Westminster--though, by tradition, a few years later than
Westminster--its foundation goes back to the birth of England. Its
history is known in some detail, and is full of incident, so that it
may be called the pivot upon which, presumably, turned the development
of the Thames Valley above London for two hundred years. Its site is
worth noting. The rich, but at first probably swampy, pasturage upon
the Surrey side was just such a position as one foundation after
another up and down England settled on. To reclaim land of this kind
was one of the special functions of the great abbeys, and Chertsey may
be compared in this particular to Hyde, for instance, or to the Vale
of the Cross, to Fountains, to Ripon, to Melrose, and to many others.
It was in the new order of monastic development what Staines, its
neighbour, had been in the old Roman order--the mark of the first
stage up-river from London.
The pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the
Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred
and the positive mission of the town of Paris, swept it completely.
Its abbot and its ninety monks were massacred, and it was not till
late in the next century, about 950, that it arose again from its
ruins. It was deliberately re-colonised again from Abingdon, and from
that moment onwards it grew again into power. Donations poured upon
it; one of them, not the least curious, was of land in Cardiganshire.
It came from those Welsh princes who were perpetually at war with the
English Crown: for religion was in those days what money is now--a
thing without frontiers--and it seemed no more wonderful to the Middle
Ages that an English monastery should collect its rents in an enemy's
land than it seems strange to us that the modern financier should draw
interest upon money lent for armament against the country of his
domicile. Here also was first buried (and lay until it was removed to
Windsor) the body of Henry VI.
The third of the great early foundations is Abingdon, and in a way it
is the greatest, for, without direct connection with the Crown, by the
mere vitality of its tradition, it became something more even than
Chertsey was, wielding an immense revenue, more than half that of
Westminster itself, and situated, as it was, in a small up-valley
town, ruling with almost monarchical power. There could be even less
doubt in the case of Abingdon than there was in the case of Chertsey
that it was the creator of its own district of the Thames. It stood
right in the marshy and waste spaces of the middle upper river,
commanding a difficult but an important ford, and holding the gate of
what was to be one of the most fruitful and famous of English vales.
It can only have been from Abingdon that the culture and energy
proceeded which was to build up Northern Berkshire and Oxfordshire
between the Saxon and the Danish invasions. There only was established
a sufficient concentration of capital for the work and of knowledge
for the application of that wealth.
Like its two peers at Chertsey and at Westminster, Abingdon begins
with legend. We are fairly sure of its date, 675, but the anchorite of
the fifth century, "Aben," is as suspicious as the early Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle itself, and still wilder are the fine and striking stories
of its British origin, of its destruction under the persecution of
Diocletian and of its harbouring the youth of Constantine. But the
stories are at least enough to show with what violence the pomp and
grandeur of the place struck the imagination of its historians.
Abingdon was, moreover, probably on account of its distance from
London, more of a local centre, and, to repeat a word already used,
more of a "monarchy" than the other great monasteries of the Thames
Valley. This is sufficiently proved by a glance at the ecclesiastic
map, such as, for instance, that published in "The Victoria History of
the County of Berkshire," where one sees the manors belonging to
Abingdon at the time of the Conquest all clustered together and
occupying one full division of the county, that, namely, included in
the great bend of the Thames which has its cusp at Witham Hill.
Abingdon was the life of Northern Berkshire, and it is not fantastic
to compare its religious aspect in Saxon times over against the King's
towns of Wantage and Wallingford to the larger national aspect of
Canterbury over against Winchester and London.
Even in its purely civic character, it acquired a position which no
one of the greater northern monasteries could pretend to, through the
building of its bridge in the early fifteenth century. The twin fords
crossing this bend of the river were, though direct and important,
difficult; when they were once bridged and the bridges joined by the
long causeway which still runs across Andersey Island between the old
and the new branches of the Thames, travel was easily diverted from
the bridge of Wallingford to that at Abingdon, and the great western
road running through Farringdon towards the Cotswolds and the valley
of the Severn had Abingdon for its sort of midway market town.
These three great Benedictine monasteries form, as it were, the three
nurseries or seed plots from which civilisation spread out along the
Thames Valley after the destruction wrought by the first and worst
barbarian invasions. All three, as we have seen, go back to the very
beginning of the Christian phase of English history; the origins of
all three merge in those legends which make a twilight between the
fantastic stories of the earlier paganism and the clear records of the
Christian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England. An outpost
beyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford.
Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing its
importance for commerce and as a highway, supported no great
monastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by the
foundations lower down the stream.
Chertsey and Westminster certainly, and Abingdon very probably, were
destroyed, or at least sacked, in the Danish invasions, but their
roots lay too deep to allow them to disappear: they re-arose, and a
generation before the Conquest were again by far the principal centres
of production and government in the Thames Valley. Indeed, with the
exception of the string of royal estates upon the banks of the river,
and of the town of Oxford, Chertsey, Westminster and Abingdon were the
only considerable seats of regulation and government upon the Thames,
when the Conquest came to reorganise the whole of English life.
