our river cathedrals in Western Europe--an apse pointing up stream,
though rounded and lacking the flying buttresses of the Gothic, for it
was thick, broad, and Norman. Here also, as one may believe, from its
situation, trees would have shrouded somewhat what he saw. There are
few such riverside apses in Christian Europe that are not screened in
this manner by trees planted between the stream and them. But as he
drifted farther down, before he reached the bridge, the west front
would have burst upon him, quite new, exceedingly rich and proud, a
strict example, one may believe, of the Perpendicular, and of what was
for the first time, and for a moment only, a true English Gothic. It
would have stood out before him, catching the sun of the afternoon in
its maze of glass. It would have seemed a thing to endure; within his
lifetime it was to be utterly destroyed.
Once more in the many reaches between Abingdon and Wallingford, the
sights would have been those which a man sees now. And though at
Wallingford he would have had before him a town of brilliant red tiles
and timberwork, and a town perhaps larger than that which we see
to-day, yet (could such a man come to life again) the contrast would
not strike him here, and still less in the fields below, so much as
when he came near to Reading.
That everything else of age in Reading has disappeared one need not
say, but were that traveller here to-day, the thing that he would most
seek for and most lack would be the bulk of the building at the
farther end of the town.
One can best say what it was by saying that it was like Durham. It is
true that Durham Cathedral stands upon a noble cliff overhanging a
ravine, while Reading Abbey stood upon a small and irregular hill
which hardly showed above the flat plains of the river meadows, but in
massiveness of structure and in type of architecture Reading seems to
have resembled Durham more nearly than any other of our great
monuments, and to emphasise its parallelism to Durham is perhaps the
best way to make the modern reader understand what we have lost.
Nothing that he had seen in this journey would more have sunk into the
mind of a contemporary man, nothing that he would lack were he
resuscitated to-day would leave a want more grievous. In the
destruction of Reading the people of this country lost something which
not even their aptitude for foreign travel can replace.
Windsor, as he passed, stood up above the right of him, not very
different from what we still admire as we come down from Bray and look
up to the jutting fore-tower which is worthy of Coucy. But down below
Windsor (after whose bridge we to-day see nothing whatever of value),
just after he had passed the wooden bridge of Staines and shot the
weir of that town, the river bent southward.
The traveller would have found Pentonhook already forming or formed,
and when he had got round it he would have seen soaring above him down
stream the great mass of Chertsey Abbey. If Reading had the solidity
and the barbaric grandeur of Durham, Chertsey had in an ecclesiastical
way the vastness of Windsor, and must have seemed like a town to
anyone approaching it thus down the river. The enclosed area of the
abbey buildings alone covered four acres.
This impression which such a traveller would have received of the
great religious houses was enhanced by something more than the
magnitude and splendour of the buildings. Divided as was opinion at
that moment upon their value to the State, and jealous as had become
landless men of the long traditions and privileges of the monks, these
still represented not only their own wealth but the general
accumulation of capital and the continued prosperity of the river
valley. It is true to say, in spite of the difficulty of appreciating
such a truth in the light of our knowledge of what was to follow, that
the destruction of such foundations would have seemed to the traveller
before the Dissolution inconceivable. Nevertheless it came.
These notes are not the place in which to discuss that most difficult
of all historical problems--I mean the causes which led the nation to
abandon in a couple of generations the whole of its traditions and to
adopt, not spontaneously but at the bidding of a comparatively small
body of wealthy men, a new scheme of society. But it is of value to
consider the economic aspect of the thing, and to show what it was
that Henry desired to seize when his policy of Dissolution was
secretly formed.
The economic function of the monastic system in the Middle Ages, and
especially in the later Middle Ages, is one to which no sufficient
attention has been given by historians.
They collected, as does no modern agency, wealth from very various
sources, scattered up and down the whole of the kingdom, and often
farther afield, throughout Europe, and exercised the whole economic
power so drawn together in one centre, and so founded a permanent
nucleus of wealth in the place where the community resided.
We are indeed to-day accustomed to a similar effect in the action of
our wealthy families. The rents of the London poor, a toll upon the
produce of Egypt, of the Argentine, or of India, all flow into some
country house in the provinces, where it revives in an effective
demand for production, or lends to the whole countryside a wealth
which, of itself, it could never have produced. The neighbourhood of
Aylesbury, the palaces of the larger territorials, are modern examples
of this truth, that the economic power of a district does not reside
in its productive capacity, but in its capacity for effective demand.
And it is undoubtedly true that if there were anything permanent in
modern society we should be witnessing in the wealthier quarters of
Paris and London, in the Riviera in the holiday part of Egypt, and in
certain centres of provincial luxury in England, in France, and in
Western Germany, the foundation of a permanent economic superiority.
