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[In continuous use since the Dissolution] {Frontispiece.

ENGLISH
MONASTERIES

From Saxon Days to their
Dissolution

Uontjon

G. J. PALMER AND SONS

PORTUGAL STREET
1904

CAMBRIDGE

PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER
ALEXANDRA STREET

Introduction

IN accordance with many requests, the following
sketch of some of the features of monastic life in
England is reprinted from The Church Times, in a
somewhat extended and slightly amended form.

It has been suggested that it would be helpful
to students to give a list of authorities on which
these pages are based. A large number of authori-
ties, such as monastic chartularies and customaries,
and episcopal registers, only exist in manuscript ;
but the following are some of the principal printed
books, in addition to the extended edition in eight
vols. of Dugdale's Monasticon :

English Monastic Life (1904). Abbot Gasquet.

Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of St. Augustine ',

Canterbury, and St. Peter, Westminster (1902). Henry

Bradshaw Society.
Observances of the Austin Priory of Barnwell (1897).

J. Willis Clark.

Mediceval England (1903), Chaps. 3, 9, 15. Mary Bateson.
Rites and Customs of Durham (1842). Surtees Society.

Introduction

Halmota Prioratus Dunelmensis (1886). Surtees Society.
Durham Account Rolls, 3 vols. (1898—1900). Surtees

Society.
St. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertines (1902).

Rose Graham.
Gesta Abbatum S. Albani, and other monastic volumes of

the Rolls Series, including Nos. 8. 28, 29, 33, 36, 43, 45,

72, 78, 79, 85, and 96.
The Chronicle ofjocelin of Brakeland, of Bury St. Edmunds

(1903). Sir Ernest Clarke.
The Obedientiaries of Abingdon Abbey (1902). Camden

Society.

Records of Wroxall (1904). J. P. Rylands.
Saint Anselm (1888), Chap. 3. Dean Church.
A Consuetudinary of St. Swithurfs (1886). Dean Kitchin.
Obedientiary Rolls of St. Swithun's (1892). Dean Kitchin.
Charters and Records of Cluni (1888). Sir G. Duckett.
Rentalia et Custumaria of Glastonbury. Somerset Record

Society.

Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich (1888). Dr. Jessopp.
Collectanea Anglo-Premonstratensia (1904). Abbot Gasquet.

Inventories oj Christ Church, Canterbury (1902). Messrs.
Legg and Hope.

Charlularies of Finchale Priory (1837) '> °f J arrow and
Monkwearmouth (1854) ; oj Fountain's Abbey (1863 —
78) ; of Whitby Abbey (1879) ; of Newhouse Abbey
(1878) ; of Rievaulx Abbey (1889) ; of ' Giseburne Priory
(1889) ; and of Brinkburn Priory (1893). Surtees Society-

Chartularies of St. Peter's, Bath (1893) ; of Bruton and
Montacute Priories (1894); and of Michelney and
Athelney Abbeys (1899). Somerset Record Society.

Episcopal Registers of Exeter, 7 vols. (1886, etc.). F. C.
Hingeston-Randolph.

(vi)

Introduction

Episcopal Registers of Winchester, 3 vols. (1896, in progress).

Hampshire Record Society.

Episcopal Registers of Worcester (1898, in progress). Wor-
cester Historical Society.
Sedt Vacante Register of Worcester Priory, five parts (1893

— 7). Worcester Historical Society.
Episcopal Registers of Bath and Wells, 4 vols. (1887—1889,

in progress). Somerset Record Society.
Register of Walter Gray, Archbishop of York (1872). Sur-

tees Society.
Register of Bishop Kellaw of Durham, 4 vols. (1873 — 8).

Rolls Series.
Register of Archbishop Peckham, 3 vols. (1882—5). Rolls

Series.

For the suppression of the monasteries the
following should be consulted :

Letters and Papers of the reign of Henry VIII. (Domestic

State Papers). Dr. Gairdner.

History of the Church of England, 6 vols. Canon Dixon.
Henry VI1L and the English Monasteries, 2 vols. (1888).

Abbot Gasquet.

Henry VIII. (1901). F. Darwin Swift.
Reformation of the Church of England, 2 vols. (1882.) J. H.

Blunt.

The Victoria County Histories, now in progress,
propose to deal thoroughly with all the religious
houses ; up to the present, those of Hampshire (2nd
vol.) have been treated by Rev. Dr. Cox, and those
of Bedfordshire (ist vol.) by Sister Elspeth. The
Times, in reviewing the first of these volumes, said
( vii )

Introduction

that if the scheme was followed up in other coun-
ties after a like fashion with Hampshire, the result
would be the issue of a new * Monasticon.'

Possibly it is presumptuous to quote St. Augus-
tine in connection with a booklet of this description,
but the words with which the great Doctor con-
cludes his treatise De Civitate Dei seem applicable :

"If in these pages there is either too much or
too little, the fault is mine, and may I be forgiven ;
but if there is just sufficient join with me in giving
thanks to God."

F. S. A.
October, 1904.

( viii )

Contents

CHAPTER I

PACK

VOCATION i

CHAPTER II
THE MONASTIC TENANTS 18

CHAPTER III
EDUCATION IN MONASTERIES 32

CHAPTER IV
MONASTIC CHARITIES. . , .- . . . 40

CHAPTER V
MONASTIC DIET . . . . . . . .49

CHAPTER VI
MONASTIC MORALITY AND FOREST COURTS . . 69

CHAPTER VII
VISITATIONS 80

CHAPTER VIII
THE Two COMMISSIONS OF HENRY VIII . . 93

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUDING WORDS . . . 108

b

List of Illustrations

I NEWSTEAD PRIORY Frontispiece

PAGE

II RIEVAULX ABBEY . . fi . . facing 16

III FOUNTAINS ABBEY. . „ 32

IV BYLAND ABBEY . . . . . „ 48
V BUILDWAS ABBEY „ 64

VI LLANTHONY PRIORY „ 80

ENGLISH MONASTERIES

CHAPTER I
VOCATION

IT is proposed, in the course of a few chapters, to
put on record certain facts and statements on
the "religious" (using the word in its technical signi-
fication) life of England from the seventh century to
the sixteenth. Such statements, though based on
the original study of a large number of episcopal
registers and monastic chartularies, as well as on a
variety of old documents at the Public Record
Office or in private keeping, will, in many cases,
only yield evidence familiar to those well acquainted
with a too little studied subject ; but some of the
points brought forward may be novel to all.

It may be well, in the first instance, to disabuse
the mind of the low motives that are often sup-
posed to have actuated men and women in seeking
admission to the cloistered life.

A recent American writer of repute, on Monks
and Monasteries (Mr. Wishart, 1900) has said : —

" The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt,
the devoted or bereaved wife, the pauper and the

English Monasteries

invalid, the social outcast and the shirker of civic
duties, the lazy and the fickle, were all to be found
in the ranks of the monastic orders."

Now and again, in a very small minority of
cases, such instances as these found their way into
the mediaeval monasteries, with the result that those
whose intentions were so poor became the very
ones about whom scandal afterwards arose. But,
broadly speaking, such a statement, as applicable
to the monastic life generally, is simply an im-
possible libel, that could not be put forth by any
genuine student of monastic life. The notion of a
" lazy " man or woman desiring to take vows is an
absurdity ; that laziness, and other sins, might of
course attack cloistered as well as uncloistered lives,
no one would deny. The difficulties surrounding
the first steps to enter a monastery were by no
means inconsiderable, the harshest side of the
cloistered life was always set sternly before the
applicant, and the novices were severely tested ere
they were permitted to take the habit. As we
read the extraordinary and heart-rending methods
adopted by the English Carthusians to keep all
save the most devoted out of their ranks — pre-
cautions that were maintained, as can be proved,
by the Carthusians of Sheen up to the very moment
of their terrible treatment by Henry VIII. — who a
short time before had praised them as the very salt
of the earth — the marvel is that they could ever
find applicants with sufficient courage to enter their
ranks.

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Vocation

Among the Lansdowne MSS. of the British
Museum is a small fifteenth-century manuscript of
the rule of the Carthusians of Sheen. It opens
with the form of receiving postulants and novices
in English. After a variety of preliminary questions
had been put to the postulant in chapter, he retired.
Thereupon the prior asked each of the chapter in
turn whether they thought the applicant worthy to
be admitted, If the replies were in the affirmative,
the candidate was recalled, and was thus addressed
by the prior : —

" The convent hath deliberated of your humble
petition. And now our Statutes doe appoint me
breefly to set before your eyes the strictness and
austoritie of our order, and the length and prolixitie
of the divine office as well of the day office as the
night office, which in the wynter is farr longer,
beside the office of our Blessed Lady which you are
to say daylie in your cell ; morover you are to say
yearly a hundred dead offices in private, likewise
many Psalters (or as we tearme them monachales)
which you are yearly to say unless you performe
them in masses. For your cloathing and lodging,
after you have received the habitt, you can make
no further use of lynen except handkerchers towels
and the like, but for your body you are to weare
a shirte of heare and a cord aboute your loynes
and a wolen shirte. You are to lie upon strawe or
a bed of chaffe with a blanket betweene. For your
diet it is a perpetuall abstinence from flesh, inso-
much that in the greatest or most dangerous sick-

(3)

English Monasteries

ness you can expect no dispensation theirin. Also
a good parte of the yeare we abstaine from all
Whitmeates, as in Advent, Lent and all the
Fridayes of the yeare, besides many other fasts
both of the church and of our order in which wee
abstain from Whitmeat.

" Likewise from the exaltation of the holie
Crosse until Easter wee fast with one meall a day,
except some few days of recreation before Advent
and Lent. For silence and solitude it ought to be
perpetuall, except when our Statutes giveth license
or that you aske leave. These be the generall
observances of our order common to all as well as
seniours as juniours. But besides these generall
there are some particular ordained and appointed
for novices or newly professed to exercise them in
the purgative way, and for theire soner attaining of
humility and solid vertue, as is the dressing up
of Alters, sweeping of churches and chappels, mak-
ing cleane of candelstickes, serving of others and
suchlike. Which workes by how much they are
more vile and contemptible in the eyes of the world,
by so much they are more precious and meritorious
in the sight of Almighty God, and by how much
that men, wether more noble, better learned, or of
greater talents doth willingly and affectionately
perform the same for the love of God by so much
soner they will obtain remission of theire sinnes,
be purged from their reliques, be freed from theire
former evil habitts and obtaine puritie of hart,
humility, and other solid vertues, which are not

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Vocation

gotten without humiliation, and therefore those who
doe flye or withdraw themselves from ye works of
humility, doe deprive themselves of the best meanes
to gaine the vertue itselfe. These according to our
Statutes and the Custome of our house I have layed
unto you. Putasne ista posse performare ? "

In the great majority of cases, it is arguing
against fact and reason to try and believe that
aught save a generous Christian enthusiasm for
the higher life led England's sons and daughters
to embrace the vowed life, from the dawn of
monasticism down to its suppression. No one in-
tending to be true to the rule would be moved to
embrace it through a worldly motive, or to gain
any temporal end, or leisured spiritual ease. Some
of the causes that have led men of education, with-
out perhaps any particular prejudice, and only
badly informed, to adopt such views, or to write
such passages as those just cited from Mr. Wishart's
book are not far to seek. The chief factor in bring-
ing about such a belief was the desire shown and
often carried out by the high-born founders or
benefactors of religious houses to end their days
within the cloister and wearing the monk's habit.
Sometimes such as these passed the last few years
of their life in religious retirement, and in other
cases only months or even days. In the rough
days from which England suffered for some little
time after the Conquest, certain of the monastic
founders led lives or committed acts unworthy
of a Christian layman, and their retirement to a

(5)

English Monasteries

monastery when their powers were failing seems to
us, from a modern standpoint, a rather cowardly
proceeding. Thus Hugh d'Avranches, made by
the Conqueror Count Palatine of Chester, whose
active military life was disgraced by many excesses,
entered the monastery of St. Werburgh of Chester,
of his own foundation, there to end his days ; but
his religious life was of brief duration, for he died
on the fourth day of his retirement from the world.
Others beyond doubt entered the monastery, with-
out any expectation of early death, after particular
excesses or special crimes, with the idea of doing a
something by way of satisfaction for the expiation
of their sins, and perchance to put hindrances in
the way of their re-occurrence. Those, however,
who are ready to draw large conclusions from such
cases are quite forgetful of the terms under which
those who sought some share in the religious life
far on in their earthly career were admitted. No
doubt, in several cases, such as that of Count Hugh
and other founders who entered their monasteries
with the hand of death already on them, the chapter
would permit the dying knight to be clad in a pro-
fessed monk's habit — and who can blame their
charity ? But such a line of action was an acknow-
ledged irregularity, and quite at variance with
the ordinary custom. Those who study English
monastic terms, and know that in the Cistercian
abbeys, and not infrequently in other religious
houses, such as those of the White Canons, the
lay-brothers were termed conversior converts, some-

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Vocation

times wonder how it came to pass that those who
were not quire-monks, who wore a different habit,
whose hours for manual labour were far more and
for offices and meditation far less, came to be dis-
tinguished by such a title as 'converts.' It was
indeed a special triumph of the established religious
life that knights and other unruly men of violent
passions should be moved to lead a docile and
humble life within the abbey's precincts, or working
in the fields around ; and such men when they
joined a community and proved themselves amen-
able to discipline, occasionally joined the conversi,
or converts, who were thus originally styled to
distinguish them from those who from their youth
had been dedicated to the cloister. It was but very
rarely that such as these were admitted to the
priesthood or became chapter or quire monks ;
they only found entrance to the more menial
position, and hence by degrees the term conversi
or converts became equivalent to lay-brothers. Just
the same story is true of the quire-nuns and the
working sisters of the other sex. It therefore
follows that those jaundiced minds of Mr. Wishart's
cataloguing would after all, if they succeeded in
gaining admission, find the way open to nought
save the inferior position, and would not become,
in any real sense of the term, either monks or
nuns.

Saving for the very few that were directly
founded by kings or queens, every monastic house in
England, from the eighth to the thirteenth century,

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English Monasteries

was founded by men of large landed property,
and, after the Conquest, by those of feudal power.
It was in this way, from the very necessity of the
case, that the religious houses obtained the endow-
ments of land or tithe that were essential for their
support. Not only did such as these found the
monasteries, but they largely helped to fill them.
There is not a single old feudal family known in
English history but several of its members can be
proved to have entered the ranks of the religious.
Nor were such as these only drawn from the cadets
of families of position or substance. Those who
have tried to study the earlier history of the county
families of any of our English shires will be quite
familiar with cases in which the ordinary succession
of primogeniture in manorial or landed descent
is interrupted, because the eldest son had taken
monastic vows.

The idea current among certain superficial
writers, that there was a perpetual warfare be-
tween the monastic and feudal system, cannot be
maintained by true historical students either in
Christendom at large or in England in particular.
It is too often forgotten that the monasteries were
very largely recruited from those who were them-
selves members of the feudal aristocracy. Particu-
larly was this the case in the eleventh century,
when the influence of Hugh the Abbot of Cluny,
who was himself of high feudal birth, was so great.
Lists or isolated names of the members of the
priories or cells of Cluniac foundation in our own

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Vocation

country of this period prove that these monks who
settled on our shores were, many of them, members
of the French aristocracy.

Though it was the glory of the English Church
in the most stringent times of feudal tyranny to call
to Holy Orders those who were specially freed
from among her own villeins for the purpose, and
though many of the lowliest birth attained to, then
as now, high and responsible position in the hier-
archy, the other side of the shield must not be
forgotten. Columns might readily be filled with
the names of those in England who were members
of good families, and did distinguished service for
the Church, though trained in cloistered seclusion.
It may suffice here to mention two or three of con-
siderable mark in early days. Winfrid of Crediton,
who, after years of careful seclusion in the Hamp-
shire monastery of Nursling, became the renowned
apostle of Germany, under the title of Boniface,
was the eldest child of wealthy and noble parents.
Biscop, who at the age of twenty-five gave himself
up to the monastic life, and became the celebrated
abbot of the North of England, so well known as
St. Benedict Biscop, was of good birth and position,
and the owner of a considerable estate. " He
despised," says Bede, " a temporal wealth that he
might obtain that which is eternal ; he refused to
be the father of mortal children, being fore-ordained
of Christ to educate for Him in spiritual doctrine
immortal children in Heaven." St. Alphege, the
saintly Archbishop martyred by the Danes in 101 1,

(9)

English Monasteries

was born to high position and wealth, the only son
of a family of distinction ; but he forsook all in
favour of a Benedictine monastery.

