FOUNTAINS ABBEY
[Illustration: _Fountains Abbey_
_J. M. W. Turner, R.A. pinxit._ _Art Repro. Co._
_From a drawing in the possession of J. E. Taylor, Esq._]
FOUNTAINS ABBEY
THE STORY OF A MEDIÆVAL
MONASTERY BY GEORGE HODGES
D.D. DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL
THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL CAMBRIDGE
MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
ALBEMARLE STREET W
MCMIV
BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON & EDINBURGH
TO MY WIFE
I INSCRIBE THIS FRUIT
OF A GOLDEN SUMMER
PREFACE
The materials out of which this book is made were taken mainly from two
sources: a description and explanation of the Abbey ruins by Mr. W. H.
St. John Hope, and a collection and annotation of the Abbey records by
Mr. John Richard Walbran.
The ruins have been minutely examined by Mr. St. John Hope, who has left
no stone unconsidered. He has brought to his study of the Abbey a
profound knowledge of monastic architecture. The account of his
investigations is published in the fifteenth volume of the “Yorkshire
Archæological Journal,” to which is appended a historical ground-plan of
the Abbey, drawn by Mr. Harold Brakspear. The Marquess of Ripon has had
copies of this plan framed and placed in various parts of the buildings
for the information of visitors. Through the courtesy of Mr. Hope and
Mr. Brakspear I am enabled to give a reduced version of this excellent
plan.
The records have been gathered together by Mr. Walbran, and printed,
with many learned and interesting notes, in two volumes of the
publications of the Surtees Society, entitled “Memorials of Fountains
Abbey.” They begin with a contemporary narrative of the foundation of
the Abbey, and extend to the grant which the king made of the Abbey
lands after the suppression. They include the chronicle of the
administrations of the abbots; the deed of the ground on which the Abbey
stands; a series of royal charters and a series of papal privileges;
various records of the dealings of the Monastery with its neighbours,
clerical and lay; letters to Thomas Cromwell from Layton and Legh, the
commissioners at whose demand the Abbey was surrendered, and from
Marmaduke Bradley, the abbot who surrendered it; and the king’s
assignment of pensions by name to the abbot and the monks after the
dissolution.
Of these documents, the longest and most interesting is the contemporary
account of the foundation--_Narratio de fundatione Fontanis Monasterii_.
It was written by Hugh, a monk of the daughter house of Kirkstall, upon
information given him by Serlo, an aged brother then resident in that
abbey, who had once lived at Fountains. Serlo was almost a hundred years
old when he sat in the sun in the cloister of Kirkstall, and told this
story of his early days, answering Hugh’s questions. “It is now,” he
says, “the sixty-ninth year of my conversion. When I first went to
Fountains to associate myself to that holy brotherhood, I was, as I
remember, about beginning my thirtieth year.” The Abbey, at that time,
as he tells us in another place, was five years old; but he had been
acquainted with the brethren before. “When the monks left the monastery
of York, I myself was present. I had known their names and faces from my
boyhood; I was born in their country, was brought up amongst them, and
to several of them I was related by ties of blood. And although I am, as
thou may see, far advanced in years, I am very grateful to my old age
that my memory remains unimpaired, and particularly retentive of those
things committed to it in early years. Such things, therefore, relating
to the origin of the Monastery of Fountains, which I personally
witnessed, or have gathered from the credible report of my elders, I
will now relate.”
Serlo spent ten years at Fountains, leaving in 1147, with the colony
which founded Kirkstall. After that, the chronicler writes not from
personal observation, but from near acquaintance. There would naturally
be frequent communication between the mother and the daughter house. The
reminiscences end with the death of the sixth abbot, in 1190. Thence the
history proceeds, by the hand of Hugh and others, to recount the
administration of the seventh and eighth abbots, and mention is made in
the last sentence of the ninth and tenth.
In addition to these books, information is to be had concerning the
Cistercian Order in its official documents. These are the Life of St.
