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Back in “the day,” monks lived from rents from huge landholdings, land given to them as pious donations by noblemen and women because the nobles wanted monks and nuns praying round the clock. Quaint idea.

At that time, there was relatively little business activity anywhere. Trade was primarily barter and local. Land was the currency. Monks had it because it was given to them so they could be free to pray. I’m talking early Middle Ages, 500s-900s. Things were different in the Mediterranean world to some degree—more commerce, but even there, land was king, so Byzantine monks also had landed estates from which they lived. Peasants worked the land and paid rent. This was true for both nobles and monks.

THen came the growth of commerce in northern and western Europe. Monks adapted, drew from various privileges to collect tolls or operate mills (indirectly) etc.,granted them by the authorities (i.e., kings, high nobles). In the later Middle Ages, the relative value of land compared to commerce declined and not only monks but also nobles gradually lost ground to the commercial bourgeoisie. We’re talking 1100s-1700s. The kings reduced nobles to pawns of absolute monarchy in the 1500s and 1600s,handed out lands and monopolies to their cronies. In Protestant countries they stole the monks’ lands and gave them to their cronies. In Catholic countries, the monasteries survived, mostly from landed estates and income from the peasants who farmed it but with commerce on the side. For instance, the Trappists in Belgium and Benedictines in Bavaria became famous for beer brewing.

Eventually, the bourgeoisie toppled the absolute monarchs but not before “enlightened” monarchs in Catholic countries destroyed most of the monasteries. Then the French Revolution confiscated and destroyed all monasteries in France and Napoleon did the same in most of the countries he conquered.

When monasteries were restored after Napoleon was finally sent packing, they had to start from scratch. They did own lands but rarely enough to provide enough income to support them. The 1800s were an age of commerce. Monks adapted. THey almost always had a few hundred acres that produced food for their own tables and, until fairly recently, often farmed that land with their own hands.

But small-sized farming in the US has been destroyed over the last 50 years. Monks had always done offshoots of farming—fruitcakes, candies, breads etc. and they kept up with the trends by using mail order to deliver.

Like any other intelligent person, they have always been on the lookout for new ways to support themselves. Some of them did contracted web designing. The Cistercians in Iowa make solid hardwood caskets, simple in design but beautiful, at prices lower than the rip-off business carried out by the mortuary industry. In the Carolinas, they had large cage-layer poultry operations, until officious bureaucrats shut them down. Others run schools. Others have printing operations. The Carmelites in Wyoming do mail-order gourmet coffees. The Carthusians worldwide survive in part from royalties from their secret recipe Chartreux liqueur which they used to make entirely themselves (lay brothers did the actual work) but now contract out but retain control of the recipe and assemble the spices themselves. Carthusians in Slovenia grow pears inside bottles on their trees, then harvest them, wash the bottles and fill them with brandy and sell them as novelty items in gift shops.

Monks are lay people who have made a commitment to a life of prayer that parallels the vow married people take as a commitment to raising children. They have to support themselves, one way or another. From the very beginnings of monasticism (in the New Testament), work was combined with prayer.