This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S. Paul’s, where

a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and parochial, rose out of a

network of close-packed streets and alleys thronged with busy craftsmen

and noisy, chaffering traders. Through the heart of it flowed the

“Wall-brook,” on whose bank there lingered, long after the stream

itself was buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with

merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to a landing-place

at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond the Walbrook lay the

East-Cheap, almost busier and more crowded still; while to the

north, along the upper course of the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish

quarter.[134] Population was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of

the wealthier citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded

with bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up the

river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered round the famous

abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the last Old-English king, and

the palace of William Rufus, a splendid edifice with a breast-work

and bastion stretching down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of

the city, just outside the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where

a great horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse

of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running

streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138]

and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland stretching

away across the northern part of Middlesex to the foot of the Chiltern

Hills. Here the stag and the fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull,

had their coverts, beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which

the citizens were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their

pleasure.[139] Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the

greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young burghers were

content, in the summer evenings when their day’s work was done, with

a saunter among the shady gardens and fresh springs which enlivened

the northern suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a

tract of low-lying moor or marsh--the Moorfields of later times--on

whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s content the

exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140] Business, pleasure,

piety, intellectual culture, all had their places in the vigorous life

of the great city. Each of the two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S.

Peter’s, had a school attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady

at Bermondsey, just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not absorb

all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected and noted above

all other citizens for their manners, dress, table and discourse.”[142]

“Moreover, almost all the bishops, abbots and great men of England

are, in a manner, citizens and freemen of London; as they have

magnificent houses there, to which they resort, spending large sums of

money, whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies

by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to go there by

their own business.”[143] And between these visitors and the resident

citizens there was no hard and fast line of demarcation. Neither the

knight-errant’s blind contempt for practical industry nor the still

blinder contempt of the merely practical man for everything which has

not its value in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the

old English system the merchant who had made three long voyages over

sea on his own account was entitled to rank as a thegn, and to take

his place among the nobles of the land. Under the Norman system a link

between the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman origin,

to whom London in no small measure owed the marked importance which

it attained under Henry I. The Norman knights had no monopoly of the

enterprizing spirit of their race; the victorious host had scarcely

settled down upon the conquered soil when it was followed by a second

invasion of a very different character. Merchants, traders, craftsmen

of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s

newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native

people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The

fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town population

chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years of the conquest.

The process was very likely more helped than hindered by the grinding

tyranny which united all the Red King’s victims in a community of

suffering; but its great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His

restoration of law and order, his administrative and judicial reforms,

gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and commercial energy.

England under him had her heavy burthens and her cruel grievances; they

stand out plainly enough in the complaints of her native chronicler.

But to men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French kingdom

or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman duchy under the nominal

government of Robert Curthose, a country where “no man durst misdo with

other,” and where the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144]

may well have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder

that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and get an honest

living came across the sea to find shelter and security in the rich

and prosperous island. For settlers of this kind it was easy enough to

make a home. No gulf of hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense

of wrong suffered and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their

English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s reign had closed,

English and Normans were living contentedly side by side in all the

chief cities of England: sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of

Norwich, the new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their

own, but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse was

perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement, Norman taste,

Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the

English burghers; and intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the

great cities, where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or

strange, and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s

languages had been worn away by years of commercial intercourse,

the fusion was naturally more easy; in London, whither the “men of

Rouen” had come in their “great ships,” with their cargoes of wine or

sturgeons,[146] long before their countrymen came with bow and spear

and sword, it was easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which

the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors attracted them

as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign;

and the attraction grew still stronger during the unquiet times in

Normandy which followed the Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the

chief Norman cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them

out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their trade,

and better stored with the goods in which they were wont to deal.”[147]

[133] Stow, _London_ (Thoms), p. 97.

[134] The only body of Jews who appear in the Pipe Roll of 31

Hen. I are those of London.

[135] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[136] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[137] _Ib._ p. 6.

[138] _Ib._ p. 3.

[139] _Ib._ p. 12.

[140] _Ib._ p. 11.

[141] _Ib._ p. 4.

[142] _Ibid._

[143] _Ib._ p. 8.

[144] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

[145] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 520.

[146] _De Institutis Lundoniæ_, Thorpe, _Anc. Laws_, p. 127

(folio ed.).

[147] _Vita S. Thomæ_, Anon. II. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol.

iv.) p. 81.

That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant in the city

there can be little doubt; but they seem to have won their predominance

by fair means and to have used it fairly. If they, as individuals,

prospered in the English capital, they contributed their full share

to its corporate prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at

large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth; they brought

enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social as well as political

progress. In their pleasant, cheerful, well-ordered dwellings many a

noble knight or baron may have been glad to accept a hospitality such

as his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could never

afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic may have enjoyed a

refinement of society such as he could rarely hope to meet among the

rough and reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born

laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general statements;

we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves; we can go

with them to visit the home of a typical London citizen of the early

twelfth century. In the heart of the busiest trading quarter, on the

spot where Mercer’s Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of

S. Mary Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more

famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and Rohesia his

wife. When their son, grown to manhood and high in office, was asked

of his origin and extraction, he answered simply that his parents

were citizens of London, dwelling blameless and respected among their

fellow-burghers.[148] Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers

led them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never have

known that his father and mother were foreigners--Gilbert, born at

Rouen, of a respectable burgher family; Rohesia, sprung from the same

rank of life at Caen.[149] Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve

of London,[150] and bore a high character for intelligence, industry

and upright dealing. Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her

domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her motherly

love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely blended

together in her habit of weighing her little son at stated intervals

against money, clothes and food which she gave to the poor, trusting

thereby to bring a blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old

enough, he was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where

his father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior; and

when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to spend them in riding

and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle, a young knight sprung from one of

the noblest families of Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate

friend of the little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the

simple, matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that

it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households around

it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a degree as to excite special

notice or envy; he and his wife lived in comfort and affluence, but

only such as befitted their station; they seem to have been in no way

distinguished from the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class

citizens of their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the

circumstance to which we owe our knowledge of its character and its

history:--that in it had been born a child who was to begin his career

as Thomas of London the burgher’s son, and to end it as Thomas of

Canterbury, archbishop, saint and martyr.

[148] _S. Thomæ Ep._ cxxiv. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. p.

515).

[149] Anon. II. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 81.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii. p. 14) calls him

_vicecomes_, which in relation to London at this period can

only mean port-reeve; and a constant tradition of later days

pointed to the father of S. Thomas as the most venerated

predecessor of the mayor.

[151] Anon. I. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv.),

p. 7.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii.), p. 14.

[153] E. Grim (_ib._ vol. ii.), p. 359. Anon. I. (_ib._ vol.

iv.), p. 6. Garnier, _Vie de S. Thomas_ (Hippeau), p. 3.

The Norman settlers were not the only new element in the population

of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land of Normandy, France

and the Empire, the immediate neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally

of the English kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies

of England. The relation between the two countries was primarily a

political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech and kindred temper

drew Fleming and Englishman together in the bonds of a natural sympathy

which grew with the growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges

were even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen and

Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important part of the trade

of eastern England. Not only was the estuary of the Scheld a high-way

of communication with the more distant regions of central Europe,

but Flanders herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry

for which the raw material was in great part furnished by England.

The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the great yearly fairs

of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly from the wool of English sheep.

Dover was the chief mart for this export; in the itinerary of the

canons of Laon we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over

the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales, which were

deposited in a warehouse built for that special purpose till they could

be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the Flemings had almost a monopoly

of this weaving trade, although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at

Huntingdon, Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen were

already beginning to emulate their example; it may, on the other hand,

point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the

time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish

queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the

time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous

enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have

been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless,

a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy

members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of

holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one

remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of

these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of

our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as

they were from all direct communication with England, there must have

seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against

the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but

of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic

land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of

the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than

for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as

distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and

the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important

influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners

of two greater settlements--one under Edward III. and one under

Elizabeth--which were to work a revolution in English industry.

[154] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 5 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.

Opp._, p. 536).

[155] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 401 (Hardy, p. 628).

Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 64; Ann. Camb. a. 1107; Brut

y Tywysogion, a. 1105.