Stephen Harding, the chief founder; the Exordium (1120), a history of
the beginning of the Order; the Charta Charitatis (1119), its
constitution; the Rule of St. Benedict, to whose strict keeping the
Cistercians were pledged; the Usus Antiquiores or Consuetudines, the
Customs of the Society; and the Instituta Capitali Generalis, or laws
passed during several hundred years by the General Chapter for the
government of the Order. A life of St. Stephen, in English, was
published in 1844, under the editorship of John Henry Newman, as the
first in a projected series of lives of the English saints. The Rule of
St. Benedict is admirably summarised in the article on Monachism in the
“Encyclopædia Britannica.” The Institutes have been printed in
successive numbers of the “Yorkshire Archæological Journal” (vols. ix.,
x. and xi.) by the Rev. J. T. Fowler. The other documents are assembled
in the 166th volume of Migne’s “Patrologia Latina.”
In the Rites of Durham, a contemporary account of the customs of a
Benedictine abbey, light is thrown upon obscure passages in these
official documents, and much help is given in the way of homely detail
towards an understanding of the routine of the monastic day. Dean
Stubbs, in his lectures on Ely Cathedral, and the Rev. John Henry Blunt,
in his account of Sion House, prefixed to his edition of the “Myroure of
oure Ladye,” take us pleasantly into the refectory, telling us what the
monastic folk had for dinner, and with what curious signs they
communicated one with another during the silent meal.
The writer gratefully acknowledges the friendly services of the Dean of
Ripon and of Charles Edward Eardley Childers, of Pittsburg, and the
courtesy of the Marquess and Marchioness of Ripon during his
locumtenency of Studley Church, in the summer of 1901.
THE DEANERY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
_Sept. 1903_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING
PAGE
The Abbey and the Elm 1
St. Stephen Harding 3
The founding of Citeaux (_Cistercium_) 4
The pursuit of Poverty 6
The coming of St. Bernard 8
Cistercians at Rievaulx 9
Discontent at St. Mary’s, York 10
Departure of the Monks 12
_The founding of Fountains_, 1132 13
St. Bernard receives the Abbey into his Order 14
The starving time 15
The arrival of prosperity 16
CHAPTER II
THE GROWTH OF THE ABBEY
I. COLONIES
The Monks appreciated by their neighbours 20
Newminster founded, 1137 22
Kirkstead, 1138 23
Louth Park, 1138 23
Woburn, 1145 23
Lisa-Kloster, 1146 24
Kirkstall, 1147 25
Vandey, 1147 25
Meaux, 1150 27
II. BUILDINGS
The Cistercian plan 28
The Architect 29
_Nave and transepts_ [in their present form] 30
Built by Abbot Richard, the first, 1132-1139 31
And Abbot Richard, the second, 1139-1143 32
Abbot Henry Murdac, 1143-1147 33
The Fire 35
_Eastern range of cloister, and part of Western_ 36
Built by Abbot Richard, the third, 1147-1170 36
Abbot Robert the Strenuous, 1170-1179 37
_Builds Southern range and completes Western_ 38
Abbot William, 1179-1190 38
Abbot Ralph Haget, 1190-1203 38
Abbot John of York, 1203-1211 40
Abbot John of Ely, 1211-1220 42
Abbot John of Kent, 1220-1247 43
_Builds Chapel of Nine Altars and Infirmary_ 44
CHAPTER III
THE DAILY LIFE OF THE MONKS
The wall, the porter’s lodge 45
The chapel, the mill, bake-house and brew-house 46
The guest houses 47
The Cellarium
Cellarer’s office 50
Vestibule, cellar, buttery, passage 51
Refectory 52
Dormitory 53
The lay brothers, _Conversi_ 53
The Church
Porch 58
Gallery 59
Nave 59
Retro-choir 61
Choir 62
Chancel 63
North transept: Tower 65
South transept: Sacristy 66
Chapel of the Nine Altars 68
At service in the Abbey 69
The West walk: Novices 73
The dormitory 74
The North walk: living-room 77
The cloister brothers, _Monachi_ 80
The chapter-house: morals 84
The day’s work 90
The parlour 94
The warming-house: recreation 95
The refectory 96
The bill of fare 100
Under the dormitory 105
The Abbot’s lodgings 106
Scriptorium and Muniment room 109
Coal-yard and rubbish-heap 110
Misericord 111
The Infirmary 113
The end of the day 115
CHAPTER IV
THE SUPPRESSION
Abbey lands and dignities 117
Abbot John Darnton, 1479-1494 117
Abbot Marmaduke Huby, 1494-1526 119
_Builds the tower_ 119
The Monasteries and the Reformation 120
Abbot John Thirsk, 1526-1536 123
Abbot Marmaduke Bradley, 1536-1539 125
The coming of the King’s commissioners 125
_The spoiling of the Abbey_, 1539 126
The subsequent owners 129
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fountains Abbey, from a water-colour
drawing by J. M. W. Turner, in the
possession of J. E. Taylor, Esq.
