rivals, the Franciscans. Their first settlement was in the country lane
which now we call Chancery Lane. After a residence there of fifty years
they removed to this corner of the town, which was, so to speak, made
for them--that is, the City Wall which formerly ran straight from
Ludgate to the river was pulled down and rebuilt farther west along the
bank of the Fleet. Within the piece of ground thus added the Black
Friars settled down, and because the ground had not formerly belonged to
the City, it now became a Precinct of its own, enclosed by its own wall,
with its four gates not amenable to the City and pretending to a right
of Sanctuary. Edward I. and his Queen Eleanor were great benefactors to
the Dominicans. Of the church and the stately buildings of the proud
order not a trace remains. In the Guildhall Museum may be seen a drawing
of some ruined vaults belonging to the Abbey, which were discovered on
enlarging the premises of the _Times_ some years ago. There is nothing
above-ground. The Dominicans, however, never succeeded in winning the
affections of the people to the same extent as the Franciscans. They
were learned; they insisted strongly on doctrine; but they were harder
of heart than the Grey Friars. It was the Dominicans who encouraged the
planting of the Inquisition.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. AUGUSTINE (ST. AUSTIN)]
All these Houses were within the walls. Without were others, as rich and
as splendid. South of Fleet Street, between Bridewell Palace and the
Temple, was the House of the Carmelites, called the White Friars. These
also were an Order of Mendicants. The _Fratres Beatæ Mariæ de Monte
Carmelo_ sprang from the hermits who settled in numbers on the slopes of
Mount Carmel. They were formed into an order by Almeric, Bishop of
Antioch, and were first introduced into Europe about the year 1216, by
Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem. They got their house in London from
Edward I.; but their chief benefactor was Hugh Courtenay, Earl of
Devonshire. They, too, had their Sanctuary, afterwards called Alsatia.
This privilege was not abolished till the year 1697.
Beyond the Carmelites were the Templars, but the suppression of the
Order removed them from the scene in the year 1310.
The Priories of St. Bartholomew and of St. John belong to Norman London.
On the north of Bartholomew's, however, stood the house of the
Carthusians. The Carthusian Order was a branch of the Benedictine Rule,
to which the Cluniacs and Cistercians also belonged.
The house of the Salutation of the Mother of God--which was its full
title--was founded in the year 1371 by Sir Walter Manny. Those who know
their Froissart know that gallant Knight well and can testify to his
achievements; how he entreated King Edward for the citizens of Calais;
how he rescued the Countess of Montfort besieged in the castle of
Hennebont, and, for his reward, was kissed--he and his companions--not
once, but two or three times, by that brave lady; these and many other
things can be told of this noble Knight. Not the least of his feats was
the foundation of this House of Religion.
When we speak of the Plague of London we generally mean that of 1664-65.
But this was only the last, and perhaps not the worst, of the many
plagues which had visited the City. Thirteen great pestilences fell upon
the City between the years 1094 and 1625--in the last year 35,000 died.
That is to say, one plague happened about every forty years, so that
there never was a time when a recent plague was not in the minds of
men. Always they remembered the last visitation, the suddenness and
swiftness of destruction, the desolation of houses, the striking down of
young and old, the loss of the tender children, the sweet maidens, the
gallant youth. Life is brief and uncertain at the best; but when the
plague is added to the diseases which men expect, its uncertainty is
forced upon the minds of the people of every condition with a
persistence and a conviction unknown in quiet times when each man hopes
to live out his three score years and ten.
In the year 1347 there happened a dreadful plague. It began in
Dorsetshire and spread over the whole of the south country, reaching
London last. After a while the church-yards were not large enough to
hold the dead, and they were forced to enclose ground outside the walls.
The Bishop of London, therefore, bought a piece of ground north of
Bartholomew's, called No Man's Ground, which he enclosed and
consecrated, building thereon a "fair chapel." This place was called the
Pardon Church-yard. It stood, as those who know London will be
interested to know, beyond the north wall of the present Charter House.
Two years later, the plague still continuing, Sir Walter Manny bought a
plot of thirteen acres close to this church-yard, and built a chapel
upon it--it stood somewhere in the middle of the present Charterhouse
Square--and gave it for an additional church-yard. More than fifty
thousand persons were buried here in one year, according to Stow; but
the number is impossible, unless the whole of London died in that year.
