Abbot Erpo's abbey, the first golden age of Kloosterrade

After the death of Abbot Richer in 1122, a period of internal tension and unrest began at the administrative level in Kloosterrade. Due to disagreements, the canons were unable to elect a leader from among their own ranks. The cause was likely the lack of strong personalities suited for the position of abbot, or perhaps the eagerness with which one or two individuals sought to become the new leader was seen as a threat to unity. On up to four occasions, clergymen from outside the abbey were elected superior. However, all these elections were always controversial and proved time and again to be a disappointment. Conflicts that arose as a result of disagreements over the interpretation of the monastic rule or attempts to adapt the monastic customs to stricter rules led to superiors being removed from office by the bishop or pope, or superiors choosing to leave the abbey themselves. In 1134, Borno was elected superior for the second time. He had been elected ten years earlier and had then sought to expand choir prayer. This attempt met with fierce opposition, and none other than the pope ruled that the old customs should be maintained. That left Borno with no choice but to leave Kloosterrade. With his return, the internal contradictions subsided. Significant and of great importance for the internal consolidation of the monastic community was the decision taken by the choir masters in 1137 following Borno’s death. From then on, they would elect superiors only from within their own community, preferably fellow brothers who had been educated at the abbey school and raised in monastic discipline from their youth.

With Erpo, a native of Maastricht, Kloosterrade gained an abbot in 1141 who had been raised in the abbey from childhood. His long abbacy lasted at least until 1178 and served as a stabilizing force. It is not without reason that this period is hailed in historiography as the golden age of medieval Kloosterrade. For decades, economic prosperity, piety, scholarship, and spirituality flourished. Now the Consuetudines—the precepts and customs introduced from Rottenbuch by Abbot Richer and subsequently modeled on the example of the monastery of Springiersbach—were given their final form, concluding the development into a convent with a moderate ordo novus as its guiding principle. In some respects, Erpo left his mark on a stricter observance of the monastic rule. By abolishing the use of fat in all food, he carried through the austerity of eating habits for which Abbot Richer, who forbade the consumption of meat, had set the tone. In addition, he introduced the silentium, a time of silence, by which he imposed a literal prohibition on the choristers from speaking outside the service times of choral prayer. On the other hand, Erpo believed that the celebration of the tides “per diem et noctem,” in which the services of choral prayer lasted almost continuously from midnight to midnight, demanded too much of the canons. In addition to the stricter observance of the rule of life he imposed, he therefore simplified the overloaded liturgical program. He limited daily choral prayers to the proper hours and eliminated extras such as reciting the separate Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and singing the fifteen psalms before the metre and the seven penitential psalms before the priem. With these adjustments to the observance of the precepts and the arrangement of choral prayer, the development of Kloosterrade under Abbot Erpo reached its completion. Thus, after only half a century, the abbey reached its zenith: Kloosterrade was the first community between the Rhine and the Scheldt to live according to the new guidelines of the Rule of St. Augustine and, due to the uniqueness of its Consuetudines, it enjoyed supra-regional prestige. For other Augustinian monasteries pursuing reform, Kloosterrade served as a model.

A defining feature of Kloosterrade Abbey in the 12th and first half of the 13th centuries was its status as a double monastery. Following the arrival of the minister Embrico, along with his wife Adeleida and their children Heriman and Margareta, a community of nuns was established alongside the men’s monastery. This development was not in accordance with the views of the founder, Ailbertus. In 1140, Superior Johan managed to find accommodation for the nuns outside the walls of Kloosterrade. However, Abbot Erpo again admitted women, because he found a compelling reason for his decision in the need for nuns to perform a variety of domestic tasks. Over the next few decades, however, the influx of monks was much greater than expected, and the problem of an undesirable mixed community arose again. The status of a double monastery would come to an end only in 1243, with the transfer of the nuns to the monastery in Sinnich that had recently been founded by Abbot Marsilius.

The practice of pastoral care was equally undesirable and inconsistent with the ideal of an ascetic and contemplative monastic life that had been the abbey’s original aspiration. Abbot Erpo’s predecessor, Superior Johan, abandoned this stance in 1140 when he decided to provide parochial pastoral care and accepted the ministry of the church in Kerkrade by the abbey’s choristers. Toward the end of Erpo’s abbacy, Kloosterrade acquired the patronage rights of several parish churches. In this way, the abbey’s sphere of influence expanded significantly between the Meuse and the Rhine.

A tangible reminder of the abbey’s heyday is the monastic chronicle compiled around 1160 during Erpo’s tenure as abbot. The medieval manuscript, which has no title or inscription, was written by three unknown chroniclers and belongs to the genre of “narrationes fundationis.” It recounts the story of the monastery’s founding, the life of its founder, and, for the most part, its subsequent history. Such chronicles were written with great care and attention in the abbey or monastery’s scriptorium, often by anonymous monks of the second generation. The Annales Rodenses detail the life of Ailbertus, his education and schooling in Tournai, and his search for a place where he could live as a hermit. The chronicle then recounts the history of the abbey’s first five decades, from Ailbertus’s arrival in 1104 to the final entry from the year 1157. The manuscript owes its name , Annales Rodenses— by which it has remained known—to choirmaster Nicolaas Heyendal, who wrote a continuation of the history of Kloosterrade toward the end of the 17th century. The importance of the chronicle of Kloosterrade for historiography is demonstrated by the fact that data from the period after 1157 are very scarce. Other sources from which one can draw to trace the ins and outs and fortunes of the abbey in the late Middle Ages are limited to only a few surviving charters.

Abbot Erpo also knew how to enhance Kloosterrade’s prestige in material terms. No fewer than 16 charters from the period 1141 to 1177 attest to this, in which donations and purchases of land, as well as the acquisition of rights to revenues, are recorded. By the end of Erpo’s tenure, presumably in 1178, the abbey’s domain had reached an area of 3,570 hectares. Although nearly half of this was the result of donations or had been contributed by monks and nuns upon entering the monastery, more than one-fifth of the land holdings were purchased by Abbot Erpo. Such an increase is indicative of the prosperity the abbey enjoyed in those days. After 1178, the growth in land holdings stagnated. The income the abbey received thereafter consisted mainly of rents and property taxes. During the period of decline following the Limburg Succession War and in later times, particularly in the 16th century, the abbey was forced to sell a considerable portion of its property out of financial necessity and to fund repairs to damage sustained by church and monastery buildings during wars and looting.

It is not known when Abbot Erpo died. His successor, Abbot Rutger, is first mentioned as abbot of Kloosterrade in 1186. He then served as a witness to the donation made by Duke Henry III of Limburg to the Abbey of Floreffe, as evidenced by the charter confirming this donation.