With that revolution it was evident that a great extension not only of
the numbers, but especially of the organisation and power, of the
monastic system would appear: that gaps left uninfluenced by it in the
line of the Thames would be filled up, and all the old foundations
themselves would be reconstructed and become new things.
The Conquest is in its way almost as sharp a division in the history
of England as is the landing of St Augustine. In some externals it
made an even greater difference to this island than did the advent of
the Roman Missionaries, though of course, in the fundamental things
upon which the national life is built, the re-entry of England into
European civilisation in the seventh century must count as a far
greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united
and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh. Moreover
although the Conquest largely changed the language of the island,
introduced a conception of law in civil affairs with which the
Anglo-Saxon aristocracy were quite unfamiliar, and began to flood
England with a Gallic admixture which flowed .uninterruptedly for
three hundred years, yet it did not change the intimate philosophy of
the people, and it is only the change of the intimate philosophy of a
people which can have a revolutionary consequence. The Conquest found
England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated
way, thoroughly European. The Normans organised that feudality,
extirpated whatever was unorthodox, or slack in the machinery of the
religious system, and let in the full light of European civilisation
through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.
The effect, therefore, of the Conquest was exercised upon the visible
and mutable things of the country rather than upon the nourishing
inward things: but it was very great, and in nothing was it greater
than in its inception of new buildings and the use everywhere of
stone. Under the Normans very nearly all the great religious
foundations of England re-arose, and that within a generation. New
houses also arose, and the mark of that time (which was a second
spring throughout Europe: full of the spirit of the Crusades, and a
complete regeneration of social life) was the rigour of new religious
orders, and especially the transformation of the old Benedictine
monotony.
Chief, of course, of these religious movements, and the pioneer of
them all, was the institution of Cluny in Burgundy.
Cluny did not rise by design. It was one of those spontaneous growths
which are characteristic of vigorous and creative times. Those who are
acquainted with the Burgundian blood will not think it fantastic to
imagine the vast reputation of Cluny to have been based upon rhetoric.
It was perhaps the sonorous Burgundian facility for expression and the
inheritance of oratory which belonged to Burgundian soil till
Bossuet's birth, and which still belongs to it, that gave Cluny a sort
of spell over the mind of Western Europe, and which made Cluny a
master in the century which preceded the great change of the Crusades.
From Cluny as a mother house proceeded communities instinct with the
discipline and new life of the reformed order, and though it has been
remarked that these communities were not numerous, in comparison to
the vigour of the movement, yet it should also be noted that they were
nearly always very large and wealthy, that they were in a particular
and close relation to the civil government of the district in which
each was planted, and that their absolute dependence upon the mother
house, and their close observance of one rule, lent the whole order
something of the force of an army.
The Cluniac influence came early into the Thames Valley. By the
beginning of the twelfth century, and within fifty years of the
Conquest, this new influence was found interpolated with and imposed
upon the five centuries that had hitherto been wholly dependent upon
the three great Benedictine posts. This Cluniac foundation, the first
of the new houses on the Thames, was fixed upon the peninsula of
Reading.
It was in 1121 that the son of the Conqueror brought the Cluniac order
to the little town. From the moment of the foundation of the abbey it
attracted, in part by its geographical position, in part by the fact
that it was the first great new foundation upon the Thames, and in
part by the accident which lent a special devotion or power to one
particular house and which was in this case largely due to the
discipline and character of the Cluniac order, Reading took on a very
high position in England. It had about it, if one may so express
oneself, something more modern, something more direct and political
than was to be found in the old Benedictine houses that had preceded
it. The work it had to do was less material: the fields were already
drained, the life and wealth of the new civilisation had begun, and
throughout the four hundred years of its existence the function of
Reading was rather to entertain the Court, to assist at parliaments,
and to be, throughout, the support of the monarchy. It sprang at once
into this position, and its architecture symbolised to some extent the
rapid command which it acquired, for it preserved to the end the
characteristics of the early century in which it was erected: the
Norman arch, the dog-tooth ornaments, the thick walls, the barbaric
capitals of the early twelfth century.
Before the thirteenth it was in wealth equal to, and in public repute
the superior of, any foundation upon the banks of the Thames with the
exception of Westminster itself, and it forms, with the three
Benedictine foundations, and with the later foundation of Osney, the
last link in the chain of abbeys which ran unbroken from stage to
stage throughout the whole length of the river. And with it ends the
story of those first foundations which completed the recivilisation of
the Valley.
Reading was not the only Cluniac establishment upon the Thames.
