MONASTIC MORALITY AND FOREST COURTS
Seeing that a well-occupied life is always acknowledged to be the least
likely to fall into mischief and sin, the rule of St. Benedict--which
required a monastery to be, as far as possible, complete in itself,
equipped with workmen of every requisite trade and industry, and
independent of external supplies--was one of great wisdom. Prayer,
labour, and study, with brief occasional pauses for recreation and
rest, filled up the entire day. The Austin Canons were not bound to
manual labour like the monks; but in every well-ordered house of
regular canons the necessity for a full occupation of time was one of
the very first principles of the religious life. On the very eve of
the utter and violent overthrow of monastic life in England, when,
according to the average run of historians, religious life was in a
state of considerable decadence, the commissioners for dissolving
the Austin priory of Ulvescroft describe the canons as engaged in
“embrothering [illuminating] or writing bookes in a very fair hand;
making their own garments, carving, painting, and graffing; the house
keeping such hospitality that except by singular good provision it
would not be maintained; and the relief of the poor inhabitants.”
The continuous round of work with head or hand, blended with the
frequently recurring services of prayer and praise by night as well as
by day, regularly practised by those who were leading well-ordered,
disciplined, and chaste lives, served to produce not a few of the
finest characters that the world has ever known. Such as these were
brought into prominence by some adventitious circumstances, and
were but samples of thousands of others of equally pious life and
conversation, but unknown outside their own precincts or the area to
which their relief of the poor extended. The general attachment and
devotion of the religious to their own houses, wherein they found so
deep-seated and genuine a joy, and so true a knowledge of the higher
life in the midst of evils and turmoils that rent the world around
them, is not infrequently expressed in terms of almost ecstatic
delight by chroniclers who wrote from within the walls with no idea
of publicity. The genuineness of their utterances, after making due
allowance for the flamboyant exuberance of the Latinity of the day, is
amply shown by the freedom with which they at the same time commented
on the occasional littleness displayed by superiors, or still rarer
lapses from virtue. Thus, a fourteenth-century Cistercian monk
who wrote glowingly of the general peace and happiness within his
cloisters, and how the lives of his predecessors and contemporaries had
made the whole district into a valley odorous with the sweet flowers of
virtuous living, told a quaint tale of a recent abbot who would have
his own name stamped on the silver spoons given to the community by a
predecessor. There can indeed be no doubt that the great majority of
the religious of mediæval England led a well-occupied and busy life,
and found therein some measure of the true happiness they sought.
Montalembert, in an eloquent passage in his _Monks of the West_, when
writing of happiness in the cloister, cites about forty place-names
given in early days by the religious of France to their earthly homes,
which are expressive of the joy or heavenly delights they therein
experienced. Nor is England, considering its more limited area, one
whit behindhand in the selection of names for monastic sites that tell
more of gleams of spiritual joy than of mere natural beauty. Such
names were peculiarly dear to the stern Cistercians. It was the White
Monks who gave to Netley on the Southampton Water its first name of
Lutley or Place of Joy. Beaulieu was the title chosen for their house,
not only by the Cistercians of Hampshire, but by the Benedictines of
Bedfordshire, and by the White Canons of Sussex; whilst Beauvale, or
the Fair Valley, was the choice of the Nottinghamshire Carthusians,
Belvoir of the monks of the Leicestershire cell from St. Albans,
and Bella Landa, or Byland, of the Yorkshire Cistercians. To their
house near Leek the White Monks gave the name of Dieu l’Encresse, or
Dieulacres, and Gracedieu to their abbey near Dean Forest; the latter
title was also chosen by the Cistercian nuns of Leicestershire. One of
their Lincolnshire houses was known as Vaudey, a corruption of Valle
Dei. Both in Somerset and Cardigan these White Monks termed their home
a Vale of Flowers, whilst in Warwickshire they had the happy Valley of
Merevale. Mountgrace expressed the thankfulness of the Carthusian Monks
for their Yorkshire Charter-house, and the Austin Canons’ name for
their Norfolk cell at Heveringham was Mountjoy.