When the time of the Conquest is passed, the
evidence of those of high birth seeking the cloister
is fully maintained. The first two Archbishops of
Canterbury who ruled in the earlier Norman days,
Lanfranc and Anselm, men of great wealth and
culture, the one of senatorial rank and the other of
noble origin, made considerable temporal sacrifices
to follow the Benedictine rule. Or once again, the
founder of the remarkable Order of the Gilbertines
— who did so good and pure a work right up to
their dissolution, the only Order founded by an
Englishman — was Gilbert of Sempringham, the
eldest son of a wealthy Norman knight, who sacri-
ficed his considerable estates to further his con-
ception of the monastic ideal. Now all these men,
and many others almost equally distinguished,
entered the religious life without any idea of after-
wards emerging from the cloister and attaining to
high spiritual rule or administration ; they were
but examples of hundreds of others of equal birth
and self-sacrifice, who served God as faithfully in
their limited circles, though their acts remain un-
written on the annals of mere human records.

Equally is all this true of the other sex. Re-
Christianised England of the pre-Norman days
stands out in bold relief from the rest of Christen-
dom for the readiness, nay, the eagerness, with
which gentle ladies of royal blood^and the proudest

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Vocation

estate adopted the monastic life, discarding all
outward pomp and circumstance. Rapin, the
French historian, sneered at the number of royal
saints produced by Saxon England, who knew, as
he thought, no suffering ; but a much greater
Frenchman, the academician Montalembert, has
amply justified their memory in a chapter of sin-
gular beauty of language blended with careful
historical research. Nothing but the fact that the
grace of God led these Saxon ladies of high degree
to see the beauty of the sacred life can account for
the way in which, throughout the seventh and
early part of the eighth century, they gave up
worldly ease for cloistered stillness. It was the
same in nearly all the petty principalities — in
Kent there were the saints, Eadburg of Lym-
inge, Eanswith, Sexberga, and Mildred ; in East
Anglia, Etheldreda, Wendreda, and Wimburga ;
in Mercia, Kyneburga, Kyneswith, Pega, Wer-
burga, and Millburga; among the East Saxons,
Ethelburga of Barking and Osyth ; in Wessex,
Frideswide, Everilda, Sidwell and Cuthburga ; and
in Northumbria, Ebba and Hilda. In the tenth
century, also, there were the Saints Eadburga of
Pershore, Edith of Polesworth, Edith of Wilton,
and Wilfrida.

Judged from the mere human standpoint, or
even from the common-place platform of average
modern Christianity, conduct of this kind seems
mere foolishness ; and worldlings have, forsooth,
to imagine that all such had been crossed in love,

English Monasteries

and soured with disappointment, or were merely
filled with a narrow-minded and tearful anxiety to
save their own souls. But, after all, the example
set by these Christian Saxon ladies has never died
out, and never will, so long as the love of the hea-
venly Bridegroom endures. England from the
seventh century downwards has never lacked
delicately nurtured ladies, ready to forego worldly
distinction, domestic ease, or intellectual ambition,
in favour of a heart-whole sacrifice to the religious
life. When Henry VIII. crushed out the nunneries
in England, a large number of the Sisters belonged
to the best of the nation's blood ; and ladies of the
noble and high-born families who clung to the
unreformed faith at once established and main-
tained English nunneries across the seas in Bel-
gium or in France. With the blessed revival of
Catholic life within the English Church, in the
middle of the last century, there came about a
re-establishment of vowed Sisterhood life, which
has of late made a wondrous growth. Those best
qualified to judge know well how these English
sisterhoods and nunneries have been guided and
endowed by those of the gentlest blood, whose
names in religion hide those by which the world
might have recognised them. And what was true
of their origin is true of their present-day life ;
wealth, position, comfort, and intellect are still
placed by many of these Sisters at the feet of
Christ.

There was naturally great anxiety on the part

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Vocation

of monasteries to do their best with the lands
bestowed on them, and the monks and religious
canons became almost proverbially the best farmers.
Nor was the land cleared, the cattle tended, the
sheep pastured, and the wood thinned simply with
the idea of producing a good revenue to support
themselves, to maintain their church and buildings,
and, above all, to minister to the poor and needy ;
for it was keenly felt that there must be work for
the hands as well as the head, and that in doing
their very best in manual toil, as well as in worship
in quire, they were giving glory to the Creator.
" Idleness," says St. Benedict in his rule, " is the
enemy of the soul ; therefore let the brothers
devote certain hours to work with their hands,
and at other times occupy themselves in sacred
reading." Then the great founder of the religious
rule proceeded to lay down the hours, according
to the seasons, during which such work was to be
performed. Nor were his brethren, as he plainly
told them, \\hatever had been their position, to be
disconcerted if the necessity arose for getting in
the harvest or doing agricultural labours with their
own hands. The way in which the monks of Eng-
land triumphed over nature, drained the swamps,
and brought barren tracts of land into cultivation,
was beyond all praise ; thus they found abundant
employment for their tenants and neighbours as
well as for themselves, and materially increased
the food supplies for the country at large. Visitors
to the sites of ruined abbeys, such as the Yorkshire

(13)

English Monasteries

houses of Fountains, Riveaulx, or Byland, are apt
hastily to praise the cunning of the monks in
obtaining settlements in such pleasant and well-
cultivated sites, forgetful that it was these very
monks who turned comparatively barren and deso-
late lands into pasture, plantation, and tillage.
The marvellous drainage works accomplished in
the Holderness by the Cistercian monks of Meaux
Abbey, or by the Gilbertine Canons of Watton
Priory, whereby hundreds of acres were rendered
capable of tillage, bear their fruits to the present
day. It is difficult now to estimate the drudgery,
toil, and skill required in days comparatively des-
titute of mechanical appliances to produce such
results.

Perhaps the one spot in all England more than
another that would cure the man who talks flip-
pantly of the lazy, indulgent life of our mediaeval
monks in their comfortable quarters is the rarely-
visited site of the once great mitred Benedictine
Abbey of St. Benet of Holme, amid the Norfolk
Broads. To visit such a place, particularly in wet
or lowering weather, with the waters swirling round
the still well-defined precincts, the wide dykes
filled to the brim, the land oozing with moisture
over hundreds of acres all round — and then to
picture the courage necessary to enable scores of
men to give their lives and pass their days in a
continuous round of worship and of battling with the
elements in such a desolate spot as this — cannot
fail to shatter any honest man's belief in the ease-

(14)

Vocation

seeking nature of an English Benedictine of me-
diaeval days. Such a man, after visiting St.
Benet's, Holme, might say, "What a fool," but
he could no longer sneer at the monk as a poor,
lazy beggar.

More particularly, too, would this be the case
did he know some of the stories, as yet unknown
to print, of the monks of this swamp. How, for
instance, on one occasion (in the winter of 1287-8)
the waters overflowed the lands and outbuildings
to such an extent that only the church, on the
highest ground, was unflooded ; and how, within
the nave, after much anxious thought, it was con-
sidered true charity to stable the horses to save
them from drowning. Or if perchance the thought
should arise that these monks were sustained by
good fare against the damp and chills of their
surroundings, the truth as to their usual meagre
dietary, with exact details, can be learnt from
various obedientiary rolls that are still preserved
among the stores of the Bodleian. But more anon
as to monastic fare.

We are accustomed to acknowledge that litera-
ture was sustained in the cloister, and to recog-
nise the beauty of the illuminated missals therein
written and painted with such consummate skill ;
but that the monastery, particularly the Cistercian
House, was the centre of so many crafts is often
unknown or forgotten. Within the large precincts
of such a house would be not only the various
storehouses, but the workshops of the smith, the

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English Monasteries

carpenter, the mason, the shoemaker, the weaver,
the candlemaker, and the winepress. Everything
that could be required for the church and house
and its inmates was, if possible, made on the pre-
mises. If anyone is desirous of understanding, by
ocular proof, to what use many of the outbuildings
still standing around the grand ruins of Fountains,
Kirkstall, or Furness were put, he cannot do better
than visit the old Cistercian abbey of Maulbraun,
in Wiirtemberg, within easy reach by train of
Heidelberg ; for he will there find nearly the
whole of the necessary mediaeval buildings of the
community still standing, and in fairly good con-
dition. It was, doubtless, the frequent communi-
cation of the English Cistercian monks with their
fellows on the Continent that moved them success-
fully to attempt and carry on such forms of culture
as vine-growing, that seem ill-adapted to our climate
and have long since been abandoned. But that
vines were grown and wine made at Beaulieu, and
various other monastic centres in England is beyond
a doubt.

It was this very desire after agricultural com-
pleteness, and the thorough farming of all entrusted
to their care, that brought about in England that
curious admixture of the two sexes that prevailed
in most of the houses of the Gilbertine order.
Houses for Sisters was the first idea of St. Gilbert,
and always remained paramount in his mind ; but
in order to secure effective administration of their
lands, certain religious Canons were attached to

( 16)

THE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEY (Cistercian)

[To face page 16.

Vocation

them, in absolutely separate buildings, to serve as
chaplains, and to superintend or personally carry
out all the agricultural details, on the due sustain-
ing of which the whole convent depended. This,
too, was doubtless the main reason why we also
find two or three canons attached to those great
houses of Hampshire Benedictine nuns of pre-
Norman foundation, Nunnaminster, Wherwell, and
Romsey. A like cause was probably the reason
why priors, masters, or wardens, were in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries associated to some extent
with the prioresses of such nunneries as Nuneaton,
Warwickshire; Kingsmead, Derbyshire; or Catesby,
Wyrthorp, and Stamford, Northamptonshire — a
fact not hitherto, so far as we are aware, noted
or commented upon by any writers on English
monasticism.

(17)

CHAPTER II
THE MONASTIC TENANTS

WHEN the religious houses were possessed of
manors — and all save the smallest houses
held at least one or two and frequently many — it was
incumbent upon them to discharge the obligations
that rested on manorial lords ; nor was there any
difficulty about this, for the technical obligations
of presiding at courts and fulfilling other like duties
were almost invariably discharged, even on secular
manors, by the lord's steward. Still the lord was
responsible, and held responsible, in the same fashion
as a modern landowner and his agent, and the
difference between a good and a bad or careless
landlord had even more striking results in the
feudal and sub-feudal days than in our own. The
tenants of the monastic estates were of every kind,
from those who held under the obligation of mili-
tary service to the Crown and so many knight's
fees, to the humblest customary tenants or villeins,
who were tied to the soil. The abbot or prior had
to carry out the obligations resting on landholders

(18)

The Monastic Tenants

of the days in which he lived ; he could not, if he
would, have upset the land system, but by just and
conscientious administration each manor might be-
come a centre of comparative content.

If the student of manorial records and cus-
tomaries compares any considerable number of
manors that were in monastic, or Church, hands,
with those that were in lay control, it will be found,
broadly speaking, that the lot of the tenants
generally, and more especially that of the villeins,
was decidedly superior when under monastic ad-
ministration. True, tenants of ecclesiastical manors
had their difficulties with the lord from time to
time, and were, perhaps, all the more ready now
and again to show dissatisfaction in a more marked
way than they would have dared to do against the
more severe secular lords ; but the easy terms on
which the assarts or clearings made by the monks
and their lay brothers were conferred on their
tenants, the commuting of labour customs for quite
small sums of money, the generally light character
of the labour for the lord, the better harvest fare
provided, and, more particularly, the far greater op-
portunity for manumission or freedom that pertained
to the clerical estates, all these were noticeable in so
many instances, that there can be no doubt it was
as a rule far better for each class of tenants to be
on a monastic rather than on a secular estate.

In the valuable chartulary of the abbey of
Burton-on-Trent, preserved at Beaudesert, there
are full accounts of the tenantry on their Stafford-

(19)

English Monasteries

shire and Derbyshire manors drawn up about the
year noo, as well as some like entries of the year
1114. It would be very difficult to find such easy
tenures on any secular manors of approximate
date. In a variety of cases a house was held for
which a single day's harvest work per week for the
lord was the only charge. The proportion of ad
opus tenants on these estates was unusually small ;
thus at Mickleover, out of a total of seventy-eight
only twenty-two had to make any return in labour,
and in each of these cases the villein held two
bovates or oxgangs of land in return for two days'
labour a week at harvest-time, the occasional
carrying of a load to the lord's garden, and plough-
ing once in the winter and twice in the spring.
Their position, too, is also shown by the fact that
they were cowkeepers ; for time was allowed them,
when working for the lord, to drive home and milk
their cows, and generally to attend to their stock.
In two other Mickleover cases ad opus tenures of
two bovates of land had recently (noo) been com-
muted by the abbot for 2s. a year, a sum which
gives a good idea of the comparatively small
amount of exacted labour.

In the adjoining township of Littleover there
were twenty-two villeins, including Goderic the
reeve, the majority of whom held two bovates of
land ; but in only four cases did they make recom-
pense to the lord by labour. On the same manor
there were, in 1 1 14, five men in charge of the plough
oxen (bovarii) ; each of them held one bovate of

(20)

The Monastic Tenants

land and two acres of marsh in return for making
or providing the irons of three ploughs, the amount
of demesne land being sufficient for three ploughs.
On another of the abbot's Derbyshire manors,
Wellington, there was no "inland" or demesne
land, but there were thirty-two bovates, seven of
which, sufficient for two ploughs, were held by the
lord, The remaining twenty-five bovates were thus
held : — One, with part of the church meadow, by
Goderic the priest ; Unifred, six bovates for 6s. \
Soen, four bovates for 6s. ; Serlo, two bovates for
2s. ; Lewin, the reeve, one bovate for is. ; Hotin,
one bovate for 2s. ; Godwin, half bovate for I id. ;
Lewric and Lewin, each two bovates for 32^. and
two days' work a week from July to Martinmas;
Edwin and three others, each one bovate for \6d.
and two days' work for the like period ; Godric,
half bovate for 8d. and half day's work for the like
period ; and Lewin, the smith, one bovate by the
service of two ploughs, or for \6d. and work as
above.

It was easy, too, on most monastic manors, for
the native tenant or villein to obtain leave to live
elsewhere on payment of a small acknowledgment,
which was a privilege very rarely granted by a
secular lord. Thus, on the manor of Inkpen, Berk-
shire, in the time of Richard I., the Abbot of
Titchfield, as lord, licensed three of his native
tenants to dwell outside the manor in return for
6d. a year apiece at Michaelmas ; in another case
the annual acknowledgment for a like permission

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English Monasteries

took the shape of a ploughshoe (or iron tip for a
wooden share), then worth about 2d. ; and in a third
case, the more costly service of a pair of cart-wheels,
probably worth about is.

The same abbot, according to the customary of
the Hampshire manor where the abbey stood, had
an extraordinarily generous scale of dietary for
those tenants who worked at the lord's autumn
harvesting. Those who worked one day a week
for the whole day received at three o'clock a supply
of food (unum pastum) consisting of bread, with
beer or cider, broth (potagium), and two sorts of
flesh or fish, as well as drink once after dinner. For
supper the fortunate labourer also received a wheat
loaf weighing forty ounces, and two herrings, or
four pilchards, or one mackerel. As such a pastum
by itself seems to have been considered as worth
4*/., this food allowance was certainly remarkably
generous. If three days' labour was the service to
be rendered, the last of the three was recompensed
in a like generous fashion, whilst on the two first
days the pastum was a loaf of barley bread, water
to drink, and two kinds of fish, whilst the change
in the supper consisted merely of the substitution
of a forty-ounce barley loaf for one of wheat.
When the customary tenants had to wash sheep or
do a day's work on the meadows at the lord's will,
they received nothing, save that they had wheat
bread and beer when they had finished ; but the
shearers of sheep had cheese in addition to the
bread and beer. Those who dressed the meadows

(22)

The Monastic Tenants

had no food allowance, but when haymaking they
received bread and beer, with flesh or fish. In
short, it is admitted that on several monastic estates
the harvest payment in food for villein labour cost
more than the labour was worth.