But nothing in modern society has any roots. Where to-day is some one
of these great territorial houses in fifty years there may be nothing
but decay. Fashion may change from the Riviera to some other part of
the Mediterranean littoral, and with fashion will go the concentration
of wealth which accompanies it.
In the Middle, and especially in the latter Middle, Ages it was
otherwise. The great religious houses not only tended to accumulate
wealth and to perpetuate it in the same hands (they could not gamble
it away nor disperse it in luxury; they could hardly waste it by
mismanagement), but they were also permanently fixed on one spot.
Such an institution as Reading, for example, or as Abingdon, went on
perpetually receiving its immense revenues for generation after
generation, and were under no temptation or rather had no capacity for
spending it elsewhere than in the situation where their actual
buildings were to be found.
In this way the great monastic houses founded a tradition of local
wealth which has profoundly affected the history of the Thames Valley.
And if that valley is still to-day one of the chief districts wherein
the economic power of England is concentrated, it owes that position
mainly to the centuries during which the great foundations exercised
their power upon the banks of the river.
The growth of great towns, one of the last phases of our national
development, one which finds its example in the Thames Valley as
elsewhere, and one to which we shall allude before closing these notes
upon the river, has somewhat obscured the quality of this original
accumulation of wealth along the Thames. But when we come to consider
the figures of the census at an earlier time, before modern
commercialism and the railway had drawn wealth and population into
fewer and larger centres, we shall see how considerable was the string
of towns which had grown up along the stream. And we shall especially
see how fairly divided among them was the population, and, it may be
presumed, the wealth and the rateable value, of the valley.
The point just mentioned in connection with the larger monastic
foundations, and their artificial concentration of economic power,
deserves a further elaboration, for the economic importance of a
district is one of the aspects of geography which even modern analysis
has dealt with very imperfectly.
Economists speak of the economic importance of such-and-such a spot
because material of use to man-kind is there discovered. Thus, people
commonly point to the economic importance of the valleys all round the
Pennine Range in England because they contain coal and metals, and to
the economic importance of a small district in South Wales for the
same reason.
A further consideration has admitted that not only places where things
useful to mankind are discovered, but places naturally fitted for
their exchange have an economic importance peculiarly their own.
Indeed, the more history is studied from the point of view of
economics, the more does this kind of natural opportunity emerge, and
the less does the political importance of purely productive areas
appear. The mountain districts of Spain, the Cornish peninsula, were
centres of metallic industry of the first importance to the Romans,
but they remained poor throughout the period of Roman civilisation.
To-day the farmer in the west of America, the miner and the clerk in
Johannesburg, are perhaps more numerous, but as a political force no
wealthier for the opportunities of their sites: the economic power
which they ultimately produce is first concentrated in the centres of
exchange where the wealth they produce is handled.
Now there is a third basis for the economic importance of a district,
and as this third basis is indefinitely more important than the other
two, it has naturally been overlooked in the analysis of the
universities. This basis is the basis of residence. Given that a
conqueror, or a seat of Government established by routine, is
established in a particular place and chooses there to remain; or
given that the pleasure attached to a particular site--its natural
pleasures or the inherited grandeur of its buildings or what not--make
it an established residence for those who control the expenditure of
wealth, then that place will acquire an economic importance which has
for its foundation nothing more material than the human will. Thither
wealth, wherever produced, will flow, and there will be discovered
that ultimate motive force of all production and of all exchange, the
effective demand of those possessors who alone can set the industrial
machine in motion.
This has been abundantly true in every period of the world's history,
whenever commerce existed upon a considerable scale, or whenever a
military force sufficiently universal was at the command of wealthy
men.
It is particularly true to-day. To-day not the natural centres of
exchange, still less the natural centres of production, determine what
places in the world shall be wealthy and what shall not. The surplus
of the wealth produced by the Egyptian fellaheen is carefully
collected by English officials and largely consumed in Paris; the
wealth produced by the manufacturers of North England is largely spent
in the south of England and upon the Continent; until their recent and
successful revolt, the wealth produced by the Irish peasantry was
largely spent in London and upon the Riviera.
The economic importance, then, of the Thames Valley has not
diminished, but increased since South England ceased to be the main
field of production.
The tradition of Government, the habitual residence of the wealthy and
directing classes of the community, have centred more and more in
London. The old establishment of luxury in the Thames Valley has
perpetually increased since the decline of its industrial and
agricultural importance, and undoubtedly, if it were possible to draw
a map indicating the proportion of economic _demand_ throughout the
country, the Valley of the Thames would appear, in proportion to its
population, by far the most concentrated district in England, although
it contains but one very large town, and although it is innocent of
any very important modern industry.