It is the aim, however, of these chapters to deal with facts in an
endeavour to dispel fictions, and not to rest on generalities or
vague assertions. It is, therefore, incumbent on us to admit that
scandals from time to time occurred within the cloisters in England as
elsewhere, and were indeed bound to do so as long as sin exists. Sin
cannot be walled out. It is wicked to gloat over sin, it is diabolical
to exaggerate it. There is no good in unnecessarily dwelling upon sin,
but there is also distinct evil in denying it. “It is better,” said St.
Gregory the Great, who was monk as well as Pope, “to have a scandal
than a lie.” That there were abuses must be frankly and honestly
admitted, but in that connexion it is well to recollect the bold and
vigorous writings of Lacordaire. “Abuse,” he writes, “proves nothing
against any institution; if it is necessary to destroy everything
subject to abuse--that is to say, of things which are good in
themselves, but corrupted by the liberty of man--God Himself ought to
be seized upon His inaccessible throne, where too often we have seated
our own passions and errors by His side.”
When undoubted monastic evils come to light through visitations, they
bring to mind a graphic story that was a favourite pulpit illustration
of that saintly French parish priest of last century, the Curé d’Ars,
showing the fierce and persistent temptations that beset the earnest
strivers. A hermit, who doubted of the reality of the powers of
darkness, had a prayer granted that he might for one day be able to
see these hidden forces. Taking a journey that day to a distant city,
mainly heathen, he had to pass a house of religious men of great
repute. To his horror he noticed devils hovering over the roofs, and
perched on every point of vantage on the walls, and at first thought
that it was a terrible abode of hypocrisy. But journeying on to the bad
city, and finding only one sleepy imp over the gateway, he realised
that Satan knows well the power of goodness, and how best to distribute
his forces.
We believe, with emphasis, after a close and absolutely candid study of
the whole of the episcopal act-books of several of our more important
English sees, and of a great variety of monastic records, as well as
of all that has been printed pertaining to England’s old religious
houses, that no unprejudiced person could possibly follow such a
line of study without coming to the conclusion that goodness of life
very largely predominated, and that the records of evil--all things
considered--were singularly few and far between. It also appears to
be well established that the general morality and uprightness of the
regular clergy was a good deal in advance--as it ought to have been--of
that of the secular clergy.
In proof of the last point a singular and quite novel piece of
evidence can be adduced. Hitherto but little attention has been given
by general, county, or local historians with regard to England’s old
forests, or royal wastes appropriated to sport, which were often of
vast extent and to be found in almost every shire. There is, however, a
very considerable store of documents, from King John’s time downwards,
dealing with the exceptional and somewhat severe forest legislation,
wherein are recorded the forest offences that were brought before the
Justices at the occasional sittings for Forest Pleas, and also at the
constantly recurring smaller courts of Swainmote or Woodmote. With
England’s forests the religious houses were most intimately associated.
There was not a single forest wherein several monasteries had not
particular and exceptional privileges conferred in early days by royal
charters--privileges that brought their inmates or their servants into
the closest connexion with these great game-stored preserves. Over
the great wild stretch of Peak Forest, Derbyshire, or certain parts of
it, the abbeys of Basingwerk, Beauchief, Darley, Dernhall, Dieulacres,
Leicester, Lillenhall, Merivale, Roche, and Welbeck, together with
the priories of Kingsmead, Launde, and Lenton all had rights. When
Forest Pleas were held and chartered claims had to be put in, it almost
invariably happened that those of monasteries far exceeded those of the
laity. Not only had the surrounding monasteries, and sometimes those at
a distance, particular rights, but, as a rule, there was at least one
religious house within the forest bounds, to say nothing of the granges
of more distant convents. Thus there was Ivychurch Priory in the centre
of the Wilts Forest of Clarendon, Flaxley Abbey in Dean Forest, Rufford
Abbey and Newstead Priory in Sherwood, Tutbury Priory in Needwood,
Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest, Pipewell Abbey in Rockingham Forest,
or Chertsey Abbey in the Forest of Windsor.
