MONASTERIES.--THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE
CLERGY.--IMPROPRIATIONS.--EVILS OF THE SYSTEM.
With the causes already enumerated as those which worked the downfall
of the Roman Catholic church, there conspired the ignorance and
immoral lives of the clergy. A system of celibacy upon compulsion was
sure to produce a system of profligacy. Yet the disgusting catalogue
of offences alleged against the regulars, by the visiters of the
monasteries, ought, perhaps, to be received with some caution. The
commissioners were not unprejudiced judges. They knew full well, that
the king, their master, was determined on the dissolution of the
religious houses, and that, at all events, a quarrel was to be picked.
Bad enough those houses probably were, but had they been better, their
doom was sealed. The preamble of the act for dissolving the smaller
ones on pretence of their corruption, proclaims that the greater were
spared as being regular, devout, and praiseworthy; yet we know what
followed.[108] The nunnery of Godstow, in Oxfordshire, was actually
reported as exemplary; it was the school to which all the young
gentlewomen of the country resorted. Their friends pleaded with the
king to spare it, the inquisitors seconded their petition,--but they
obtained for it no other boon than that it should be eaten up last.
Voluntary confessions of guilt, which accompanied the surrender of the
abbeys, are the mere suicidal confessions of a man upon the wheel,
proof of nothing but of the pain or the hope which extorted them. The
monks found that they could not save their ship, and therefore, they
compromised, by stripping themselves naked, and trying for a plank.
Had they stood upon their own innocence, they would have condemned the
king, and still lost their estates; did they allow their guilt, they
screened his rapacity, and received a see, a living, or a pension. The
courtiers were interested in swelling the cry that such men were not
fit to live. They, like the visiters, themselves hoped for a share of
the golden eggs when they should have succeeded in killing the hen.
“Wherefore this waste?” was their pretence; but they carried a bag of
their own, which was to be filled out of their neighbour’s pocket; and,
whatever might be the sin of sacrilege, “tithe corn,” thought they,
“makes very good bread.” Here is no attempt or desire to defend these
miserable monks in the teeth of damning facts--and some such, no doubt,
there were to testify against very many of the monastic abuses--but
it is nothing but justice, and the practice of every equitable court,
to weigh the characters and prejudices, and private interests of the
witnesses, when they would swear away a man’s life, substance, and good
name; and, in the present instance, it is fair to adopt the same rule,
were it only out of consideration to the many sincere, and humble, and
righteous servants of God, that those religious houses contained within
their walls, even in the midst of an adulterous and sinful generation;
the faithful among the faithless; the many who had fled thither for
shelter from the sorrows of life; the ambitious, with blithed hopes and
a broken spirit, the gay with the experience of the wise man that all
under the sun was vanity; the forlorn, whom the world had abandoned,
and left to drift upon the rocks; the disappointed, whose course of
true love might not have run smooth; these, and a thousand other
malignant influences, contributed their victims to those “populous
solitudes;” persons having now no other desire than to pass the time
of their sojourning here in piety, in privacy, and in peace. This is
a class to which it is impossible to refuse our sympathy, and whom it
would be ungenerous and unjust to confound with the swarm of lazy,
sensual, unlettered drones among whom it was their unhappy lot to
live, and whom the shock of the Reformation dispersed. Exemption from
episcopal visitation, and consequently from any inspection whatever,
was the beginning of the evil. This privilege of the monasteries proved
their poison: it was a short-sighted policy of the pope to hide them
from the eye of the secular clergy, whose jealousy would have acted as
a wholesome stimulant to the detection and correction of abuses. But
the seculars he systematically slighted, and his iniquity eventually
found him out. Then, again, came upon them an evil spirit which led
them to grasp at the possession of all the benefices in the country.