We have looked in vain through many a cus-
tomary of secular manors to find a parallel to this ;
the only approach to it is in other manors in
monastic hands. As a broad rule there was no
food or drink given to the secular lord's villeins for
labour on the demesne, save at corn harvest, and
then only on a somewhat meagre scale.

One other point of the generous treatment of
the tenants on the lands of Titchfield Abbey may
be named. Those who have studied riverside
manorial customs on manors that bordered on the
Thames, Trent, Severn, Ouse (Yorks.), and else-
where, know that not only the free ferrying of the
lord's household and his goods by the tenants was
usually expected, but also the water-transit of
himself or his property to quays or places at a
considerable distance. But the waterside tenants
of Titchfield, who were boat owners — although
they had to take the abbot, canons, or members of
the household and their horses free across the
estuary of the Hamble when necessary — if they
had to convey them up the water to Southampton
were always to be recompensed by a pastum, or by
^d. in money, whichever they preferred.

It may also be mentioned as still further show-
ing the condition of the natives on these monastic

(23)

English Monasteries

lands that they were forbidden to sell their horses
or oxen that had been bred on the manor without
the lord's leave. The very statement of this small
restriction shows that they were at liberty to trade
in cattle or horses outside those of manorial breed.
Nor were they to fell any oak or ash growing on
their holding without the lord's leave, save in the
case of wood required for the repair of their houses
or the strengthening of their hedges. As a rule
timber, for even these purposes, could not be taken
without a permit. The licence fee for marriage
with any one within the manor was two shillings,
with anyone outside, according to the lord's dis-
cretion. The reeve elected by the homage was to
be free of all service of every kind, and from pay-
ment of churchset, pannage-fee, etc., during his term
of office.

The Surtees Society in 1889 printed a most
interesting volume of extracts from the Halmote
Court or Manor rolls of the prior and convent of
Durham from 1296 to 1384. They supply a vivid
picture of the life of the various classes of tenants
on the thirty-five vills under the control of that
monastery, of their comparative independence, and
of the merciful dealing of the conventual lord.
Mr. Booth, as editor, writes in warm praise :

"We see them (the tenants) in their tofts,
surrounded by their crofts, with their gardens of
pot-herbs. We see how they ordered the affairs of
the village when summoned by the bailiff of the
vill to consider matters which affected the common-

(24)

The Monastic Tenants

weal of the community. We hear of their tres-
passes and wrong-doings, and how they were
remedied or punished ; of their strifes and con-
tentions, and how they were repressed ; of their
attempts, not always ineffective, to grasp the
principle of co-operation as shown by their by-
laws ; of their relations with the prior, who repre-
sented the convent and alone stood in relation of
lord. He appears always to have dealt with his
tenants, either in person or through his officers,
with much consideration ; and in the imposition of
fines we find them invariably tempering justice
with mercy."

Another book that is very helpful in showing
the relationships that existed between a great
abbey and its various tenants is the Rentalia et
Custumaria of Glastonbury, printed a few years
ago by the Somerset Record Society. Some of
these West-country tenants had to find part of
their rent in labour, and part in kind or in pay-
ment. There are payments in kind of salmon,
eels, and honey, whilst not a few who worked
direct for the abbey had stated wages. Even in
cases where the villein had to do as much as three
days' work a week from Michaelmas to Midsummer,
and five days' work a week during harvest-time, he
held in recompense several acres of arable land
that he cultivated for himself during the free days,
and had a small share of every acre of corn that
he reaped or grass that he cut for the lord.
The smaller cottagers had a variety of curious

(25)

English Monasteries

customary services in lieu of rent, mostly of a trifling
character. Thus a woman named Alice held her
cottage and half-an-acre of land by the service of
sharpening the reapers' sickles and bringing them
water at harvest-time. Whilst at work for the
abbot the labourers were, as a rule, entertained at
common meals, and they met at Christmas in the
great hall for a special feast.

It may, in short, be taken as a fact, that the
best farming and the greatest degree of fair dealing
and generous treatment were to be found on the
monastic lands. The more this subject is studied,
the more thoroughly are such facts established.
Nor are the reasons why this should be the case
far to seek. However unworthy the superior or
the leading officials of an abbey or priory may
occasionally have been, the system at all events
secured a succession of resident lords for the most
part of high moral and religious character, or of
diligently supervised granges where the estates
were at some distance from the central house.
There were no protracted wardships or minorities ;
the lords were not frequently absent at wars, or
with the court ; and the actual character of the
administration could not possibly have fluctuated
in a like way as on secular estates. The heads of
religious houses, and the chief obedientiaries or
officials, had almost invariably some experience of
manual labour as well as of agricultural farming,
and could sympathise with the toil of the one and
the anxiety of the other. Not infrequently in the

(26)

The Monastic Tenants

larger houses special lands were appropriated to
the support of the burdens of a particular part of
the monastic life, and where this was the case, the
almoner, the sacrist, or the cellarer, as the case
might be, gave his immediate attention to the
cultivation and the produce of such small estates.
Hence came about a continuous contact between
the religious and the tenants of various classes.

Into all this work and superintendence the true
monk brought the spirit, and often the actual
direction, of his rule. Not only did the monk
learn to do field and garden labour as part of his
training, but to enter upon it as a conventual or
common work under the direction of the prior or
one deputed by him. The Cluniacs and the
Cistercians gave a dignity to their work by certain
defined usages. When the brethren were gathered
for work, the abbot himself, in a Cluniac house,
was expected to meet them at the cloister door,
saying, Eamus ad opus manuum, " Let us go forth
to tue work of our hands." Thence they went in
procession, saying a psalm, to the assigned place,
and when there, certain suitable collects with the
"Our Father" and versicles were said ere the
work was begun, the superior taking his share.

Wide and general as was the dispersion of
England's religious houses, it was as nothing com-
pared with the number of their granges, and to
every grange a chapel was attached. These chapels
were divided by a screen ; the choir was for the
brethren, professed and lay, and the western part

(27)

English Monasteries

for the tenants and labourers. That so vast an
amount of land came by benefaction into the
hands of the monasteries throughout England in
mediaeval days may have had certain economic
objections ; but one result, at all events, was
achieved through that fact, namely, the removal to
a great extent of any idea of the degradation of
manual toil, and the linking together of labour and
worship. It was impossible in old days to go
many miles in any direction without alighting
upon a humble chapel specially built for those who
tilled the soil. In a single midland county where
there were only seven religious houses (apart from
hospitals), traces, either in stone or records, have
been found of upwards of twenty grange chapels.
The mere worldling will doubtless view with some
contempt this association of Divine service and the
weary round of agricultural toil ; but for such we
are not writing. Those who have any faith in the
reality of religious joy will realise the blessing of
such opportunities, which were so largely multi-
plied by the monks of England, not only for their
own spiritual advantage, but for those who worked
under and with them.

The great opportunities that the native tenants
or villeins had of securing their freedom, for Holy
Orders or otherwise, on the monastic estates, and
the general advantages of all such tenants in the
matter of education, must be left for another chap-
ter, as they both demand more extended treat-
ment than can be given in a single paragraph or

(28)

The Monastic Tenants

two. The only other point to be now briefly dealt
with is the question of the tenants of nunneries.
Though their numbers were not large, and many
of the houses quite small, still the houses of reli-
gious women suppressed by Henry VIII. were
nearly one hundred and fifty.

As to their lands and estates, in their later
history they were sometimes farmed out at mere
annual rents with but small control from the reli-
gious, so that they would differ but little from any
ordinary landed property. But this was the ex-
ception, and unknown in the earlier centuries of
their existence.

The Gilbertine houses had canons attached to
them with the avowed object of looking after the
temporal affairs of the nuns, and in their elaborate
statutes there are the fullest details as to the
management of the granges by the lay brothers,
as lately set forth in English in Miss Graham's
interesting book on this Order. To most of the
older Benedictine nunneries, as well as to the two
large houses of Nuneaton and Amesbury, de-
pendencies of Fontevrault, special officials were
attached to superintend the tenants.

Nevertheless, the abbess or prioress, if manors
pertained to the house, had all the privileges and
responsibilities attached to the position, notwith-
standing her sex, and was the lady of the manor.
The abbesses of Barking, Nunnaminster, Shaftes-
bury, and Wilton, held of the king an entire
barony, and were actually summoned for a time to

(29)

English Monasteries

parliament as barons. Now and again the con-
vents had for their superiors ladies who were as
remarkable for their zeal in temporal as in spiritual
matters. In the chartulary of the Hampshire
abbey of Wherwell, at the British Museum, is an
interesting and beautiful account of "the blessed
mother, the abbess Euphemia," who ruled the
house from 1226 until her death in 1257. The
following extracts of part of the story of her rule,
written by an inmate of the house shortly after
her death, show the thoroughness of her adminis-
tration in temporal matters, leaving out the account
of her rebuilding most of the conventual buildings
on improved sanitary lines, and planting and
draining the precincts, and doubling the number
of the sisters :

" Euphemia, notwithstanding all her attention
to spiritual affairs, and the good of the actual
monastery, so conducted herself with regard to
exterior affairs, that she seemed to have the spirit
of a man rather than a woman. The court of the
abbey manor, owing to the useless mass of squalid
buildings, and the nearness of the kitchen to the
granary and old hall, was in much danger of fire ;
whilst the confined area and the amount of animal
refuse was a cause of offence both to the feet and
nostrils of those who had occasion to pass through.
The Mother Euphemia, realising that the Lord
had called her to the rule, not that she might live
at ease, but that she might, with due care and
dispatch, uproot, and destroy, and dissipate all

(30)

The Monastic Tenants

that was noxious, and establish and erect that
which would be useful, demolished the whole of
these buildings, levelled the court, and erected a
new hall of suitable size and height. She also
built a new mill some distance from the hall, and
constructed it with great care, in order that more
work than formerly might be done therein for the
service of the house. She surrounded the court
with a wall and the necessary buildings, and round
it she made gardens and vineyards and shrubberies
in places that were formerly useless and barren,
and which now became both serviceable and
pleasant. The manor house of Middleton, which
was close to a public thoroughfare, and was further
disfigured by old and crumbling buildings, she
moved to another site, where she erected permanent
strong buildings and a farmhouse on the bank of
the river. She also set to work in the same way
at Tufton, in order that the buildings of both the
manor houses in that neighbourhood might be of
greater service and more secure against the danger
of fire."

A recently published volume on Wroxall Priory,
Warwickshire, shows how admirably that convent
managed the affairs of the manor. The tenants
dined with the prioress at Christmas.

(31)

CHAPTER III
EDUCATION IN MONASTERIES

A CONSIDERABLE educational work was
accomplished by the monks and regular
canons, quite outside the careful claustral teaching
of the novices who were being trained to enter their
own ranks. An able work, published a few years ago,
on the early schools of England, the writer of which,
however, never lost an opportunity of decrying the
' religious,' attempted to show that English monas-
teries had but little, if any, connexion with education
outside the actual cloister. But his own pages of
documentary school evidence might be cited against
him. We have, for instance, definite information
of the close connexion of monasteries and schools
in documents pertaining to Bruton Abbey, Somer-
setshire, Winchcombe Abbey, Gloucestershire, and
the celebrated abbeys of Evesham and Sherborne,
as well as the priories of Lewes and Launceston.
At some of the more important hospitals, the heads
of which were often termed priors, and whose
brethren were certainly regulars and followed the

(32)

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Education in Monasteries

Austin rule, education was one of their definite
functions. Thus the hospital, or priory, of Bridg-
water educated thirteen poor boys up to the time
of its dissolution, whilst actual thirteenth-century
lists of the names of the boys being taught at the
great York hospital of St. Leonard's, adjoining the
abbey of St. Mary, are still extant. Wherever the
records or rolls of one of the greater monasteries
are extant in any abundance, references to schools
and schooling are almost certain to be found. The
accounts, for instance, of the great priory of Durham
show that the monastic funds were used to further
schooling, altogether apart from the instruction or
training of their novices. The boys who attended
it were called the Children of the Almery ; they
were taught by one of the priory chaplains, who
received a stipend, and they were also fed at the
priory's charge, but seem to have returned home to
sleep. The accounts for 1369 — 70 show that
Nicholas,^ the chaplain, received a stipend of 56^. 8^.
pro eriidicione puerorum. In 1372 — 3 the master of
the Almery school received 395-. 3^., in addition to
a gown, and 2s. for coal. John Garner, master of
the grammar school, received 53^. 4^. about 1430,
payable at Pentecost and Martinmas. George
Trewhytt, in 1500, received a stipend, as grammar
schoolmaster, of 6os., together with a furred gown
worth icxr. lid. In 1536 — 7 the sacrist's roll shows
that the boys' schoolroom was repaired ; and in the
same year the bursar received from the almoner
. to pay for a table for the schoolmaster.

(33) 3

English Monasteries

It is as well to set out a few details like this,
and they could be matched, as we know, from rolls
of other large foundations; for those whose business
it is to belittle English monasteries continuously
assert that they educated no one but their own
novices. Now at Durham we know that the
training of the novices was a matter entirely apart
from that of these boys, as narrated in the well-
known Rites of Durham. There were always at
least six novices under tuition, who went daily to
their books in the cloister, and were under instruc-
tion for seven years. Their master was one of the
older monks, whose duty it was not only to instruct
them but to exercise a general supervision. If any
of them showed marked capacity they were sent to
Durham College, Oxford, which was one of the two
exclusively Benedictine colleges. The rolls have
various entries relative to their expenses in going
to the University. Occasionally outside paid help
was sought for their further instruction at Durham ;
thus one of the very rolls that names the stipend
of the schoolmaster of the Almery boys, also men-
tions a smaller sum paid to one pro erudicione
juvenum monochorum. At Norwich Priory fourteen
boys were educated, and at Winchester eight. At
St. Albans there was a school under secular masters,
who were selected and paid by the abbot of the
monastery; early in the fourteenth century there
was a bequest made to this school to release
sixteen of the poorest of the scholars from all
payment.

(34)

Education in Monasteries

Even so remote a house as that of St. Benet,
Holme, in the swamps of the Norfolk Broads, had
boys under education, apart from the novices, who
were probably the more promising children of the
humbler tenants. Here, too, as at Durham, such
boys formed part of the almoner's charge. It would
indeed be passing strange if no such records of
schoolwork existed, for Benedictine and other
custumals were not compiled for amusement or
to satisfy hypothetical conditions. Such docu-
ments were practical directions for the times
when they were drawn up. If they are con-
sulted, it will be found that it was the ordinary part
of an almoner's duty to have control over any
monastic school, apart from the claustral one for
the novices. He was enjoined to keep the boys
strictly, and had to provide the rods for their dis-
cipline. If they did not learn sufficiently they were
to be discharged, and their places filled by those
who were better disposed.

It is also worth while to mention under this
head, that in the highly interesting volume of
fifteenth-century monastic visitations made by the
Bishops of Norwich, edited a few years ago by
Dr. Jessopp, there are various references to the
schoolmasters and schoolrooms of small priories
which could not possibly have referred to the
cloister-taught novices. At Westacre Priory, Nor-
folk, there was a boarding school for the sons of the
county gentlemen.