These rights, for the most part, referred to wood, sometimes permitting
the felling of all timber necessary for their conventual buildings,
churches, and farmsteads and fences, but more usually applying to
undergrowth or dead wood for fuel. One house might have the right to
send a horse and cart daily for a load of fuel, and another to do the
same once a week or fortnight. The agistment of cattle at certain
seasons and the pannage of swine were granted here and there, whilst
venison-rights were by no means unknown. Occasionally the abbot or
superior had certain rights granted him over the game or deer in a
chase bordering on a royal forest, as was the case with the abbot of
Whitby and Pickering Forest--a grant of much higher value than the far
commoner right of free-warren, which covered hares and rabbits, and
which pertained to a variety of manors. But such a grant as this did
not imply that the abbot sent his monks hunting through the chase.
Venison-grants, when made, usually took the form of a tithe of the
hunting. The tithe of the wild boars killed in Dean Forest went
to the abbey of St. Peter’s, Gloucester; the tithe of the deer
hunted in Pickering Lythe went to the abbey of St. Mary’s, York;
and that of Duffield Frith and Needwood to the priory of Tutbury.
As a result of these and like grants, venison pasties no doubt very
occasionally smoked on the common tables of those laxer monasteries
where flesh-eating was permissible; but, as a rule, the only venison
consumed within conventual buildings would be reserved for guests of
considerable distinction, or for use in the infirmary.
Next to charges of deep drinking, charges of hunting, poaching, and
venison-gorging have always been the commonest and most generally
accepted accusations against England’s religious. This notion was not
only one of the mainstays of ribald contemporary ballads, or used to
lend point to the rollicking jests of such writings as “Ingoldsby
Legends,” but has even been gravely endorsed and circumstantially
told both in the poetry and the prose of writers of repute. Now it
so happens that an opportunity of testing the truth of such charges,
after a dry legal fashion, has just recently occurred. It has long been
known that in the very few cases where hunting or deer-stealing of
any form came to the knowledge of monastic Visitors, it was severely
condemned and punished; but how about the general records of the
various forest courts, wherein “benefit of clergy” could not be pleaded
after the same fashion as elsewhere, and where clerks of every kind
were subject to presentment? Within the past twelve monks almost the
whole of the muniments at the Public Record Office have been overhauled
for an historical purpose altogether apart from any such question as
the one now under discussion. The proceedings of forest courts were
extraordinarily thorough, and screened none. The verderers who sat
in judgment at the smaller courts were elected by the freeholders in
county court, but subject to removal by the Crown; the foresters were
partly hereditary and partly Crown appointments; the reeves and four
chief men had also to attend from each township, as well as bailiffs
and jurors from each hundred in the forest precincts. Moreover, before
each Eyre or Forest Pleas before the Justices, a “regard” of the
whole forest was undertaken, which was a most thorough and exhaustive
investigation under many heads, carried out and duly scheduled by
twelve resident knights. Nor would there be any disposition, but the
contrary, to screen monks or canons, for they were often regarded with
keen jealousy by high-placed officials and seculars of influence.
From the temptations that lay at the very threshold of the majority
of the monastic houses--the inmates of many never being able to set a
foot outside their walls which was not on forest ground--and from the
genuine excuse that not a few would have of entering forest thickets
in search of fuel for their hearths and ovens, it might have been
naturally expected that the charges against them of venison-trespass
would be fairly frequent. But what is the case? Throughout the length
and breadth of England, in the extant forest documents extending over
several centuries, only three or four charges of venison-trespass
against the religious have been found, and about a like number for the
receipt of venison, or the harbouring of forest offenders. It is not
to be understood that the examination has been quite thorough, save
of a certain number of forests; but it is highly improbable that the
charges against monks or canons regular, if the search was exhaustive,
could not be counted on the fingers of both hands. And yet at the same
time the charges against rectors, vicars, or parochial chaplains, and
the heavy fines, sometimes exceeding a whole year’s income, are fairly
common. No charges have been noticed against the monks of Rufford or
the canons of Newstead, though both in Sherwood; and yet there was
hardly a parish pertaining to that forest whose rector or vicar was
not, at some time, convicted of deer-slaying with bow and arrows, or
with greyhounds.
Such a result as this may fairly be claimed as an official testimony to
the superior morality of the vowed religious in a matter wherein there
was often great laxity of principle and practice even among those of
high-standing and good position.