serious matter for both parties. But it was much more serious for the
bishop than for the convent. The bishop had always his state to keep up
and his many houses to maintain, and his establishment was enormously
costly. His margin for law expenses was small; and I suspect that a
bishop in England during the thirteenth century who had no private
fortune outside his mere episcopal revenues would have been likely
sooner or later to find himself in serious difficulties. On the other
hand, in a great monastery all sorts of expedients could be resorted to
in order to effect a salutary retrenchment--as when the monks of St.
Alban's agreed to give up the use of wine for fifteen years, and
actually did so, that they might be able to rebuild their refectory and
dormitory in the days of John the twenty-first abbot. Moreover,
inasmuch as a corporation never dies, the convent could raise very
heavy sums on the security of its estates, and take its own time to
repay the loans. A bishop could not pledge his episcopal estates beyond
his own lifetime, and the result was that, in the days when life
assurance was unknown, a bishop who had to raise money for a costly
lawsuit would have to pay a rate of interest which would make our blood
run cold if we had to pay it, or our hearts leap for joy if we could
get it in these days of two and three per cent. The bishop was always
at a disadvantage in these appeal cases; he stood to lose everything,
and he stood to win nothing at all except the satisfaction of his
conscience that he was struggling for principle and right. And thus it
came to pass that the monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely
shrank from engaging in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a
deputation from the convent to watch the case as it was going on, and
there was all the delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a
trip, in fact, to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.
But when there was no appeal case going on--and an appeal was too
expensive an amusement to be indulged in often--there was always a good
deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the convent, and
to give them something to think about and gossip about nearer home. We
have the best authority--the authority of the great Pope Innocent
III.--for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth century were
extremely fond of beer; but there was something else that they were
even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history is almost made up of
the stories of this everlasting litigation; nothing was too trifling to
be made into an occasion for a lawsuit. Some neighbouring landowner had
committed a trespass or withheld a tithe pig. Some audacious townsman
had claimed the right of catching eels in a pond. Some brawling knight
pretended he was in some sense _patron_ of a cell, and demanded a
trumpery allowance of bread and ale, or an equivalent. As we read about
these things we exclaim, "Why in the world did they make such a fuss
about a trifle?" Not so thought the monks. They knew well enough what
the thin end of the wedge meant, and, being in a far better position
than we are to judge of the significance and importance of many a
_casus belli_ which now seems but trivial, they never dreamed of giving
an inch for the other side to take an ell. So they went to law, and
enjoyed it amazingly! Sometimes however, there were disputes which were
not to be settled peaceably; and then came what University men in the
old days used to know as a "Town and Gown row."
Let it be remembered that a Benedictine monastery, in the early times,
was invariably set down in a lonely wilderness. As time went on, and
the monks brought the swamp into cultivation, and wealth flowed in, and
the monastery became a centre of culture, there would be sure to gather
round the walls a number of hangers-on, who gradually grew into a
community, the tendency of which was to assert itself, and to become
less and less dependent upon the abbey for support. These _towns_ (for
they became such) were, as a rule, built on the abbey land, and paid
dues to the monastery. Of course, on the one side, there was an
inclination to raise the dues; on the other, a desire to repudiate them
altogether. Hence bad blood was sure to arise between the monks and the
townsmen, and sooner or later serious conflicts between the servants of
the monasteries and the people outside. Thus, in 1223, there was a
serious collision between the Londoners and the Westminster monks; the
mob rushed into the monastery, and the abbot escaped their violence
with difficulty by slipping out at a back door and getting into a boat
on the Thames. On another occasion there was a very serious fray
between the citizens of Norwich and the priory there, in 1272, when the
prior slew one man with his own hands, and many lives were lost. At a
later time there was a similar disturbance at Bury St. Edmunds, and in
the year 1314 the great abbey of St. Alban's was kept in a state of
siege for more than ten days by the townsmen, who were driven to frenzy
by not being allowed to grind their own corn in their own handmills,
but compelled to get it ground by the abbey millers, and, of course,
pay the fee.
Thirty years later, again, that man of sin, Sir Philip de Lymbury,
lifted up his heel against the Abbey of St. Alban's, and actually laid
hands upon Brother John Moot, the cellarer; and on Monday, being market
day at Luton in Beds, did actually clap the said cellarer in the
pillory and kept him there, exposed to the jeers and contempt of the
rude populace, who, we may be sure, were in ecstasies at this precursor
of Mr. Pickwick in the pound. But the holy martyr St. Alban was not
likely to let such an outrage pass; and when the rollicking knight came
to the abbey to make it up, and was for presenting a peace-offering at
the shrine, lo, the knightly nose began to bleed profusely, and, to the
consternation of the beholders, the offering could not be made, and Sir
Philip had to retire, holding his nose, and shortly after he died--and,
adds the chronicler, was speedily forgotten, he and his.
Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is
reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there
was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the
canvassing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a
convent might be turned for years into a house divided against itself,
the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog. Nor did it
at all follow that because the convent had elected their abbot or prior
unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by the king, to
whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable instance in
Carlyle's "Past and Present."] King John kept monasteries without any
abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the meantime, and leaving
the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an abbot was forced upon a
monastery in spite of the convent, as in the case of Abbot Roger
Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks not only detested
because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they denounced as actually
immoral. Sometimes, too, the misconduct of a prior was so abominable
that it could not be borne, and then came the very difficult and very
delicate business of getting him deposed: a process which was by no
means easily managed, as appeared in the instance of Simon Pumice,
Prior of Worcester, in 1219, and in many another case.
Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to
relieve the monotony which it has been too readily assumed was the
characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own
within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their
relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that
confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly
relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent,
was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get
the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was
holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity
upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the
practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look
after them, it was assumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to
undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?
Nor, again, must we suppose that the monks were debarred all
amusements. On August 29, 1283, there was a great wrestling match at
Hockliffe, in Beds, and a huge concourse of people of all sorts were
there to see the fun. The roughs and the "fancy" were present in great
force, and somehow it came to pass that a free fight ensued. I am sorry
to say that the canons of Dunstable were largely represented upon the
occasion. We are left to infer that the representatives were chiefly
the servants of the canons, but I am afraid that some at least of their
masters were there too. In the fight one Simon Mustard, who appears to
have been something like a professional prize-fighter, "a bully
exceeding fierce," says the annalist, got killed; but thereon ensued
much inquiry and much litigation, and Dunstable and its "religious" had
to suffer vexations not a few. In fairness it should be remembered that
these Dunstable people were not monks but canons--regular or
irregular--and those canons, we all know, would do anything. We protest
against being confounded with canons!
The amusements of monks were more innocent. The garden was always a
great place of resort, and gardening a favourite pastime. We may be
sure there was much lamentation and grumbling at St. Alban's when Abbot
John de Maryns forbade any monk, who from infirmity could only be
carried on a litter, from entering the garden at all. Poor old fellows!
had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the flower-beds?
Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion among them; but in
the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by his letters, there
were other diversions of a far more reprehensible character. Actually
at the small Priory of Coxford, in Norfolk, the prior and his canons
were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was dreadful! In other
monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only the abbots, but the
common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to be found as monks
keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister, Peckham denounces these
breaches of decorum as grave offences, which were not to be passed over
and not to be allowed. What! a black monk stalking along with a
bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse than the Jackdaw of Rheims,
using bad words in the garth, and showing an evil example to the
chorister boys, with his head on one side!
But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all delights
to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking. "Sir, I like
my dinner!" said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one thought the
worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in a great abbey
was clearly a very important event in the day--I will not say it was
_the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important one. It must
strike any one who knows much of the literature of this age that the
weak point in the monastic life of the thirteenth century was the
gormandizing. It was exactly as, I am told, it is on board ship on a
long voyage, where people have little or nothing to do, they are always
looking forward to the next meal, and the sound of the dinner-bell is
the most exciting sound that greets the ear in the twenty-four hours.
And so with the monks in a great monastery which had grown rich, and in
point of fact had more money than it knew what to do with: the dinner
was the event of the day. It is not that we hear much of drunkenness,
for we really hear very little of it, and where it is spoken of it is
always with reprobation. Nor is it that we hear of anything like the
loathsome and disgusting gluttony of the Romans of the empire, but
eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one
is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is
significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief
reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the
curtailing the luxury of the refectory.
But the monks were not the only people in those times who had a high
appreciation of good cheer. When a man of high degree took up his
quarters in a monastery he by no means wished to be put off with
salt-fish-and-toast-and-water cheer. Richard de Marisco, one of King
John's profligate councillors, who was eventually foisted into the see
of Durham, gave the Abbey of St. Alban's the tithes of Eglingham, in
Northumberland, to help them to make their ale better--"taking
compassion upon the weakness of the convent's drink," as the chronicler
tells us. The small beer of St. Alban's, it seems, was not so much
improved as was to be desired, notwithstanding this appropriation of
Church property, for twice after this the abbey had the same delicate
hint given to it that its brewing was not up to the mark, when the
rectory of Norton, in Hertfordshire, and two-thirds of the tithes of
Hartburn, in Northumberland, were given to the monastery that no excuse
might remain for the bad quality of the malt liquor.