The question of manumission, or the freeing

(35)

English Monasteries

from serfdom, is almost too important to take up,
save in a separate chapter ; but a brief comment may
here be made upon this subject, as it has a distinct
bearing upon monastic education. The freeing of
a villein from his tied condition to a particular
manor was very rarely done by a secular lord, but
it was a matter of common occurrence on monastic
manors. Mr. J. Willis Bund, who has recently
edited the highly interesting Sede Vacante register
of Worcester, which covers the various intervals
when that see was vacant and administered by the
Priors of Worcester, draws attention to the fact that
fourteen cases of manumission occurred on the
priory estates during a very brief period about the
beginning of the fourteenth century, and points
out how very large must have been the instances
of freedom-granting by the monasteries if this case
can be taken as a sample. Much evidence can be
gained from episcopal act-books in various dioceses
in corroboration of manumission for the purpose of
taking Orders. The register of Bishop Drokinsford,
of Bath and Wells (1309 — 1329), shows that formal
manumission was often granted at the self-same
time as the newly-created freeman was admitted to
the first tonsure. Bishop Hobhouse, in editing this
register for the Somerset Record Society, seems to
think that there was something rather shocking in
thus taking a rough country lad fresh from the
plough-tail and admitting him to minor Orders
in an uneducated condition. But there is every
probability that the young aspirant for the first

(36)

Education in Monasteries

step in clerkship, freed for the purpose, was one of
the humbler monastic tenants who had already
received at least the rudiments of a clerkly educa-
tion at the hands of his patrons. This, too, is the
probable explanation for the great number of
monastic " titles," or pledges for the temporal
support of those ordained to the sub-diaconate, or
the diaconate, that are to be found in many epis-
copal registers throughout the fourteenth century.
Those of course who were being ordained to serve
in monasteries required no title ; but those who
were ordained as seculars, with monastic titles —
and they often formed a large majority of the whole
candidates — had almost certainly received their
primary education (whether from the ranks of the
villeins or free tenants) at the hands of the particular
monastery that vouched, if necessary, for their
maintenance. No other explanation of these very
frequent monastic titles for seculars — mostly be-
fore the Black Death of 1349— has as yet been
offered.

As to nunneries and education, all the larger
houses, and probably all the smaller ones, in pro-
portion to their capacity, opened their gates freely
for the instruction of young girls, who were not
infrequently accompanied by their brothers when
of tender years. The children of well-to-do parents
often arranged for them to be boarders at the
nunneries in mediaeval days, as is still the custom.
In pre-Reformation days the nunnery was the
popularly accepted place for the education of girls

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English Monasteries

of different ranks. Thus Chaucer, in describing the
miller of Trumpington, says : —

" A wyf he hadde, com of noble kyne ;
Sche was i-fostryd in a nonnery. . . .
What for hir kindred and hir nortelry
That sche had lerned in the nonnerye."

In later days, not long after their suppression,
John Aubrey wrote with great appreciation of the
educational work of the Wiltshire convents.

"The young maids were brought up at nun-
neries, where they had examples of piety and
humility, and modesty, and obedience to imitate
and to practice. Here they learned needlework,
the art of confectionery, surgery .... physic,

writing, drawing, etc It was a fine way of

building up young women, who are led more by
example than precept ; and a good retirement for
widows and grave single women to a civil, virtuous,
and holy life."

Much more evidence, if it was required, could
be produced as to the education so generally given
by English nuns. Quite recently, in turning over
some little-explored forest accounts at the Public
Record Office, an entry was found (not hitherto
referred to in print) of John of Gaunt sending two
bucks from his park at Kenilworth to certain
Spanish damsels at Nuneaton. This led to further
investigation, when it came out that several Spanish
young ladies, who had accompanied the Duke's
second wife to England, were sent to the Priory of
Nuneaton for purposes of education.

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Education in Monasteries

When the Commissioners visited Nunnaminster,
Winchester, in May, 1536, they forwarded a most
highly favourable report of that ancient house,
pronouncing the inmates to be "very clene, ver-
tuous, honest, and charitable conversation, order,
and rule," as testified by the mayor and corpora-
tion and all the country side. They found there
twenty-six "chyldren of lordys, knyghttes, and
gentylmen brought up yn the sayd monastery."
The list of these girls begins with " Bryget Plan-
tagenet, dowghter unto the Lord Vycounte Lys-
ley," and includes members of the families of
Copley, Philpot, Tyrell, Dingley, and Titchborne.
There was also one boy, Peter Titchborne, " chylde
of the high aulter." The casual references to " the
schools " at English nunneries for girls of all con-
ditions of life might be multiplied almost inde-
finitely.

No attempt of any kind was made to replace
these homes for English girls' instruction when
the nunneries were blotted out of existence.

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CHAPTER IV
MONASTIC CHARITIES

THE accounts of every monastery show certain
definite sums set apart for charitable distri-
bution, either in money, clothing, or food. These
sums being charged on real property, came within
the cognizance of the Commissioners who drew up
the Valor of 1534. The amounts in some cases
were considerable, especially when they are com-
pared with the total revenue of the house. Bishop
Hobhouse has thus tabulated them for Somerset-
shire : —

£ *• d.
Glastonbury . . . ... ... 140 16 8

Wells, St. John's 368

Bruton 26 6 8

Taunton ... ... ... 41 9 o

Keynsham ... ... ... 10 15 o

Worspring ... ... ... 800

Bath Abbey 10 2 6

Bath, St. John's 80

Muchelney ... ... ... n 3 o

Montacute 23 8 6

Athelney 22 18 2

Cleve 26 18 4

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Monastic Charities

Barlynch 8 I O

Dunster 14 8

Bridgewater, St. John ... 32 6 8

Total £356 14 10

For the much smaller county of Warwickshire,
the amount of income assigned of obligation to the
poor or in hospitality from the religious houses

was far more considerable, as is shown by the fol-
lowing table : —

£ J. d.

Warwick, St. Sepulchre's ... 25 7 o

Studley 25 6 3

Alcester 6 13 4

Wroxall 23 o o

Pensley ... ... ... 994

Thelesford 2 13 4

Coventry, Benedictines ... 60 1 8 6

„ Carthusians ... 77 6 9

Combe ... 45 16 8

Erbury 26 19 8

Kenilworth 23 17 7

Stoneleigh 52 19 8

Merivale 12 16 8

Maxstoke 22 i 8

Avecote 18 o 6

Nuneaton 34 6 8

Polesworth ... ... ... 31 6 o

Kenwood 8 10 8

£507 9 7

•

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English Monasteries

But such tables as these are wholly inadequate
if we desire to give a true idea of English monas-
tic charity.

In addition to these definitely pledged sums, a
really much larger amount was distributed in kind
by many a religious house up and down the coun-
try. Nor were these doles the mere lazy handing
out of surplus food to be scrambled for by the
sturdiest beggars, as is not infrequently repre-
sented by cynical and ill-informed writers of
romance.

All monastic custumals lay down the most
careful directions as to the duties of the almoner.
"Every conventual almoner," says one English
mediaeval writer, " must have his heart aglow with
charity ; his pity should know no bounds, and he
should possess the love of others in a most marked
degree; he must show himself as the helper of
orphans, the father of the needy, and as one who
is ever ready to cheer the lot of the poor and help
them to bear their hard life." As alms were a
chief daily function of every monastic house, the
almoner had leave of absence from the morning
offices whenever his duties required him. He was
not only the distributor of the alms of the house to
those who sought them, but he was to visit all the
aged, blind, or bedridden poor within a reasonable
distance.

According to the wording of the custumal of
St. Augustine's, Canterbury, recently printed by
the Henry Bradshaw Society, the almoner was to

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Monastic Charities

make the most solicitous enquiry, through some
trustworthy servant, as to the cases of illness and
infirmity in the neighbourhood. When he went in
person on visits of inquiry, two servants accom-
panied him, carrying the materials for immediate
or urgent relief. If perchance the sick man asked
for anything that the almoner did not possess, he
was to do all in his power to acquire it for him.
Although the poor in their need were never sent
empty away from the monastery gate on whatever
day they might apply, every house had its general
day or days in the week when a general distribu-
tion was made to all the needy. At St. Augus-
tine's there were two such days every week
throughout the year, when the needy attended
at the monastic almshouse for the general distri-
bution of food and broken meat that had been
collected from the refectory, the " misericorde,"
and the abbot's chamber and hall. For this pur-
pose attendants went round after meals with
baskets, and vessels for beer. Moreover, such was
their care that no needy applicant should fall
short, that the almoner had full power to go to
the granary and take sufficient grain for the
making of fresh bread for these two days of
general relief if there was any probability of the
surplus bread falling short.

In most monasteries the whole commons of a
deceased monk were distributed to the poor for
thirty days after his death.

To the almoner and his subordinates were

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English Monasteries

entrusted the old clothes of the convent for dis-
tribution to the necessitous. Nor were such gifts
always second-hand, for the almoner was instructed
to lay in a store of stockings and shoes and other
small presents for widows and orphans before the
Christmas season.

In another way also the hospitality of every
monastery was bound to be exercised in propor-
tion to its size, and that was in the entertainment
of travellers of whatever degree. The custumals
insist, in differing terms but with much explicit
detail, on the due discharge of this obligation with
all courtesy and kindness. According to the very
wording of St. Benedict's rule, guests were to be
received as if they were Christ Himself. None
were to be refused admission ; all were to be made
welcome, but more especially monks, clergy, poor,
and foreigners. Every custumal enjoins on the
hosteler or guest-master the primary duties of
having everything ready, clean, and sweet in the
guest-house or the appointed chambers, such as
wood for the fire, straw for the beds, water for the
jugs and basins, rushes for the floor, and candles
for lighting. Guests were to be supplied, if pos-
sible, with better food than the ordinary monastic
commons. Well-to-do guests, using the house as a
convenience on their travels, would doubtless, from
time to time, make presents to the convent treasury,
but such offerings would be quite the exception.

In almost every English episcopal register of
the fourteenth century occur petitions from monas-

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Monastic Charities

teries asking the Bishop's sanction to the appro-
priation of churches or rectories, of which they
already held the advowson. In such cases it is
generally found that the main reason given for
asking the favour is that the stress of hospitality
on the particular house is so great — owing very
often to increase of traffic on a neighbouring high-
way— that the income is insufficient. There cer-
tainly were several objections that can readily be
urged to this removal from a parish of the greater
part of the income arising from tithe and glebe ;
but it may be remarked en passant that in pre-
Reformation days there was, broadly speaking,
much more security for the just administration of
the Church revenues of an appropriated parish
rather than of one that remained a rectory. If
there is any one thing certainly established by the
study of episcopal Act-books, it is that the best of
mediaeval Bishops were practically powerless to
prevent the evils of lay patrons appointing youths
in minor Orders to rectories and of the frequent
non-residence of even older rectors. Consequently
the rectories were far too often merely served by
parochial chaplains removable at will. In the case
of ordination of vicarages, the vicars were per-
petual, and their residence insisted on ; whilst the
income from the greater tithes was, as a rule, fairly
used for good purposes by the religious house to
which it was appropriated, a certain portion of it
being definitely assigned to the poor of the par-
ticular parish.

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English Monasteries

Another point to bear in mind with regard to,
at all events, the spirit of monastic charity, as
shown in statutes and custumals, was the endea-
vour that all the professed religious should culti-
vate a special sympathy with the poor, as God's
poor, and that such ideals should not be the
exclusive privilege of the almoner and sub-almoner,
or to some extent of the hosteler. Hence came
about the maundy, or washing of the feet of the
poor. This was under the superintendence of the
almoner. At Abingdon monastery there was a
daily maundy, when every morning, after the
Gospel of the morrow or early Mass, the almoner
went to the door of the abbey, and selected three
from the poor waiting for an alms, whose feet were
washed by the abbot, or by some monk deputed
by him ; the chosen almsmen were afterwards fed
and given a small present of money. On the great
maundy of Thursday in Holy Week it was the
custom in most Benedictine houses to call in as
many very poor men as there were monks. They
were placed opposite each other in two rows, the
poor men on one side, the monks on the other.
Then, after certain appropriate antiphons, psalms,
and collects, each brother crossed over to his poor
man, knelt before him, endeavouring to see in
him Christ Himself, and washed his feet ; then
rising he kissed him on the mouth and eyes, sat
him down to meat and ministered to him.

At the great monastery at Evesham the rule
provided for the continuous support of thirteen

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Monastic Charities

poor persons, who were fed from the surplusage of
the abbot's table ; and this in addition to the
twelve " maundy " poor who were clothed as well
as fed, and fifty sick persons who were also sup-
ported at the abbey's expense.

The one only claim to monastic alms and mon-
astic charity was to be poor and needy. Modern
"Charity Organization" methods of subjecting
every claimant to strict interrogatories as to the
cause of poverty were as unknown to England's
mediaeval monks as they were to the Christian
Fathers of the sub-apostolic age.

It remains to mention under this heading that
many a monastery, in fact the great majority of
the larger houses, were the chief supporters of
subsidiary hospitals under their control, where
beds were provided for the sick and infirm, and
where food and lodging were also given to needy
wayfarers. This was specially the case when the
religious house was on the confines of or within a
town. Derby, Coventry, and Northampton are
among the many towns that afford examples of
this kind of charitable work. In many other in-
stances a modicum of assistance to hospital work
formed a regular charge on the eleemosynary
funds of the greater foundation. Thus the bursar's
rolls of the great priory of Durham, for the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries, show under the
head of customary alms — in addition to £$ 43. 8d.
distributed to the poor on Maundy Thursday, and
.£13 on the thirteen principal feasts — a sum of

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English Monasteries

about half a mark for shoes for the poor of the
Domus Dei or God's House, and a furthur sum for
a like purpose for five widows of the hospital of
St. Mary Magdalen. The actual almoner's rolls
of the same priory of the fourteenth century and
onwards show that they maintained a great in-
firmary at Durham for the poor entirely in their
own management, £5 6*. being the annual charge
merely for the garments and shoes supplied to the
inmates. There was also a hospital at Witton,
originally designed for lepers, which was managed
and supported by the Durham priory.

Like evidence can be readily produced all over
the country. An interesting item of practical
charity in the West of England may fittingly
conclude these brief gleanings as to instances of
monastic charity. The priory of Bath supported
the hospital that was designed to help the poorest
to the use of the city's curative waters.

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CHAPTER V
MONASTIC DIET

ONE of the commonest and cheapest ways of
abusing the religious, and bringing monastic
life into contempt, has always been to depict the
monk, and sometimes the nun, as usually given
up to extravagant living in the satisfying of the
appetite for food and drink. The coarse ballad of
older times flung such charges broadcast, and to-
day the tenors and basses of high-class concerts
continue to sustain popular delusions by songs of
" Simon the Cellarer " stamp. Moreover, the modern
poster and smaller advertisements appear to think
that nothing tends so much to increase the sale of
wines and spirits as the often cleverly rendered
pictures of jovial monks tippling beer or sampling
vintages amid impossible surroundings.

The Devil, naturally enough, was ever ready
specially to tempt the monk, vowed to a limited
dietary, to gluttony and drunkenness, and to do his
work on insidious and gradual lines. Now and
again, in some very rare cases, he succeeded ; and

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English Monasteries

occasionally a corrupt superior infected for a time
his flock until sharply pulled up by a visitation.
Such cases, though severely punished, could seldom
be kept secret, and the worldling, whose own con-
duct was rebuked by the generally high level of the
religious life, took an evil pleasure in retailing and
exaggerating the news. But on the whole, in days
when there was much proneness to coarse sins even
among those of high position, the vowed religious
of England led exemplary lives, and occupied a
decidedly higher plane than the secular clergy. We
do not take the rest of our history from scurrilous
writers of either prose or verse ; the student who
attempted to do this would be laughed out of court;
it is merely the innate and perpetual hatred of the
world for Christ that has made many an historian,
or writer of historical sketches, so ready to turn
aside from any patient study of the lives of those
who tried specially to deny themselves for the
Master's sake, and to accept cynical sneers in the
place of sober facts.

Perhaps a few plain statements with regard to
the eating and drinking of England's religious may
tend to dispel views that are far too common even
among those who have no desire unfairly to belittle
the cloistered life. A diet roll for the year 1492
that has been printed in extenso, and was fully
analysed by Dean Kitchin, yields interesting results
as to the fare at a large Benedictine house in the
days when they certainly fared better than in earlier
periods. On Monday before Christmas Day there

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Monastic Diet

were placed on the refectory tables of St. Swithun's
for general consumption at the two meals, dishes
of moile made from marrow and grated bread, tripe,
beef, mutton, calves-feet, and 170 eggs. The cost
of this food was 8^. 4*/., or about £4 of our money.
On Christmas Day the fare was only a very little
better, and cost 9-y. 6d. ; the dishes were seasoned
vegetables, tripe, brose or bread soaked in dripping,
beef, mutton, and stew or onion broth. On days of
strict fast their fare that year was salt fish, relieved
by dried figs or raisins as an extra, and mustard.
" The charge for mustard, i$d" says Dean Kitchin,
" runs through all the fast days ; it would appear
that during the time of a meagre indigestible fish
diet the brethren needed something to warm and
stay their poor stomachs."

