THE SUPPRESSION
For two hundred and fifty years--from the time of Abbot John of Kent,
whose day ended in 1247, to the time of Abbot John, called Darnton,
whose day began in 1479--no notable additions were made to the fabric of
the Abbey. The energies of the brethren were directed to the diligent
living of their daily life.
In Craven, the Abbey owned a hundred square miles within a ring fence;
in the neighbourhood of Ripon, their lands ran in one direction for
thirty uninterrupted miles. The monks of the daughter house of Kirkstead
had farms in Lincolnshire, forty thousand acres of pasture land in
Wildmore Fen, and property in Boston, Lincoln and London. They had
tithes of the deer in Kirkstead Chase and the swans on Witham river.
They sold wool in Flanders. They maintained several large mills and an
iron works. And Fountains was much richer than Kirkstead. These
possessions brought heavy responsibilities, and made a great demand on
the monks’ time. There were tenants and title-deeds to be looked after,
collections to be made, markets to be considered, with buying and
selling, and the care of sheep and cattle.
In addition to these cares, the abbot was the official visitor of eleven
other abbeys--the eight daughter houses, with three which had grown out
of the first--and went about among them on journeys of inspection and
encouragement and counsel. Also, as late as the fourteenth century, he
had a seat in Parliament, where he wore his mitre and discussed the
affairs of the wide world. Early in the fifteenth century he attended
the Council of Constance, where he heard Wyclif condemned and saw Hus
burned. Late in the same century, when Henry VII., the last of the
mediæval kings, kept St. George’s Day in state at York, it was the Abbot
of Fountains who read the epistle at high mass in the Minster.
This abbot was John Darnton, who resumed again the old enthusiasm for
making the Abbey beautiful. He put new windows in the place of the plain
old ones, in the west end of the nave, and in the chapel of the nine
altars, east and north and south. After him, on the very eve of the
Suppression, looking forward to centuries more of prosperity and peace.
Abbot Marmaduke Huby built the noble tower.
About this time the Abbey bought a map--“a paper map of the world”--for
which the bursar paid eight pence. There it hung upon the parlour wall,
that all the monks might see what sort of place they lived in--a small
world, whose centre was at the altar of St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But
while the new glass was being put in the big new windows the tidings
came that a new world had been found across the sea; and to this
expansion it soon became necessary to readjust the horizons both of maps
and of ideas. In the process of this readjustment the Abbey came to an
end.
When the Reformation began, the abbeys were all against it. To the men
of the cloister, living by rule and wonted to silence, the bold ideas of
the robust prophets of the new time had a harsh and forbidding sound.
Rumours of the current sayings and doings found their way into the
Abbey--the farmer made report to the cellarer when he brought in his
beets and onions--and the brethren shuddered to hear them, as men shake
and shiver upon whom the cold wind blows around the corner after a day
spent by the warm fire. In the quickening contention between the old
learning and the new the monks held with the past.
Thus it was also in the increasingly embittered politics of the time. At
Jervaulx Abbey, on a July Sunday in 1536, a monk sharply interrupted the
preacher who was maintaining that the king was the head of the Church.
The monk said that he neither would nor could take the king’s highness
for to be the only and supreme head of the Church of England. He
affirmed that the Pope was the head of the Church, and not the king. And
his brethren agreed with him. That was what they held at Fountains. On
one side were the king and the bishops, on the other side were the Pope
and the monks. The contrast between abbey and cathedral--between the
monks’ church and the bishops’ church,--is of like significance with the
contrast between the castles of Kenilworth and Warwick. The two castles
took different sides in a great national division; and Kenilworth,
which chose the side of Charles, and lost, is a battered ruin, while
Warwick, which chose the side of Cromwell, and won, is a stately
inhabited mansion. The abbey and the cathedral made their choice in an
earlier division. It needs but a glance to tell which chose the side
that was defeated.
Fountains, like the other monasteries, was ill prepared for the heavy
storm. The convent had decreased in numbers. One of the fire-places in
the warming-house, one of the ovens in the refectory kitchen, had been
blocked up as being no longer needed. The partitions down the rows of
pillars in the nave had been removed, for there were no lay brothers to
sit in the long lines of stalls. Men were asking menacing questions as
to the practical value of these vast establishments which were
withdrawing from the general life of the nation so much wealth and
strength. Parliament suppressed nearly four hundred of the lesser
monasteries, partly on the ground that they were places of evil living,
partly on the ground that their revenues were needed for the better
benefit of the people; and there were few complaints. Though the greater
abbeys were expressly exempted at that time from the accusations of
immoral conduct, even they could not escape the charge of rendering but
a scanty and uncertain service to the community.