And here let me remark in passing that another wide-spread delusion
needs to be removed from the popular mind with regard to the relations
between the monks and the clergy. We have again and again heard people
say, "Wonderfully devoted men, those monks! Look at the churches all
over the land! If it had not been for the monks how could all the
village churches have been built? The monks built them all!" Monks
build parish churches! Why, the monks were always robbing the country
parsons, and the town parsons, too, for that matter. Every vicarage in
England represents a spoliation of the church, whose rectorial tithes
had been appropriated by a religious house, the parson being left with
the vicarial tithes, and often not even with them, but thrown for his
daily bread upon the voluntary offerings of his parishioners. The monks
build churches! I could not from my own knowledge bring forward a
single instance in all the history of England of a monastery
contributing a shilling of money or a load of stone for the repair, let
alone the erection, of any parish church in the land. So far from it,
they pulled down the churches when they had a chance, and they were
always on the look-out to steal the rectory houses and substitute for
them any cheap-and-nasty vicarage unless the bishop kept a sharp
look-out upon them and came to the help of his clergy. Of all the sins
that the monks had to answer for, this greedy grasping at Church
property, this shameless robbery of the seculars, was beyond compare
the most inexcusable and the most mischievous. To the credit of the
Cistercians it must be told that they _at first_ set themselves against
the wholesale pillage of the parochial clergy. I am not prepared to say
they were true to their first principles--no corporate society ever
was, and least of all a religious corporation--but at starting the
Cistercians were decidedly opposed to the alienating of tithes and
appropriating them to the endowment of their abbeys, and this was
probably one among other causes why the Cistercians prospered so
wonderfully as they did during the first hundred years or so after
their first coming here; people believed that the new order was not
going to live by robbing parsons, as the older orders had done without
remorse. The swindler always thinks his victim a fool, and the victim
never forgives the smarter man who has taken him in. Accordingly the
monks always pretended to think scorn of the clergy, and when the
monasteries fell the clergy were the very last people to lament their
fall.
And this brings us to the question of the moral condition of the
monasteries. Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century "the
golden age of English Churchmanship." Subject to correction from the
greatest of England's great historians--and subject to correction, too,
from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable eminence,
are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this subject--I
venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century was also the
golden age of English Monachism. Certainly we know much more about the
monasteries and their inner life during this period than at any other
time. The materials ready to our hand are very voluminous, and the
evidence accessible to the inquirer is very various. I do not believe
that any man of common fairness and candour who should give some years
to the careful study of those materials and that evidence could rise
from his examination with any other impression than that, as a body,
the monks of the thirteenth century were better than their age. Vicious
and profligate, drunken and unchaste, as a class, they certainly were
not. Of course there were scandalous brethren. Here and there--but
rarely, very rarely--there was a wicked abbot or prior. Of course there
were instances of abominations on which one cannot dwell; of course
there are stories which are bad to read; stories which find their way
into the chronicles because they were strange or startling; but these
stories are always told with horror, and commented upon with severity
and scorn. Excuse for wickedness or any palliation of it, you simply
never find.
On the other hand, the intense _esprit de corps_ of a convent of monks
went beyond anything that we can now realize, and led to grave sins
against truth and honesty. The forgeries of charters, bulls, and legal
instruments of all kinds for the glorification of a monastery by its
members was at least condoned only too frequently. It can hardly be
doubted that the scriptorium of many a religious house must have been
turned to very discreditable uses by unscrupulous and clever scribes,
with the connivance if not with the actual knowledge of the convent,
for such things were not done in a corner. If the forgeries
succeeded--and that they often did succeed we know--the monastery got
all the advantage of the rascality; no inquiry was made, and it was
tacitly assumed that where so much was gained, and the pride of "our
house" was gratified, the end justified the means.