This was another effort to depress the working clergy, which the pope
encouraged, but which, like the former, was, in the end, most injurious
to his own authority, by bringing the clergy into contempt, and opening
the eyes of the people, to the covetousness of the monks. The system
of _impropriations_, which began with William the Conqueror, grew so
rapidly that, in the course of three centuries, more than a third part
of the benefices in England became such,[109] and those the richest,
for the whiter the cow the surer was it to go to the altar, and by the
time of the Reformation, there was added another third.[110] An attempt
was made by the legislature to stay the evil, and the statute of
mortmain was passed in the reign of Edward I., whereby it was enacted,
that “no person, religious or other, should presume to buy or sell, or
under any colour of donation, lease, or other title, to receive any
lands or tenements, or by any act of invention to appropriate them,
under pain of forfeiture of them.”[111] But the statute was evaded
by royal dispensations, and the mischief grew. Even the pope himself
took alarm (_pavet ipse sacerdos_); and Alexander, at the end of the
twelfth century, writes to the Bishop of Worcester to admit no man to
a vicarage on presentation of the monks, till they had assigned him,
on the instant, such a portion of income as would suffice for the
episcopal dues, and for the competent maintenance of the minister;[112]
but this decree they set at naught by not presenting at all, either
serving the churches by stipendiary curates, or (which was the readier
way) leaving them altogether unserved.[113] By-and-by the example of
the monasteries was followed by the chantries, colleges, hospitals,
and nunneries; these, in their turn, learned the art of procuring
impropriations;[114] nay, even corporations, transforming themselves,
by a legal fiction, into religious societies, did the same; for before
King Henry VIII. there seems to have been no precedent in England for
a mere layman to be an impropriator.[115] The monks, however, had
peculiar facilities for the accumulation of livings. Their influence
with some neighbouring lord of a manor would often win him to make
over the church on his estate, and the tithes with which it might be
endowed, to their own abbey; they, meanwhile, undertaking to provide
for the fulfilment of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to it. Then,
again, if they could not beg they could buy, often the parish itself,
as well as the benefice; or where the purchase was more circumscribed,
the pope, ever their friend, would sometimes grant them the privilege
of non-payment of tithes to the extent of such estate, to the great
injury of the clergymen, when it happened to be considerable. Thus
rectories were reduced to vicarages; the greater tithes going to the
abbey fund, the small tithes left as a miserable stipend (often not
more than a sixteenth part of the revenue of the benefice[116]) to
the minister, who took the monks’ labouring oar under the title of
_vicarius_. Thus originated that divorce between the property of the
parish church and the minister of it, which continues in most instances
of vicarages to this day; and thus it came to pass that town livings
(contrary to all reason) are at present of all others, the poorest,
less than the usual pittance of endowment having been left to them by
the considerate monks, who reckoned, and perhaps rightly reckoned, in
the days when masses were said, that a large population would supply
by fees alone an adequate provision for the vicar. Meanwhile, the
people were disgusted with this gross and cruel invasion of the rights
of their pastors; and the representatives of the monasteries read
themselves in amidst reproaches loud and deep, of the bystanders.[117]
But they were not thin-skinned. They prepared, however, a sop for
Cerberus, by exacting with little rigour the small tithes, or, in
some cases, by accepting an easy composition instead of them; hoping,
by such _modus_ (_decimandi_) to purchase the more cheerful and
prompt payment of the great tithes, which was their affair; and not
at all uneasy because the propitiation happened to be made at the
vicar’s expense.[118] Their only remaining concern was to find some
“Sir Johns” (as the poor clergy were called before the Reformation,)
sometimes with an honourable adjunct of “lack Latin,”[119] or
“mumble-matins[120],” or “babbling Sir Johns,”[121] or “blind Sir
Johns,”[122] as it might be, who were just qualified according to the
letter of the law, to stand in the gap; mass-priests, who could read
their breviaries, and no more--for in those days men seem to have
received ordination without any adequate examination either as to
learning or character[123]--persons of the lowest of the people, with
all the gross habits of the class from which they sprung; loiterers
on the alehouse bench;[124] dicers, scarce able to say by rote their
Pater-noster, often actually unable to repeat the commandments;[125]
divines every way fitted to provoke the 75th canon, which was no
doubt, in the first instance levelled against them.[126] Such were the
ministers to whom was consigned a very large proportion of the parishes
of England before the Reformation; with what effect, the ignorance,
the superstition, the vices which then spread themselves over the