There used to be a stone cross standing in the church-yard with the
following inscription:
Anno Domini 1349, regnante magna pestilentia, consecratum fuit hoc
coemiterium in quo et infra septa presentis monasterii sepulta
fuerunt mortuorum corpora plus quam quinquaginta millia praeter alia
multa abhinc usque ad presens: quorum animabus propitietur Deus.
Amen.
The old Pardon Church-yard afterwards became the burial-place of
suicides and executed criminals. To this sad place the bodies of such
were carried in a cart belonging to St. John's Hospital; the vehicle was
hung over with black, but with a St. John's Cross in front, and within
it hung a bell which rang with the jolting and the shaking of the
cart--a mournful sight to see and a doleful sound to hear.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF AUSTIN FRIARS]
Twenty-two years later, when there had been upward of a hundred thousand
persons buried in the new church-yard, Sir Walter Manny, now grown old
and near his end, bought ten acres more, which he gave to the ground,
and established here a House of Carthusians, called the Salutation. At
first he thought of making a college for a warden, a dean, and twelve
secular priests. On the advice, however, of Simon Sudbury, Bishop of
London, he abandoned that project and established a House of
Carthusians.
The Cistercian Order was founded by one Stephen Harding, originally a
monk of Sherborne. He is said by William of Malmesbury to have left his
convent and to have gone into France, where he practised "the Liberal
arts" until he fell into repentance, and was received into the monastery
of Molesmes, in Burgundy. Here he found a little company of the brethren
who were not content with the Rule of the House, but desired instruction
and a rule more in accordance with their Founder's intention. They
seceded, therefore, and established themselves at Citeaux, then entirely
covered with woods. This is their manner of life set forth by the
Chronicler:
Certainly many of their regulations seem severe, and more
particularly these: they wear nothing made with furs or linen, nor
even that finely spun linen garment which we call Staminium;[8]
neither breeches, unless when sent on a journey, which at their
return they wash and restore. They have two tunics with cowls, but
no additional garment in winter, though, if they think fit, in
summer they may lighten their garb. They sleep clad and girded, and
never after matins return to their beds; but they so order the time
of matins that it shall be light ere the lauds[9] begin; so intent
are they on their rule, that they think no jot or tittle of it
should be disregarded. Directly after these hymns they sing the
prime, after which they go out to work for stated hours. They
complete whatever labor or service they have to perform by day
without any other light. No one is ever absent from the daily
services, or from complines, except the sick. The cellarer and
hospitaller, after complines, wait upon the guests, yet observing
the strictest silence. The abbat allows himself no indulgence beyond
the others--everywhere present--everywhere attending to his flock;
except that he does not eat with the rest, because his table is with
the strangers and the poor. Nevertheless, be he where he may, he is
equally sparing of food and speech; for never more than two dishes
are served either to him or to his company; lard and meat never but
to the sick. From the Ides of September till Easter, through regard
for whatever festival, they do not take more than one meal a day,
except on Sunday. They never leave the cloister but for purpose of
labor, nor do they ever speak, either there or elsewhere, save only
to the abbat or prior. They pay unwearied attention to the
canonical[10] services, making no addition to them except for the
defunct. They use in their divine service the Ambrosian chants[11]
and hymns, as far as they were able to learn them at Milan. While
they bestow care on the stranger and the sick, they inflict
intolerable mortifications on their own bodies, for the health of
their souls.
When we consider this death in life, this, suppression of everything
which makes life, this annihilation of aims, ambitions, and natural
affections, this destruction of love, emotion, and passion, this mere
monotony of breathing, this wearisome futility and vanity, this endless
iteration of Litanies; when we remember that hundreds of thousands in
every Christian country, men and women, voluntarily entered upon this
life, knowing beforehand what it was, and that they patiently endured
it, we can in some measure realize the intensity and the reality of the
torments which they believed to be provided for the vast majority of
mankind. There grew up, in the course of years, rich monks and luxurious
monks; but in the early days of each order there was the austerity of
the Rule. And though here and there we find a brother who rises to a
spiritual level far above the letter of his Order, the religion of the
ordinary brother was little more than the fear of Hell, with a sense of
gratitude to the Saints for snatching him out of the flames.
