Rich people would send their children to monastery's to be monks and nuns

>Rich people would send their children to monastery's to be monks and nuns
>Knowing full well it would be a life of poverty and chastity for the kids

Why?

>poverty

>Gets rid of excess sons to mitigate infighting after you die
>Gives your family church connections and the political power that brings
>Ensures your children still receive a comparatively good life for the time

It was just an astute move for many noble and royal families

>chastity

for that matter...

In reality, how common were slutty, repressed nuns?

According to my porn movies, very common.

That's what boys were for.

>a life of poverty and chastity for the kids

On paper sure. However real monasteries not so much. From the late 9th to the mid 14th century the pope was away writing letters that keeping families on monastery grounds was not okay nor was it okay for a monk to be married. For the nuns they always had a lot of orphans in their care which a good many people noted were more then the number they took in officially.

I wouldn't mind being a monk. Would you rather be a peasant/serf who farms crops all his life, for a count or duke, surely to lose a couple of fingers and toes along the way and die before you're 45?

Most nobles were hardly better off than the people who supported them.
And most monasteries did not take their vows of poverty seriously. They lived far better than your average peasant, even better than your average knight. Letters to bishops and the Vatican were rife with complaints like having to work too much (and cutting into their prayer time), and not enough wine or beer. Back in the day, monasteries were often more of an alcoholics club.

There were a lot of abortions back then. But nobody knows how many because they were always "off the books". Suffice to say, we know all the convents knew how to take care of such problems discreetly.

First son inherits the estate
Second son gets sent to the army to get killed
Other sons get sent to the monasteries

That way your estate doesn't get diluted over time into a hundred tiny useless plots of land.

>monasteries
>poverty

mfw

>Second son gets sent to the army to get killed
What army? I thought there weren't any standing armies back then.

Also couldn't the other sons become priests instead of monks?

If you were from a noble family, the monastic lifestyle would have been significantly less extravagant than if you remained in the nobility.

That is the end of this public service announcement so you may carry on with your memeing.

>Narrow down number of retard children so you can give the one, moderately competent or deserving child your estate without beheading your kin or sending them away

Easy.

What are they gonna do? Say they don't love God that much?

That doesn't mean you can't send him to uncle Yeoric, to be his squire/fuckboy.
There is also another factor: Before the industrial revolution, nobody is guaranteed to live. So even if Nobles have higher living standards, you still got mortality running amok, so you want to hedge your heir betting.

So the first son that looks healthy gets groomed. Everyone else is hedged into diversified bets, to make sure they are the backup in case somebody dies before they can stick their dicks into a bridge and produce a new generation.
The same is true of every social class, where a position can be inherited. Even traders, craftsmen or farmers.

And it remains true even today: You get a family, groom them a little, and then prioritize some of them. It doesn't have to be the children either, it can be nephew or even further out.
Its very common in high end trades, such as doctors or practitioners, politics, smaller and medium trade companies, etc etc etc.

First son, noble.
Second son, military.
Third son, who cares. Monk.

This highly depends on place and time but in general you are wrong.

>military
You have no idea how the middle ages worked, do you?

Because in a system where most wealth is tied to land and you have primogeniture inheritance systems, you need to have some outlet for your children besides the eldest male who inherits, and anyone you can marry off. Otherwise, you're just asking your kids to murder each other.

So their favorite child would be eldest now.

If I recall, this is exactly how the de Hautevilles ended up in Sicily. Their father had like 11 sons or some shit. Normandy had been exporting land hungry mounted mercenaries for a generation by then.

Not their firstborn or ones they wanted around. It's a good way to remove infighting among siblings, strengthen ties to the church, and you always have a highly literate clergyman to call on if you ever need one.

>Be rich member of the nobility
>live your firstborn
>All the other kids hate him because he will take everything.
>Whatdo.jpg
>Send them to the military and church.
>profit

Well, it prevented infighting. And life in the orders was pretty comfy, unless you were sent in one of those mendicant order. You'd pray (a lot), tend to the community, work in the fields, copy books, shitpost in engravings, grow herbs and shit, and in general be a economic center. And with a bit of luck, you might end up running the place in a few decades.

As for chastity, that was the point. So there weren't more heirs around. Any children that might be born would be illegitimate. There has been a lot of black legends surrounding monastic orders from both protestants and later anti-clericals but take them with a grain of salt.

So, it wasn't a bad life, prevented inheritance struggles, and was potentially the start of a good career in the Church for sons that otherwise would have been left with nothing. IMO, the fate of second son is worse. You're just a spare heir, and all you can do is knight around until you get your own land somehow, become a mercenary, maybe a courtier, or grow old and live off your older brother's wealth. At least later once standing armies become a thing they would join the military, but still.

Where do you think the nobles sent their slutty daughters they couldn't wed anymore?

>nobles
>mostly comprised of people living extravagant lifestyles

lol

Please explain to me how living according to the Benedictine Rule would have been more luxurious than being a noble.