A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different position

from both the Fleming and the Norman. These were the Jews. Their first

appearance in England is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who

brought over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were

special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they play a less

conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find them at Lincoln,

Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be no doubt that they were already

established in most of the chief English towns. They formed, however,

no part of the townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he

was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or for evil,

save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll and tax and from the

fines of justice, he had the means of accumulating a hoard of wealth

which might indeed be seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of

the king, but which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care

against all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually

appears is that of a money-lender--an occupation in which the scruples

of the Church forbade Christians to engage, lest they should be

contaminated with the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples, the

Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless

contributed to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means

for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would have been

possible without such aid. But, except in this indirect way, their

presence contributed nothing to the political developement of the

towns; and in their social developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter

exempt from the jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as

from that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from

the Christian community around it, had no part at all.

[156] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 317 (Hardy, p. 500,

note).

Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the general manner

of life was much the same in all ranks of society. The domestic

arrangements of the castle or manor-house differed little from those

of the citizen’s dwelling. In both the accommodation usually consisted

merely of a hall, a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure

of cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall

was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for the whole

household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with hay or rushes;[158] a

fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in its centre, or in a wide

recess at one end; and round the fire were ranged in due order the

tables and benches at which the family, guests and servants all

assembled for meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend

Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but one daily

repast--the mid-day dinner--and those who wished to ape courtly manners

followed his example; the practice, however, found little favour with

the mass of the people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess,

and preferred their four meals a day according to ancient English

custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted

his business or conversed with his friends; and it was in the hall

too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared and the wooden

shutters which closed the unglazed windows safely barred,[160] guests

and servants, divided at most by a curtain drawn across the room, lay

down to sleep in the glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used

at once as bedroom and private sitting-room by the master and mistress

of the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving

as a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate

ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of S.

Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which a burgher-mother

rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a dainty silken coverlet.[165] The

whole house, whether in town or country, was commonly of wood.[166]

With open hearths and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably

altogether lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns

were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert Becket’s

house was burnt over his head several times, and in each case a large

part of London shared in the destruction.[167] But the buildings thus

easily destroyed were as easily replaced; while the cost of a stone

house was beyond the means of any but the great nobles, unless it

were here and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was

no other building material to be had except wood or rubble, for the

nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into general use was

a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes used for roofing, the

majority of houses, even in great cities like London, were covered with

thatch.[169] All the architectural energy of the time spent itself in

two channels--military and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was

as yet a very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied

its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the stone wall

of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness and solidity, was

often nothing more than a shell, the space inside it being divided by

wooden partitions into rooms covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even

where the keep was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or

elegance was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important

purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity which gives to the

remains of our early castles a grandeur of their own, and strikes the

imagination far more impressively than the elaborate fortifications

of later times. But it left no scope to the finer fancies of the

architect. His feeling for artistic decoration, his love of beauty,

of harmonious light and shade, had free play only in his work for the

Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury and elegance

had to find expression chiefly in minor matters, and especially in

dress. During the last reign the extravagance of attire among the

nobles had been carried to a pitch which called forth the energetic

remonstrances of serious men; prelate after prelate thundered against

the unseemly fashions--the long hair curled and scented like a woman’s,

the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes and loose flowing

garments which rendered all manly exercises impossible.[170] After

the Red King’s death a reforming party, headed by the new sovereign

and his friend Robert of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return

to the more rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a

close-fitting tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet,

thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk, then

as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their neighbours from beyond

the Channel. Among the rural population, however, foreign fashions

were slow to penetrate; and the English countryman went on tilling his

fields clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the ordinary

costume of all classes of men among his forefathers, and which has

scarcely yet gone out of use among his descendants.

[157] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. pp. 2, 5.

[158] _Ib._ p. 16.

[159] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 407 (Hardy, p. 636).

[160] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. p. 13.

[161] _Ib._ pp. 2, 15.

[162] _Ib._ p. 5.

[163] _Ib._ p. 16.

[164] _Ib._ p. 10.

[165] Ed. Grim (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. ii.), p. 357. Anon.

I. (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 4.

[166] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, pp. 8, 17, 18.

[167] According to Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_,

vol. iii. p. 8), fires and drunkenness were the two plagues of

London.

[168] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, p. xxvii. (introduction).

[169] _Ib._ p. 18.

[170] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 816.

Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 314 (Hardy, p. 498).

[171] Will. Malm. as above, and l. v. c. 407 (p. 636).

[172] We see this long cloak in a story of Robert of Bellême

(Hen. Hunt. _De Contemptu Mundi_, ed. Arnold, p. 310), and in

that of Henry “Curt-Mantel” (Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._,

dist. iii. c. 28., ed. Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

The life of the English country folk had changed since the first days

of the Norman settlement almost as little as their dress. The final

transformation, now everywhere complete, of the ancient township into

the feudal manor was but the last step in a process which had begun

at least as far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house

of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now developed,

was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the home-farm, the lord’s

demesne land, cultivated partly by free tenants, partly by the

customary labour due from the villeins whose cottages clustered on

its border, and whose holdings, with a tract of common pasture and

common woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the portion

thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed in large

open fields in strips of an acre or half an acre in extent, each man

holding a certain number of strips scattered one in one field and one

in another; while in proportion to the total amount of land which he

thus held he contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the

heavy plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common. On the

estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings were mostly of

virgates or half-virgates--that is, land to the extent of some thirty

or fifteen acres, and furnishing in the former case two oxen, in the

latter one ox, to the common plough team, which usually consisted of

four; those belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight.

Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of the common

pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well as of the common woodland

where he fed his pigs on the oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for

fuel and other household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land,

but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage with or

without a garden. Whatever the extent and character of their holding,

they held it in consideration of certain services due to the lord,

discharged partly by labour upon his demesne land, partly by customary

payments in money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes

on particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173] The

superintendence of all these matters was in the hands of the reeve

or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with the regulation of its

labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock, the ingathering of its

dues, the letting of its unoccupied land, and the general account of

its revenues. Under his orders every villein was bound to do a certain

amount of “week-work”--to plough, sow, or reap, or otherwise labour

on the demesne land a certain number of days every week; generally

the obligation, on every virgate held in villenage, was for two or

three days a week throughout the year, sometimes with an extra day at

harvest-tide. The customary dues and services varied with the special

custom of each manor; they consisted partly of payments either in kind

or money, or both, and partly of services such as hewing, carting,

and drying wood, cutting turf, making thatch, making malt, mowing and

carrying hay, putting up fences, providing ploughs and labour for a

specified length of time at particular seasons, ploughing, sowing,

harrowing and reaping a given extent of the demesne land. Some of the

rents were paid by the discharge of a special duty; the cowherds,

oxherds, shepherds, swineherds, usually held a piece of land “by their

service,” that is, in consideration of their charge over the flocks

and herds of the lord; sometimes we find a further labour-rent paid

by their wives, who winnow and reap so much corn on the demesne.[174]

Many of the cotters doubtless held their little dwellings on a similar

tenure, by virtue of their offices as the indispensable craftsmen of

the village community, such as the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the

wheelwright. The mill, too, an important institution on every large

manor, paid a fixed money rent, and sometimes a tribute of fish from

the mill-stream.[175]

[173] “Præcaria” or “præcationes.”

[174] _Liber Niger_ (App. to Chron. Petroburgense, ed.

Stapleton, Camden Soc.), pp. 158, 163, 164, 165.

[175] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 158, “i molendinus

cum i virgâ terræ reddit xl solidos et cc anguillas.”

We may draw some illustrations of the life of these rural communities

from the “Black Book” of Peterborough, in which the manors belonging

to the abbey were described about the year 1125. On the manor of Thorp

there were twelve “full villeins” holding eleven acres each, and

working on the demesne three days a week; there were also six half

villeins who did the like in proportion to their holdings. All these

paid of custom ten shillings annually, besides five sheep for eating,

ten ells of linen cloth, ten porringers, and two hundred loaves for

the love-feast of S. Peter; moreover they all ploughed sixteen acres

and a half for their lord. Six _bordarii_ paid seven shillings a year;

and they all rendered twenty-two bushels of oats for their share of

the dead wood, twenty-two loaves, sixty-four hens, and one hundred and

sixty eggs.[176] At Colingham twenty villeins worked each one day a

week, and three boon-days in August; they brought sixty waggon-loads

of wood to the manor-house, dug and carried twenty loads of turf and

twenty of thatch, harrowed all the winter-ploughing, and paid annually

four pounds in money. There were also fifty sokemen who paid twelve

pounds a year, ploughed, harrowed and reaped eighteen acres, besides

ploughing with their own ploughs three times in Lent; each of them

worked three days in August, and served of custom six times a year in

driving the deer for the abbot’s hunting.[177] At Easton twenty-one

villeins holding a virgate each worked twice a week throughout the

year and three boon-days in August; they had twelve ploughs with which

they worked once in winter and once in spring, and then harrowed; they

ploughed fifteen acres and three roods, whereof five acres and one

rood were to be sown with their own seed; in spring they had to plough

ten acres and a half and sow twenty and a half with their own seed; in

summer, for fifteen days, they had to do whatsoever the lord commanded.