It is interesting, in connection with this economic aspect of the
Thames Valley, to note that, alone of the great river valleys of
Europe, it has no railway system parallel to its banks. There is no
series of productive centres which could give rise to such a railway
system. The Great Western Railway follows the river now some distance
upon one side, now some distance upon the other, as far as Oxford; but
it does not depend in any way upon the stream, and where the course of
the stream is irregular it goes on its straight course, throwing out
branch lines to the smaller towns upon the banks: for the railway
depends, so far as this section is concerned, upon the industries of
the Midlands and of the west. Were you to cut off the sources of
carriage which it draws upon from beyond the Valley of the Thames it
could not exist.
The Scheldt, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne, the Seine, the Elbe,
are all different in this from the Thames. The economic power of our
main river valley is chiefly a spending power. It produces little and,
though it exchanges more of human wealth, it is the artificial
machinery of exchange rather than the physical movement of goods that
enriches it.
Now this habit of residence, this settlement of the concentrated power
of demand upon the banks of the Thames, was the work of the monastic
houses. It may be argued that, with the commercial importance of
London, and with its attainment of the position of a capital, the
residence of such economic power would necessarily have spread up the
Thames Valley. It is doubtful whether any such necessity as this
existed. In Roman times the Thames certainly did not lead up thus in
the line of wealth from London, and though it is true that water
carriage greatly increased in importance after the breakdown of Roman
civilisation, yet the medium by which that water carriage was utilised
was the medium of the Benedictine foundations. They it was who
established that continuous line of progressive agricultural
development and who prepared the way for the later yet more continuous
line of the full monastic effort which succeeded the Conquest.
A list of monastic institutions upon the river, if we exclude the
friars, the hospitals, and such foundations as made part of town or
university life, is as follows:--a priory at Cricklade, another at
Lechlade, the Abbey at Eynsham (sufficiently near the stream to be
regarded as riparian), the Nunnery and School of Godstow, the great
Abbeys of Osney and Rewley, the Benedictine Nunnery at Littlemore, the
great Abbey of Abingdon, the Abbey of Dorchester, Cholsey (but this
had been destroyed before the Conquest, and was never revived), the
Augustinian Nunnery at Goring, the great Cluniac Abbey at Reading, the
Cell of Westminster at Hurley, the Abbey of Medmenham, the Abbey of
Bisham just opposite Marlow, and the Nunnery of Little Marlow; the
Nunnery of Burnham, which, though nearly a mile and a half from the
stream, should count from the position of its property as a riparian
foundation, the little Nunnery of Ankerwike, the great Benedictine
Abbey of Chertsey, the Carthusians of Sheen, and the Benedictines of
Westminster, to which may be added the foundation of Bermondsey.
When the end came the total number of those in control of such wide
possessions was small.
Indeed it was perhaps no small cause of the unpopularity, such as it
was, into which the same monasteries had locally fallen, that so much
economic power was concentrated in so few hands. The greater
foundations throughout the country possessed but a little more than
3000 religious, and even when all the nuns, friars, and professed
religious of the towns are counted, we do not arrive at more than 8000
in religion in an England which must have had a population of at least
4,000,000, and quite possibly a much larger number; nor could the mobs
foresee that the class which would seize upon the abbey lands would
concentrate the means of production into still fewer hands, until at
last the mass of Englishmen should have no lot in England.
Moreover, it would be an error to consider the numbers of the
religious alone. The smaller foundations, and especially the convents
of nuns, did certainly support but small numbers, and this probably
accounts for the ease with which they were suppressed, but, on the
other hand, their possessions also were small. In the case of the
great foundations, though one can count but 3000 monks and canons, the
number of them must be multiplied many times if we are to arrive at
the total of the communities concerned. Reading, Abingdon, and the
rest were little cities, with a whole population of direct dependants
living within the walls, and a still larger number of families
without, who indirectly depended upon the revenues of the abbey for
their livelihood.
Another and perhaps a better way of presenting to a modern reader the
overwhelming economic power of the mediæval monastic system,
especially its economic power in the Valley of the Thames, would be to
add to such a list of houses a map of that valley showing the manors
in ecclesiastical hands, the freeholds and leaseholds held by the
great abbeys, in addition to the livings that were within their gift;
in a word, a map giving all their different forms of revenue.
Such a map would show the Valley of the Thames and its tributaries
covered with ecclesiastical influence upon every side.
Even if we confined ourselves to the parishes upon the actual banks of
the river, the map would present a continuous stretch of possessions
upon either side from far above Eynsham down to below bridges.
The research that would be necessary for the establishment of such a
complete list would require a leisure which is not at the disposal of
the present writer, but it is possible to give some conception of what
the monastic holdings were by drawing up a list confined to but a
small part of these holdings and showing therefore _a fortiori_ what
the total must have been.