Most of the brethren, again, of the new and more austere Orders, until
they became rich, were simple and illiterate. They wanted a rule of life
which should give them no chance of committing sin; like women, they
desired to be ruled in everything, even the most trivial. At dinner, for
instance, they were enjoined to drink with both hands, and to incline
the head when served; in church they were not to clinch their hands or
to stretch out their legs; the whole day was mapped out for them as it
is for boys at school. From primes (the daybreak service) till tierce,
spiritual exercises; from tierce till sext, and from nones till vespers,
manual labors; once every day private prayer at the altar; silence in
the cell; to ask for what was wanted after nones; no conversation in the
chapter, the cloisters, or the church; from November till Easter
conversation on the customs of the Order; afterwards on the Gospels, and
so on. The effect on the common nature would be to produce a breathing
machine, incapable of thought, of action, of judgment, with no
affections, emotions, or passions. The holy brotherhood becomes a troop
of slaves engaged upon a round of trivial duties, kept at a low stage
of vitality by scanty food and short sleep. They cease after a while to
desire any change; they go on in meekness and submission to the end,
their piety measured by their regularity. Now and then among them is
found one who frets under the yoke. Either he wants new austerities,
like Stephen Harding, or he rises in mad revolt, and before he can be
suppressed commits such dreadful sins of rebellion and blasphemy as
leave little doubt that after all his pains and privations his chances
in the next world are no better than those of the foul-mouthed ruffler
outside, whose life has been one long sin, whose death will be caused
by a knife in a drunken fray, whose body will be carried in the black
cart with the bell to Pardon Church-yard, and whose soul, most
certainly, will be borne to its own place by the hands of the Devil to
whom it belongs.
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, FROM THE CLOISTERS]
There must have been in every convent such times of madness and revolt,
even though the vital powers were kept low with poor and scanty food. It
is not every man who can be thus changed into a slave and a
praying-machine. The noblest souls must break out from time to time;
only the ignoble sink contentedly day by day into lethargic, passive,
mechanical discharge of the rules; their mouths mechanically mumble the
litanies; the sacredness falls out of the most holy acts and words by
reason of their familiarity; they drop into second childhood in the
vigor and strength of manhood. If the walls of the convent could speak,
what tales would they tell of madness and despair and vain rage and
drivelling idiocy! One thing, however, came to the relief of these poor
men in every order; it was the gradual relaxation of the Rule, until, by
the Dissolution, the laws of the Founder had passed into forms and
words, and the House, enriched by benefactions, had become a pleasant
club, consisting of none but gentlemen, where certain light duties
removed the tedium of an idle life.
For two hundred years this House of the Salutation continued. There
remains no record of that long period; no record at all. There is no
history of those poor souls who lived their dreary lives within its
walls. The monks obeyed the Rule and died and were forgotten. Nay, they
had been forgotten since the day when they assumed the hood. The end of
the Carthusians came in blood and prison and torture; but that belongs
to Tudor London.
The accompanying view (p. 130) of the Charter House after the
Dissolution, and when Sutton had altered it for his new Foundation, is
useful in showing the arrangement of the older monastic buildings.
Chapel, cloisters, courts, bowling green, kitchen garden, and
"wilderness" are all exactly as the monks left them, though most of the
buildings are of later date. The founder, Sir Walter, lived to see only
the commencement of his work. He died the year after his House was
established, and was buried in the chapel, he and his wife Margaret, and
many other gallant knights and gracious ladies, who thus acknowledged,
when they chose to be laid among the dust and ashes of the poor folk who
had died of the plague and those who had died by the gibbet, their
brotherhood with the poorest and the humblest and the most unfortunate.
The modern visitor to London, when he has seen great St. Bartholomew's,
is taken up a street hard by. Here, amid mean houses and shops of the
lower class, he sees standing across the road St. John's Gate, a place
already as well known to him and as frequently figured as St. Paul's
itself. This is the gate--and it is nearly all that is left--of the
great Priory of St. John of Jerusalem.
It was founded in the year 1100, and therefore belongs to Norman London.