They also made seventy-three bushels of malt from the lord’s barley;

and they paid seventeen shillings and sixpence a year. A man named Toli

held one virgate at a rent of five shillings a year; and eleven sokemen

held thirteen virgates and a half by a payment of twelve shillings,

two days’ work in summer and winter, and fifteen days in summer at the

lord’s bidding. The miller, with a holding of six acres of arable land

and two of meadow, rendered one mark of silver to the lord.[178]

[176] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), pp. 158, 159.

[177] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 159.

[178] _Ib._ pp. 159, 160.

Fisherton, again, supplies illustrations of a great variety of

services. On this manor there were twenty-six “full villeins,” twelve

“half villeins,” one “cotsetus” and three “bordarii.” The full villeins

worked two days a week, the half villeins one day, throughout the year;

the four cottagers worked one day a week in August, their food being

supplied by the lord. The villeins had among them nine ploughs, which

were all brought into requisition once in winter and three times in

spring. The full villeins carted a load of wood, the half villeins

in proportion; the full villeins moreover ploughed and harrowed of

custom an acre in spring, and half an acre in winter; they also lent

their ploughs once in summer for fallowing. At Pentecost the lord

received one penny for every villein plough-ox. Each full villein paid

twopence at Martinmas and thirty-two pence on the four quarter-days;

the half villeins paid half the sum. Every one of them gave a hen at

Christmas. The mill brought three shillings a year, the fishing five

shillings. Land enough for twelve full villeins lay unoccupied; the

reeve had to discharge its dues out of his own purse, and hire it out

at the best rent he could get. There were twenty sokemen, holding three

ploughlands, and lending their ploughs once in winter, twice in spring,

and once for fallowing; each of them reaped one acre, and did two days

bene-work in August; at hay-harvest they gave of custom three days’

work, one for mowing, one for turning the hay, and one for carrying it;

each gave a hen at Christmas, and they all paid four pounds a quarter.

On the demesne were three ploughs, each with a team of eight oxen;

these were under the care of five ox-herds, who held five acres each,

and whose wives reaped one day a week in August, the lord supplying

their food.[179] At Oundle we get a glimpse not only of the rural

township, but of the little dependent town growing up on it. “In Oundle

are four hides paying geld to the king. Of these hides, twenty-five

men hold twenty virgates, and pay of custom twenty shillings a year,

forty hens, and two hundred eggs. The men of the township have nine

ploughs; from Michaelmas to Martinmas they find ploughs for the lord’s

use once a week, and from Martinmas to Easter once a fortnight, and

ten acres fallow. Each virgate owes three days’ work a week. There are

ten _bordarii_, who work one day a week; and fifteen burghers, who pay

thirty shillings. The market of the township renders four pounds and

three shillings. A mill with one virgate renders forty shillings and

two hundred eels. The abbot holds the wood in his own hand. The men of

the township, with six herdsmen, pay five shillings a year poll-tax.

The church of this township belongs to the altar of the abbey of

Borough.”[180]

[179] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 164.

[180] _Ib._ p. 158.

Services such as these were doubtless an irksome and a heavy burthen;

to modern ideas of independence, the life of the rural population was

the degraded life of serfdom. But there was another side to the system.

The lord had his duties as well as the villein; the villein had his

rights as well as the lord. When their work for the lord was done and

their customary dues were paid, the villagers were free to make their

own arrangements one with another for the yoking of their oxen to the

common ploughs and the tillage of the common fields; and the rest

of their time and produce of their labour was theirs to do with as

they would, subject merely to such restrictions as to grinding at the

lord’s mill, or obtaining his license for the sale of cattle, as were

necessary for maintaining the integrity of the estate. While they owed

suit and service to their lord, he was bound by his own interest as

well as by law and duty to guard them against external interference,

oppression, or injury; the extent of his rights over them, no less

than of their duties to him, was defined by a strict and minute code

of custom to which long prescription gave all and more than all the

force of law, and law itself could occasionally step in to avenge the

wronged villein even upon his lord; Alfred of Cheaffword is recorded in

the Pipe Roll as having paid a fine of forty shillings for scourging

a rustic of his own.[181] The villein’s life was not harder than that

of the poor free man; it was quite as secure from wrong, and far more

secure from want. The majority of the cultivators were indeed tied to

their land; but their land was equally tied to them; the lord was bound

to furnish each little bundle of acre-strips with its proper outfit of

plough-oxen, to provide each tenant with his little cottage, and to

see that the heritage passed on to the next generation, just as the

manor itself, and with it the tenants and their services, passed from

father to son in the case of a lay proprietor, or from one generation

of monks to another in a case like that of Peterborough. Even if a

villein failed in his dues, the worst punishment that could befall him

was the seizure of his little household goods; eviction was out of the

question. The serfdom of the villein was after all only the lowest

link in a chain of feudal interdependence which ended only with the

king himself. If the “rustics” possessed their homesteads only on

condition of work done at the lord’s bidding and for his benefit, the

knight held his “fee” and the baron his “honour” only on condition

of a service to the king, less laborious indeed, but more dangerous,

and in reality not a whit more morally elevating. If they had to ask

their lord’s leave for giving a daughter in marriage, the first baron

of the realm had to ask a like permission of the king, and to pay for

it too. If their persons and their services could be transferred by

the lord to another owner together with the soil which they tilled,

the same principle really applied to every grade of feudal society;

Count William of Evreux only stated a simple fact in grotesque language

when he complained that his homage and his services had been made

over together with the overlordship of his county by Robert Curthose

to Henry I., with no more regard to his own will than if he had been

a horse or an ox.[182] The mere gift of personal freedom, when it

meant the uprooting of all local and social ties and the withdrawal

of all accustomed means of sustenance, would have been in itself but

a doubtful boon. There were, however, at least three ways in which

freedom might be attained. Sometimes the lord on his death-bed, or in

penance for some great sin, would be moved by the Church’s influence

to enfranchise some of his serfs. Sometimes a rustic might flee to one

of the chartered towns, and if for the space of a year and a day he

could find shelter under its protecting customs from the pursuit of

his lord’s justice, he was thenceforth a free burgher. And there was a

greater city of refuge whose protection was readier and surer still.

The Church had but to lay her consecrating hands upon a man, and he was

free at once. To ordain a villein or admit him as a monk without his

lord’s consent was indeed forbidden; but the consecration once bestowed

was valid nevertheless; and the storm of indignation which met the

endeavour of Henry II. to enforce the prohibition shows that it had

long been almost a dead letter.

[181] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 55.

[182] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 814.

If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of Henry I.

were to be judged solely from her highest official representatives, it

would certainly appear to have been at a low ebb. S. Anselm had lived

just long enough to accomplish the settlement of the investitures,

but not to direct its working or experience its results. On his death

early in 1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as to

keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The supreme direction

of affairs in the Church as well as in the state was thus left in the

hands of the party represented by Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy

and that of his master was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion

than that of Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in

a moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees were

no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s benefit; the most

sacred offices of the Church were no longer openly sold to the highest

bidder; but they were made appendages to the great offices of the

state; the Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid

of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of secular

government. The system had undoubted advantages in a worldly point of

view. A great deal of the most important political and administrative

work was of a nature which, in the condition of society then existing,

required the services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover,

a man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and standing,

so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to the temptations

and corruptions of place and power than a layman surrounded with

personal and social ties and open to all sorts of personal and social

ambitions, and could thus be safely intrusted with a freedom of action

and authority such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial

and family influence might have led to the most dangerous results. On

these and similar grounds Henry made a practice of choosing his chief

ministers from the ranks of the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics

upon them, by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring

a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of their

temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to the state the

services of a more able, vigorous and honest set of administrators than

could have been obtained by any other means; but from another side

the system lay open to grave objection. The men whom it set over the

dioceses of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior

intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral character,

men whom it would be most unjust to compare for a moment with the

hirelings who bought their sees of William Rufus. But they were

essentially of the world, worldly; their minds and their hearts were

both alike fixed on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer

or justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop of Ely

or Salisbury. And as were the bishops, so were the priests. When once

it became clear that the main road to ecclesiastical preferment lay

through the temporal service of the crown, the whole body of secular

clergy turned into a nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their

highest point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence

which they still retained passed altogether away. But the Church’s life

was not in her bishops and her priests; it was in her humble, faithful

laity. Down below the dull utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of

the times,” the finer sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay

buried but not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of

enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and then of the

monks of Citeaux.