(photogravure) _Frontispiece_
The East End of the Abbey (photogravure) _To face page_ 24
The Interior, looking west (photogravure) “ 40
Historical Ground Plan (coloured) _The End_
The Cellarium (photogravure) “ 52
Principal Patterns of the Roman Floors
at Fountains Abbey, from a print by
Wm. Fowler of Winterton “ 72
The Abbey from the South-East (photogravure) “ 80
The Abbey from the South-West (photogravure) “ 96
Fountains Hall (photogravure) “ 128
Plan of the Precinct _The End_
[These plans are derived from the _Yorkshire Archæological Journal_
vol. xv.]
ERRATA
Plate facing page 52. _For_ “The Cloisters”
_read_ “The Cellarium”
Page 9, lines 3 and 13. _For_ “Rievaux”
_read_ “Rievaulx”
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING
The first Fountains Abbey was a forest tree. In the days of the simple
beginning, the brethren ate and slept and said their prayers under an
elm which stood in the middle of the valley.
The elm lived into the eighteenth century, and toward the end of its
life was made to divide its honours with a group of venerable yews. Some
said that the monks found their first shelter under the yews. But Serlo
settled the matter, hundreds of years ago, in favour of the elm.
_Ulmus_, he said, _Ulmus erat vallis in medio, lignum frondosum_. The
yews were there, however, in the first days, and one or two of them are
still surviving.
They are propped up on either hand, like an old man leaning on his
staff; but they live. The elm has wholly disappeared. Mr. Walbran’s
maternal great-grandfather remembered “the stump of an enormous elm tree
in the last stage of decay, which was called ‘the Fountain’s elm.’” It
stood “between the river Skell and the stream from Stank’s pond, not far
from the eastern boundary of the Abbey site.” But the smooth turf covers
the place. Only the yews look down from their gentle hill upon the
broken walls. There they were when the monks came, a little adventurous
company, to begin their life of seclusion and prayer. Their leaves were
green when the Abbey rose in splendour, and mitred abbots walked in
their shadow. They saw the expulsion of the convent and the ruin of the
monastery. They are a symbol of the persistence of the quiet, elemental
forces amidst our human chance and change.
The monks of Fountains Abbey belonged to the Cistercian Order.
In the twelfth century, when the Abbey began, this was the newest
religious society. The Benedictines, after splendid services to
civilisation, had encountered the temptations which accompany the
praises and the gifts of grateful communities, and had been worsted.
They had verified the wise saying, “When anybody does a good thing, all
the neighbours join together to keep him from doing it again.” They had
grown rich in the treasures which are subject to the invasions of moth
and rust and thieves, but they were growing poor in the accounts of
heaven. The purpose of the Cistercians was to return to primitive
monastic simplicity. Gregory the Great had said that he who would see
angels must have his head pillowed on a stone. The Cistercians believed
it.