Another, and earlier one, was to be found at Bermondsey; but its
proximity to London and its distance down river forbid it having any
place in these pages. It was founded immediately after the Conquest;
Lanfranc colonised it with French monks; it became an abbacy at the
very end of the fourteenth century, and was remarkable for its
continual accretion of wealth, an accretion in some part due to the
growing importance of London throughout its existence. At the end of
the thirteenth century it stands worth £280. At the time of its
dissolution, on the first of January 1538, in spite of the much higher
value of money in the sixteenth century as compared with the
thirteenth, it stands worth over £500: £10,000 a year.
A relic of its building remained (but only a gatehouse) till 1805.
Osney also dated from the early twelfth century, and was almost
contemporary with Reading.
It stood just outside the walls of Oxford Castle to the west, and upon
the bank of the main stream of the Thames, and owed its foundation to
the Conqueror's local governing family of Oilei. Though at the moment
of its suppression it hardly counted a fifth of the revenues of
Westminster (which must be our standard throughout all this
examination), yet its magnificence profoundly affected contemporaries,
and has left a great tradition. It must always be remembered that
these great monasteries were not only receivers of revenue as are our
modern rich, but were also producers or, rather, could be producers
when they chose, and that therefore the actual economic power of any
one foundation might always be higher, and often was very considerably
higher, than the nominal revenue, the dead income, which passed to the
spoliators of the sixteenth century. When a town is sacked the army
gets a considerable loot, but nothing like what the value was of the
city as it flourished before the siege.
At any rate, whether Osney owed its magnificence to internal industry,
to a wise expenditure, or to a severity of life which left a large
surplus for ornament and extension, it was for 400 years the principal
building upon the upper river, catching the eye from miles away up by
Eynsham meadows and forming a noble gate to the University town for
those who approached it from the west by the packway, of which traces
still remain, and over the bridges which the Conqueror had built. So
deep was the impress of Osney upon the locality, and even upon the
national Government, that Henry proposed, as in the case of
Westminster, to make of the building one of his new cathedrals, and to
establish there his new See of Oxford. The determination, however,
lasted but for a very short time. In a few years the financial
pressure was too much for him; he transferred the see to the old
Church of St Frideswides, where it still remains, and gave up Osney to
loot. It was looted very thoroughly.
The smaller monasteries need hardly a mention. At the head of them
comes Eynsham, worth more than half as much as Osney, and a very
considerable place. Founded as a colony or adjunct to Stow, in
Lincolnshire, it outlived the importance of the parent house, and was
at the height of its prosperity immediately before the Dissolution.
Eynsham affords a very good instance of the way in which the fabric in
these superb temples disappeared. As late as the early eighteenth
century there was still standing the whole of the west front; the two
high towers, the splendid west window, and the sculptured doorways
were complete, though they remained but as a fragment of a ruined
building. A century and a half passed and the whole had disappeared,
carted away to build walls and stables for the local squires, or sold
by the local squires for rubble.
Of the little priory at Lechlade very little is known, save that it
was founded in the thirteenth century and had disappeared long before
the Reformation, while of that at Cricklade we know even less, save
that it humbly survived and was counted in the "bag" at only four
pounds a year.
With Dorchester, which had existed from the twelfth century, and which
was worth almost half as much as Eynsham, and with the considerable
Cell of Hurley which attached to Westminster, the list is complete. It
is interesting to know that the church at Dorchester was saved by the
local patriotism of one man, who left half his fortune for the
purchase of it, and that not in order to ruin it and to sell the
stones of it, but in order to preserve it: a singular man.
In a general survey of monastic influence in the Valley of the Thames,
it would be natural to omit the foundations which belonged to the
later Middle Ages. It was in the Dark Ages that the great Benedictine
work was done, the pastures drained, the woods planted, the
settlements established. It was in the early Middle Ages, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in the first half of the
fourteenth--in a word, before the Black Death--that the work of the
new and vigorous foundations, and the revived energy of the older
ones, spread Gothic architecture, scholastic learning, and the whole
reinvigorated social system of the time, from Oxford to Westminster;
and the historian who notes the social and economic effects of
monasticism in Western Europe, however enthusiastic he may be in
defence of that force, cannot with truth lend it between the Black
Death and the Reformation a vigour which it did not possess. It had
tended to become, in the fifteenth century, a fixed social institution
like any other, one might almost say a bundle of proprietary rights
like any other. And though it is easy now to perceive what ruin was
caused by the sudden destruction, the contemporaries of the last age
of Great Houses were perpetually considering their privilege and their
immovable tradition rather than the remaining functions which the
monasteries fulfilled in the State.
On this account historical notes dealing with the development of the
Thames Valley would naturally omit a reference to foundations existing
only from the close of the Middle Ages. But an exception must be made
to this rule in the case of Sheen.
