CHAPTER IV.
MONASTERIES.—THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CLERGY.—IMPROPRIATIONS.—EVILS OF THE SYSTEM.
MONASTERIES.—THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CLERGY.—IMPROPRIATIONS.—EVILS OF THE SYSTEM.
With the causes already enumerated as those which worked the downfall of the Roman Catholic church, there conspired the ignorance and immoral lives of the clergy. A system of celibacy upon compulsion was sure to produce a system of profligacy. Yet the disgusting catalogue of offences alleged against the regulars, by the visiters of the monasteries, ought, perhaps, to be received with some caution. The commissioners were not unprejudiced judges. They knew full well, that the king, their master, was determined on the dissolution of the religious houses, and that, at all events, a quarrel was to be picked. Bad enough those houses probably were, but had they been better, their doom was sealed. The preamble of the act for dissolving the smaller ones on pretence of their corruption, proclaims that the greater were spared as being regular, devout, and praiseworthy; yet we know what followed.[108]The nunnery of Godstow, in Oxfordshire, was actually reported as exemplary; it was the school to which all the young gentlewomen of the country resorted. Their friends pleaded with the king to spare it, the inquisitors seconded their petition,—but they obtained for it no other boon than that it should be eaten up last. Voluntary confessions of guilt, which accompanied the surrender of the abbeys, are the mere suicidal confessions of a man upon the wheel, proof of nothingbut of the pain or the hope which extorted them. The monks found that they could not save their ship, and therefore, they compromised, by stripping themselves naked, and trying for a plank. Had they stood upon their own innocence, they would have condemned the king, and still lost their estates; did they allow their guilt, they screened his rapacity, and received a see, a living, or a pension. The courtiers were interested in swelling the cry that such men were not fit to live. They, like the visiters, themselves hoped for a share of the golden eggs when they should have succeeded in killing the hen. “Wherefore this waste?” was their pretence; but they carried a bag of their own, which was to be filled out of their neighbour’s pocket; and, whatever might be the sin of sacrilege, “tithe corn,” thought they, “makes very good bread.” Here is no attempt or desire to defend these miserable monks in the teeth of damning facts—and some such, no doubt, there were to testify against very many of the monastic abuses—but it is nothing but justice, and the practice of every equitable court, to weigh the characters and prejudices, and private interests of the witnesses, when they would swear away a man’s life, substance, and good name; and, in the present instance, it is fair to adopt the same rule, were it only out of consideration to the many sincere, and humble, and righteous servants of God, that those religious houses contained within their walls, even in the midst of an adulterous and sinful generation; the faithful among the faithless; the many who had fled thither for shelter from the sorrows of life; the ambitious, with blithed hopes and a broken spirit, the gay with the experience of the wise man that all under the sun was vanity; the forlorn, whom the world had abandoned, and left to drift upon the rocks; the disappointed, whose course of true love might not have run smooth; these, and a thousand other malignant influences, contributed their victims to those “populoussolitudes;” persons having now no other desire than to pass the time of their sojourning here in piety, in privacy, and in peace. This is a class to which it is impossible to refuse our sympathy, and whom it would be ungenerous and unjust to confound with the swarm of lazy, sensual, unlettered drones among whom it was their unhappy lot to live, and whom the shock of the Reformation dispersed. Exemption from episcopal visitation, and consequently from any inspection whatever, was the beginning of the evil. This privilege of the monasteries proved their poison: it was a short-sighted policy of the pope to hide them from the eye of the secular clergy, whose jealousy would have acted as a wholesome stimulant to the detection and correction of abuses. But the seculars he systematically slighted, and his iniquity eventually found him out. Then, again, came upon them an evil spirit which led them to grasp at the possession of all the benefices in the country. This was another effort to depress the working clergy, which the pope encouraged, but which, like the former, was, in the end, most injurious to his own authority, by bringing the clergy into contempt, and opening the eyes of the people, to the covetousness of the monks. The system ofimpropriations, which began with William the Conqueror, grew so rapidly that, in the course of three centuries, more than a third part of the benefices in England became such,[109]and those the richest, for the whiter the cow the surer was it to go to the altar, and by the time of the Reformation, there was added another third.