In the southern extremity of Furness, about half a mile to the west
of Dalton, a deep narrow vale stretches itself from the north, and
opens to the south with an agreeable aspect to the noonday sun; it
is well watered with a rivulet of fine water collected from the
adjacent springs, and has many convenient places for mills and
fish-ponds. This romantic spot is the Vale of Deadly Nightshade,
or, as it is sometimes called, Bekangs-Gill.
The solitary and private situation of this dell being so well
formed and commodious for religious retreat had attracted the
attention of Evanus, or Ewanus, a monk, originally belonging to
the monastery of Savigny in Normandy, from which he and a few
associates had migrated, and had recently seated themselves at
Tulket, near Preston in Amounderness, where Evanus was chosen to
be their first abbot. Accordingly, they were induced to change
their residence; and exactly three years and three days after their
settling at Tulket on the fourth of the nones of July, 1124, they
removed to the sequestered shades of Bekangs-Gill, and there began
the foundation of the magnificent Abbey of St. Mary in Furness,
in magnitude only second of those in England belonging to the
Cistercian Monks, and the next in opulence after Fountains Abbey in
Yorkshire, being endowed with princely wealth and almost princely
authority, and not unworthy of the style in which its charter
records the gifts and grants, with all their privileges, of its
Royal founder, "to God and St. Mary," in the following words:--
"In the name of the Blessed Trinity, and in honour of St. Mary
of Furness, I Stephen, earl of Bulloign and Mortaign, consulting
God, and providing for the safety of my own soul, the soul of my
wife the countess Matilda, the soul of my lord and uncle Henry
king of England and duke of Normandy, and for the souls of all the
faithful, living as well as dead, in the year of our Lord 1127 of
the Roman indiction, and the 5th and 18th of the epact:
"Considering every day the uncertainty of life, that the roses and
flowers of kings, emperors, and dukes, and the crowns and palms
of all the great, wither and decay; and that all things, with an
uninterrupted course, tend to dissolution and death:
"I therefore return, give and grant, to God and St. Mary of
Furness, all Furness and Walney, with the privilege of hunting;
with Dalton, and all my lordship in Furness, with the men
and everything thereto belonging, that is, in woods and in
open grounds, in land and in water; and Ulverston, and Roger
Braithwaite, with all that belongs to him; my fisheries at
Lancaster, and Little Guoring, with all the land thereof; with
sac[10], and soc[11], tol[12], and team[13], infangenetheof[14],
and every thing within Furness, except the lands of Michael Le
Fleming; with this view, and upon this condition, That in Furness
an order of regular monks be by divine permission established:
which gift and offering I by supreme authority appoint to be for
ever observed: and that it may remain firm and inviolate for ever,
I subscribe this charter with my hand; and confirm it with the sign
of the Holy Cross.
"Signed by
Henry, King of England and Duke of Normandy.
Thurstan, Archbishop of York.
Audin, } Bishops.
Boces, }
Robert, Keeper of the Seal.
Robert, Earl of Gloster."
The magnitude of the Abbey may be known from the dimensions
of the ruins; and enough is standing to show the style of the
architecture, which breathes the same simplicity of taste which
is found in most houses belonging to the Cistercian monks, which
were erected about the same time with Furness Abbey. The round and
pointed arches occur in the doors and windows. The fine clustered
Gothic and the heavy plain Saxon pillars stand contrasted. The
walls shew excellent masonry, are in many places counter-arched,
and the ruins discover a strong cement. But all is plain: had the
monks even intended, the stone would not admit of such work as has
been executed at Fountains and Rieval Abbeys. The stone of which
the buildings have been composed is of a pale red colour, dug from
the neighbouring rocks, now changed by time and weather to a tint
of dusky brown, which accords well with the hues of plants and
shrubs that everywhere emboss the mouldering arches.
The church and cloisters were encompassed with a wall, which
commenced at the east side of the great northern door, and formed
the strait enclosure; and a space of ground, to the amount of
sixty-five acres, was surrounded with a strong stone wall, which
enclosed the porter's lodge, the mills, granaries, ovens, kilns,
and fish-ponds belonging to the Abbey, the ruins of which are
still visible. This last was the great enclosure, now called the
deer-park, within which, placed on the crown of an eminence that
rises immediately from the Abbey, and seen over all low Furness,
are the remains of a beacon or watch-tower, raised by the society
for their further security, and commanding a magnificent prospect.