whole country, sufficiently testify. A feature or two of the times,
such as have been preserved to us, are here offered to the reader,
not, to be sure, always drawn by a very friendly hand, but still, in
all probability, tolerably faithful. The prayers of the church, being
in Latin, tended little or nothing to edification. Preaching there
was scarce any. Quarterly sermons appear to have been prescribed
to the clergy, but not to have been insisted upon; for though mass
was on no account left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be
omitted for twenty Sundays together, and nobody be blamed.[127]
The unpreaching prelate is honest Latimer’s by-word. Indeed, as the
Reformation approached, as the stirring of the foundations began to
make itself felt; to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a
heretic.[128] The friars, to be sure, were not dumb dogs, but they
barked to little purpose, in a manner to prove rather that they were
hungry than watchful; their discourses having for their object rather
to fill their own wallets than satisfy their hearer’s wants, and if
not occupied with uncharitable invectives against other ecclesiastics,
a tissue of fables and old wives’ tales.[129] Catechising, in the
protestant sense of the term, was unknown or unpractised. When, indeed,
it was perceived how powerful a weapon it was in the hands of the
Reformers, steps were taken at the council of Trent for putting forth
what was called a catechism. But the Trent catechism was composed
avowedly for the instruction of the parish priests, not for the use
of children, to whom it was not at all adapted; and, after all, the
gross ignorance of the former must have made it a dead letter to most
of them; utterly unintelligible so long as it remained in the learned
language in which it was written, and if translated, (as it was, into
Italian, French, German and Polish, whether into English we know not,)
still containing too much special pleading, too obvious an anxiety
for secular interests, too manifest an apprehension that the “craft
was in danger,” too much doubtful or ridiculous theology, to stand
against the strong blows of the men of the new learning. The Church
Catechism, on the other hand, writ in our own mother tongue, brief,
and, on the whole, of admirable simplicity; a manual which, elementary
as it may be thought, no competent judge can examine without seeing
that its authors must have been men mighty in those Scriptures,
whereof, indeed, it is the essence, most patiently investigated, and
most skilfully and scrupulously expressed; this wrought so effectually,
that “now” (says an authority of the second year of Elizabeth, quoted
by Strype) “a young child of ten years old can tell more of his duty
towards God and man than a man of their bringing up can do in sixty
or eighty years.”[130] Nay, of the Scriptures even the more learned
clergy knew very little, the universities being taken up with popes’
laws and schoolmen. Indeed, it was difficult to meet with a copy of
the Bible, or of any other profitable book of divinity in these seats
of learning, so successfully had the friars bought them all up; and
students, we are told, in the reign of Edward III. actually withdrew
from them in consequence, and returned to their own homes;[131] nor
does the study of the Scriptures appear to have had a chance against
Scotus and Aquinas till Dean Colet established it at Oxford; and,
about the same time, George Stafford, at Cambridge, by lectures on
the books of Holy Writ.[132] The people at large, if possible, fared
worse. They were debarred from all knowledge of their Bibles, either
by the language in which they were written (for copies of Wickliffe’s
translation were scarce), or, if not, by the price at which they were
sold; the cost of Wickliffe’s New Testament, in the beginning of the
fifteenth century, being four marks and forty pence, a sum equal to
2_l._ 16_s._ 3_d._ of present money.[133] Thus the multitude knew
just so much of Scripture history, as the miracle plays taught them,
and little more. To these burlesque and indecent caricatures of Holy
Writ (though it is fair to say not so intended) the idle and the
dissipated were the first to resort, as to fairs and revels, with
which festivities, indeed, they ranked, so that, had they been better
worth attention, it is probable that an attendance upon them would
not have conduced much to edification. The Sabbath was rather a day
of sports and pastimes than of devotion and instruction; of dancing,
shooting with the bow, and practising with the buckler;[134] nor were
these, it may be well imagined, the most culpable of its occupations.
The churches were profaned. In the top of one of the pinnacles of
St. Paul’s in London was Lollard’s tower, the prison, and often the
grave of the saints. In the _arches_ of the same cathedral were the
ecclesiastical courts, of which the balance was not always the balance
of the sanctuary, though in the sanctuary it was held. In the spacious
_nave_ was the exchange for the merchants (for Sir Thomas Gresham
had not yet lived to remove the reproach), and the scene of all the
brawlings of the horse-fair.[135] Payments of money were made at the
_font_; and the _crypt_, or underground chapel, in which the early
mass was said, was the trysting-place of the nightly revellers of
either sex.[136] Nor were such abuses as these confined to London.
