something to accumulate vast amounts of surplus labor. Part of that surplus arises from their own self-denial but other parts of it (the larger portion??) arose from their trading and productive activity. At either Fountains or Rivaulx abbey, they sold sheep futures to the French, gambling their future sheep production for immediate capital. They owned fisheries at vast distances and farms that required two or three days travel to visit.
So, what I'm saying is that while they told themselves (maybe?) that they were engaging in a religious vocation, they were actually doing little pretty much what we do today on a regular basis. They were farming, herding, milling, smithing, etc except that instead of posting on internet forums between productive moments, they went up to the abbey or chapter house to read, think and ritualize. Their personal poverty didn't mean that the institutions that they ran were not economic institutions that functioned using the same kinds of choices that businesses use today.
To put it another way, if you added a chapel, infirmary, and a library to every IBM corporate building, and required all employees to dress alike and pray five times a day, you'd have the modern day equivalent of an abbey. The big difference being, that with the collapse of monarchy and absolutism and the rise of democracy, no one would believe the underlying religious ideology that kept the system intact from a cultural point of view.