Stephen Harding, who founded the Cistercian Order, was an Englishman,
from Dorsetshire. He spent his early years in the monastery at
Sherborne. Thence he went wandering, in the free fashion of the time,
partly to see the sights, partly to save his soul, and made a pilgrimage
to Rome. On his way back, in Burgundy, he chanced upon a little company
of monks, who were encamped in a clearing in the midst of a thick
forest. They had built a chapel with the trunks of trees, and around it
had gathered a forlorn group of huts made of the boughs, and were
freezing and starving to their hearts’ content. All this filled Stephen
with devout envy. He joined this monastery, and thereafter saw England
again no more.
But presently, the rule seemed to many of the brethren to be too hard
for human endurance, and they relaxed it, and began to live more softly,
so that Stephen was dissatisfied. And out he went, and a few like-minded
brethren with him, in quest of hardship, which they found at Citeaux.
This was a wild place in the dark woods, with a deep stream running
through the midst of it, the banks of which were the residence of beasts
of prey. Here Stephen was made prior; the honest severity of Benedict’s
laws was sought again; the brethren lived in holy simplicity.
And then friends appeared. This good life was appreciated by rich and
powerful neighbours, and they brought gifts and built a church; and one
of them was buried there. This was Odo, duke of Burgundy, whose son
Hugh, with a company of friends, people of the court, took a fancy for
going to church at the monastery chapel, so that the plain place shone
with their silks and jewels, and the simple brethren were distracted in
their prayers by the neighbourhood of all this fine array. The chapel
was becoming a fashionable church. By this time Stephen was the
abbot--abbot of Cistercium, which was the Latin for Citeaux. And Stephen
stopped it. He turned all these gay worshippers out of doors, forbade
them ever to come in again, and shut the monastery gate in the face of
all his influential friends.
Then he made the plain services more plain. He forbade that “in the
House of God, in which they wished to serve God devoutly day and night,
anything should be found which savoured of pride and excess, or can in
any way corrupt poverty, that guardian of virtue, which they had chosen
of their own accord.” There must be no gold or silver in the church,
except a silver cup for the sacramental wine. A single candlestick must
suffice for light, and that must be of iron and straight from top to
bottom. Vestments must be of common stuff, no more of silk or
cloth-of-gold. All the pictures must come down. The brethren said their
prayers in a chapel as severe as a Puritan meeting-house. In the midst
of a time of monastic splendour, when monks of St. Benedict and even
monks of Cluny rode abroad like knights or princes, Stephen Harding’s
household were separate from the world in all sincerity.
Once, when the poverty which they invited came and lodged with them so
long that the pantry was bare even of crumbs, one of the brothers went
out to beg for bread, and came home with a great apronful. But when
Stephen found that the bread had come from one who had made his money by
dishonesty, he took it off the table, carried it into the fields and
gave it to the shepherds. The brethren used to notice that in the
evening, when the abbot went into the church, he often stopped, after he
had shut the door, and pressed against it with his hand. And when they
asked him what it meant, he said, “I am forced during the day to give
free course to many thoughts for the ordering of the house; all these I
bid remain outside the door, and tell them not to venture in, and to
wait till the morrow, when I find them all ready for me after Prime has
been said.”
It seemed, for a time, as if this severity of discipline and this
unworldliness of spirit would forever bar the door against new-comers.
Brethren died, and nobody took their places. At last, however, all this
good planting came to its proper harvest. One day, in the year 1113,
thirty men appeared at the gates of Citeaux, asking to be received as
novices. And their leader was a man whose character and strength made
him presently the greatest churchman of his time. With the accession of
Bernard, the Cistercian monastery grew speedily into the Cistercian
Order; and the Cistercian Order came in due time into England.
Turstin, Archbishop of York, wrote to Bernard at Clairvaux, asking for
Cistercian monks; and Bernard, being now, in Stephen’s old age, at the
head of the Order, sent over a colony which settled in the valley of the
Rie, at Rievaux. There they lived their new life of simple devotion.
And presently the fame of the sanctity of the monks of Rievaux began to
vex the consciences of their neighbours.