Of the two religious movements which at this time stirred the depths

of English society, the earlier, that of the Austin canons, was in

its origin not monastic but secular. It arose, in fact, out of a

protest against monasticism. About the middle of the eleventh century

an attempt had been made to redress the balance between the regular

and secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and

consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by their own

fault, already to a great extent lost. Some earnest and thoughtful

spirits, distressed at once by the abuse of monastic privileges and by

the general decay of ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform

by the establishment of a stricter and better organized discipline in

those cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges of

secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the eighth century by

Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the members of his own chapter, and

generally followed in the collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model

adopted by cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward

the Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of Wells and

Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop Thomas of York

under the latter, severally attempted to enforce it upon their canons,

but without success. The English clergy were accustomed to the full

enjoyment not only of their separate property but of their separate

houses; many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men

and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required them to

break up their homes and submit to community of table and dwelling,

was naturally resented as an attempt to curtail their liberty and

bring them under monastic restraint. Lanfranc soon found that the

only way to get rid of the old lax system was to get rid of the

canons altogether; accordingly, from some few cathedrals the secular

clerks were once again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced

by monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization

in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of churches the

canons were influential enough to resist expulsion as well as reform,

and to maintain the old fashion with its merits and its abuses, its

good and evil sides, all alike undisturbed and unrestrained. On the

Continent, too, the rule of Chrodegang proved unequal to the needs

of the time. Those who had the attainment of its object really at

heart ended by taking a lesson from their rivals and challenging the

monks with their own weapons. Towards the beginning of the twelfth

century the attempts at canonical reform issued in the foundation of

what was virtually a new religious order, that of the Augustinians

or Canons Regular of the order of S. Augustine. Like the monks and

unlike the secular canons, from whom they were carefully distinguished,

they had not only their table and dwelling but all things in common,

and were bound by a vow to the observance of their rule, grounded

upon a passage in one of the letters of that great father of the

Latin Church from whom they took their name.[183] Their scheme was a

compromise between the old-fashioned system of canons and that of the

monastic confraternities; but a compromise leaning strongly towards

the monastic side, tending more and more towards it with every fresh

developement, and distinguished from it chiefly by a certain simplicity

and elasticity of organization which gave scope for an almost unlimited

variety in the adjustment of the relations between the active and

the contemplative life of the members of the order, thus enabling it

to adapt itself to the most dissimilar temperaments and to the most

diverse spheres of religious activity.

[183] On Austin canons see Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ (Eng.

trans. ed. Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47; on canons in general, _ib._

vol. i. pp. 494, 495, 538; Stubbs, pref. to _Tract. de Inv. S.

Crucis_; and Freeman, _Norm. Conq._, vol. ii. pp. 84, 85, 452,

453, and vol. iv. p. 374.

The Austin canons, as they were commonly called, made their way across

the Channel at the beginning of Henry’s reign. The circumstances of

their earliest settlement illustrate the intimate connexion between the

religious and the national revival in England. Their first priory was

founded in 1108 by the English queen Matilda--“Maude the good queen,”

as they gratefully called her--in the soke of Aldgate, just within the

eastern wall of London. Part of its endowment was furnished by the

estates of an old English cnihtengild whose members surrendered their

property for the benefit of the new community. The house was dedicated

to the Holy Trinity; its first prior, Norman by name, was a native of

Kent who had studied in Gaul under S. Anselm; through Anselm he was

enabled to bring the Augustinian order under the notice of Matilda,

whose confessor he afterwards became. How he lavished all his funds on

the furnishing of his church and the stocking of his library; how the

starving brotherhood set out a row of empty plates in the refectory

to attract the sympathy of the citizens who were taking their Sunday

stroll round the suburb and peeping curiously in at the windows of

the new building; how the pitying burgher-wives vowed each to bring

a loaf every Sunday; and how the plates in the refectory were never

empty again[184]--is a story which need not be repeated in detail.

Some fifteen years later Rahere the king’s minstrel threw up his post

at court to become the head of an Austin priory which he built on a

plot of waste marshy ground along the eastern border of Smithfield. He

dedicated his establishment to S. Bartholomew and attached to it an

hospital for the relief of the sick and needy. Every day--so tradition

told--Alfhun, the master of the hospital, went about the city as the

Little Sisters of the Poor do to this day, begging in the shops and

markets for help towards the support of the sick folk under his care.

Most likely he was himself a London citizen; his name is enough to

prove him of genuine English birth.[185] Another famous Augustinian

house was that of Merton in Surrey. There the brotherhood devoted

themselves to educational work. Their most illustrious scholar--born

in the very year in which their house was founded, 1117--is known to

us already as Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket. At the other end of

England, Walter Lespec, the noblest character among the lay barons of

the time, found comfort for the loss of an only son in “making Christ

his heir”--devoting to God’s service the heritage which had been

destined for his boy, and founding the priory of Kirkham in Yorkshire

on the spot where the lad had expired.[186] Before the close of

Henry’s reign the Austin canons had acquired such importance that two

of their order were raised to the episcopate, one even to the primacy

of all Britain. After five years of vacancy the metropolitan chair of

Canterbury was still too vividly haunted by memories of S. Anselm for

Henry and Roger to venture on trying to fill it from the ranks of the

latter’s party; they gave it to Anselm’s old friend and suffragan,

Ralf, bishop of Rochester.[187] But when Ralf, who at the time of his

election was already an aged man, died in 1122, the seculars, headed by

Roger of Salisbury, made a successful effort to secure a non-monastic

primate. Not daring, however, to go the full length of appointing one

of themselves, they took a middle course and chose a canon regular,

William of Corbeil, prior of S. Osyth’s at Chiche in Essex.[188] The

strict monastic party counted the new sort of canons very little better

than the old ones. William himself, however, was a perfectly blameless

churchman, whose worst fault was a constitutional timidity and

shrinking from political responsibilities which made him powerless to

stem the tide of worldliness among his suffragans, though he at least

kept the metropolitan chair itself safe from contaminating influences.

The case of the other Augustinian prelate is a specially interesting

one. Henry, who so irritated both his English and Norman subjects by

his general preference for foreign churchmen, had nevertheless chosen

for his own spiritual adviser a priest whose name, Eadwulf, shows him

to have been of English origin, and who was prior of an Augustinian

house at Nostell in Yorkshire. The king’s last act before he left

England in 1133, never to return, was to promote his confessor to a

bishopric. Twenty-three years before, following out a cherished plan

of S. Anselm’s, he had caused the overworked bishop of Lincoln to be

relieved of part of his enormous diocese by the establishment of a new

see with the great abbey of Ely for its cathedral and the monks for its

chapter.[189] He now lightened the cares of the archbishop of York

in like manner by giving him a new suffragan whose see was fixed at

Carlisle. Eadwulf was appointed bishop; naturally enough he constituted

his chapter on the principles of his own order; and Carlisle, the last

English bishopric founded before the Reformation, was also the only one

whose cathedral church was served by canons regular of the order of S.

Augustine.[190]

[184] The history of H. Trinity, Aldgate, is printed in the

appendix to Hearne’s edition of William of Newburgh, vol. iii.

pp. 688–709.

[185] The story of S. Bartholomew’s and its founder comes from

“Liber fundacionis ecclesiæ S. Bartholomæi Londoniarum,” a MS.

of Henry II.’s time, part of which is printed in Dugdale’s

_Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 292–295. The remainder is

as yet unprinted; but Dr. Norman Moore has published in the _S.

Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports_, vol. xxi. pp. xxxix.–cix., a

translation made about A.D. 1400; the 22d chapter of this (pp.

lxix., lxx.) contains the account of Alfhun.

[186] The stories of all these Austin priories are in Dugdale,

_Monast. Angl._, vol. vi. pts. i. and ii. Merton is in pt. i.

pp. 245–247; Kirkham, _ib._ pp. 207–209.

[187] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 221–223; Will. Malm.,

_Gesta Pontif._, l. i. c. 67 (Hamilton, p. 126). The king

wanted to appoint Faricius, abbot of Abingdon; his choice was

opposed by the seculars, who wanted one of their own party.