It was the misfortune of Fountains, at this critical time, to have an
incompetent and unworthy abbot; though even a saint could not have saved
the place from the hand of the spoiler. In 1530, the Earl of
Northumberland appealed to Cardinal Wolsey, in behalf of the brethren of
Fountains, to remove the abbot. Abbot Thirsk, he said, doth not
endeavour himself like a discreet father towards the convent and the
profit of the house, but hath, against the same, as well sold and
wasted the great part or all of their store in cattle, as also their
woods in divers countries, neither does he maintain the service of God
like to the ancient custom there. The King’s commissioners, Layton and
Legh, said worse things about him. They declared that he was defamed _a
toto populo_. They complained that there was no truth in him, one day
denying and the next confessing various sins laid to his charge. They
were especially indignant because one night he took secretly out of the
sacristy or treasure room a gold cross adorned with stones, and in
company with a jeweller, who had come from London, whom he took into his
lodgings, did abstract from the cross an emerald and a ruby, which the
London jeweller bought of him, cheating the abbot badly. It is plain
that the poor man was at his wit’s end, sorely badgered by these
insistent visitors, seeing the ruin of his holy house, and trying, if
possible, to save something out of it. Finally, he resigned his office
into the hands of the commissioners, who assigned him a scanty pension.
He took refuge in the Abbey of Jervaulx, where he became involved in the
revolutionary proceedings of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and atoned for
such misdeeds as he may have committed by being hanged at Tyburn.
Abbot Thirsk’s successor, Marmaduke Bradley, was selected by the
commissioners. They said that he was the wisest monk in England; and he
showed that he was even as wise, as the Bible says, as a serpent, by
doing what his masters bade him. In 1539, at their demand, he
surrendered the Abbey to the King.
The commissioners came down from London, late in the November of that
year, and called a meeting, probably in the chapter house. There they
assembled the abbot and the convent and the chief people of the
neighbourhood, to whom they duly declared “the godly determination of
the King’s majesty to alter and change that house, with many others,
from an unchristian life to a trade of virtuous and honest living.” The
thirty-two brethren were promised proper pensions. They were accordingly
advised “to submit themselves to his Majesty’s clemency and goodness,
and by way of surrender to yield up into his Grace’s hands their
monastery, with all the lands, possessions, jewels, plate, ornaments,
and other things belonging to the same.” The commissioners then took
possession of the convent seal, with all the keys, and made an
inventory. Thus politely, and even piously, was this royal robbery
effected.
The abbot betook himself to Ripon, where he held a prebendal stall. The
prior and his thirty brethren were turned briskly out of doors to face
the approaching winter. Despoiled of their own garments they were given
suits of citizen’s clothes, and were set outside the gates of their
fair paradise to make their way, as best they could, over the strange
roads of the cold world.
The gold and silver of the rich altars, with all things of value such as
could be moved, were put in waggons and sent to the king. Distant though
the Abbey was from any town, the rumour of these proceedings would
attract a crowd. And the crowd stole what they could. The servants of
the commissioners, who had a better chance, stole more, according to
their opportunity. They rode about in those days, from the wreck of one
abbey to the ruin of another, with rich copes for travelling cloaks and
chasubles for saddle cloths. The master thief was abroad, and it was a
pity if the little thieves could not have a share.
Then the windows were taken out, so carefully that but a handful of the
precious glass remained in all the ruins, and were disposed of, nobody
knows how or where. The bells were taken down and carried off; one to
be hung, tradition says, in the cathedral tower at Ripon. Finally, the
roofs were pulled off, and the lead brought into the dismantled church;
and there between the great pillars, betwixt the broken altars of St.
Mary and St. Bernard, in a fire whose fuel was the carved work of the
choir stalls, it was melted into convenient shape for the market.
An eye-witness has left a description of the spoiling of the dependent
house of Roche Abbey. “The sudden spoil fell,” he says, “the same day of
their departure from the house.... The church was the first thing that
was put to the spoil, then the abbot’s lodging, dorter and frater
[_i.e._, dormitory and refectory] with the cloister and all the
buildings thereabout within the abbey walls.... The persons that cast
the lead into fodders plucked up all the seats in the choir where the
monks sat when they said
[Illustration: _Fountains Hall._
Photo. Frith. Art Repro. Co.
]
service, which were like to seats in minsters, and burned them and
melted the lead therewith, although there was wood plenty within a
flight-shot of them, for the abbey stood among the woods.” Everybody was
busy, he says, pilfering what he could and hiding it among the rocks,
“so that it seemeth that every person bent himself to filch and spoil
what he could.” At Fountains, the ashes of such fires remained until the
last century, amidst the general wreck.
The place was sold within a few months to Richard Gresham, a gentleman
of London, who paid seven thousand pounds for it. In 1597, the heirs of
Gresham sold it to Stephen Procter, a courtier of Elizabeth, who pulled
down some of the buildings outside the cloister that he might get
materials for his fine new Fountains Hall, near the west gate. His
affairs falling into great confusion the place was again sold, and
thereafter passed from hand to hand until, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, it came into the possession of William Aislabie, the
owner of the neighbouring estate of Studley Royal. From whose
granddaughter, Miss Lawrence, it passed by will to the Earl de Grey, the
uncle of the present owner, the Marquess of Ripon.
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
London & Edinburgh
[Illustration: HISTORICAL GROUND PLAN
FOUNTAINS ABBEY]
[Illustration: Plan of the Precinct FOUNTAINS ABBEY]