The door leading to it is still remaining in the enclosure wall, on
the eastern side.
During the residence of the monks at Tulket, and until the election
of their fifth Abbot (Richard de Bajocis) they were of the order
of Savigny under the rule of St. Benedict; and from their habit
or dress were called Grey Monks; but at the time of the general
matriculation of the Savignian monasteries with that of Citeaux,
the monks of Furness also accepted of the reform, exchanged their
patron St. Benedict for St. Bernard, changed their dress from grey
to white, and so became White Monks, Bernardins, or Cistercians,
the rule of which order they religiously observed until the
dissolution of the monasteries.
The Cistercian order in its origin was devoted to the practice
of penance, silence, assiduous contemplation, and the angelical
functions (as Mr. West expresses it) of singing the divine praises;
wherefore it did not admit of the ordinary dissipation which
attends scholastic enquiries. St. Bernard who was himself a man of
learning, well knowing how far reading was necessary to improve
the mind even of a recluse, took great care to furnish his monks
with good libraries. Such of them as were best qualified were
employed in taking copies of books in every branch of literature,
many of which, beautifully written on vellum, and elegantly
illuminated, are at this time to be seen in their libraries. They
used neither furs nor linen, and never eat any flesh, except in
time of dangerous sickness; they abstained even from eggs, butter,
milk, and cheese, unless upon extraordinary occasions, and when
given to them in alms. They had belonging to them certain religious
lay brethren, whose office was to cultivate their lands, and attend
to their secular affairs: these lived at their granges and farms,
and were treated in like manner with the monks, but were never
indulged with the use of wine. The monks who attended the choir
slept in their habits upon straw; they rose at midnight, and spent
the rest of the night in singing the divine office. After prime
and the first mass, having accused themselves of their faults in
public chapter, the rest of the day was spent in a variety of
spiritual exercises with uninterrupted silence. From the Feast of
the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (the 14th of September) until
Easter they observed a strict fast: and flesh was banished from
their infirmaries from Septuagesima until Easter. This latter
class of monks was confined to the boundary wall, except that on
some particular days the members of it were allowed to walk in
parties beyond it, for exercise and amusement; but they were very
seldom permitted either to receive or pay visits. Much of these
rigorous observances was mitigated by a bull of Pope Sixtus IV.,
in the year 1485, when among other indulgencies the whole order
was allowed to eat flesh three times in every week; for which
purpose a particular dining-room, separate and distinct from the
usual refectory, was fitted up in every monastery. They were
distinguished for extensive charities and liberal hospitality; for
travellers were so sumptuously entertained at the Abbey, that it
was not till the dissolution that an inn was thought necessary in
this part of Furness, when one was opened for their accommodation,
expressly because the Monastery could no longer receive them. With
the rules of St. Bernard the monks had adopted the white cassock,
with a white caul and scapulary. Their choral dress was either
white or grey, with caul and scapulary of the same, and a girdle
of black wool; over that a hood and a rocket, the front part of
which descended to the girdle, where it ended in a round, and the
back part reached down to the middle of the leg behind: when they
appeared abroad, they wore a caul and full black hood.
The privileges and immunities granted to the Cistercian order in
general were very numerous: and those to the Abbey of Furness were
proportioned to its vast endowments. The Abbot held his secular
court in the neighbouring castle of Dalton, where he presided,
with the power of administering not only justice, but injustice,
since the lives and property of the villain tenants of the lordship
of Furness were consigned by a grant of King Stephen to the
disposal of the lordly Abbot! The monks also could be arraigned,
for whatever crime, only by him. The military establishment of
Furness likewise depended upon the Abbot. Every mesne lord and free
homager, as well as the customary tenants, took an oath of fealty
to the Abbot, to be true to him against all men, except the king.