This the monks of Christ Church resisted, but, as Faricius was

obnoxious because he was an Italian, they finally all agreed

upon Ralf, and the king confirmed their choice.

[188] Eng. Chron. a. 1123; Flor. Worc. Contin. (Thorpe), vol.

ii. p. 7; Gerv. Cant., _Actus Pontif._ (Stubbs, vol. ii.), p.

380. On S. Osyth’s see Will. Malm., _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c.

731 (Hamilton, p. 146).

[189] Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), pp. 195, 211; Flor. Worc.

(Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 60; Will. Malm., _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c.

445 (Hardy, p. 680); _Gesta Pontif._, l. iv. c. 185 (Hamilton,

p. 325).

[190] On Carlisle and Eadwulf (or Æthelwulf) see Joh. Hexham,

a. 1133 (Raine, vol. i. pp. 109, 110); and Dugdale, _Monast.

Angl._, vol. vi. pt. i. pp. 141–145.

Meanwhile a mightier influence than theirs was regenerating all the

Churches of the West--our own among the number. Its root was in a

Burgundian wilderness; but the seed from which it sprang was of English

birth. Harding was an Englishman who spent his boyhood in the monastery

of Sherborne in Dorset, till he was seized with a passion for wandering

and for study which led him first to Scotland, then to Gaul, and at

last to Rome. It chanced that on his return thence, passing through

the duchy of Burgundy, he stopped at the abbey of Molêmes. As he saw

the ways and habits familiar to his childhood reproduced in those of

the monks, the wanderer’s heart yearned for the peaceful life which he

had forsaken; he took the vows, and became a brother of the house. But

when, with the zeal of a convert, he began to look more closely into

his monastic obligations, he perceived that the practice of Molêmes,

and indeed of most other monasteries, fell very far short of the strict

rule of S. Benedict. He remonstrated with his brethren till they had

no rest in their minds. At last, after long and anxious debates in

the chapter, the abbot determined to go to the root of the matter,

and appointed two brethren, whose learning was equalled by their

piety, to examine diligently the original rule and declare what they

found in it. The result of their investigations justified Harding’s

reproaches and caused a schism in the convent. The majority refused

to alter their accustomed ways; finding they were not to be reformed,

the zealous minority, consisting of Robert the abbot, Harding himself

(or Stephen, as he was called in religion), and sixteen others equally

“stiff-necked in their holy obstinacy,” left Molêmes, and sought a new

abode in the wilderness. The site which they chose--in the diocese of

Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from Dijon--was no happy valley, no “green

retreat” such as the earlier Benedictine founders had been wont to

select. It was a dismal swamp overgrown with brushwood, a forlorn,

dreary, unhealthy spot, from whose marshy character the new house took

its name of “the Cistern”--_Cistellum_, commonly called Citeaux. There

the little band set to work in 1098 to carry into practice their views

of monastic duty. The brotherhood of Molêmes, left without a head

by their abbot’s desertion, presently appealed to the archbishop of

Lyons and the Pope, and after some negotiation Robert, willingly or

unwillingly, returned to his former post. His departure gave a shock

to the foundations of the new community; zeal was already growing

cold, and of those who had followed him out from Molêmes all save

eight followed him back again. Those eight--“few in number, but a host

in merit”--at once chose their prior Alberic to be abbot in Robert’s

stead, while the true founder, Stephen Harding, undertook the duties of

prior. Upon Alberic’s death in 1110 Stephen became abbot in his turn,

and under him the little cistern in the wilderness became a fountain

whose waters flowed out far and wide through the land. Three-and-twenty

daughter-houses were brought to completion during his life-time. One of

the earliest was Pontigny, founded in 1114, and destined in after-days

to become inseparably associated with the name of another English

saint. Next year there went forth another Cistercian colony, whose

glory was soon to eclipse that of the mother-house itself. Its leader

was a young monk called Bernard, and the place of its settlement was

named Clairvaux.[191]

[191] For the Life of S. Stephen Harding, and the early history

of Citeaux and its order, see Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv.

cc. 334–337 (Hardy, pp. 511–517); Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist.

Norm. Scriptt._), pp. 711–714; and _Gallia Christiana_, vol.

iv. pp. 980–984.

From Burgundy and Champagne the “White Monks,” as the Cistercians were

called from the colour of their habit, soon spread over France and

Normandy. In 1128 they crossed the sea and made an entrance into their

founder’s native land; William Giffard, bishop of Winchester, founded

the abbey of Waverley in Surrey for twelve monks from the Cistercian

house of Aumône in Normandy.[192] The movement spread rapidly in all

directions. In 1131 Walter Lespec the founder of Kirkham, zealous

in every good work, established in the heart of the Yorkshire wolds

a “daughter of S. Bernard,” the abbey of Rievaux;[193] far away on

the Welsh border, in the valley of the Wye, Tintern was founded in

the same year by Walter de Clare.[194] The story of another famous

Yorkshire house, Fountains, is a curious repetition of that of Citeaux

itself. Thirteen monks of the Benedictine convent of S. Mary at York,

fired by the example of the newly-established brotherhood at Rievaux,

determined, like Stephen Harding and his friends at Molêmes, to go

forth into the wilderness where they might follow the Cistercian rule

in freedom. But when they asked their abbot’s leave to depart it

was sternly refused. Archbishop Thurstan, to whom they appealed for

support, came in person to plead their cause with the abbot, and was

so insolently received that after a stormy scene in the chapter-house

he laid the convent under interdict, and walked out followed by the

zealous thirteen “with nothing but the clothes on their backs.” The

warmly-sympathizing primate gave them a temporary shelter in his own

home; at Christmas he bestowed upon them for their dwelling a lonely

valley called Skeldale, near Ripon, “full of thorns and enclosed by

rocks,” and for their maintenance the little township of Sutton. They

at once chose one of their number, Richard by name, as abbot, and

went forth under his guidance to settle in their new abode, although

the cold of a Yorkshire winter was at its bitterest, and they had not

where to lay their heads. In the middle of the valley stood a great

elm--“thick and leafy as elms are wont to be.”[195] That tree was the

original abbey of our Lady of Fountains. Its spreading branches formed

a roof to shelter the little band of monks; “their bread was supplied

to them by the archbishop, their drink by the streamlet which ran

through the valley,” and which, as in the case of Citeaux, suggested a

name for the future house. In this primitive dwelling they fulfilled

their religious exercises in peace and contentment till the winter

was past, when they began to think of constructing a more substantial

abode. They had no mind to follow their own inspirations and set up an

independent rule of their own; in all humility they wrote to S. Bernard

(who since the death of S. Stephen Harding was universally looked up

to as the head of the Cistercian order), telling him all their story,

and beseeching him to receive them as his children. Bernard answered

by sending to them, with a letter full of joyous welcome and hearty

sympathy, his friend and confidant, Godfrey, to instruct them in

the Cistercian rule. They had now been joined by ten more brethren.

But the elm-tree was still their only shelter, and their means of

subsistence were as slender as at the first. Presently there came a

famine in the land; they were reduced to eke out their scanty store

of bread with leaves and stewed herbs. When they had just given away

their two last loaves--one to the workmen engaged on the building,

the other to a passing pilgrim--this supreme act of charity and faith

was rewarded with a supply sent them by the lord of Knaresborough,

Eustace Fitz-John. At last, after struggling on bravely for two years,

they found it impossible to continue where they were, with numbers

constantly increasing and means at a standstill; so the abbot went to

Clairvaux and begged that some place might be assigned to them there.

S. Bernard granted the request; but when Abbot Richard came back to

fetch the rest of the brotherhood he found that all was changed. Hugh,

dean of York, had just made over himself and all his property to

Fountains. It was the turn of the tide; other donations began to flow

in; soon they poured. Five years after its own rise the “Fountain”

sent out a rivulet to Newminster; after that her descendants speedily

covered the land. Justly did the brotherhood cherish their beloved

elm-tree as a witness to the lowly beginnings whence had sprung the

mightiest Cistercian house in England. It bore a yet more touching

witness four centuries later, when it still stood in its green old

age, the one remnant of the glory of Fountains which the sacrilegious

spoiler had not thought it worth his while to touch.[196]

[192] Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 237, 241.

[193] _Ib._ pp. 274, 280, 281.

[194] _Ib._ pp. 265, 267, 270.

[195] So says the historian of Fountains. How this can have

been, in Yorkshire and at Christmas-time, I cannot pretend to

explain.