>inb4 monks never followed their rule kiddo because they were ebil lying x-chans heh

>people roleplay and fantasize the middle ages despite the fact that women and children were treated as commodities rather than people

Why?

What does that life matter if your sons will never get married and have children of their own.

>>Knowing full well it would be a life of poverty and chastity for the kids

1. If you can manage it then is objectively better to be chaste than not
2. "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it."

Not to mention that monks and nuns live pretty good lives of fasting, prayer, singing, farming, brewing beer, makings crafts, reading, etc. it's not so bad if you can handle not having sex.

But its true tho

he's saying most nobles didn't live "extravagantly"

Ok and the original post that started this back and forth said that monastic life was "less extravagant" than being a noble; extravagance is relative.

I quite like the idea of being a commodity, having lewd relations wit the local temple bishop and being tossed around in a boys choir before growing up into a repressive field-monk who has an oral fixation with his crops, especially the squash.

How do you know that?

>you are only allowed to think about perfect utopias

Well you see user Christians are evil so you have to always assume the worst about anything they've ever done and If you don't have evidence that is just proof the church destroyed it.

now it's not assuming the worst, it's assuming they did what the people before them did, that revolutions or conversions do not change the nature of mankind even if that's what the new elite wants.

yeah dude there were like totally tons of abortions back then because hey medieval people had the same attitudes about sex as we do today and there is literally no difference between medieval catholic culture and 21st century secular culture! there were tons of abortions back then trust me bro.

that was the ideals of society, not representative of the masses in general similar to the way people believed in trolls and ogres and used magics in a religious christian society or Muslim theocracies having thriving sex industries. When your'e young you want to fuck and when you get pregnant you want to end it if the result will be your chance of rising a child in good conditions is terminated.

Pepe Rodriguez published his book length study of the sexual life of clergy in Spain (La Vida sexual del Clero 1995). He concluded that among practicing priests 95% masturbate; 7% are sexually involved with minors and 26% have "attachments to minors;" 60% have sexual relations, 20% have homosexual relations.

He further refined the figures of 354 priests who were having sexual relations:

53% of these were having sex with adult women, 21% with adult men, 14% were sexually active with minor boys and 12% with minor girls. Although Rodriguez' book caused a monumental debate no one has challenged the reality of his numbers.

this started because some user claimed that nuns had tons of abortions so we aren't discussing the masses. i understand that jaded cynical pomos refuse to believe that anyone could ever have sincere religious faith but i can assure you this is not the case and it definitely wasn't the case during the medieval period. did some nuns violate their vows of chastity? without a doubt. was this the norm? highly unlikely.

>Pepe

As a second son, depending on your father's standing, you could also be married off to an heiress and start your own cadet branch that inherits her holdings. Thats how the Bourbons started.

Many, MANY of the people put in convents were put in there by their parents or because some powerful noble needed a convenient divorce.

They frequently did have children of their own but the whole purpose was to make sure they didn't have LEGITIMATE children. Legitimacy became a huge deal later in the Middle Ages. For example, William the Conqueror's uncle, the Archbishop of Rouen, had bastards running around.

>tfw this got me hard

like i said i get that it's hard for you to believe that anyone would choose to join a convent so therefore they must've been "put" there by le ebil patriarchy but there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the MAJORITY of nuns

Postmale high estrogen numale low test sjw mra cuck fedora.

Are you trolling me? I can't be certain if you are because of the amount of genuinely uneducated people on this board.

if you think most medieval nuns joined a convent against their will then it is you who is genuinely uneducated

Totally cucked fedora drained of his testosterone and packed full of estrogen kys cuck.

...

im not the guy insulting people and again if you think most nuns were forced into their vows you are simply ignorant

I'm not pretending you cuck!

Nowhere did I write that most nuns were forced into their vows.
I simply wrote that many noblewomen were forced into the convent because of political realities. I don't doubt there were many sincerely religious people. We have records of fucking anchorites for Christ's sake who live in bricked up rooms like prisoners on purpose.
I just doubt that many young women can just up and join a convent of their own volition because "muh Jesus", and that fathers would regularly permit their daughters to become nuns unless they were seriously ugly and unable to get married.

ok i think we're getting caught up in semantics. did some women get forced into a convent? yes. was that the norm? no.

So...did he go up and ask every priest whether he masturbates, diddles kids, fucks nuns and sleeps with other priests?

In the earliest years of the church, the clergy were largely married men. C K Barrett points to 1 Cor 9:5 as clearly indicating that "apostles, like other Christians, have a right to be (and many of them are) married" and the right for their wife to be "maintained by the communities in which they [the apostles] are working."[3] However, Paul himself was celibate,[4][5] and there is no consensus that inclusion among the requirements for candidacy to the office of "overseer" of being "the husband of one wife"[6] meant that celibate Christians were excluded.[7]

y'all niggas gay