The house of God, as it should seem from the homily “On the right Use
of the Church,” was too generally the place of rendezvous for such as
loved greetings in the market place, had tales to tell, or business to
transact; and the devotions of the day were suffered to drag on like
Pharaoh’s chariots with the wheels off, whilst many of the congregation
were more profitably employed (as they thought) in the discussion of
farm or merchandize, as they paced to and fro along its aisles. It is
to these and similar acts of irreverence that the canons have respect
in the directions they give to churchwardens and questmen--directions
which a change in the manners of the times has rendered obsolete and
almost unintelligible;[137] and it may be reasonably supposed, that in
the ordering of our church ceremonies, and in the composition of our
church service itself, the principle of fully and fervently occupying
all who were within the walls in their devotions was studiously kept
in sight by the reformers; and that the sacrifice of prayer and praise
should no longer be considered the exclusive office of the priest,
as it had been too much in papal times, the people looking on, but
that every member should be called upon at intervals, and those of
short and frequent recurrence, the whole service through, to testify,
by lifting up his voice in confession or response, that he, too,
had a lively interest in the common work before them, of besetting
God, as it were, in a round (so the quaint old Fuller expresses it),
and not suffering him to depart till he had blessed them--“_hæc vis
grata Deo_.” The saints’ days and holidays, again, were numerous,
even to the hinderance of a harvest, and to the certain and perpetual
encouragement of riot and revelry throughout the country.[138] Taverns
and alehouses, little better than brothels, with their dishonest games
of cards, dice, backgammon, tennis, foot-ball, quoits, drained the
pockets of their votaries, and sent them to rob on the highway. So says
Sir Thomas More, who might, perhaps, have excepted the more athletic
sports here enumerated from his anathema, and thereby have rendered it
more effective.[139] The due punishment of the culprits was rendered
difficult by the places of refuge afforded them in the precincts of
religious houses, which were the thieves’ paradise;[140] and though
felons of all kinds could here claim sanctuary, even for life, so that
they would actually sally forth by night to rob or slay, and return
before day-break to their asylum within the rules with impunity, yet to
the poor persecuted Lollard was the gate of mercy closed, and he might
be legally pursued even unto the horns of the altar.[141] The friar,
meanwhile, went on with his mumpsimus. His most constant hearers (so
profitable was his teaching) were at a loss to distinguish between the
deadly sins and the ten commandments;[142] of which latter, indeed,
as of the articles of the belief in English, the people were entirely
ignorant, being wholly given to superstitions.[143] They hastened to
the churches for holy water, of which the devil was said to be afraid,
before a thunder-storm;[144] fled to St. Rooke in time of pestilence;
in an ague, to St. Pernel, or master John Shorne; being Welshmen, and
disposed to take a purse, they besought the help of Darvel Gathorne;
if a wife were weary of her husband, she betook herself to St.
Uncumber,[145] they repaired to the wise woman to recover what they had
lost, or to be recruited from a sickness; and addicted themselves with
all their might to magic, sorcery, charms, and the black art.[146] The
grossest pretensions which indulgences could advance were swallowed;
and not strained at. Relics, carrying imposture on their very face,
(“lies,” in the language of Scripture,) were kissed with pious
credulity. Pilgrimages were undertaken in the spirit of the company
in the Canterbury Tales, or of Ogygius in his journey to our lady of
Walsingham;[147] and yet were reckoned acts that would be accounted to
the parties for righteousness: and, whilst no man brought his gift to
the altar of his Saviour in Canterbury cathedral throughout a whole
year, offerings were made at the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in the
same place, and during the same period, to the amount of nearly a
thousand pounds.
No wonder that in these ages of darkness doctrines not found in the
word of God, but of which we have seen that the germ existed even in
the Saxon church, should have shot up with vigour like the gourd of
Jonah in the night; or that, in the absence of Scripture to speak for
itself, the religion of Rome (as Latimer observes) should have passed
for it.[148]