There remains one question which may suggest itself to our minds as it
has often suggested itself to others. From what class or classes in
society were the monks for the most part taken? This is one of the most
difficult questions to answer. The late Dr. Maitland, who perhaps knew
more, and had read more, about monks and monasteries than any
Englishman of his time, professed himself unable to answer it; and my
friend Dr. Luard--whose labours in this field of research have gained
for him a European reputation, and whose wonderful industry,
carefulness, and profound knowledge, qualify him to speak with
authority on such a point, if any one might pronounce upon
it--hesitates to give a decided opinion. The impression that is left
upon my own mind is, that the thirteenth-century monk, as a rule, was
drawn from the gentry class, as distinguished from the aristocracy on
the one hand, or the artisans on the other. In fact, _mutatis
mutandis_, that the representatives of the monks of the thirteenth
century were the Fellows of Colleges of the nineteenth before the
recent alteration of University and College statutes came into force.
An ignorant monk was certainly a rarity, an absolutely unlettered or
uneducated one was an impossibility, and an abbot or prior who could
not talk and write Latin with facility, who could not preach with
tolerable fluency on occasion, and hold his own as a debater and man of
business, would have found himself sooner or later in a very ridiculous
and very uncomfortable position, from which he might be glad to escape
by resignation.
* * * * * * *
Three centuries after the time we have been considering, the religious
houses were suppressed--to use that euphonious term which has become
universally accepted--only after they had existed in these islands in
one form or another for at least a thousand years. Century after
century monasteries continued to spring up, and there never was much
difficulty in finding devout people who were ready to befriend a new
order, to endow it with lands, and to give it a fair start. In other
words, there was always a _demand_ for new monasteries, and the first
sure sign that that demand had been met, and more than met, was when
the supply of monks began to fall short, and when, as was the case
before the end of the fifteenth century, the religious houses could not
fill up their full complement of brethren. Is it conceivable that this
constant demand could have gone on, unless the common sense of the
nation had been profoundly convinced, and continuously convinced, that
the religious orders gave back some great equivalent for all the
immense surrenders of wealth which generation after generation of
Englishmen had made--some equivalent for all the vast stream of
benefactions which flowed on from age to age so strongly that kings and
statesmen had to interfere and check, if it might be, the dangerous
prodigality of lavish benefactors? What that equivalent was, what the
real work of the monasteries was, what great functions they discharged
in the body politic, what the nation at large gained by their
continuance and lost by their fall--these are questions which on this
occasion I am not concerned with, and with which I scrupulously forbear
from dealing. But there are moments when a great horror comes upon some
men's minds, and a vision of a lonely and childless old age rises
before them in the gloom of a dreary twilight, or when the mists of
autumn hide the sunbeams, and they think, "If desolation were to come
upon our homes, where could we hide the stricken head and broken
heart?" To that question--a morbid question if you will--I have never
found an answer. The answer was possible once, but it was in an age
which has passed away.
Yes, that age has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is
true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes the
echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single sound
is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the several
parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter that "flash along
the chords and go," the wail of the minor, as if crying for the theme
that has vanished and yet will reappear--"like armies whispering where
great echoes be"--these things are not mere repetition; they are
messages from the Eternal Father to the sons of men, reminding them
that the world moves on. Merely to ape the past, and to attempt to
reproduce in the nineteenth century the tree that had taken a
millennium to grow into its maturity in the thirteenth and was rudely
cut down root and branch in the sixteenth, is about as wise as it would
be to try and make us sing the Hallelujah Chorus in unison! Let the
dead bury their dead.
Meanwhile the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are
rising up around us each after his kind; Pall Mall swarms with them,
hardly less splendid than their progenitors, certainly not less
luxurious. Our modern monks look out at the windows of the Carlton and
the Athenæum with no suspicion that they are at all like the monks of
old. Nor are they. They lack the old faith, the old loyalty to their
order, and with the old picturesqueness something else that we can less
afford to miss--the old enthusiasm. We look back upon the men of the
thirteenth century with much complacency. A supercilious glance at the
past seems to give the moderns an excellent opinion of themselves. But
suppose the men of the thirteenth century could turn the tables upon
us, and, from their point of view, pass their judgment upon the daily
life of the conventuals of St. James's, who are, after all, only
survivals, but just conceivably not quite survivals of the fittest;
would the monks of old find all things quite up to the highest ideal,
or would they hide their heads in shame and confusion of face compelled
to acknowledge that the new is in all things so much better than the
old?
IV.
THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA.
"So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,
And a famine of strivers silenced strife:
There were none to love and none to wed,
And pity and joy and hope had fled,
And grief had spent her passion in sighing;
And where was the Spirit of Life?"