Every mesne lord obeyed the summons of the Abbot, or his steward,
in raising his quota of armed men; and every tenant of a whole
tenement furnished a man and a horse of war for guarding the coast,
for the border service, or any expedition against the common enemy
of the king and kingdom. The habiliments of war were a steel coat,
or coat of mail, a falce, or falchion, a jack, the bow, the byll,
the crossbow, and spear.
What wonder, says a lively writer, that Abbot Pele, or any other
man, owning such vast possessions and having such temporal and
spiritual privileges as the following, should have grown proud and
gross, and contumacious! Within the limits of his own district
he was little short of omnipotent. The same oath of fealty was
taken to him as to the king himself; he had no less than twelve
hundred and fifty-eight able men armed with coats of mail, spears,
and bows and arrows, upon the possessions of the Monastery, ready
for active service, four hundred of whom were cavalry; besides
manorial rights, he had extended feudal privileges, appointment of
sheriff, coroner, and constable, wreck of the sea, freedom from
suit of county; a free market and fair at Dalton, with a court of
criminal jurisdiction; lands and tenements exempt from all toll
and tax whatever; the emoluments incidental to wardship, such as
the fining of young ladies who married against his will, &c. He
had the patronage of all the churches save one; no bailiff could
come into his territories under any pretence whatever; and no man
was to presume in any way to molest or disturb him on pain of
forfeiting ten pounds to the king. In addition to its rich home
territory in the North Lonsdale, the Abbey possessed the manor
of Beaumont in the south; land and houses at Bolton, and in many
other places near Lancaster; five villages in Yorkshire, with much
land and pasturage; and a mansion for the abbot, in York itself;
all beautiful Borrowdale in Cumberland was their property; houses
at Boston in Lincolnshire; land in the Isle of Man; and houses
in Drogheda and two other towns in Ireland. The home lordship
comprehended the rich district of Low Furness and all the district
included between the river Duddon on the one side, and the Elter
(beginning at the Shire Stones on the top of Wrynose), Lake
Windermere and the Leven on the other; with the isles of Walney and
Foulney, and the Pile of Fouldrey. They had an excellent harbour
of refuge fitted to accommodate the largest vessels of that era at
any time of tide, and they had four good iron mines in their near
neighbourhood, the ore of which, however, they do not seem to have
exported. The total income of the society appears, at the time of
its dissolution in 1537, to have been more than nine hundred pounds
a-year; which would be represented by about ten times that value in
our time, or _nine thousand a-year_.
But in the reign of Edward the First, its revenues seem to have
been nearly as large again. According to the late Mr. Beck, the
author of _Annales Furnesienses_, to which we are indebted for much
of these particulars, the tenants of the Abbey paid great part of
their rents by provisioning the monks with grain, lambs, calves,
&c., or bartered them for beer, bread, iron, wood, and manure. More
than two hundred gallons of beer were distributed weekly among
these tenants upon tunning days, accompanied with about three score
of loaves of bread; the expenditure in this particular alone, per
annum, must have been at least one thousand pounds of our present
money: one ton of malleable iron was also given to the same people
for the repair of their ploughs, and wood for that of their houses
and fences. They might take, too, all the manure--amounting yearly
to four or five hundred cartloads--with the exception of that from
the Abbot's and high stables. The tenants paid by way of fine, or
admission to their tenements, but one penny, called "God's Penny,"
and were sworn to be true to the king and to the convent. What alms
were distributed amongst the poor by this wealthy and pious society
we have no means of discovering. It was bound, upon the anniversary
of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, to distribute two oxen, two cows,
and one bull among the poor folks who assembled for that purpose
at the Porter's Lodge. At the same place, ninety-nine shillings'
worth of bread, and six maze of _fresh_ herrings, valued at forty
shillings, were also given in alms every Monday and Tuesday; the
convent maintained from its very commencement thirteen poor men,
allowing each of them thirty-three shillings and fourpence yearly:
and eight widows received a similar allowance of provisions to that
allowed for the same number of monks. They had five flagons of ale
weekly, and each of them a _clibanus_,[15] which it is supposed
must have been a certain quantity of bread. Lastly, there were two
schools held in some part of the monastery, where the children
of those tenants who paid their rent in provisions, and who it
is probable lived in the neighbourhood, received their education
gratuitously, and dined in the hall during their attendance as
well. If one of these showed symptoms of superior intelligence, he
had the privilege of being elected into the society in preference
to all others, by which step he might rise by good fortune or
_finesse_ even to be Lord of Furness.