[196] The story of Fountains is in the _Narratio_ of Hugh of

Kirkstall, in _Memorials of Fountains_ (Walbran, Surtees Soc.),

and Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v. pp. 292 _et seq._ See

also Will. Newb., l. i. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 50). The elm

was standing in Leland’s day.

The influence of the Cistercians was different in kind from that of the

earlier monasticism. The life of the Benedictines was, so to say, in

the world though not of it. They sought tranquillity and retirement,

but not solitude; the site of an abbey was chosen with a careful eye

to the natural resources of the place, its accessibility, and the

advantages which it offered for cultivation and production of all

kinds. A Benedictine house almost invariably became, and indeed was

intended to become, the nucleus of a flourishing lay population, either

a cluster of rural settlements, or, not unfrequently, a busy, thriving

town. But by the close of the tenth century, although the palmy days

of the Benedictine fathers as the guardians of art and literature were

in part still to come, the work in which they had been unrivalled for

five hundred years, as the missionaries, cultivators and civilizers of

Europe, was well-nigh accomplished; and the position into which they

had unavoidably drifted as owners of vast landed property protected by

special privileges was beginning to show its dangerous side. On the

one hand, the secularizing spirit which had made such inroads upon the

Church in general was creeping even into the cloister. On the other,

the monasteries were growing rich and powerful at the expense of the

parochial and diocesan organization. The laity were too apt, while

showering their pious gifts upon the altars of the religious houses, to

leave those of their own parish churches naked and uncared-for; and the

growing habit of diverting the tithes of various estates and districts

to the endowment of some abbey with which they were quite unconnected

was already becoming a distinct abuse. Against all this the scheme of

the Cistercians was a direct protest. They refused to have anything to

do with tithes in any shape, saying that monks had no right to them;

their houses were of the plainest possible construction: even in their

churches scarcely an ornament was admitted to soften the stern grandeur

of the architecture; there were no broidered hangings, no delicate

paintings, no gold and silver vessels, no crucifixes glittering with

enamel and precious gems; they hardly allowed, even for the most

solemn rite, the use of any vestment more ornate than the simple white

surplice or alb; and their ordinary habit, made from the wool of their

flocks, was not black like that of the Benedictines, but the natural

white or gray, for they looked upon dyeing as a refinement useless to

men who had renounced the cares and pleasures of this life as well as

the deceitfulness of riches.[197] Their aim was to be simply voices

crying in the wilderness--a wilderness wherein they were resolved to

dwell, as much as possible, alone. Their rule absolutely forbade the

erection of a house even of their own order within a certain distance

of another. But the cry that came forth from the depth of their

solitude thrilled through the very hearts of men, and their influence

spread far beyond the number of those who actually joined the order. It

was the leaven of that influence, more than all others, which worked

on and on through the nineteen years of anarchy that followed Henry’s

death till it had leavened the whole lump, regenerated the Church,

and made her ready to become in her turn the regenerator of the state

and the nation. Already, before the order of Citeaux had been half a

century in existence, William of Malmesbury, himself a member of one

of the most ancient and famous of English Benedictine abbeys, could

describe it as the unanimously acknowledged type of the monastic

profession, the ideal which served as a mirror to the diligent, a goad

to the negligent, and a model to all.[198]

[197] See abstract of rule in Dugdale, _Monast. Angl._, vol. v.

pp. 224, 225.

[198] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 337 (Hardy, p. 517).

How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among

the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the

last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at

Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence

his parents, Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on the

river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free

rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who

taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and

brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give

them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland

round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost

unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found

left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay

exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus

nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his

parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish

which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by

the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging

higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his

shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose even

above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen,

it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters

in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering

chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to

country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and

seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he

became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with

them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs

of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S.

Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into

partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the

profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very

soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank

days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern

the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and

keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted

him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The

young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting.

As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been

wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed

learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm,

or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he

did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to

the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him--Scotland, Britanny,

Flanders, Denmark--he sought out the holy places of the land and

made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently

was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to

turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more

lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation

upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last

he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return,

weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted

him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew

so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but

could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he

threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S.

Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but

he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to

the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied

him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this

world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over

the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast

over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old

over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and

Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless

moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild

beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it

first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the

moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus.

His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated

by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s

colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and

months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly

to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years,

tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent

Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to

a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the

lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S.

Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to

practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving

alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and

constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of

S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether

he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew

by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the

whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings,

was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in

later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with

a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book.

Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance

of the chief object of his devotion--S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His choice

was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: “Let

us go water our flocks at Finchale!” Godric offered the man his sole

remaining coin--a farthing--to lead him to the spot, and saw at once

that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who,

making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips

down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on

a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and

the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river,

seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric’s day the place

was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere

sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down

to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns

and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging

over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the

sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling.

His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to

have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone

served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn

out with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing

the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet

vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the

country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing

for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian

saints seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern

self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear,

where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the

stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow

fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour

of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As

he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees

he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who denies himself the

converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company

of angels.” Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked

along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at

night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of

a cock.” The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every

kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous

size that he took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression

was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a

moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers

which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor

of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his

feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade

them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young

shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter

about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard

frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen

or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to

warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from

the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had hidden from

the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and

caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling

of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky

bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to

the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded

in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how

to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric

ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to

dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted

to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the

one to whom we owe the record of Godric’s life, were the devoted

attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters

men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety

of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all

Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]

[199] The story of S. Godric is in _Libellus de Vitâ S.

Godrici_, by Reginald of Durham (Surtees Society).

It was in 1122--two years after the wreck of the _White Ship_--that

Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there sixty years. He is the

last of the old English saints; his long life, beginning probably

before the Conqueror’s death and ending only seven years before that

of Henry II., is a link between the religious life of the earlier

England which had passed away and that of the newer England which was

arising in its place. The spiritual side of the revival was in truth

closely connected with its national side. All the foreign influences

which the Norman conquest had brought to bear upon the English Church

had failed to stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather,

she was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One of the

most striking signs of the times was the renewal of reverence for

those older English saints whose latest successor was striving to

bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s patrimony. Normans and

English hushed their differences before the grave of the Confessor;

Lanfranc was forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At

Canterbury itself the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm

was still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced by

Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal for discipline or their

passion for architectural display, worked in the same direction. It

was in the old minster of S. Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had

placed the Benedictine colony whose settlement helped to bring about

the appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of another

early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury reared his

abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of London planted the Austin canons

at Chiche over the shrine of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury

planted them at Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation

of a bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S.

Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two of the

very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William of S. Calais and

Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour that art could devise or

wealth procure, was one vast monument to the honour of S. Cuthbert.

Literary activity was re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive

precentors of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up into

more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S. Dunstan. Eadmer’s

best inspiration came to him indeed from a nearer source; his most

valuable work is the history of his own time, which he grouped, as in

a picture, around the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was

doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of sympathy

which extended far beyond his local associations at Canterbury. The

saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid and Oswald, found in him a

new biographer. In the northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks

were busy at Durham with the story of their own church and its

patron, Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot

of Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost every

church of importance in central and southern England was throwing open

its archives to the eager researches, and contributing its memorials

of early Mercian and West-Saxon saints to swell the hagiological

collections of a young monk at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.

There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England where

the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had never died

out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for more than a century

the depository of the sole contemporary edition of the English

Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national history continued to be

recorded in the national tongue down to the early years of Henry I.

In the middle of his reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in

consequence of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed

their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from Worcester,

and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with additions from local

history and other sources. It is only in their version that the

earliest Chronicle of Worcester has been preserved to us. But they

did more than transcribe the story of the past. When the copyist had

brought his work down to the latest event of his own day--the sinking

of the _White Ship_ in 1120--another scribe carried on the annals of

Peterborough and of England for ten more years, in the native speech of

the land; and when he laid down his pen it was taken up by yet another

English writer whose notices of contemporary history, irregular and

fragmentary though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the

darkness of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death of the

first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]

[200] In strictness, we must except the years 1043–1066, when

the Abingdon Chronicle is also contemporary.

[201] On the school of Worcester and its later influence,

and the relations between the Chronicles of Worcester and

Peterborough, see Green, _Conquest of England_, pp. 341,

342 and notes, and p. 370, note 2; and Earle, _Parallel

Chronicles_, Introd.

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at

Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed

springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one

abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the

vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national

sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any

lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but

Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of

Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence

made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his

work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of

the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations,

whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too

readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into

what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion.