One or two remarks are necessary for the due
understanding of Benedictine diet-rolls, of which
several are extant besides those of Winchester.
Although there were a variety of dishes, it was
usual, save on feast days, for the monk to partake
of only one dish, though the old as well as those in
the infirmary were often allowed a pittance, or
something extra. The general method of serving
was for two dishes to be handed to or placed in
reach of each ; " if any one cannot eat of one dish
let him eat of the other, if of neither they shall
bring him something else so long as it is not a
delicacy." The great quantity of eggs used — eggs
not being permitted as an addition to but instead
of meat — seems to prove that even in the somewhat

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English Monasteries

easy-going house of St. Swithun, towards the end
of its days, the large majority of the professed
monks did not follow a flesh dietary but only those
who were dispensed. No. 39 of the old Benedictine
rule strictly forbade flesh of quadrupeds or of birds
except to those who were genuinely weak or ill
(omnino debiles et egrotes) ; but this rule was after-
wards relaxed by general councils of the order.

A homely touch occurs in the refectory custu-
mal of the monks of St. Swithun's, Winchester.
The convent gardener had to find apples as a slight
relief to the severe fare of Advent and Lent on
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, save when
some festival intervened. The apples were dis-
tributed in numerical accordance, with due grada-
tion, to the monks in official position. It is to be
hoped that they were permitted to distribute the
fruit within or without the house ! The prior, if
present, had fifteen of the apples, the second prior
ten, the third prior eight, and so on with the rest
of the obedientiaries or officials. In recognition of
his trouble in this respect the gardener was to
receive a conventual loaf on the first and last days
of each of these festivals.

In the same house cheese was provided daily
in the refectory both at dinner and supper, from
Easter until Lent began. Butter was supplied after
a very limited fashion, namely on Wednesdays
and Saturdays, and that only from May 1st to
September I4th.

The three reformed congregations of Benedic-

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Monastic Diet

tines, Carthusians, Cluniacs, and Cistercians, all
made a point of more rigid observance of the dietary
rule. The Carthusians adhered to the absolute
and perpetual refusal of every kind of flesh-meat
right up to the dissolution ; for them it was never
lawful even in times of the gravest illness. The
Cistercians, whose abbeys were so frequent through-
out England, were in the first instance rigid in
prohibiting flesh save in the infirmary. Their
strictness in this respect in England for some time
after their establishment is well illustrated by the
following fact. In June 1246, the new conventual
buildings of the great Hampshire monastery of
Beaulieu were dedicated by the Bishop of Win-
chester at a function which was attended by the
King and Queen and by a large assembly of the
magnates of the realm. At the next visitation
both prior and cellarer were deposed from their
offices because, even on a supreme occasion of this
kind, they had broken the rule by serving secular
visitors with flesh in the refectory. Early in the
fifteenth century power to dispense from this rule
was granted for a time to Cistercian superiors ; but
this worked badly, and in 1485 those who desired
it (even if well in health) might have meat three
days in the week — namely, Sundays, Tuesdays,
and Thursdays, provided they took it in a separate
chamber built for the purpose, usually termed the
misericorde, and not in the refectory or fratry.

By some it was pleaded that the greater cold-
ness of England, as compared with the rest of

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English Monasteries

Christendom, demanded a better diet ; but this
notion did not commend itself to Gilbert of Sem-
pringham, the devout and yet very practical English
founder of the essentially English order that bore
his name. In the guest-houses of the Gilbertine
foundations the canons were prohibited from ever
eating or drinking with their guests, unless it was
an Archbishop or Bishop ; and as it was lawful to
give obedience to a Bishop, if such a guest invited
a canon to eat or drink, he might do so once or
twice to avoid discourtesy. But even in the guest-
houses no flesh was on any account to be served
save for an Archbishop, Bishop, or Papal Legate,
or in the case of real sickness. Supposing a Bishop
required it, Gilbert laid down that none of his
canons or lay -brothers were to prepare the meat,
but the prelate's own attendants, "for," he adds,
" in our houses nothing of the nature of flesh or
blood ought ever to be eaten save by the sick, nor
within the walls of the granges save by the sick and
hired labourers."

The remarkable series of obedientiary rolls of
every kind pertaining to the great Benedictine
priory of Durham, which have recently been printed
for the Surtees' Society in three volumes by Canon
Fowler (1898 — 1901), throw remarkably full light
on the dieting of monks in a great house whose
funds were never lacking. The accounts are ex-
ceptionally complete for the year 1333 — 4. The
cellarer's roll contains each week's expenditure
for food. The roll begins with the week after

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Monastic Diet

Martinmas, when the following were the cellarer's
purchases : — 1000 herrings, 6s. gd. ; a horse-load of
whiting, 4s. ; 7 salmon, plaice, and smelts, 4^. 2d. ;
pork and veal, gs. o^d. ; 7 sucking pigs, 14 geese
and 17 fowls, 7$. ^\d. ; wildfowl, 3^. ; butter and
honey, lod. ; 48 fowls, Ss. ; arid 700 eggs, 42s. 6d.
The following are the entries for the week that in-
cluded Christmas Day : — 8 horse-loads of whiting,
26s. qd. ; 2 horse-loads of plaice, smelts, and lobsters,
ifs. id.\ 2 turbots and I salmon, bought in the town,
6s. ox/. ; veal, 3^. 2d. ; 68 fowls for gifts, $s. 4^. ; 10
ducks and wildfowl, $s. gd. ; 4 stone of cheese and
4 stone of butter, ?s.6d.; and 12 fowls, 2s. 2d.
There were no eggs bought in Christmas week,
but in the following week 900 were purchased.
Throughout the whole of Lent the weekly pur-
chases were strictly confined to fish, not even eggs
being allowed ; the week before Lent 900 eggs were
bought, and in Easter week 300. It may here be
mentioned that the eggs purchased by the cellarer
in the whole year amounted to 44,140. The pur-
chases made in the second week in Lent were : —
9 horse-loads of whiting, bought at the seaside and
elsewhere, 43 s. 6\d. ; 9 fresh salmon and 3 turbot,
26s. lod. ; and 27 crabs, plaice, smelts, and mussels,
6.y. yd. The third week's purchases were : — 1000
red herrings, bought at Newcastle, gs. ; 9 horse-
loads of whiting, bought at the seaside and in the
town, 55-r. gd. ; 2 salmon, 5^. 2d. ; 80 salt fish bought
at Newcastle, i6s. 6d. ; and 140 salt mackerel and
mussels, for the servants, 6s. yd. Lent was evidently

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English Monasteries

rigorously kept, for twice during the great fast the
prior entertained an earl and his household without
any change in the fish diet. This monastery was
certainly fortunate in being within easy distance of
the best part of England's fishing coast. The
Durham monks and their retainers and guests
could always procure a considerable variety of fish
diet. During this particular year, in addition to
the varieties already named, the cellarer was able
to supply for the tables, whelks, kippers, cod, cod-
ling, trout, skate, sturgeon, eels, lamprey, fresh
herrings, and porpoise.

There must have been a very moderate and
occasional use of both cheese and butter ; the year's
purchase of the former only amounted to 32 stone
2 Ibs., and of the latter to 25 stone. Rice, which
was imported in large quantities from the East, has
been mentioned as a pittance at Winchester ; on
two occasions in the whole year it seems to have
served as a delicacy for a few at Durham, for there
are two entries of the purchase of 12 Ibs. of rice.

When the number of mouths to be filled at this
great monastery are considered, it is obvious that
the weekly purchases of the cellarer, which averaged
about £5 a week, must have been wholly inade-
quate for the bare support of life. It is therefore
a relief to find that he had a well-stocked larder of
salt flesh and fish to fall back upon. In this year
William Hexham, the cellarer, had in the larder 2O2
41 Marts " or Martinmas cattle, killed and salted for
winter and subsequent consumption, some from

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Monastic Diet

their own manors, and others bought at Darlington
and elsewhere. A large stock of mutton, and
occasionally lamb, beef, and pork, was also received
at intervals from the manors, and now and again
purchased, which was also salted down for larder
purposes. Moreover, upwards of sixty barrels of
herrings, and 1000 cod fish were bought to be salted
as larder storage, as well as 205 dried fish (probably
large cod) for the servants.

This seems a mighty store ; but how many were
there to support ? The ideal number of monks for
a large Benedictine establishment was seventy, but
it was seldom realised. We know the exact num-
bers at Durham on various occasions ; probably at
this date it was sixty. Then there were the
chaplains, the lay brothers, the singing boys, the
almonry boys, and a considerable number of paid
servants of the house, as well as those of the priors'
lodgings, and of the great and roomy guest-house,
and the monks' infirmary. The cellarer had to
provide food for all these, as well as for the large
infirmary outside the gates, and to a considerable
extent for a hospital in the town. Altogether, the
mouths that had to be provided for (inclusive of
guests of all ranks) may be safely estimated as
averaging at least 250 a day. The great guest-
house, with its courtly sets of apartments (the prin-
cipal of which were termed the King's chambers, the
knights' chambers, and the clerks' chambers) were
frequently filled, and this irrespective of humbler
lodgings for middle-class folk and the poorer way-

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English Monasteries

farers. Moreover, " the releefe and almesse of the
hole Convent was alwaies open and free, not onely
to the poore of the citie of Durham, but to all the
poore people of the countrie besides." — (Rites of
Durham.} During 1333-4, the King paid three
visits to the priory, once accompanied by the
Queen. The King's justices tarried with the prior
when visiting Durham ; on one of these three occa-
sions during this year they stayed at the monastery
for four days, and on another for a whole week.
During another whole week the prior entertained
the members of his council ; visits were also paid
by bishops and earls, on one occasion by two
bishops at the same time. The retinue of these
distinguished visitors was always considerable. It
may also be remembered, when thinking of the
two hundred salted " marts " that found their way
into the larder during the year, and the carcases of
sheep bought for salting or occasionally for fresh
use, that the cattle of those days were decidedly
smaller than what are now seen in butchers' shops,
whilst the sheep resembled the small Welsh
mutton.

It is no guess-work that the Durham cellarer
provided all the necessary food for the hostelries
and for the prior's table, or even an assertion based
upon the usual custom of Benedictine houses. It
is testified to in extant rolls. For this year, 1333-4,
Brother Robert de Middleham was hosteler, and
his expenses show that he found — in addition to
wine, of which more anon — nothing save diverse

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Monastic Diet

special pittances for guests and for prior, sub-prior
and their companions, at diverse special occasions,
at the small cost of 2is. $d. ; a pittance made to
the convent in the refectory on the first Rogation
Day at the price of 26s. ; and a pittance of 1 1 s. 6d.
provided for the chaplain who heard the confes-
sions in Lent of the parishioners of St. Oswald's.
Everything else, even for kings, bishops, or earls,
was provided by the cellarer ; and we find at the
end of his roll, under the heading Empcio specierum,
various small purchases of almonds, pepper, saf-
fron, mace, cinnamon, sugar, rice, honey, figs, and
raisins, of much of which it is expressly stated that
it was for the prior's table. In later days delicacies
of confectionery were occasionally provided by the
priory cooks or purchased, such as anise comfit, mad-
ryan, gobett reall, pinyonade, sugar-in-plate, char-
decoyne, or geloffors, but always for the guests.

So far as the Durham rolls are concerned, a
close study of them proves beyond doubt that the
fare of these monks was (for the times in which
they lived, when meat was plentifully enjoyed by
the poorest) simple in quality, and moderate in
quantity, and further, that the fasts were most
carefully observed. Neither in amount nor in
variety of food did the monks of Durham fare so
well as the inmates of an average English work-
house of the present day.

A recent most capable historical writer (Miss
Bateson) has said : rt At St. Albans the diet seems
to have been very severe ; it was an innovation

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there in the thirteenth century to allow the sick in
the infirmary to have meat. It is clear from the
detailed custumals of Abingdon and Evesham that
mutton and beef were not eaten in their refectories,
but bacon was generally consumed, and all kinds
of fat."

The pittance was an occasional relief to the
usual strict dietary in the way of some exceptional
or extra food or delicacy. In some monasteries,
as at Durham, it was customary for the chief officials
or obedientiaries to give a pittance to the whole
convent on some special festival. In not a few
monasteries there were special endowments for
certain pittances, usually of early origin. This is
a matter of decided interest in connexion with
monastic fare ; for it shows that early benefactors
were so impressed with the usual ascetic fare of the
religious that they desired to secure for them an
occasional alleviation. The word "pittance" has
been by some, rather absurdly, derived from picta,
a small coin of Poitiers, imagining that it was
originally a dole of that value ; but almost every
monastic roll with which we are acquainted spells
it pietancia, and the true derivation comes from
pietas and implies pity or commiseration. There
are lists of provisions made for pittances both on
flesh days and fish days at St. Albans in the second
volume of the annals of that house in the Rolls
Series. In some houses it happened that a fashion
set in of giving lands or rents for pittances, and
their very frequency, as lands increased in value,

Monastic Diet

and the sternness of rules of dietary relaxed, be-
came an embarrassment. In these circumstances
the whole question of the pittances required re-
arrangement, for it would have been extravagant
and luxurious to continue to use such funds accord-
ing to the primary intention of the pious founders.
In such cases the whole funds of this kind were
sometimes put in the custody of a particular
obedientiary who expended them in accordance
with the decision of the chapter and visitor, and
was himself termed the pittancer.

A good instance of this occurs in the later rolls
of the abbey of St. Benet's, Holme, many of which
are at the Bodleian, and have never been published
or printed. John Takylston was both prior and
pittancer of this abbey at the beginning of Henry
VIII.'s reign. His accounts for 15 1 1 — 12 show that
his total receipts as pittancer for that year were
£9 ifs. \\d.y which would have been a monstrous
sum to spend on extra fare. In genuine food-
pittance the only expenditure was in providing figs
and other fruit for the convent at a cost of $s. 4^.,
and in a sum of \2d. spent on peas and beans and
butter, probably for some tasty dish of vegetables
specially cooked, for peas and beans had for some
time been considered only fit for cattle. The seven
principal feasts of the year were brightened by a
very moderate expenditure on wine ; the total cost
for the whole seven occasions was but i6s., and as
the monks of St. Benet's then numbered twenty-
three, the individual consumption on each occasion,

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even if the wine was strictly confined to the pro-
fessed monks, must have been diminutive. Three
definite pittances, of early bequest, intended to
provide an extra dish for each inmate, were at this
time commuted for money payments, each monk
receiving at different periods of the year the
respective sums of 6d., iod., and I2d., the abbot
and prior both receiving double the amount. Small
sums of money for each religious to provide personal
necessaries, or to serve as pocket-money when on
exterior service, were not unusually allowed in the
later days of English monasticism. The consider-
able balance still left in the hands of this pittancer
was used in a variety of ways towards the relief of
the needs of the house. Thus the pittancer that
year found his own clothes and the wages and
clothes of his servant ; made payments for collec-
tion of rents, for felling trees and making faggots
for fuel, for mowing the grass of the cloister-garth ;
discharged the abbey's share of 33^. due to the
King as voted by Convocation, and the sum of 45.
as the abbey's subsidy to the general chapter of the
Benedictines ; paid for the repairing of the glass
windows of his own apartments, and the re -thatch-
ing it with reed ; and had withal 3 s. left to distribute
in alms during Lent. Those who know the dreary
swamps and general surroundings of St. Beliefs
will not be surprised that early benefactors desired
to fortify the inmates against damp and chills by
the relief of a more generous diet ; and we cannot
but admire the self-restraint and wise economy that

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Monastic Diet

directed the superfluity of these pittances into other
channels. The Benedictines, in their practical deal-
ings with the benefactions of the piety or pity of
former centuries, set an example which might
with profit be followed by modern Charity Com-
missioners.

