ENGLISH MONASTERIES
ENGLISH MONASTERIES
CHAPTER IVOCATION
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 signification) 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 supposed to have actuated men and women in seeking admission to the cloistered life.
A recent American writer of repute, onMonks and Monasteries(Mr. Wishart, 1900) has said:—
“The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt, the devoted or bereaved wife, the pauper and theinvalid, 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 mediæval 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 impossible 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—precautions 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.
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, insomuch that in the greatest or most dangerous sicknessyou 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, making 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 notgotten without humiliation, and therefore those who doe flye or withdraw themselves from yeworks 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 intending 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, without 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 bringing 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 amonastery 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, without 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 professed monk’s habit—and who can blame their charity? But such a line of action was an acknowledged 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 termedconversior converts, sometimeswonder 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 distinguished 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 amenable to discipline, occasionally joined theconversi, 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 termconversior 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,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 endowments 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 between 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 themselves members of the feudal aristocracy. Particularly 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 owncountry 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 hierarchy, 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 considerable mark in early days. Winfrid of Crediton, who, after years of careful seclusion in the Hampshire 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 1011,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 sacrificed his considerable estates to further his conception of the monastic ideal. Now all these men, and many others almost equally distinguished, entered the religious life without any idea of afterwards 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 unwritten 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 Christendom for the readiness, nay, the eagerness, with which gentle ladies of royal blood and the proudestestate 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 singular 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 Lyminge, Eanswith, Sexberga, and Mildred; in East Anglia, Etheldreda, Wendreda, and Wimburga; in Mercia, Kyneburga, Kyneswith, Pega, Werburga, 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,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 heavenly 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 maintained English nunneries across the seas in Belgium 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 partof 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, whatever 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 England 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 Yorkshirehouses 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 desolate 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 destitute of mechanical appliances to produce such results.
Perhaps the one spot in all England more than another that would cure the man who talks flippantly of the lazy, indulgent life of our mediæval 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-seekingnature of an English Benedictine of mediæval 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 considered 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 literature was sustained in the cloister, and to recognise 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, thecarpenter, 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 premises. 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 Würtemberg, within easy reach by train of Heidelberg; for he will there find nearly the whole of the necessary mediæval buildings of the community still standing, and in fairly good condition. It was, doubtless, the frequent communication of the English Cistercian monks with their fellows on the Continent that moved them successfully 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.
THE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEYTHE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEY (Cistercian)
THE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEY (Cistercian)
THE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEY (Cistercian)
It was this very desire after agricultural completeness, 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 tothem, in absolutely separate buildings, to serve as chaplains, and to superintend or personally carry out all the agricultural details, on the due sustaining 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.