But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct

which led him--patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type,

as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been--to clothe the

ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing

their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely

at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another

ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in

the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version

of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school

of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the

land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of

Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals

which had gone on growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with

the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own

work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s birth in 848 and

Florence’s own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down,

through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the

great compilation of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who

soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln,

began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have

learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English

Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the

copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at

the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of

either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in

an old West-Saxon monastery.

[202] On Simeon, see Bishop Stubbs’s preface to Roger of

Howden, vol. i. (Rolls ed.); Mr. Arnold’s prefaces to Simeon,

vol. i., and Henry of Huntingdon (_ibid._); and Mr. Hodgson

Hinde’s preface to Simeon (Surtees Soc.).

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the

Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little town in Wiltshire from

which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been

Norman, the other English.[204] They early destined their son to a

literary career; “My father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if

I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and

imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a

virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire

a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself

disinclined.” It is plain that submission to the father’s wishes cost

no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, “Reading was the

pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing

years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a

disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some

remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The

place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh

century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that

time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was

a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the

light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy

and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness

of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage

grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its

second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the

history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture

of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the

edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of

his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury;

its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought

back from Archbishop Theodore’s school at Canterbury; and the whole

ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs.

The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions

upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman.

It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars;

and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth and fame were great enough

to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for

making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the

coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike

character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king

to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws

and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor

at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the

treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and

showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones

of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on

either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of

the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: “Whosoever

is mightiest among them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however,

fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and

the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material,

moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when

William entered the abbey-school.[206] The bent of the lad’s mind

showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of

the general course taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give

point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which

cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I

searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose

dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who

study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;--and especially

into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of

times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is

good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his studious

habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey’s darling scheme

was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and

means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most

energetic assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,”

he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind none of my

elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them

all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own diligence in collecting that pile

of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May

those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]

[203] This conclusion, which seems the only one possible, as to

the date of William’s birth is that of Mr. W. de Gray Birch,

_On the Life and Writings of Will. of Malmesbury_, pp. 3, 4

(from _Trans. R. Soc. of Lit._, vol. x., new series).

[204] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. iii. (Hardy, p. 389).

[205] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[206] The history of Malmesbury is in Will. Malm.’s _Vita S.

Aldhelmi_, i.e. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. (Hamilton, pp. 332 _et

seq._)

[207] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 143).

[208] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p.

431).

It is not difficult to guess in what department of the library William

took the deepest interest. Half Norman as he was by descent, the

chosen literary assistant of a Norman abbot,[209] it was natural that

his first endeavour should be to “collect, at his own expense, some

histories of foreign nations.” As he pondered over them in the quiet

cloisters of the old English monastery which by this time had become

his home, the question arose--could nothing be found among our own

people worthy of the remembrance of posterity?[210] He had but to

look around him, and the question answered itself. To the antiquary

and the scholar Malmesbury was already classic ground, where every

step brought him face to face with some memory of the glories of

Wessex under the old royal house from which Ealdhelm sprang. To

Ealdhelm’s own fame indeed even the prejudices of Abbot Warin had

been forced to yield, and a new translation of the saint’s relics in

1078 had been followed by a fresh outburst of popular devotion and

a fresh influx of pilgrims to his shrine. Every year his festival

brought together a crowd of devotees, of sick folk seeking the aid of

his miraculous powers, and--as generally happened in such cases--of

low jesters seeking only to make their profit out of the amusement

which they afforded to the gaping multitude. The punishment of one of

these, who was smitten with frenzy and only cured after three days’

intercession on the part of the monks, during which he lay chained

before the shrine, was one of the most vivid recollections of William’s

childhood.[211] In the vestiary of the abbey-church he beheld with

wonder and awe the chasuble which, as a quaint legend told, the saint

in his pious abstraction of mind had once hung upon a sunbeam, and

whose unusual length helped to furnish a mental picture of his tall

stately form.[212] Among the older literary treasures which served as a

nucleus for the new library, he gazed with scarcely less reverence on

a Bible which Ealdhelm had bought of some foreign merchants at Dover

when he visited Kent for his consecration.[213] The muniment-chest was

full of charters granted by famous kings of old, Ceadwalla and Ine,

Ælfred and Eadward, Æthelstan and Eadgar. In the church itself a golden

crucifix, a fragment of the wood of the Cross, and several reliquaries

containing the bones of early Gaulish saints were shown as Æthelstan’s

gifts, and the king himself lay buried beneath the tower.[214] On the

left of the high altar, facing S. Ealdhelm’s shrine, stood a tomb

which in William’s day was believed to cover the remains of a scholar

of wider though less happy fame than Ealdhelm himself--John Scotus,

who, flying from his persecutors in Gaul, was said to have established

a school under Ælfred’s protection at Malmesbury, and to have been

there pricked to death by his pupils with their styles in the little

church of S. Laurence.[215] The scanty traces of a vineyard on the

hill-side which sheltered the abbey to the north were associated with a

visitor from a yet more distant land. In the time of the Danish kings

there came seeking for admission at Malmesbury a stranger of whom the

brotherhood knew no more than that he was a Greek and a monk, and that

his name was Constantine. His gentle disposition, abstemious habits,

and quiet retiring ways won him general esteem and love; his whole time

was spent in prayer and in the cultivation of the vineyard which he

planted with his own hands for the benefit of the community; and only

when at the point of death he arrayed himself in a pallium drawn from

the scrip which he always carried at his side, was it revealed to the

astonished Englishmen that he had been an archbishop in his Eastern

home.[216]

[209] Godfrey was a monk of Jumièges; Will. Malm. _Gesta

Pontif._, l. v. c. 271 (Hamilton, p. 431).

[210] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, p. 142).

[211] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 275 (Hamilton, pp.

438, 439).

[212] _Ib._ c. 218 (p. 365).

[213] _Ib._ c. 224 (pp. 376–378).

[214] _Ib._ c. 246 (p. 397).

[215] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 240 (Hamilton, p.

394), and _Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 122 (Hardy, p. 190). The

story seems however to be false. It probably originated in a

confusion, first between John Scotus and John the Old-Saxon,

who was nearly murdered by the monks of Athelney; and secondly,

between both these Johns and a third scholar bearing the same

name, who is mentioned by Gotselin of Canterbury as buried

at Malmesbury, but whose real history seems to be lost. See

Lanigan, _Eccles. Hist. of Ireland_, vol. iii. pp. 300, 301,

315, 316, 318–320.

[216] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 260 (Hamilton, p.

415).

Under the influence of surroundings such as these William began his

studies in English history. But he was brought to a standstill at the

very threshold for lack of a guide. From the death of Bæda to his own

day, he could not by the most diligent researches discover a single

English writer worthy of the name of historian. “There are indeed

certain records of antiquity in the native tongue, arranged according

to the years of our Lord after the manner of a chronicle, whereby the

times which have gone by since that great man (Bæda) have been rescued

from complete oblivion. For of Æthelweard, a noble and illustrious man

who set himself to expound those chronicles in Latin, it is better

to say nothing; his aim indeed would be quite to my mind, if his

style were not unbearable to my taste.”[217] The work of Florence

was probably as yet altogether unpublished; it was certainly not yet

finished, nor does it appear to have been heard of at Malmesbury. That

of Eadmer, whose first edition--ending at the death of Anselm--must

have been the last new book of the day, received from William a just

tribute of praise, both as to its subject-matter and its style; but it

was essentially what its title imported, a _History of Recent Events_;

the introductory sketch prefixed to it was a mere outline, and,

starting as it did only from Eadgar’s accession, still left between its

beginning and Bæda’s death a yawning chasm of more than two centuries

which the young student at Malmesbury saw no means of bridging over

save by his own labour.[218] “So, as I could not be satisfied with what

I found written of old, I began to scribble myself.”[219]

[217] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, pp. 1, 2).

[218] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, prolog. l. i. (Hardy, p. 2).

[219] _Ib._ prolog. l. ii. (Hardy, pp. 143, 144).

Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of William’s

first historical work, the _Gesta Regum Anglorum_ or _Acts of the

English Kings_, followed a few years later by a companion volume

devoted to the acts of the bishops. He was stirred by the same impulse

of revived national sentiment which stirred Florence of Worcester to

undertake his version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very

differently on two different minds. William’s _Gesta Regum_ were first

published in 1120, two years after the death of Florence. The work

of Florence, although he never mentions it, had doubtless reached

him by this time, and must certainly have been well known to him

before he issued his revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the

Chronicle had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked

upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself a loftier aim.