This brings us to the consideration of what the
religious drank. It is scarcely necessary to say that
the solace of tea, coffee, or cocoa was utterly un-
known to the monks and nuns of Old England.
Water as a regular beverage was almost equally
unknown ; home-brewed beer was the usual drink
that accompanied every meal. Most of the religious
formed no exception in this respect to the general
rule. Beer-drinking was accepted in England as a
matter of course, and when we learn occasionally
of the limit allowed, it does not seem to err on the
side of niggardliness. Number 40 of the old
Benedictine rule laid down that an emina of wine
was to suffice for the day, save when extra labour
or the heat of summer made more desirable, in
which case it was left to the judgment of the
Superior. Much discussion used to arise on the
continent as to the true interpretation of an emina,
and it was generally agreed that it meant about
two-thirds of a pint of our liquid measure. But so
rarely was wine used in England that this rule was
but seldom required. Among the mitigations of
the rule sanctioned by the Pope for the English
province, as cited in the customary of St. Augus-
tine's, Canterbury, was the permission to drink

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"beer, which, as the rule mentions no particular
measure, may be had daily as commons without
any precise limit (in communi sine taxacionealiqud)"
This does not, of course, mean unlimited beer, but
that it was left to each house to regulate the quan-
tity. The brewhouse was a general adjunct of the
outer conventual buildings; in the larger houses
beer was brewed in two qualities. The ordinary
beer was very light. Pious Gilbert of Sempring-
ham, in his minute regulations, could scarcely im-
agine a grosser or more awkward piece of careless-
ness on the part of the canons who supplied the
temporal needs of the nuns than a failure in beer.
In that portion of the Gilbertine rule that concerns
itself with the provision of beer it is laid down
that : " For the avoiding of scandal, if the nuns,
having no beer, are obliged to drink water, it is
only just that the masters of the house who pro-
vide the supplies shall share in their deprivation.
Whenever the nuns, through the negligence or
carelessness of the proctors, have to drink water,
the four proctors are to associate themselves with
them in their water-drinking, even if on a journey
or absent from the house, unless across the seas."

With regard to wine, irrespective of the much
stricter dieted reformed congregations, the ordinary
Benedictine monk or the regular canon but rarely
tasted it, and only on special festivals or at times
of illness. Gilbert of Sempringham enjoined on
his canons never to take wine unless it was well
watered. The higher class guests were responsible

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1 •

Monastic Diet

for the lion's share in the consumption of wine at
the larger monasteries. These houses served, inter
alia, as inns, minus the bills, for the magnates of
the land, including royalty, when on their travels.
For such visits they were usually well prepared.
Those who study the itineraries of our kings as
gained from the date places of public documents
know how frequent was the entertainment of
royalty within monastic precincts. Even in Nor-
thamptonshire, where there were several royal
residences, kings sojourned with the Cistercians
of Pipewell and the White Canons of Sulby, as
well as with the lordly Benedictines of Peter-
borough.

The wine for entertaining guests was in the
joint charge of the abbot or prior and the hosteler.
In the already cited Durham hosteler's account for
1333-4 there occurs an expenditure of 35^. io</.
for sixty-five gallons of wine, bought for the prior's
lodgings, for the solar, and for the guests who
attended at the time of audit. The practice of
giving wine at the time of drawing up the accounts,
when the bailiffs of different manors and other
external officials attended, was usual. Even the
pittancer of St. Benet's expended &/. in wine when
his accounts were made. At Durham there were
occasional large purchases of wine, intended to
last for some considerable time, and there always
appears to have been a good store. In 1299 nine
casks of wine were bought at Hull and seven at
Hartlepool and Newcastle at a cost, including

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carriage, of £36 js. Just a century later the
bursar bought fifty-two gallons of red wine for
the prior for filling up a cask. When the Justices
were entertained by the prior, certain special and
more costly wines were generally set upon the
guest table; thus in 1528-9, although £g had
been spent that year on ordinary red wine, the
bursar bought malmsey and claret in the town, at
a cost of 2os., on an occasion when the Justices
and the Bishop happened to be among the prior's
guests. Wine was also offered to the confraters,
or well-to-do lay associates of the house, when they
were admitted to the confraternity, or when they
visited the house. The Rites of Durham expressly
says of the prior that " for ther better intertayne-
ment he had evermore a hogsheade or two of wynes
lying in a seller appertayninge to the halle to serve
his geists withall."

Wine was probably always on the prior's board,
and would be set before him when he dined in the
refectory. Its use by the Durham monks at large
was rare in occurrence, and then in most moderate
quantities. A curious custom prevailed on St.
Aidan's Day (August 3ist), when wine and pears
were provided for the whole establishment ; the
usual amount was 900 pears and nine gallons of
wine. The wine was of a cheap light character,
for on one occasion, when the separate price of this
pittance is given, the pears cost 2s. gd. and the
nine gallons of wine only 6s. 6d. In 1413 four
gallons and a pint of wine were given to the

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Monastic Diet

convent on the feast of the Purification, at a charge
of 4*. \\d., entered in the almoner's accounts. A
small quantity of wine was usually given to the
novices in the common room on the day of their
profession.

The master of the conventual infirmary gave a
pittance of spices and wine to those in his depart-
ment of the monastery on St. Andrew's Day ; but
he also regularly provided it for the sick and
weakly in special cases. The quantity used for
this purpose was but small ; for several years in
succession in the fifteenth century the infirmarian's
charge for wine only amounted to $s. or 6s. ; but
perhaps this was the wine for the altar of the
infirmary chapel, that for the sick coming from the
cellarer's stores.

The constant round of Masses in a religious
house required a considerable supply of wine.
Though sometimes a succession of sacrist rolls are
found wherein there is no wine entry — in which
cases the church wine would come from the
common store — it is usual to find that the sacrist
purchased specially for this purpose. At Durham,
in the fifteenth century, this officer's roll for many
years contains the annual entry of a pipe of red
wine for altar use. A pipe was 126 gallons, so
that this works out at about three pints a day ;
from such a quantity as this, when the great
number of altars and Celebrations are remembered,
there could have been but little, if any, surplus.
Henry III. granted charters to the great Cistercian

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Abbey of Beaulieu, and four of the other large
monasteries of the south of England, bestowing
on each of them a yearly tun of wine, out of the
prisage wine of Southampton, for sacramental
purposes. The sacristan of St. Benet's spent
26s. 8d. on wine for the church in the very year
that preceded the Dissolution.

About the most interesting wine entry in the
whole of the voluminous accounts of Durham
priory is one on the roll of Adam of Darlington,
bursar, for the years 1355-6. Edward III. returned
hastily from the north of France in November,
1355 ; for whilst he was invading France, the Scots
invaded English territory and surprised Berwick.
In January Edward, in his turn, invaded and
ravaged Scotland and recovered Berwick. On his
march to the north the priory sent forth one of
their monks, William de Masham, to join the King,
in charge of the sacred banner of St. Cuthbert, and
with him he also took a pipe of wine. May we
not conclude that this was intended for the relief
of the wounded on the expected battle-fields ?

The last monastic record relative to wine that
shall be here named tells of the self-denial of the
monks of St. Albans. At a time when funds were
sorely needed for the rebuilding of the refectory
and dormitory, the monks agreed to forego their
allowance of wine on festivals altogether for fifteen
years, the value to be added to the building fund.

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CHAPTER VI
MONASTIC MORALITY AND FOREST COURTS

OEEING that a well-occupied life is always
w3 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 consider-
able decadence, the commissioners for dissolving
the Austin priory of Ulvescroft describe the canons
as engaged in " embrothering [illuminating] or

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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 little-
ness displayed by superiors, or still rarer lapses
from virtue. Thus, a fourteenth-century Cistercian

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Monastic Morality & Forest Courts

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 mediaeval 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 Hamp-
shire, but by the Benedictines of Bedfordshire, and
by the White Canons of Sussex ; whilst Beauvale,
or the Fair Valley, was the choice of the Notting-
hamshire Carthusians, Belvoir of the monks of the

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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 1'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 Mere-
vale. 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

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Monastic Morality & Forest Courts

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 tobe 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
Cure 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 journey-
ing 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 dis-
tribute his forces.

We believe, with emphasis, after a close and
absolutely candid study of the whole of the epis-
copal 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

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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 par-
ticular 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.

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Monastic Morality & Forest Courts

Over the great wild stretch of Peak Forest, Derby-
shire, or certain parts of it, the abbeys of Basing-
werk, Beauchief, Darley, Dernhall, Dieulacrcs,
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 some-
times 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 Claren-
don, 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 apply-
ing 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

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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 con-
sumed within conventual buildings would be re-
served 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

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Monastic Morality & Forest Courts

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 i*^*"^
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
extraordinarly 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

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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 Sher-
wood ; and yet there was hardly a parish pertaining
to that forest whose rector or vicar was not, at

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Monastic Morality & Forest Courts

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.

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CHAPTER VII
VISITATIONS

IN accordance with the various Canons and
Councils, both general and particular, all
English monasteries in pre-Norman times were
subject to the Bishop as visitor ; but after the Con-
quest, when special houses gained in power, and new
or reformed congregations obtained a lodgment,
the diocesan's right of visiting became materially
abridged. Up to their end all the English Bene-
dictine houses of men or women, which numbered
about 200, were subject, save for a few exceptions,
to the Bishop. In fact, so great was the Bene-
dictine influence in England that no fewer than
nine of the old cathedral foundations had monastic
chapters, whilst another one (Carlisle) belonged to
the canons regulars of St. Austin. In these cases,
which were peculiar to England, the Bishop was
regarded as taking the place of the abbot, whilst

Visitations

the acting superior of the house itself was only
termed prior. All the Austin houses, save one,
were also subject to their diocesan. The exempt
Benedictine abbeys were Westminster, St. Albans,
Bury St. Edmunds, Battle, St. Augustine's, Canter-
bury, and Peterborough ; the last named was, more-
over, subject to the Primate. To these must be
added the Austin abbey of Waltham. In these cases
the cumbrous and costly custom prevailed of either
very heavy fees or a journey to Rome for confir-
mation ; their exemption seems to have proved a
hindrance to discipline and good order.

The two great orders of the reformed Benedic-
tines, the Cluniacs, and the Cistercians — the latter
of whom were a great power in England — were
free from diocesan visitation, and the appointment
of their superiors had not to be confirmed by the
Bishop, though his benediction was usually sought.
The exemption in each of these cases arose from
the central houses, which were respectively at
Cluny and Citeaux, in Burgundy, obtaining
general powers of visitation throughout Christen-
dom. The White or Premonstratensian canons,
who were subject to some extent to their central
house at Pr^montre in the diocese of Laon, also
obtained papal exemption from their diocesans,
although it was not unusual for the abbot and
chapter-general of Prdmontre" to appoint a Bishop
as visitor-general of the whole of the English pro-
vince. The Gilbertines, as well as all houses of
mendicant friars, were also exempt.

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English Monasteries

It thus came to pass that in certain dioceses
where the Benedictines or Austins were not very
strong, the Bishop only visited a minority of the
religious houses of his diocese. It has sometimes
been assumed that these exemptions of whole
orders conduced to disorder and carelessness.
Although it would seem that the episcopal super-
vision of the diocesan of ea,ch religious house was
on the whole most desirable, the supposition of
laxness in its absence cannot be sustained ; and
the visitations made by the Commissioners of par-
ticular orders were, as a rule, more regular in
occurrence, and, for the most part, as searching in
character.

The customary time for visitations was once
in every three years ; but in the cases where the
diocesan was visitor the period was not unfre-
quently deferred ; though sometimes, in cases of de-
linquency, repeated at much shorter intervals. The
object of the visit was twofold — namely, to ascer-
tain the temporal as well as the spiritual and moral
conditions of the house. The former was a most
important part of the inquiry, for not only were
houses taught to be as far as possible self-con-
tained, but in the days when funded property was
almost unknown, the very existence of the house
depended upon the condition of its pasturage and
tillage, and the amount of cattle, grain, and general
stores for the sustaining of life. The visitor was
received with peculiar honour, met at. the gates in
procession, and conducted to church and chapter -

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Visitations

house. In addition to the usual services, the
Bishop preached a sermon in the chapter-house
to the inmates, and his secretary often entered the
text in the brief entry of the visitation made in
the episcopal register — possibly with a view to
check the Bishop giving the like discourse on the
next occasion. The Bishop, with whom was gene-
rally associated some diocesan official as assessor,
began the visitation by asking for a report from
the superior as to the general condition of the
house, both temporal and spiritual, and as to the
conduct of the inmates. Then the obedientiaries,
or those who held office, were called before him in
due gradation, each one being specially questioned
as to the affairs of his own office. After this each
religious inmate, novices as well as the professed,
was called up in turn before the visitor, the exami-
nation being always conducted severally and sepa-
rately, so that the communication might be un-
checked and frank. All were expected to be
absolutely open in their declarations without fear
or favour, and to conceal no evil of any kind of
which they were aware. Meanwhile the Bishop's
secretary took notes of the evidence given by each.
Where everything seemed going smoothly, and
there was no reason to suspect any hidden mis-
chief, the visitor sometimes allowed inmate after
inmate merely to testify his Omnia bene, or that all
was well ; on the contrary, the questions became
searching if there appeared to be any attempt at
concealment.

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English Monasteries

It was difficult under such a system, not only
for scandals to escape, but even for the milder
forms of disorder or laxity to avoid detection.

The most complete record of English monastic
visitation is to be found in a volume at the Bod-
leian, pertaining to Norwich diocese during the
episcopates of Bishops Goldwell and Nicke ; it
covers a period of forty years, namely from 1492
to 1532. The number of religious houses, exclu-
sive of hospitals and collegiate churches, under
episcopal visitation in this diocese was 34; those
that were exempt, including thirty friaries, were 38.
Details are given of 141 formal visits paid to the
religious houses of Norfolk and Suffolk, the actual
statements of each inmate being briefly recorded.
In the large majority of cases the visitor found
that no reform of any kind was needed. Fifteen
visits, or about one in nine, brought to light mat-
ters that certainly required mending, and for the
reformation of which strict injunctions were issued.

Out of thirty-four visits paid to the eight nun-
neries of the diocese, one resulted in detecting a
case of grievous sin, and there was a painful scandal
brought to light in one of the inspections of the
Austin canons of Westacre. By the end of the
fifteenth century the numbers had become much
reduced through poverty in many of the houses of
East Anglia, particularly in the small settlements
of Austin canons. It is estimated that there were
then in Norfolk diocese about 230 Austin canons,
1 20 Benedictine monks, and 80 Benedictine nuns.

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Visitations

There seems no reason whatever to doubt that the
vast majority of these were leading exemplary
lives. As an evidence of the patience of the visitor
in hearing every kind of complaint, it may be
mentioned that the older nuns of Flixton com-
plained to the Bishop of the mutton served in the
refectory being burnt, and the beer being too weak;
the further complaint as to the too rapid repetition
of the psalter at the offices would probably appeal
to him as more worthy of the attention of the
diocesan. The whole of these visitations were
printed a few years ago for the Camden Society,
under the capable editorship of Dr. Jessopp. In
commenting upon this valuable proof as to the real
condition of England's religious houses just before
their fall, the learned editor cordially welcomes all
possible publicity being given to further documen-
tary evidence from any known source, adding that
"... then it may happen that we shall be forced
to confess that in the sixteenth century there were
creatures in human form who exhibited as shock-
ing examples of truculent slander, of gratuitous
obscenity, of hateful malignity, as can be found
among the worst men of any previous or succeed-
ing age, but we shall have to look for them, not
within the cloisters, but outside them, among the
robbers, not among the robbed."