[110]An attempt was made by the legislature to stay the evil, and the statute of mortmain was passed in the reign of Edward I., whereby it was enacted, that “no person, religious or other, should presume to buy or sell, or under any colour of donation,lease, or other title, to receive any lands or tenements, or by any act of invention to appropriate them, under pain of forfeiture of them.”[111]But the statute was evaded by royal dispensations, and the mischief grew. Even the pope himself took alarm (pavet ipse sacerdos); and Alexander, at the end of the twelfth century, writes to the Bishop of Worcester to admit no man to a vicarage on presentation of the monks, till they had assigned him, on the instant, such a portion of income as would suffice for the episcopal dues, and for the competent maintenance of the minister;[112]but this decree they set at naught by not presenting at all, either serving the churches by stipendiary curates, or (which was the readier way) leaving them altogether unserved.[113]By-and-by the example of the monasteries was followed by the chantries, colleges, hospitals, and nunneries; these, in their turn, learned the art of procuring impropriations;[114]nay, even corporations, transforming themselves, by a legal fiction, into religious societies, did the same; for before King Henry VIII. there seems to have been no precedent in England for a mere layman to be an impropriator.[115]The monks, however, had peculiar facilities for the accumulation of livings. Their influence with some neighbouring lord of a manor would often win him to make over the church on his estate, and the tithes with which it might be endowed, to their own abbey; they, meanwhile, undertaking to provide for the fulfilment of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to it. Then, again, if they could not beg they could buy, often the parish itself, as well as the benefice; or where the purchase was more circumscribed, the pope, ever their friend, would sometimes grant them the privilege of non-payment of tithes to the extent of such estate, tothe great injury of the clergymen, when it happened to be considerable. Thus rectories were reduced to vicarages; the greater tithes going to the abbey fund, the small tithes left as a miserable stipend (often not more than a sixteenth part of the revenue of the benefice[116]) to the minister, who took the monks’ labouring oar under the title ofvicarius. Thus originated that divorce between the property of the parish church and the minister of it, which continues in most instances of vicarages to this day; and thus it came to pass that town livings (contrary to all reason) are at present of all others, the poorest, less than the usual pittance of endowment having been left to them by the considerate monks, who reckoned, and perhaps rightly reckoned, in the days when masses were said, that a large population would supply by fees alone an adequate provision for the vicar. Meanwhile, the people were disgusted with this gross and cruel invasion of the rights of their pastors; and the representatives of the monasteries read themselves in amidst reproaches loud and deep, of the bystanders.[117]But they were not thin-skinned. They prepared, however, a sop for Cerberus, by exacting with little rigour the small tithes, or, in some cases, by accepting an easy composition instead of them; hoping, by suchmodus(decimandi) to purchase the more cheerful and prompt payment of the great tithes, which was their affair; and not at all uneasy because the propitiation happened to be made at the vicar’s expense.[118]Their only remaining concern was to find some “Sir Johns” (as the poor clergy were called before the Reformation,) sometimes with an honourable adjunct of “lack Latin,”[119]or “mumble-matins[120],” or “babbling Sir Johns,”[121]or “blind Sir Johns,”[122]as it might be, who were just qualified according to the letter of the law, to stand in the gap; mass-priests, who could read their breviaries, and no more—for in those days men seem to have received ordination without any adequate examination either as to learning or character[123]—persons of the lowest of the people, with all the gross habits of the class from which they sprung; loiterers on the alehouse bench;[124]dicers, scarce able to say by rote their Pater-noster, often actually unable to repeat the commandments;[125]divines every way fitted to provoke the 75th canon, which was no doubt, in the first instance levelled against them.