In his own acceptation of the word, he is the first English historian

since Bæda; he is in truth the founder of a new school of historical

composition. William’s temper, as displayed in his works, might form

the subject of a curious psychological study. It is a temper which,

in many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the world in our

own day than to a monk of the twelfth century. He has none of the

narrowness of the cloister; he has little of the prejudices common

to his profession or his age; he has still less prejudice of race.

The Norman and the English blood in his veins seem completely to

neutralize each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only

of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his violent English

sympathies, William calmly balances the one side against the other,

and criticizes them both with the judicial impartiality of a spectator

to whom the matter has a purely philosophical interest. The whole bent

of his mind indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than

political. With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its

composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his readers quite as

much as to instruct them. He utterly discards the old arrangement of

events “by the years of our Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance

of chronology on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them

in the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight of

his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with dry political

details, always seizing an opportunity to break in upon their monotony

with some curious illustration, some romantic episode, some quaint

legend, or--when he reaches his own time--some personal scandal which

he tells with all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of

story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst of

his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales, sometimes

of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating to a student bent

only upon following the main thread of the history. But in William of

Malmesbury the main thread is often of less real value than the mass of

varied adornment and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is

no Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval historians

who can vie with him in the telling of a story. His long and frequent

digressions into foreign affairs are often of great intrinsic value,

and they show a depth of insight into the history of other nations and

a cosmopolitan breadth of thought and feeling quite without parallel

in his time. His penetration into individual characters, his power of

seizing upon their main features and sketching them to the life in a

few rapid skilful strokes--as in his pictures of the Norman kings or

of the Angevin counts--has perhaps not many rivals at any time. Even

when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves, there is a

value in the light which they throw upon the writer’s own temper or on

that of the age in which he lived. Not a few of them have a further

interest as fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature

whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians, we

might never have known. The Norman conquest had doomed to gradual

extinction a vast growth of unwritten popular verse which, making

its way with the wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and

cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of England for

four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were numbered. He had managed to

hold his ground against the growing hostility of the Church; but the

coming of the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence.

His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who sat in the seat

of his former patrons; _jongleur_ and _ménestrel_ from over sea had

taken in the king’s court and the baron’s castle the place which the

gleeman had once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only

the common people still hailed his appearance as a welcome break in

the monotonous drudgery of their daily life. Before his day was quite

over, however, the new school of patriotic historians had arisen; and

they plunged into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which

he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose stores they

might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines of the structure

which they were building up on the meagre foundations of the Chronicle.

Florence was the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process.

William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay at his own door:

a simple English ballad which the country-folk around Malmesbury in

his day still chanted as they went about their work was the spell by

which S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first to his

singing and then to his preaching, four hundred years before.[220]

The same spell of song, handed on from generation to generation, and

passing from the gleeman’s lips into the pages of the twelfth century

historians with William at their head, has transformed the story of

the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that too often only

serves to darken the true character of the period which it professes to

illustrate. What it does illustrate is not the tenth century but the

twelfth. It helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national

revival towards the national past, by showing us the England of

Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not as it actually was,

but as it appeared to the England of Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,--to

the England of Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William

of Malmesbury.

[220] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 190 (Hamilton, p.

336).

We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture

and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he

would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward

life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time;

and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact,

abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could

feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full

scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely

his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by

personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and

extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any

other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough

to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a

mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he

could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow

circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that

of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank

and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open

alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the

high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics

and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy

Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at

the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local

shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps,

to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local

history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the

great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political

news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social

gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these

channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable

convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society

of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest,

and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among

earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they

treated almost as an equal, and whom they came, with a train of secular

clerks and lay followers, to visit and consult on matters of Church or

state or of their own personal interests. If the king himself chanced

to pass that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the

monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman kings

were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of his own eyes,

at any rate from that of his friend Abbot Godfrey; his portrait of

Henry I. was in all likelihood painted from life as the king paid his

devotions before S. Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table

in the refectory, or--quite as probably--as William, in his turn, sat

in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his friend and

patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester, if not actually with

the king himself. The hospitality of the abbey was repaid by that which

greeted its brethren wherever they went, on business for their house or

for themselves. The monk went in and out of castle or town, court or

camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William, indeed, might be

sure of a welcome anywhere; and William, indefatigable as a student,

was almost equally so as a traveller. The little sketches of town and

country which illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the

_Gesta Pontificum_ must have been made on the spot. He had seen the

marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down the legend

of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of the martyrdom;[222]

he had seen with his own eyes the Roman walls of Carlisle, and heard

with his own ears the rough Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as

it was to a southerner, he yet learned enough to catch from some

northern gleeman the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of

Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt, wandered

with delight up that vale of Severn which he paints in such glowing

colours, and been drawn to write the life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of

his church and his tomb at Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was

the garner in which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from

one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted and set in

order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that absolute security

from outward disturbance and worldly care, which to the modern student

is but a hopeless dream.

[221] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 91 (Hamilton, pp.

196–198); _Gesta Reg._, l. i. c. 20 (Hardy, pp. 32–34); _Antiq.

Glaston._, _passim_.

[222] _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 74 (Hamilton, pp. 152–155);

_Gesta Reg._, l. ii. c. 213 (Hardy, p. 366).

[223] _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 253 (Hardy, p. 427).

The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to

the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen

encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival

which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their

Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224]

Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the

court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an

unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by

his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey

such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and

in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea

left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and

sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost

equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to

gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson

Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a

warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his

chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of

letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a

glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over

its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at

his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy

had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity;

Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his

archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a _History of the English_

in emulation of the _Gesta Regum_. Nor did history alone absorb the

intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers,

among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically

practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of

lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from

all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman

poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza

of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried

his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh

century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and

Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon

quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands.

He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at

Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems,

to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what

we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned

to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his

first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of

Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened

a school, apparently in Normandy, for the diffusion of the scientific

lore which he had acquired in the East. He had picked up, among other

things, an Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which

he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding mathematicians

for centuries after. But his teaching of the physical science of the

East was vehemently opposed by western scholars; his own nephew, who

had been one of his pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was

in the shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put forth,

under the title of _Quæstiones Naturales_, a plea for a more free

inquiry into the principles of natural science, instead of the blind

following of old authorities which had hitherto contented the scholars

of the West.[229] In the last years of Henry’s reign he seems to have

returned once more to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows

how daring was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen,

and how vast was the range of study and experience now thrown open to

English scholars. We see that England was already within reach of that

wider world of which her Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.

[224] _Ib._ l. v. c. 394 (p. 620).

[225] _Ib._ c. 390 (p. 616).

[226] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 418 (Hardy, p. 650).

[227] “In historicis nos narrationibus occupatos detorsit

a proposito tua, Rodberte, voluntas. Nuper enim cum in

bibliothecâ nostrâ sederemus, et quisque pro suo studio libros

evolveret, impegisti in Amalarium de Ecclesiasticis Officiis.

Cujus cum materiam ex primâ statim tituli fronte cognosceris,

amplexus es occasionem quâ rudimenta novæ professionis

animares. Sed quia confestim animi tui alacritatem turbavit

testimoniorum perplexitas et sermonum asperitas, rogasti ut

eum abbreviarem. Ego autem ... munus injunctum non aspernanter

accepi.” ... (Will. Malm. _Abbreviatio Amalarii_, prolog.) Mr.

Birch (_Will. Malm._, p. 43) takes this Robert to be the earl.

But does not the phrase about “nova professio” rather suggest a

new-made monk of the house?

[228] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 409 (Hardy, p. 638).

[229] On Adelard, see Wright, _Biog. Britt. Litt._, vol. ii.

pp. 94–100.

[230] “In Perdonis ... Adelardo de Bada, 4s. et 6d.” Pipe Roll,

31 Hen. I. (Hunter) p. 22--among the “Nova placita et novæ

conventiones” of Wiltshire. Mr. Hunter (_ib._, pref. p. xxi.)

takes this to be the traveller, but Mr. Wright doubts it.

What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual

developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler,

“the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231]

The foundations of the political and administrative system by which

that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid

in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray--the brightest

period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he

himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which

he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out

Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never

broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in

Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of

a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work;

and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes

and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger

from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the

realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive

kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen

Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions

beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of

Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the

beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the

moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between

the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important

influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into

contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby

this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We

must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel

awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our

way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of

the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out

the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of

Anjou.

[231] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

[232] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 68.