Sheen was a Charterhouse, and it merits observation not only from the
peculiar characteristics of the Carthusian Order, but also from its
considerable position so near to Westminster and not yet overshadowed
by the greatness either of that abbey or of Chertsey. It received,
from its land in England alone, a revenue of close upon two-thirds of
that which Westminster enjoyed. Recent in its origin (it had existed
for only just over 100 years when Henry VIII. attacked it), not
without that foreign flavour which, rightly or wrongly, was ascribed
in this island to the Carthusian Order, rigid in doctrine, and of a
magnificent temper in the defence of religion, these Carthusians, like
their brethren in London, formed a very natural target for the King's
attack. I include them only because notes upon the mediæval
foundations, would be quite imperfect were there no mention of Sheen,
late as the origin of the community was, and little as it had to do
with the historic development of the valley.
This completes the list of the greater foundations; with the lesser
ones it would only be possible to deal in pages devoted to the
Monastic Institution alone. The very numerous communities of friars,
and the hospitals in the towns upon the Thames, cannot be mentioned,
the little nunneries of Ankerwick, Burnham, and Little Marlow, the
communities, early and late, of Medmenham and Cholsey, the priories of
Lechlade and of Cricklade (which might have occupied a larger space
than was available), must be passed over. Even Godstow, famous as it
is from the early legend of Rosamond, and considerable as was its
function both of education and of retreat, cannot be included in the
list of those principal foundations which alone take rank as
originators of the prosperity of the valley.
Several of these smaller houses went in the dissolution to swell the
revenues of Bisham, the new community which Henry, as he said,
intended to take the place of much that he had destroyed; and Bisham
would be very well worth a considerable attention from the reader had
it survived. But it did not survive. Hardly was it founded when Henry
himself immediately destroyed it, and, as we shall see later, Bisham
affords one of the most curious and instructive examples of the way in
which that large monastic revenue, which it was certainly intended to
keep in the hands of the Crown, and which, had it been so kept, would
have given to England the strongest Central Government in Europe,
drifted into the hands of the squires, multiplied perhaps by ten the
wealth of their class, and transformed the Government of England into
that oligarchy which was completed in the seventeenth century, and
which, though permeated and transformed by Jewish finance, is standing
in a precarious strength to this day.
Westminster, Chertsey, Sheen, Reading, Abingdon, and Osney
disappeared.
One writes the list straight off without considering, taking it for
granted that everything which could have roused the cupidity of that
generation necessarily disappeared: and as one writes it one remembers
that, after all, Westminster survived. Its survival was an accident,
which will be further considered. But that survival, so far from
redeeming, emphasises and throws into relief the destruction of the
rest.
Of these enduring monuments of human energy and, what is more
important still in the control of energy, human certitude, what
besides Westminster survived? Of Chertsey there is perhaps a gateway
and part of a wall; of Sheen nothing; of Reading a few flints built
into modern work; of Abingdon a gateway, and a buttress or two that
long served to support a brewhouse; of Osney nothing, contrariwise,
electric works and the slums of a modern town. All these were
Westminsters. In all of these was to be discovered that patient
process of production which argues the continuity, and therefore the
dignity, of human civilisation. Each had the glass which we can no
longer paint, the vivid, living, and happy grotesque in sculpture
which only the best of us can so much as understand; each had a
thousand and another thousand details of careful work in stone meant
to endure, if not for ever, at least into such further centuries as
might have the added faith and added knowledge to restore them in
greater plenitude. The whole thing has gone. It has gone to no
purpose. Nothing has been built upon it save a wandering host of rich
and careworn men.
Suppose a man to have gone down the Thames when the new discussions
were beginning in London and (as was customary even at the close of
the Middle Ages) were spreading from town to town with a rapidity that
we, who have ceased to debate ideas, can never understand. Let such a
traveller or bargeman have gone down from Cricklade to the Tower, how
would the Great Houses have appeared to him?
The upper river would have been much the same, but as he came to that
part of it which was wealthy and populous, as he turned the corner of
Witham Hill, he would already have seen far off, larger and a little
nearer than the many spires of Oxford, a building such as to-day we
never see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns.
It was the Abbey of Osney. It would have been his landmark, as
Hereford is the landmark for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the new
spire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channel
past Bisham upon a rising tide. And as he passed beneath it (for, of
the many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he would
have seen a great and populous place with nothing ruinous in it, all
well ordered, busy with men and splendid; here again that which we now
look upon as a relic and a circumstance of repose was once alive and
strong.
Upon his way beneath the old stone bridge which crossed the ford, and
shooting between the lifted paddles of the weirs, he would, once below
Oxford, have seen much the same pastures that we see to-day; but in a
few hours Abingdon, the next to Osney, would have fixed his eyes as
Osney had before.