The Worcestershire Historical Society has done
good service in printing the important Sede Vacante
Register in the possession of the Dean and Chapter
of Worcester. When there was a vacancy in the

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English Monasteries

see, the spiritualities were administered by the
Prior of Worcester, who then had the right to visit
both the parochial clergy and the religious houses
subject to diocesan control. This register covers
all the vacancies — sometimes extending over more
than a year — between the death of Bishop Giffard
in 1301 to the enthronement of Bishop Bourchier in
1435. During this period the prior, either in person
or through two commissioners, visited the episco-
pally-controlled monasteries, eighteen in number, on
eleven different occasions. Eighty-four of these
visits are duly recorded ; only two of them revealed
any special cause of offence, one of them being at
Wroxall nunnery and the other at Studley priory.
This voluminous register has been fully edited, with
prolonged introductions, by Mr. J. Willis Bund,
chairman of Quarter Sessions, etc. ; a gentleman
entirely free from mediaeval proclivities. Com-
menting on the usually received supposition of
monastic immorality, he considers that this register
disproves such charges, and gives it as his opinion
that the English monastic clergy were not one bit
more immoral " than the secular clergy of the nine-
teenth century."

The jests and jeers of cynical and satirical
writers of mediaeval days, who were themselves
usually men of depraved lives, as to the supposed
laxity of life of monks and nuns, based upon the
actions of a few degraded and disgraced religious,
coupled with the foul slanders of Henry VIII.'s
self-interested tools, have so long succeeded in

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Visitations

saturating unreflective minds with scandal that it
has become difficult for even well-intentioned writers
(who have made no personal investigations) to
escape from the evil and lying atmosphere with
which the whole subject has been so long sur-
rounded.

A particularly fine and exhaustive topogra-
phical work has recently appeared entitled The
Records of Wroxall. Wroxall Priory, Warwickshire,
was a small house of Benedictine nuns with an in-
teresting history. In these pages full extracts are
given (with one overlooked omission) of all the
visitations of the priory recorded in the Worcester
diocesan registers. The earliest of these is 1268,
and the latest in 1433. There are fourteen recorded
visitations in all, made either by the Bishop or by
the prior of Worcester's Commissaries sede vacante,
and in only three of the fourteen was any evil
detected— namely, in 1323, 1339, and 1410. Yet
Wroxall is by far the worst case of any nunnery in
the Worcester diocese, so far as extant visits are
concerned. Its character was remarkably good on
the eve of its suppression. Henry VIII.'s own
Commissioners of 1536, six in number, reported
that the nuns then numbered five with the prioress,
and were all " off good converssacion and lyvyng,
and all desyer yf the house be suppressed to be
sent to other religious houses." The priory itself
is described as " a propre litle house, and in con-
venyent and good repaire." The writer of this
Wroxall book, who is evidently not desirous to go

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English Monasteries

beyond the truth, has failed to find a scrap of evi-
dence between the visitation of 1433 anc^ ^a^ °f
1536 ; and yet, although not a breath of scandal is
known to have rested on the nuns of Wroxall since
1410, he actually ventures thus to libel the last
days of this house entirely out of his own imagina-
tion : " Idleness had crept within its walls, together
with the vices of the world ; it had become more a
source of danger than a blessing to the community
itself and to the public outside." Such an unsup-
ported statement is a blot on the book where it
occurs, and it is cited here as a proof of the usual
unfairness of the average English mind, saturated
with over three centuries of reckless misrepresenta-
tion, when it approaches the question of the vowed
religious life.

During the vacancy between the death of Arch-
bishop Morton in October, 1500, and the election
of his successor in the following April, the prior of
Christ Church, Canterbury, asserted his right to
hold metropolitical visitations sede vacante. At this
time the sees of Winchester and Ely were also both
vacant, and Dr. Hede, as commissary of the prior,
made a visitation tour of both dioceses. The
results, giving the details of the individual state-
ments of the inmates, are extant in a volume at
Canterbury, which, it is hoped, may ere long be
printed. The record of this series of visits, un-
known save perhaps to half-a-dozen ecclesiologists,
is of considerable value in bearing remarkable
witness to the general integrity of the religious

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Visitations

houses. Such evidence is all the more valuable,
because of the obvious thoroughness of the work
undertaken by Dr. Hede ; in a single case, the
large nunnery of Romsey, there was a sad scandal,
and the investigation led to the dismissal of the
abbess.

With regard to the visitations scattered through-
out episcopal registers, the few who are acquainted
with the whole series of these act-books will agree
— and they only are competent to judge — (i) that
only those cases where injunctions were issued are
entered in any detail, in order that it might be
seen whether the reformanda were carried out;
(2) that where injunctions on one or two points
were required, it was usual for the Bishop's official
to introduce a variety of customary decrees, which
were for the most part a summary of the salient
points of the general rule, and which were con-
sidered suitable for the admonition of the religious
all over the country ; (3) that allowance must
always be made for the stilted and hyperbolical
phrasing of official ecclesiastical Latin — a fact
universally admitted by all mediaeval scholars ;
and (4) that incidental mention is made in these
registers of a very great number of visitations
taking place of which there is no detailed record,
and in which it is but common sense to conclude
there was nothing to redress.

To these reflections may be added the caution
that ought to be obvious to everyone of intelli-
gence, that the object of a visitation is to detect

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English Monasteries

laxity and possible evil, and not to record devout-
ness and good discipline. To judge of the bulk of
the religious from a few given up to bad living>
and who were heavily punished for their misdeeds,
is as monstrous and childish as it would be to con-
demn the inhabitants of some given area by the
actions of the minute minority who figure in the
police-court records.

So far as the visitation of monasteries by dele-
gated ecclesiastics from the parent house is con-
cerned, we are not aware of any general record of
that character having come to light, either at home
or on the continent, with regard to the Cistercians.
As to the visitations of English Cluniac founda-
tions, Sir G. F. Duckett did good service in print-
ing a great amount of matter of the thirteenth
century, together with some of later date, from the
original records in the National Library at Paris.
As these important visitations have recently been
the subject of controversy, it is not necessary to
allude to them any further, save by saying that it
is best to consult Duckett's two volumes in Latin,
rather than the abbreviated English rendering ;
and that they cannot possibly fail to carry con-
viction to every unjaundiced mind of the good
lives that were on the whole led by the monks
under alien rule amid circumstances of peculiar
difficulty.

The Royal Historical Society has lately printed
the first of two volumes entitled Collectanea Anglo-
Premonstratensia by Abbot Gasquet, which are

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Visitations

devoted to the contents of an original register
of the order of White Canons, in the Bodleian and
other documents in the British Museum. The
second volume will contain also details of Richard
Redman's visitations of all the English Premon-
stratensian houses. Redman was originally Abbot
of Shap, Cumberland. In 1478 he was nominated
by the Abbot of Pre'monstre to be vicar of the
English province ; at that time he had been
already Bishop of St. Asaph for ten years, and
thence he was successively translated to Exeter
and Ely, dying Bishop of Ely 1505. He remained
visitor of the Premonstratensians till the time of
his death. Redman's visitation register, well-
known to the writer of these chapters, shows that
there was often much to correct ; but the houses
far oftener could show a clean bill of health, and
where there was evil it only affected one or two
individuals. It will also be found that the punish-
ment of the guilty was usually most genuine and
severe.

For serious sins Redman's usual punishment
was forty days gravioris culpa, with the further
penance of being sent to another house of the
same order for seven years, during which long
period the offender was under a certain amount
of particular discipline and observation, and never
allowed to leave the precincts. The chief points
of the preliminary forty days' punishment were : —
To sit alone in the refectory on the ground at
meal-times, with bread and water as the only

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English Monasteries

fare ; to lie prostrate at the entrance to the choir
when the canons were entering or departing at the
various hours ; to be spoken to by no one ; and to
be excluded from the Communion.

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CHAPTER VIII
THE TWO COMMISSIONS OF HENRY VIII

MOVED, as he chose to assert, with a desire
" to purge the Church from the thorns of
vices and to sow it with the seeds and plants of
virtue," Henry VIII., the most immoral and cove-
tous king that England has ever known, determined
towards the end of 1534 to take active steps to
secure the suppression of the religious houses.
The Supreme Head Act of that year had conferred
visitatorial powers on the Crown. For this purpose
Henry appointed Thomas Cromwell as his Vicar-
General, suspending meanwhile all episcopal or
other forms of visitation. This absolutely un-
scrupulous minister, well worthy of the king who
appointed him, and who never lost an opportunity
of obtaining bribes in money, goods, leases, or
estates, had the fullest authority and jurisdiction
conferred upon him, with power to visit and exer-
cise such control through his appointed commis-
saries. The visitation of Cromwell's agents began
in August, 1535, and extended to February, 1536.

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English Monasteries

The chief visitors were the notorious Legh, Layton,
and London. They had not completed the visita-
tion of the Northern Province when Parliament
met, but reports were forwarded to Cromwell of
the visited houses, both small and great. They
had also during this period managed to frighten
some houses into making " voluntary surrenders,"
and, by imposing a series of harsh and unreason-
able injunctions, had endeavoured to drive out
the remainder. Legh, writing to Cromwell with
reference to these injunctions, had no hesitation in
showing his hand : " By this ye see that they shall
not need to be put forth, but that they will make
instance themselves, so that their doing shall be
imputed to themselves and no other." In March
1536 a bill for the dissolution of the smaller houses
under .£200 a year was introduced and forced
through Parliament by royal threats — " I hear that
my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I
will have some of your heads." About 400 houses
then fell ; the superiors receiving pensions, and the
monks, notwithstanding their alleged depravity,
obtaining admission to the larger houses or leave
to act as secular priests. This first suppression was
hateful to the majority of English folk, save those
who profited by the spoils, and brought about the
Pilgrimage of Grace, with the execution of twelve
abbots, as well as many monks and sympathetic
laymen of all ranks.

The main excuse for this step in the general
suppression was the report of Cromwell's visitors

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Two Commissions of Henry VIII

as to the condition of the monasteries. This was
the infamous Comperta, a pestiferous document of
unrivalled mendacity and malignity, which for
three-and-a-half centuries surrounded the memory
of the latter days of England's religious with a
miasma of noxious effluvia. If any unscrupulous
or hasty controversialist desires to think evil of
monks and nuns, he will herein find a surfeit of
garbage. But with the printing of the Domestic
State Papers, and the revelations therein afforded
of the character of the visitors as displayed in their
own letters, the falsity of most of their statements
has been manifested beyond gainsaying. Dr. Gaird-
ner's cool judgment in editing the official Letters
and Papers of Henry VIII/s reign gave the first
definite blow to the possibility of placing any
reliance on the Comperta documents, as they are
flatly contradicted in so many places, and are
obviously incredible in others. Abbot Gasquet has
further exposed their worthlessness after a masterly
and searching fashion ; but it has been reserved for
scholarly members of the Anglican communion,
such as the late Canon Dixon and Dr. Jessopp, to
denounce the authors of the monastic Black Book
in terms of extraordinary but justifiable severity.
In short, it would not be possible for any one of a
decently-balanced mind — we care not whether he
is English Catholic, of the Roman obedience, non-
conformist, or agnostic — to make a careful docu-
mentary study of the times of the suppression of
the monasteries of this country, without rising from

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English Monasteries

the task with a feeling of almost unqualified disgust
for the actual visitors, and of indignation with a
king and a minister who could use such miscreants
as their tools.

"When the Inquisitors of Henry VIII. and his
Vicar-General, Cromwell," writes Dr. Jessopp, "went
on their tours of Visitation, they were men who had
had no experience of the ordinary forms of inquiry
which had hitherto been in use. They called them-
selves Visitors ; they were, in effect, mere hired
detectives of the very vilest stamp, who came to
levy blackmail, and, if possible, to find some excuse
for their robberies by vilifying their victims. In all
the Comperta which have come down to us there is
not, if I remember rightly, a single instance of any
report or complaint having been made to the
Visitors from anyone outside. The enormities set
down against the poor people accused of them are
said to have been confessed by themselves against
themselves. In other words, the Comperta of 1535
— 6 can only be received as the horrible inventions
of the miserable men who wrote them down upon
their papers, well knowing that, as in no case could
the charges be supported, so, on the other hand, in
no case could they be met, or were the accused even
intended to be put upon their trial."

On another occasion, when criticising minutely
Legh's reports of the Papist houses, the same
scholar says : —

"This loathsome return bears the stamp of
malignant falsehood upon every line, and it could

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Two Commissions of Henry VIII

only have been penned by a man of blasted cha-
racter and of so filthy an imagination that no judge
or jury would have believed him on his oath."

Such testimony is all the more remarkable, for
Dr. Jessopp tells us that few men in their early
days had the current views against the monks
more firmly fixed in their minds, and few had
more difficulty in surrendering them under the stern
pressure of historic facts.

The Comperta, or abstracts of minutes drawn up
by the visitors, are almost entirely concerned with
questions of morality ; lists of offenders were com-
piled, with the charge against the name. The charges
are absolutely unsupported, as a rule, by a shadow
of evidence, save that the odious sins are said,
absurdly enough, to have been voluntarily confessed
by the culprits.

What was the character of the chief visitors, on
whose word the average uneducated Protestant is
still inclined to believe in all that is odious against
both monks and nuns ? Cromwell himself was
steeped in peculation and in the giving and taking
of bribes. All England knew that he had his price
for everything, great or small ; his own papers reek
with it ; and when he fell so suddenly, and earned
a well-merited scaffold death, his selling offices and
grants " for manyfold sums of money " was one of
the chief charges against him.

As with the master, so with the men.

Visitors Legh and Layton, and, in a smaller
degree, those less busy visitors London and

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English Monasteries

Ap Rice, were only too ready to extort money
from the houses on which they reported, and to
appropriate all they could or dared of the confis-
cated spoils. The evidence of this is overwhelming.
Dr. Gairdner, writing some years ago in his preface
to the tenth volume of the Calendar of Letters and
Papers, expressed the guarded opinion that "we
have no reason, indeed, to think highly of the
character of Cromwell's visitors ; " and since then
very much more evidence has come to light.

Layton — a man from the ranks, and entirely
dependent on Cromwell's favour and support, to
whom he showed a blasphemously expressed ser-
vility— lost no opportunity of obtaining and extorting
bribes. Moreover, he was ever ready to sacrifice truth
to please his masters ; and wrote filthy suggestions
and coarse jests with obvious relish. Cromwell re-
warded him with much ecclesiastical preferment,
which included the deanery of York. He utilised
his position by pawning the cathedral plate, which
the Chapter had to redeem after his death. He
died at Brussels in 1545 ; England became appa-
rently too warm a place for him, for he pestered
Cromwell to get him " placed beyond the seas."

Of Legh we have a vivid picture drawn by his
occasional assistant-visitor, Ap Rice. He was a
young man of " intolerable elation," and of an
" insolent and pompatique " manner. He dressed
himself after a most costly fashion. At his visita-
tions he was accompanied by twelve liveried atten-
dants ; he bullied and browbeat the Superiors,

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Two Commissions of Henry VIII

rating certain abbots most roundly for not meeting
him at the abbey gates, even when they had had
no intimation of his visit. The almost open way
in which he extorted heavy fines, passed to his
private account, was systematic. His accusations
and bullyings went so far that his colleague Ap
Rice felt constrained to write a protest to Cromwell,
but he implored Cromwell to keep his communi-
cation private, as otherwise he felt confident that
he would receive "irrecoverable harm" (a euphe-
mism for murder) from "the rufflers and serving
men " by whom Legh was surrounded. Legh took
equal delight with Layton in telling coarse tales
which were his own invention. Sanders, the Roman
Catholic historian, does not hesitate to lay still more
serious accusations against him. As a reward for
his unhallowed zeal, Legh was made master of the
Hospital of Sherburn, ox Durham, an office which
he disgracefully abused, to "the utter disinheritance,
decay, and destruction of the ancient and godly
foundation of the same house," as was stated in
depositions made in 1557 before a Commission of
Inquiry.

Ap Rice himself, the accuser of Legh, had been
in certain grievous trouble, was abjectly subservient
to Cromwell, and was obviously, from his own
letters, willing, nay eager, to give his reports the
necessary colouring.