[126]Such were the ministers to whom was consigned a very large proportion of the parishes of England before the Reformation; with what effect, the ignorance, the superstition, the vices which then spread themselves over the whole country, sufficiently testify. A feature or two of the times, such as have been preserved to us, are here offered to the reader, not, to be sure, always drawn by a very friendly hand, but still, in all probability, tolerably faithful. The prayers of the church, being in Latin, tended little or nothing to edification. Preaching there was scarce any. Quarterly sermons appear to have been prescribed to the clergy, but not to have been insisted upon; for though mass was on no account left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays together, andnobody be blamed.[127]The unpreaching prelate is honest Latimer’s by-word. Indeed, as the Reformation approached, as the stirring of the foundations began to make itself felt; to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a heretic.[128]The friars, to be sure, were not dumb dogs, but they barked to little purpose, in a manner to prove rather that they were hungry than watchful; their discourses having for their object rather to fill their own wallets than satisfy their hearer’s wants, and if not occupied with uncharitable invectives against other ecclesiastics, a tissue of fables and old wives’ tales.[129]Catechising, in the protestant sense of the term, was unknown or unpractised. When, indeed, it was perceived how powerful a weapon it was in the hands of the Reformers, steps were taken at the council of Trent for putting forth what was called a catechism. But the Trent catechism was composed avowedly for the instruction of the parish priests, not for the use of children, to whom it was not at all adapted; and, after all, the gross ignorance of the former must have made it a dead letter to most of them; utterly unintelligible so long as it remained in the learned language in which it was written, and if translated, (as it was, into Italian, French, German and Polish, whether into English we know not,) still containing too much special pleading, too obvious an anxiety for secular interests, too manifest an apprehension that the “craft was in danger,” too much doubtful or ridiculous theology, to stand against the strong blows of the men of the new learning. The Church Catechism, on the other hand, writ in our own mother tongue, brief, and, on the whole, of admirable simplicity; a manual which, elementary as it may be thought, no competent judge can examine without seeing that its authors musthave been men mighty in those Scriptures, whereof, indeed, it is the essence, most patiently investigated, and most skilfully and scrupulously expressed; this wrought so effectually, that “now” (says an authority of the second year of Elizabeth, quoted by Strype) “a young child of ten years old can tell more of his duty towards God and man than a man of their bringing up can do in sixty or eighty years.”[130]Nay, of the Scriptures even the more learned clergy knew very little, the universities being taken up with popes’ laws and schoolmen. Indeed, it was difficult to meet with a copy of the Bible, or of any other profitable book of divinity in these seats of learning, so successfully had the friars bought them all up; and students, we are told, in the reign of Edward III. actually withdrew from them in consequence, and returned to their own homes;[131]nor does the study of the Scriptures appear to have had a chance against Scotus and Aquinas till Dean Colet established it at Oxford; and, about the same time, George Stafford, at Cambridge, by lectures on the books of Holy Writ.[132]The people at large, if possible, fared worse. They were debarred from all knowledge of their Bibles, either by the language in which they were written (for copies of Wickliffe’s translation were scarce), or, if not, by the price at which they were sold; the cost of Wickliffe’s New Testament, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, being four marks and forty pence, a sum equal to 2l.16s.3d.of present money.[133]Thus the multitudeknew just so much of Scripture history, as the miracle plays taught them, and little more. To these burlesque and indecent caricatures of Holy Writ (though it is fair to say not so intended) the idle and the dissipated were the first to resort, as to fairs and revels, with which festivities, indeed, they ranked, so that, had they been better worth attention, it is probable that an attendance upon them would not have conduced much to edification. The Sabbath was rather a day of sports and pastimes than of devotion and instruction; of dancing, shooting with the bow, and practising with the buckler;[134]nor were these, it may be well imagined, the most culpable of its occupations. The churches were profaned. In the top of one of the pinnacles of St. Paul’s in London was Lollard’s tower, the prison, and often the grave of the saints. In thearchesof the same cathedral were the ecclesiastical courts, of which the balance was not always the balance of the sanctuary, though in the sanctuary it was held. In the spaciousnavewas the exchange for the merchants (for Sir Thomas Gresham had not yet lived to remove the reproach), and the scene of all the brawlings of the horse-fair.