The Benedictine abbey of St. Mary of York was a rich and vast
establishment. It had received gifts from William the Norman, and from
William his son. It was so fine that Richard the prior and a little
company of sympathetic brethren, touched by the example of the simple
manners of Rievaux, came to the conclusion that it was too good a place
to be an appropriate residence for a Christian. They determined to leave
it.
Richard the prior, Gervase the sub-prior, Richard the sacrist, Walter
the almoner, and Robert the precentor were of one mind in the matter,
and presently a sufficient number of devout conspirators was added to
make thirteen. That was the required number for the beginning of a
monastic colony. Together they came to the old abbot and asked leave to
go. But the abbot met them with a stout refusal. The malcontents were
made to understand that they had asked a grievous thing; they had
despised their order, and brought confusion into the holy house; they
had attempted to break their solemn vows. To this, the prior made
appropriate answers, but satisfaction was impossible. Back and forth,
the matter was discussed all summer, most of the monks taking the
abbot’s part. At last, in October, the archbishop came. There was a
noisy meeting in the cloister; abbot and archbishop, monks and seculars;
with the townsfolk crowding at the abbey gate. “Your church is
interdicted!” cried the archbishop, raising his voice above the din.
“Interdict it, for aught we care, for a hundred years!” shouted the
brethren. Then they made a rush for the prior and his friends, who got
with great haste into the church, the archbishop being with them, and
barred the door for fear of their lives. Finally, they escaped in
safety. The affair made a great commotion in a day when abbots and
bishops were seldom on good terms. The abbot sent messengers to the
King, the first Henry; the bishop wrote to the legate of the Pope. But
the thing was done, and stayed done.
Two Richards, two Ralphs, Gervase, Walter, Robert and Alexander,
Geoffrey, Gregory, Thomas, Hamo and Gamel thus abandoned St. Mary’s, and
for the moment were lodgers in the archbishop’s house. Even this little
company were not all of one mind, for presently two of them were
homesick and went back; of whom Ralph “made terms with his flesh and his
belly clave to the ground,” that is, he remained in the old way, but
Gervase again repented and cast his lot with the reformers. Ralph’s
place was taken by a second Robert, a monk of Whitby.
Archbishop Turstin had a country seat at Ripon, to which he went to
keep the Christmas of 1132, bringing the thirteen brethren with him. And
on the morrow of the festival, taking them out three miles into the
country, he established them upon a piece of his own land, in the narrow
valley of the Skell. The deed of gift of this land--the “charter of
foundation”--is still preserved at Studley Royal. William the dean of
York, William the treasurer, Hugh the precentor, Robert and William the
archdeacons, five canons of St. Peters, five canons of St. Wilfrid, and
nine laymen signed it as witnesses.
The place, as the narrative says, was a long way out of the
world--_locum a cunctis retro seculis inhabitatum_; it was full of
thorns and rocks, and seemed a better dwelling for wild beasts than for
men. But they accepted it with gratitude. In the midst of the valley
they made a thatched hut, with the trunk of the great elm for roof-pole,
and having chosen the prior Richard to be their abbot, they began with
contented minds to live the life of devotion and straitness for which
they had longed amidst the pernicious comforts of the Abbey of St. Mary.
They named their little monastery _De Fontibus_, from the springs which
abounded in the valley. “O ye wells, bless ye the Lord,” they
sang--_Benedicite, fontes Domino_, and the words were echoed back in the
frosty air from the cliffs on either side.
The same spirit was in all their hearts--the spirit of religion, the
desire to devote themselves more perfectly to God. They took life very
seriously. They had stout convictions, and purposed to live in
consistency with them, and sought a place where that should be possible.
In the following spring, the brethren sent messengers to St. Bernard at
Clairvaux, asking to be admitted to the Cistercian Order. Bernard was at
that time the greatest man in Europe. He had just decided between two
rival claimants which was the true Pope. He received the men of
Fountains with great kindness, finding in them a spirit kindred with his
own. He sent them back with a gracious letter, which is still preserved.