Dr. London, who made for himself a greater
reputation as a spoiler than a maligner of monas-
teries, and who was particularly cruel towards the

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English Monasteries

friars, held considerable preferments. He was
canon of Windsor, dean of Osney, dean of Walling-
ford, and from 1526 to 1542 warden of New
College. London also distinguished himself as a
visitor of nunneries, a position for which he was
eminently unfit through the coarseness of his life.
Archbishop Cranmer calls him " a stout and filthy
prebendary of Windsor." " I have seen complaints/'
writes Bishop Burnet, "of Dr. London's soliciting
nuns." His after-life was peculiarly odious ; he
was put to open penance for double adultery with
a mother and daughter; and being subsequently
convicted of perjury had to ride with his face to
the horse's tail through Windsor, Reading, and
Newbury, and was then committed to the Fleet
prison, where he died in 1543.

Another reason for distrusting the report of
the visitors, even if their letters and other extant
disproving documents did not exist, is the hasty
nature of their visits. Is it for one moment credible
that these two or three men, in those days of
difficult locomotion, could have made any true
examination into the affairs and morality of some
10,000 monks and nuns in less than six months ?
The rough estimate of the religious of those days
is usually put at 8000 ; but it is forgotten that the
visitors' injunctions ordered the instant dismissal
of the inmates under twenty-four years of age, as
well as those who had been professed under the
age of twenty ; so that about 2000 more would
be driven out by Legh and Layton and their

Two Commissions of Henry VIII

colleagues, without a fraction of pension, in addition
to the 8000 still resident when the actual sup-
pression was enforced.

Bad as are the reports of the extant Comperta,
there was a limit even to the eager credulity or the
lying imagination of the visitors. For very shame's
sake in many cases, particularly where the house was
under the patronage of some highly-placed noble-
man, such men as Legh and Layton could not, or
dare not, allege any grave misconduct. Out of
155 houses on which they report, 43 escaped with
no reflection on their morality. In the visited
dioceses a number of houses are not even named,
presumably, as Dr. Gairdner thinks, because there
was nothing to say against them. Even in the
numerous houses where gross evil was reported,
the charges were only levelled, on the average,
against a decided minority.

Happily, however, for the general and particular
character of England's religious houses and their
inmates in the sixteenth century, it was found to
be impossible to carry out the work of suppression
of even the smaller houses on the vague charges of
the visitors, who had confined themselves, for the
most part, to scandal and slander, and had made
no regular financial statements.

On the passage of the Bill for suppressing those
foundations under ,£200 a year, in the spring of
1536, only a few months after the completion of
the visitors' Comperta, the Crown issued a com-
mission to report on the number of professed

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English Monasteries

inmates and their dependents, and the " conver-
sation of their lives," together with a statement
as to the income, debts, and condition of the
buildings. The commissioners were to be six in
number for each district — three officials, namely,
an auditor, the receiver for each county, and a
clerk ; whilst the remaining three were to be nomi-
nated by the Crown from "discreet persons" of
the neighbourhood. The returns of these mixed
commissions for the counties of Huntingdon,
Leicester, Rutland, Sussex, and Warwick, with a
condensed form for Lancashire, were known to
exist when Dr. Gairdner issued the Calendar dealing
with the documents of 1536. Some of the very
houses against which Legh and Lay ton had breathed
forth their pestilential tales were found by the
second set of visitors — who were not Cromwell's
tools, but now that their suppression was resolved
the Crown cared little or nothing whether the moral
report was good or bad — to be "of good and
virtuous conversation," and the whole tone of the
reports is for the most part so favourable that Dr.
Gairdner remarks : " The country gentlemen who
sat on the commission somehow came to a very
different conclusion from that of Drs. Layton and
Legh."

A few years after Dr. Gairdner had thus ex-
pressed himself, Abbot Gasquet came upon the
reports of the mixed commissions relative to the
religious houses of Gloucestershire (and city of
Bristol), Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Wilts,

(102)

Two Commissions of Henry VIII

which had been misplaced. Those for Norfolk
have been printed by Dr. Jessopp in the Norfolk
Miscellany, those for Hampshire by Dr. Cox in
Volume II of Victoria County History of Hants., and
the whole of them by Dr. Gasquet in the Dublin
Review for April, 1894. Space forbids mentioning
more than that house after house is named as " of
good conversation," "of good religious conver-
sation," "of honest conversation," "of convenient
conversation," "of very good name and fame," or
"of virtuous living." Occasional defaulters from
a virtuous or orderly life are named, which make
the generally favourable reports all the more
valuable. The extant reports deal with 376 re-
ligious men and women ; of this number only
twenty-two men and three women are noted as
not of good repute. The great relief that the
houses were to the poor and distressed of the
district is mentioned time after time by the com-
missioners, who were occasionally bold enough to
beg for the continuance of a particular foundation.
The foul charges of Legh, Layton, and their
colleagues had served their turn ; many copies of
the abstracts of their minutes were made for circu-
lation, several of which are still extant, and amid
the odium of these malignant lies the suppression
of the monasteries became possible. But it is
quite clear that those in power believed in their
hearts the reports of the mixed commissions of
officials and country gentlemen instead of the
egregious tales of Cromwell's tools. Had the

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English Monasteries

charges made in the first visitation been accepted
as true, it is quite impossible to believe that the
guilty ones would have been pensioned, as was so
frequently the case. Thus it can be proved that
out of twenty-seven nuns accused of incontinence
seventeen were pensioned. Various Superiors ac-
cused by the first visitors of criminal offences were
afterwards given high secular preferment in the
Church.

One of the specially bad cases, if Legh is to be
believed, who visited the house on 29 September,
J53S» was Chertsey Abbey; he reported that seven
were incontinent, four guilty of unnatural sin, and
two apostate. The house at that time only con-
sisted of an abbot and fourteen monks, so that
there were but two of virtuous life! Two years
later Chertsey was surrendered. The fickle King
at that time was establishing "King Henry VII I.'s
new monastery of Holy Trinity, Bisham," to con-
sist of an abbot and thirteen Benedictine monks,
who were to pray for the King and Queen Jane.
To this short-lived new foundation Henry VIII.
actually transferred the abbot of Chertsey and his
whole convent in their entirety, although Legh
two years before had solemnly reported them to
be the foulest set of monks that he had anywhere
discovered ! The King had wit enough to use the
lies of his first set of visitors to further his own
covetous ends ; but he could never have done more
than pretend to credit them.

Among all the foul scandals set afloat by the

( 104)

Two Commissions of Henry VIII

King's first visitors, and afterwards supported by
the discredited Bale, none was worse than that
charged against the last abbot of St. Augustine's,
Canterbury, John Essex (alias Yokes). Another
of the monks, who was incriminated with his
superior, was John Digon, the last prior of the
house. If the odious charges had been true, it is
hardly possible to believe that they would have
been pensioned ; but recently a strong piece of
evidence has unexpectedly been brought to light
through Abbot Gasquet drawing attention, in the
Downside Review, to a small volume published in
1590 by Thomas Twyne, a learned doctor of
medicine, containing a Latin tract by his father,
John Twyne, the celebrated antiquary. It is en-
titled De rebus Albionicis Britannicis atque Anglicis
Commentariorum libri duo. In the introduction we
are told that John Twyne, who died in 1581, and
left this tract behind him relative to the early anti-
quities of this island, was in the opinion of compe-
tent judges a most learned man. But it is the
form in which the treatise is drawn up, and not the
actual contents, that is of so much interest from a
monastic standpoint. It is cast in the shape of a
conversation supposed to be held between Abbot
Essex, Prior Digon, and Nicholas Wotton, the first
Dean of Canterbury after the ejection of the monks,
a man of brilliant gifts. Though the conversation
is imaginary, John Twyne tells his son that he
had often heard these three men carry on similar
learned discussions, and was evidently on terms of

(105)

English Monasteries

intimacy with them. The son entered Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, in 1560, and this treatise
was written for his information when on the eve of
proceeding to the University. Had two of these
men been odious reprobates, the father could not
possibly have held them up to his young son as
models of good scholarship. Moreover, he goes
out of his way to praise them in no slight terms,
telling his son that "above all the many people
whom I have ever known I have especially revered
two, because in their days they were above all
others remarkable for the high character of their
morals (morum gravitatem summam], and for their
remarkable acquaintance with all antiquity ; they
were, if you know not already, John Yokes and
John Digon. The first was the most worthy (dig-
nissimus) abbot, and the second the most upright
(integerrimus) prior of the ancient monastery of St.
Augustine."*

When the time comes for the writing of a true
and fearless Life and Times of Henry VIII. (a
monarch who has been aptly dubbed "the pro-
fessional widower") by some thorough and con-
scientious student of history, there can be no
reasonable doubt that Canon Dixon's statement
will be amply substantiated when he wrote : — " I
am inclined to believe that in the reign of Henry
VIII. the monasteries were not worse, but better,

* Those who wish to see this exceedingly rare book for them-
selves, and to read other particulars of the last abbot, may like to
know that there is a copy at the British Museum, press-mark 600,
3,47.

(106)

Two Commissions of Henry VIII

than they had been previously, and that they
were doing fairly the work for which they had
been founded."

Be this as it may, the time has surely come for
all educated English Churchmen to cease to gird
at monks and nuns, or to sneer at the vowed life ;
for it is to such as these that England owes its
conversion to the Faith, whether we think of the
Celtic missionaries from the North, or of St.
Augustine and his forty companions from the
South— all trained in the "School of the Divine
Service."

(107)

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUDING WORDS

A LTOGETHER apart from the outrageously
JL\. scandalous way in which the suppression of
the English monasteries was carried out — a fact that
any historian worth his salt is now bound to admit —
it is a wholesome sign of the times to find that
English Churchmen are gradually coming round
to a general acceptance of the religious and social
blessings that came to this country through monas-
ticism during the many centuries in which it played
so important a part in the national life. This is
certainly the estimate formed by those amongst us
who study the history of the vowed religious life
with sober devoutness. There are few church-
men of the immediate past whose judgments can
be followed with more implicit trust than the late
Dean of St. Paul's ; and there are none among our
living churchmen, who, from patient research, are
more capable of uttering a reliable opinion on
monasticism than the present Dean of Durham.

(108)

Concluding Words

Dr. Church penned a beautiful and compre-
hensive chapter on the discipline of a Norman
monastery in his Life of St. Anselm. From it
we borrow a single paragraph :

" In an age when there was so much lawlessness,
and when the idea of self-control was so uncommon
in the ordinary life of man, the monasteries were
schools of discipline; and there were no others.
They upheld and exhibited the great, then almost
the original, idea, that men needed to rule and
govern themselves ; that they could do it, and that
no use of life was noble and perfect without this
ruling. It was hard and rough discipline, like the
times, which were hard and rough. But they did
good work then, and for future times, by impressing
on society the idea of self-control and self-main-
tained discipline. And crude as they were, they
were capable of nurturing noble natures, single
hearts, keen and powerful intellects, glowing and
unselfish affections."

Dean Kitchin, when commenting on the division
of administration among the obedientiaries or office-
holding monks of St. Swithun's, writes :

"It must never be forgotten that this organi-
sation of offices within the convent was useful in
its best days. Where in the whole world of the
thirteenth century can we meet with so completely
framed and active a system as that of a Benedictine
House ? Not, certainly, in the feudal castle, with
its fierce warrior-lord and turbulent horde of ' devils,
not men/ as the English Chronicle calls them ; not

( 109)

English Monasteries

in the mediaeval city, with powers and privileges
still uncertain and precarious, though there was
here, perhaps, a nearer parallel than elsewhere ;
not even in King's courts, which came and went,
and had not yet developed their complete chan-
cellerie, nor had learnt the importance of ministers
and departments of administration. In a well-
ordered monastery, with its eighteen or twenty
obedientiaries, life went on smoothly and prospe-
rously. There only were the divisions of time fully
understood, and the importance of time appreciated ;
there only were the departments of work, the
directions of industry, carefully marked out ; there
too the main principle of official responsibility
began early to be asserted."

As to "the stories of corruption and immorality
on which sinful minds have ever fastened greedily,"
writes the Dean in another place, "they have
attracted far more than a fair amount of notice
and attention, and have given the excuse for those
interested and truthless persons, who, in the Refor-
mation time and in later days too, have thought to
honour God by blackening wholesale the monastic
character. Deo per mendacium gratificari is still
far too often the guiding line of many a polemic,
who tries to win his battle by flinging dirt in the
faces of his opponents. ... In these respects the
brethren at St. Swithun's may look the world in
the face without fear."

It is not within the province of an English
Churchman to deal with the maintenance of mon-

(110)

Concluding Words

asticism on our shores by those of the Roman
obedience, save to say that its flickering stealthy
flame survived continuously in glimmers of light
in spite of bitter and now obsolete statutes ; and
further to note that the oppressive action that
drove large numbers of " religious " men and
women from France to England a century ago
has been renewed in recent days. Those most
competent to judge have no hesitation in believing
that the various orders of religious men and women
of the Roman communion in this country are doing
an inestimable service — educational, charitable, and
spiritual — to those of their own faith. Our best
literary critics recognise too the genuine work that
not a few are doing in elucidating history, and in
other ways adding to the general sum of human
knowledge ; whilst all Englishmen can well afford
to be proud of the attainments and researches of
Dr. Gasquet, the abbot -president of the English
Benedictines.

With regard to the marvellous growth of com-
munity life in the Church of England during the
past half-century, it is only necessary to consult
the pages of the Official Year Book. In the issue
for 1904, seven closely-printed pages are occupied
with terse accounts of the houses and work of
Sisterhoods living under the vowed life, whose
members are the very salt of the Church in their
devotion to the religious life and to the discharge
of corporal works of mercy.

As to Brotherhoods, the growth has been

English Monasteries

steady; whilst certain rash attempts to establish
communities of men have had but an .ephemeral
existence, others (notably the Cowley Fathers, the
Order of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and the
Society of the Sacred Mission) are doing a noble
and apparently an abiding work.

Explicit

J. VAUtBR, PRINTER, CAMBRIDGE.

/ 1HE .rERSHORE .BENEDICTINES. / *^

Viscount Halifax Iras given an emphatic con-
tradiction to the statement that the Benedictine
Community at Pershore has come to an end
owing to the fact that Dom Anselm Mardon,
the late Superior, has left the Church of England
and gone back to Caldey. When the Benedictines
of Caldey Island went over to Rome, Brother
Anselm was the only monk professed under j
Anglican auspices who remained loyal to the
Church of England. Pershore Abbey, which
belonged to the Caldey Community, was, at the '
urgent request of the donor, Mr. Henry Wise,
returned to him, and the house and grounds
have been used for carrying on the contem-
plative life, the Rev. W. G. C. Prideaux, an
Oblate of Caldey, acting as chaplain and
spiritual director. The Tablet assumed that
the effort had collapsed with the return of Dom
Anselm to Caldey, but we have the assurance of
Lord Halifax that the Community will continue
as before under the authorisation and blessing
of the Bishop of Worcester. The movement
has also the sympathy of the Primate, and it
was begun under the blessing and sanction of
J - predecessor, Archbishop Temple. One of the

ost noteworthy features in the later history of
te Church of England is the revival of the
religious life, of which Cowley and Mirneld are
such notable examples. The work of these com-
3 munities has Feen extended with remarkable
results to India, South Africa, and elsewhere ;
and it is hoped that the appeal of the Rev. A. U.
Scott, vicar of St. Mary and St. John, Cowley,
for funds to erect a churchyard cross as a
memorial to Father Benson, the revered founder
of the Cowley Fathers, will meet with an
adequate response.

- . ^^ .«!• . -.<• .-• >.. muvu-uji, torn now j
1 twenty years ago he started tlie work wii-Jj J
I only a sovereign in his pocket, ft was won by <
i faith, bv inspiration, from the tragic death of'
his predecessor, whose voice he heard, and by •
\ the wonderful stability of England. .In no other
!, country could the work have gone on undis-
turbed during the war.

Cardinal Bourne, who also spoke, empha-
sised the generosity of Poland to the alien.

JBX 2592 *E5 1904 IMST
jEnglish monasteries, from

Saxon days to their dissolut

47228566

MEDIAEVAL STUDrW*

5* QUEEN'S

1