[135]Payments of money were made at thefont; and thecrypt, or underground chapel, in which the early mass was said, was the trysting-place of the nightly revellers of either sex.[136]Nor were such abuses as these confined to London. The house of God, as it should seem from the homily “On the right Use of the Church,” was too generally the place of rendezvous for such as loved greetings in the market place, had tales to tell, or business to transact; and the devotions of the day were suffered to drag on like Pharaoh’s chariots with the wheels off, whilst many of the congregation were more profitably employed (as they thought) in the discussion of farm or merchandize, as they paced to and fro along its aisles. It is to these and similar acts of irreverence that the canons have respect in the directions they give to churchwardens and questmen—directions which a change in the manners of the times has rendered obsolete and almost unintelligible;[137]and it may be reasonably supposed, that in the ordering of our church ceremonies, and in the composition of our church service itself, the principle of fully and fervently occupying all who were within the walls in their devotions was studiously kept in sight by the reformers; and that the sacrifice of prayer and praise should no longer be considered the exclusive office of the priest, as it had been too much in papal times, the people looking on, but that every member should be called upon at intervals, and those of short and frequent recurrence, the whole service through, to testify, by lifting up his voice in confession or response, that he, too, had a lively interest in the common work before them, of besetting God, as it were, in a round (so the quaint old Fuller expresses it), and not suffering him to depart till he had blessed them—“hæc vis grata Deo.” The saints’ days and holidays, again, were numerous, even to the hinderance of a harvest, and to the certain and perpetual encouragement of riot and revelry throughout the country.[138]Taverns and alehouses, little better than brothels,with their dishonest games of cards, dice, backgammon, tennis, foot-ball, quoits, drained the pockets of their votaries, and sent them to rob on the highway. So says Sir Thomas More, who might, perhaps, have excepted the more athletic sports here enumerated from his anathema, and thereby have rendered it more effective.[139]The due punishment of the culprits was rendered difficult by the places of refuge afforded them in the precincts of religious houses, which were the thieves’ paradise;[140]and though felons of all kinds could here claim sanctuary, even for life, so that they would actually sally forth by night to rob or slay, and return before day-break to their asylum within the rules with impunity, yet to the poor persecuted Lollard was the gate of mercy closed, and he might be legally pursued even unto the horns of the altar.[141]The friar, meanwhile, went on with his mumpsimus. His most constant hearers (so profitable was his teaching) were at a loss to distinguish between the deadly sins and the ten commandments;[142]of which latter, indeed, as of the articles of the belief in English, the people were entirely ignorant, being wholly given to superstitions.[143]They hastened to the churches for holy water, of which the devil was said to be afraid, before a thunder-storm;[144]fled to St. Rooke in time of pestilence; in an ague, to St. Pernel, or master John Shorne; being Welshmen, and disposed to take a purse, they besought the help of Darvel Gathorne; if a wife were weary of her husband, she betook herself to St. Uncumber,[145]they repaired to the wise woman to recover what they had lost, or to be recruited from a sickness; and addicted themselves with all their might to magic, sorcery,charms, and the black art.[146]The grossest pretensions which indulgences could advance were swallowed; and not strained at. Relics, carrying imposture on their very face, (“lies,” in the language of Scripture,) were kissed with pious credulity. Pilgrimages were undertaken in the spirit of the company in the Canterbury Tales, or of Ogygius in his journey to our lady of Walsingham;[147]and yet were reckoned acts that would be accounted to the parties for righteousness: and, whilst no man brought his gift to the altar of his Saviour in Canterbury cathedral throughout a whole year, offerings were made at the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in the same place, and during the same period, to the amount of nearly a thousand pounds.
No wonder that in these ages of darkness doctrines not found in the word of God, but of which we have seen that the germ existed even in the Saxon church, should have shot up with vigour like the gourd of Jonah in the night; or that, in the absence of Scripture to speak for itself, the religion of Rome (as Latimer observes) should have passed for it.[148]