Its founder was Jordan Briset, a Baron of the Realm, and Muriel, his
wife. They had already founded a priory for nuns close by Clerkenwell. A
church of some kind was certainly built at the beginning, but the great
Priory Church, one of the most splendid in London, was not dedicated
till the year 1185, and then by no less a person than by Heraclius,
Patriarch of Jerusalem, then in England in quest of aid and money for
another Crusade.
In its Foundation the brethren took the vows of chastity, obedience, and
poverty. They were to have a right to nothing but bread, water, and
clothes. They begged their food; on Wednesdays and Fridays they fasted;
a breach of their first vow was punished by public flogging and penance;
no women were to do any offices at all for them; they were to be silent,
never to go about alone; they were to be the servants of the sick and
poor; they were valiantly to defend the Cross. "Receive," says the
ritual of admission, "the yoke of the Lord: it is easy and light, and
thou shalt find rest for thy soul. We promise thee nothing but bread and
water, a simple habit of little worth. We give thee, thy parents and
relations, a share in the good works performed by our Order and by our
brethren, both now and hereafter, throughout the world. We place, O
brother, this cross upon thy breast, that thou mayest love it with all
thy heart, and may thy right hand ever fight in its defence! Should it
happen that in fighting against the enemies of the faith thou shouldest
desert the standard of the Cross and take to flight, thou wilt be
stripped of the holy sign according to the statutes and customs of the
Order, as having broken its vows, and thou wilt be cut off from our
body."
[Illustration: THE CHARTER HOUSE]
This poor, valiant, and ascetic society became in two hundred years
enormously rich and luxurious. By its pride and its tyranny it had
incurred the most deadly hatred of the common people, as is shown by
their behavior during the insurrection of Wat Tyler and John Bull. The
first step of the rebels in Essex was to destroy a fair manor-house
belonging to the Knights Hospitallers, and to devour and waste the
stores of food, wine, and clothes contained in it. On their way to
London they destroyed another manor belonging to the Knights, that of
Highbury. After they had burned and pillaged Lambeth and the Savoy, they
went in a body to St. John's Priory and destroyed the whole of the
buildings, church and all. And they seized and beheaded the Grand Prior,
who was also Treasurer of the Realm. The church soon rose again, and the
monastic buildings were replaced with more than the ancient splendor,
and the luxury of the Knights was in no way diminished by this disaster.
The Gate itself, part of the later buildings, now belongs to the English
Knights of St. John, who have established an ambulance station close
beside it and maintain a hospital at Jerusalem. The very beautiful
crypt of the church still stands and may be visited. Part of the walls
of the mean modern church also belongs to the old church.
On the north side of the Priory and adjacent to it lay the twin
Foundation of Briset, the Priory of Black Nuns. Its church, at the
Dissolution, became the Parish Church of St. James Clerkenwell. Jordan
Briset and his wife were buried in this church.
The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was situated at first outside
Bishopsgate, close to St. Botolph's Church. This ancient Foundation, of
which our Bethlehem Hospital is the grandchild, was endowed by one Simon
Fitz Mary, Sheriff in the year 1247. It was designed for a convent, the
monks being obliged to receive and entertain the Bishop of Bethlehem or
his nuncio whenever either should be in London. It is said to have
become a hospital within a few years of its foundation. In the year 1347
the brethren were all engaged in collecting alms. This was one of the
lesser Houses, though it survived the rest and became the great and
splendid Foundation which still exists. A little farther north, and on
the opposite side of Bishopsgate Street, stood the great House of St.
Mary Spital--_Domus Dei et Beatæ Virginis_--founded in the year 1197 by
Walter Brune and Rosia his wife. It was originally a Priory of Canons
Regular. At some time in its history, I know not when, it was converted
into a hospital, like its neighbor of Bethlehem. It would be interesting
to learn when this change became even possible. It must have been long
after its foundation, when the old prayer-machine theory had lost
something of its earliest authority, and, in the face of the mass of
human suffering, men began to ask whether the machinery engaged in
iterating litanies might not be made more useful in the alleviation of
suffering. For whatever cause, the House of God and the Blessed Virgin
became St. Mary Spital, and at the time of the Dissolution there were no
fewer than one hundred and eighty beds in the House. Near St. Mary
Spital was Holywell Nunnery. On the south side of Aldgate, outside the
wall, stood the famous Abbey of St. Clare, called the Minories, founded
by Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the year 1293, for the reception of
certain nuns brought over by his wife, Blanche, Queen of Navarre, who
were professed to serve God, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Francis.