In this list I concern myself only with the eight largest houses in
the whole length of the river. I do not mention parishes from which
the revenues were not important (though these were numerous, for the
abbeys held a large number of small parcels of land). I do not mention
the very numerous holdings close to the river but not actually upon it
(such as Burnham or Watereaton), nor, which is most important of all,
do I count even in the riparian holdings such foundations as were not
themselves set upon the banks of the Thames. Whatever Thames land paid
rent to a monastery not actually situated upon the banks of the river,
I omit. Finally the list, curtailed as it is by all these limitations,
concerns only the land held at the moment of the Dissolution. Scores
of holdings, such as those of Lechlade, which was dissolved in
Catholic times, Windsor, which was exchanged as we have seen at the
time of the Conquest, I omit and confine myself only to the lands held
at the time of the Dissolution.
Yet these lands--though they concern only eight monasteries, though I
mention only those actually upon the banks of the river, and though I
omit from the list all small payments--put before one a series of
names which, to those familiar with the Thames, seems almost like a
voyage along the stream and appears to cover every portion of the
landscape with which travellers upon the river are familiar. Thus we
have Shifford, Eynsham, South Stoke, Radley, Cumnor, Witham, Botley,
the Hinkseys, Sandford, Shillingford, Swinford, Medmenham, Appleford,
Sutton, Wittenham, Culham, Abingdon, Goring, Cowley, Littlemore,
Cholsey, Nuneham, Wallingford, Pangbourne, Streatley, Stanton
Harcourt; and all this crowd of names upon the upper river is arrived
at without counting such properties as attached to the great
monasteries within towns, as, for example, to the monasteries of
Oxford. It is true that not all these names represent complete
manorial ownership. In a number of cases they stand for portions of
the manor only, but even in this list ten at least, and possibly
twelve, stand for complete manorial ownership. Then one must add
Sonning, Wargreave, Tilehurst, Chertsey, Egham, Cobham, Richmond, Ham,
Mortlake, Sheen, Kew, Chiswick, Staines, etc., of which many of the
most important, such as Staines, are full manorial possessions.
It is clearly evident, from such a very imperfect and rapidly drawn
list, what was the economic power of the great houses, and one may
conclude, even from the basis of such imperfect evidence, that the
directing force of economic effort throughout the Thames Valley was to
be found, right up to the Dissolution, in the chapter houses of
Reading, of Chertsey, and of Westminster, of Abingdon and of the
lesser houses.
In a word, the business of Henry might be compared to what may be in
future the business of some democratic European Government when it
lays its hands upon the fortunes of the great financial houses, but
with this double difference, that the confiscation to which Henry bent
himself was a confiscation of capital whose product did not leave the
country, and could not be used for anti-national purposes, as also
that it was the confiscation of wealth which never acted secretly and
which had no interest, as have our chief moneylenders, in political
corruption. It was a vast undertaking and, in the truest sense of the
word, a revolutionary one, such as Europe had not seen until that
moment, and perhaps has not seen since.
It was effected with ease, because there did not reside in the public
opinion of the time any strong body of resistance.
The change of religion, in so far as a change was threatened (and upon
that the mass of the parish priests themselves, and still more the
mass of the laity, were very hazy), did not affect the mind of a
people famous throughout Europe for their intense and often
superstitious devotion; but in some odd way the segregation of the
great communities, their vast wealth, and perhaps an external
contradiction between their original office and their present
privilege, forbade any united or widespread enthusiasm in their
defence.
Englishmen rose upon every side when they thought that the vital
mysteries of the Faith were threatened. The risings were only put down
by the use of foreign mercenaries and by the most execrable cruelty,
nor would even these means have sufficed had the rebels formed a clear
plan, or had the purpose of Henry himself in matters of religion been
definite and capable of definite attack. But the country, though ready
to fight for Dogma, was not ready to fight for the monasteries. It
might, perhaps, have fought if the attack upon them had been direct
and universal. If Henry had laid down a programme of suppressing
religious bodies in general, he probably could not have carried it
out, but he laid down no such programme. The Dissolution of the
smaller houses was imagined by the most devout to be a statesmanlike
measure. Many of them, like Medmenham, were decayed; their wealth was
not to be used for the private luxury of the King or of nobles; it was
to swell the revenues of the greater foundations or to be applied to
pious or honourable public use. But the example once given, the attack
upon the greater houses necessarily followed; and the whole episode is
a vivid lesson in the capital principle of statesmanship that men are
governed by routine and by the example of familiar things. Render
possible to the mass of men the conception that the road, they
habitually follow is not a necessity of their lives, and you may exact
of them almost any sacrifice or hope to see them witness without
disgust almost any enormity.