_Fratribus charissimis et desideratissimis_, he wrote, _Ricardo abbati
et hiis qui cum eo sunt, frater Bernardus abbas Clarevallis, in Domino,
salutem_. And he sent with them Geoffrey, a monk of his own monastery, a
person of ability and experience, to teach them the new ways. Thus the
new life began; and presently their number was increased. Seventeen new
brethren came, seven of them being in orders.
Their number was increased, but their resources were in no way enlarged.
The archbishop, indeed, continued to be good to them, and the neighbours
occasionally sent things in,--housewives at their weekly baking
remembering the brethren and putting in an extra batch for them.
A little money they earned by making mats. But that year there was a
famine in the land, till the abbot had to go out through the surrounding
country to find food, and even then found none; so that for a time they
lived on leaves which they boiled with salt in the water of the
stream--the friendly elm, as the narrative says, affording them food as
well as shelter. One day, they said, the Lord Christ knocked at the
door, in the guise of an ill-clad, hungry man, and asked an alms in the
starving time, when they had but two loaves and a half, and no prospects
of more. At first, they had prudently refused him, but when he continued
asking had given him one loaf. And behold, within a half-hour, two men
appeared from Knaresborough Castle with a plentiful supply of bread,
over which the monks recited the “Inasmuch as ye have done it” of the
Gospel.
Finally, the situation became intolerable. The brethren had, indeed,
made choice of poverty, and had come out into the wilderness in devout
search of her; but this was a different matter. This was destitution
rather than poverty, so that, the next year, when there appeared no
likelihood of any betterment, the abbot made a journey to Clairvaux, and
begged St. Bernard to give them lands in France, or in any place where
they might live and not die. And Bernard agreed to give them a
habitation near his own abbey.
Happily, they did not need the gift. Abbot Richard, on his return, found
a change in the fortunes of the house. The colony had been joined by
Hugh, the dean of York. He had been in the company of the archbishop on
the day of his stormy visitation, and had seen the men of Fountains as
they faced the reproaches of their brethren; and being now an old man
and tired of the world, he had resolved to say his prayers for the rest
of his life with them. Thus he had resigned his high position, and
turned his back on his splendid minster, and had cast in his lot with
the starving colony. And he was fortunately rich, and brought books with
him, and money. Part of the money they gave to the poor, part they put
into the general fund, part they used to pay the carpenters and masons
who were building the church and cloister.
After this, prosperity continued. Canon Serlo, of York, who, like the
dean, had witnessed the escape of the monks from St. Mary’s, and whose
name is still to be seen among the witnesses to the charter of
foundation, now became a brother of Fountains; and with him Canon Tosti,
who is remembered in the narrative as a pleasant person. And each added
to the treasury. Then Robert and Raganilda de Sartis, owners of the
neighbouring estate of Herleshow, gave it to the monks, adding
to it the forest of Warsall. Also Serlo de Pembroke, a young
courtier--_juvenis quidam de domo regis_--lying at the point of death,
gave them his country-seat at Cayton, and when he died was buried in the
monks’ graveyard, _inter sanctos_. This was probably the first interment
in the little cemetery which awaited the brethren to the east of the
rising church. About the same time, the abbot got a farm at
Aldbrough--_grangiam fertilem_--in a place which even from Roman times
had been a fruitful region.
Presently, in 1135, King Stephen being at York, the monastery was
exempted by him from payment of “taxes, danegelds, assises, pleas and
scutages.” Also, a little later, in 1141, Pope Innocent exempted the
monastery from payment of tithes.
From that day, says Serlo the narrator, who had now become a member of
the monastic household, the Lord blessed our valleys with the blessing
of heaven above and of the deep that lieth under, multiplying the
brethren, increasing their possessions, pouring down showers of
benediction, being a wall unto them on the right hand and on the left.
What perfection of life, he cries, was there at Fountains! What
emulation of virtue! What stability of discipline! The house was
enriched in wealth, without; still more in holiness, within. Its name
became famous, and the great people of the world reverenced it.