The society numbered three and thirty monks at the time of its
dissolution, and about one hundred converts and servants, and
no convert was admitted who could not pay for the labour of an
hireling. To have been head of such a colony at home, and to have
wielded such a power abroad, must have made even the most pious of
abbots "draw too proud a breath;" and yet with all the faults and
all the vices of that cowled priesthood, we cannot now forbear to
pity their sad fate, when bidden by the remorseless king to leave
their grand old residences and quiet ways of life wherein they had
lived so long!
It must be added, that to so much power and so great prosperity,
with all the beneficence and usefulness of the society there
had come to be allied an amount of profligacy and irreligion
proportionate to the many advantages which it had enjoyed.
The early part of the sixteenth century found the morality of the
monastery represented in many instances by social arrangements
in direct violation of the injunctions laid upon all monastic
institutions, "in the king's behalf;" amongst others, of that
one which especially enjoins that "women of what state or degree
soever they be, be utterly excluded from entering into the limit
or circuit of this monastery or place, unless they first obtain
license of the King's Highness, or his visitor." It was stated,
and apparently well authenticated, that Rogerus Pele (abbot) had
two wives, or what amounted to the same thing, two concubines;
and amongst his subordinate monks, Johannes Groyn had one, whilst
Thomas Hornsby had five. Thus, evil days in one sense had already
come; and others were fast drawing nigh. The mandate, moreover, had
been prepared for their destruction independently of these and such
like shortcomings; but they afforded a powerful handle by which to
wrest them to destruction.
First came the commissioners appointed by the King for visiting
the monasteries in the North of England, with their searching
examination into everything connected with each separate society:
next, the list of crimes charged on the monks at the time of the
visitation: then the devices of the Earl of Sussex "advertised" in
his letter to the King, wherein "I, the said erle, devising with
myselfe, yf one way would not serve, how, and by what other means,
the said monks might be ryd from the said abbey;" the summons to
Whalley of the unhappy Abbot to make his proposal, in his own
handwriting, according to the "ded enrolled, which A. Fitzherbert
hath drawn" for the surrender of his monastery to the King: and
then the final consummation of all. For come it must. On the 7th
day of April, 1537, in spite of prayers to the "kynge," in spite
of many a "shillinge in golde" given to the "right honerable and
our singler goode Mr. Mayster Thomas Cromwell, secretarie to the
Kynge's highness," the royal commissioners came down upon their
prey. After hanging the Abbot of Whalley, and the royal injunction
that "all monks and chanons, that be in any wise faultie, are _to
be tyed uppe without further delay or ceremonie_," the Abbot of
Furnesse is found "to be of a very facile and ready minde," and
all hope of averting his doom being over, and his sense of peril
hastening his submission, "it coming freely of himself and without
enforcement," he signed the fatal deed of surrender, confessing
with contrition "the mysorder and evil lyfe both to God and our
prynce of the brethren of this monasterie;" the pen passed from the
hand of the Superior to each monk in succession, and the "lamp on
the altar of St. Mary of Furness was extinguished for ever."
With forty shillings given to them by the King, and clad in
"secular wedes" (that is, lay garments), without which they were
not permitted to depart, they turned their faces from their
magnificent home in the Nightshade Dell. To the degraded Abbot was
given the Rectory of Dalton, valued at £33 6s. 9d. yearly, obtained
with difficulty, and even of which he was not allowed undisturbed
possession. But no traces of his associates at the Abbey appear to
have survived their departure from it, unless we dimly discern them
in the miserable record which relates that sixteen years after the
period of their dissolution, fifteen pounds[16] were still paid in
annuities out of the revenues of the late monastery; that noble
possession which the hapless Thirty surrendered to the King.
Of the three and thirty monks of which the society at Furness was
composed, the names of the Abbot, the Prior, and twenty-eight of
the brethren, were appended to the deed: two had been committed to
ward and sure custody in the King's castle of Lancaster, for being
"found faultye:"[17] and one of the number remains unaccounted for.