There is a church, one of the meanest and smallest of all the London
churches, standing in the ugliest and dreariest part of the City, called
the Church of the Holy Trinity, Minories, which is often visited by
Americans because the arms of Washington are to be seen here; and by
antiquaries, because the head of the Duke of Suffolk, executed on Tower
Hill, is preserved here. The north wall of this church is part of the
wall of the Clare Sisters' Church, and is all that remains in that
squalid place of the noble Foundation.
Sir Walter Manny's Carthusian House was not the only Foundation arising
out of the great Plague of 1348. On the north-east of the Tower arose at
the same time a very stately House, dedicated to the Honor of God and
the Lady of Grace. It began exactly in the same way as the Carthusians',
by the purchase of a piece of ground in which to bury those who died of
the plague. John Corey, Clerk, first bought the ground, calling it the
Church-yard of the Holy Trinity. One Robert Elsing gave five pounds,
and other citizens contributing, the place was enclosed and a chapel
built on it. Then Edward III., remembering a certain vow made during a
certain tempest at sea, in which he was only saved by the miraculous
interposition of the Virgin Mary herself, built here a monastery which
he called the House and King's Free Chapel of the Blessed Virgin of
Grace--"in memoriam Gratiarum." The House obtained the Manor of
Gravesend and other rich benefactions. There is little history that I
have discovered belonging to it. The people commonly called it either
New Abbey or Eastminster, and when it was surrendered its yearly value
was £546, equivalent to about £10,000 a year as prices now obtain.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CONVENT OF NUNS MINORIES, 1810]
On the south side of Thames, besides St. Mary Overies already noticed,
there were two great Houses.
The first of these, St. Thomas's Hospital, was founded in the year 1213
by Richard, Prior of Bermondsey, for converts and poor children. He
called it the Almery. Two years afterwards the Bishop of Winchester,
Peter de Rupibus, now founded the place for Canons Regular. After the
Dissolution it was purchased by the City of London for a hospital for
the sick and poor.
The second, Bermondsey Abbey, though founded as early as 1081 by one
Alwyn Childe, Citizen, and probably one of Fitz Stephen's thirteen
conventual churches, and a most interesting House from many points of
view, hardly comes within our limits. Portions of the Abbey were
standing until the beginning of this century. All the then existing
remains were figured by Wilkinson; I have not been able to find a
fragment of it now remaining above-ground. Underground, vaults, arches,
and crypts undoubtedly remain, and will be discovered from time to time
as excavations are made for new buildings. These great Houses, all
richly endowed with broad manors, devoured a good part of the whole
country. Their schools, their learning, and their charities are matters
of sentiment if not of history. For the time came when the school should
become free of the monastery, and when the vast estates formed for the
benefit of the monks should pass into the hands of the community.
Charity to the poor is a thing beautiful in itself; better than to
relieve the poor is to lessen the necessity of poverty.
But this long list of great Houses by no means exhausts the list.
Besides these of the City, within it or else around it, were many
others, not so rich, yet well endowed. He, for instance, who walks
along the broad highway of Whitechapel and Mile End, if he continues his
walk, presently arrives at a most interesting and venerable church. It
is quite small, with a low tower; it stands in the middle of the road,
and has a long, narrow church-yard, cigar-shaped, before and behind it.
This is the Church of St. Mary, or Bow Church. It was formerly the
Church of a nunnery founded at Stratford-le-Bow by William the
Conqueror; it was augmented by Stephen, enriched by Henry II. and
Richard I., and it lasted till the Dissolution. Let us remember that
every new endowment of a monastic House meant the sequestration of so
many acres of land; they were taken from the country and given to the
Church; they could never be sold; the tenants could never acquire
property or rise in the world; all the lands owned by convents,
churches, or colleges were lands withdrawn forever (as it seemed) from
the healthy change and chance of private property.