Part 5 (1/2)

Within the retirement of that cloister, fenced all round, as I have said, with the high walls and the great buildings, there the monks were working, there the real conventual life was going on; but outside the cloister, though yet within the precincts, it is difficult for us now to realize what a vast hive of industry a great monastery in some of the lonely and thinly-populated parts of England was. Everything that was eaten or drunk or worn, almost everything that was made or used in a monastery, was produced upon the spot. The grain grew on their own land; the corn was ground in their own mill; their clothes were made from the wool of their own sheep; they had their own tailors and shoemakers, and carpenters and blacksmiths, almost within call; they kept their own bees; they grew their own garden-stuff and their own fruit; I suspect they knew more of fish- culture than, until very lately, we moderns could boast of knowing.

Nay, they had their own vineyards and made their own wine.

The commissariat of a large abbey must have required administrative ability of a very high order, and the cost of hospitality was enormous. No traveller, whatever his degree, was refused food and shelter, and every monastery was a vast hotel, where n.o.body need pay more than he chose for his board and lodging. The mere keeping the accounts must have employed no small number of clerks, for the minuteness with which every transaction was recorded, almost pa.s.ses belief. Those rolls I spoke of--the sacrist's, cellarer's, and so on-- were, it must be remembered, periodical balance-sheets handed in at audit day. They deal, not only with pence and half-pence, but with farthings and half-farthings, and were compiled from the tablets or small account-books posted up from day to day and hour to hour. They give the price of every nail hammered into a wall, and rarely omit the cost of the parchment on which the roll itself is written. The men must have been very busy, or, if you prefer it, very fussy-- certainly they could not have been idle to have kept their accounts in this painfully minute manner, even to the fraction of a farthing.

In the natural course of events, as a monastery grew in wealth and importance, there was one element of interest which added great zest to the conventual life, in the _quarrels_ that were sure to arise.

First and foremost, the most desirable person to quarrel with was a Bishop. In its original idea, a monastery was not necessarily an ecclesiastical inst.i.tution. It was not necessary that an abbot should be an ecclesiastic, and not essentially necessary that any one of his monks should be in holy orders. Long before the thirteenth century, however, a monk was almost invariably ordained, and being an ordained person, and having his local habitation in a bishop's diocese, it was only natural that the bishop should claim jurisdiction over him and over the church in which he and the fraternity ministered; but to allow a power of visitation to any one outside the close corporation of the convent was fraught with infinite peril to the community.

Confessing their faults one to another, and asking pardon of the Lord Abbot or his representative, the prior, was one thing; but to have a querulous or inquisitive or even hostile bishop coming and intruding into their secrets, blurting them out to the world and actually p.r.o.nouncing sentence upon them--that seemed to the monks an absolutely intolerable and shocking condition of affairs. Hence it seemed supremely desirable to a convent to get for itself, by fair means or foul--and I am afraid the means were not always fair means, as we should consider them--the exemption of their house from episcopal visitation or control. I believe that the earliest instance of such an exemption being granted in England was that of the Conqueror's Abbey of Battle. The precedent was a bad one, and led to all sorts of attempts by other houses to procure for themselves the like privilege. Such attempts were stoutly resisted by the bishops, who foresaw the evils that would inevitably follow, and which in fact did follow; and, of course, bishop and abbey went to law. Going to law in this case meant usually, first, a certain amount of preliminary litigation before the Archbishop of Canterbury; but sooner or later it was sure to end in an appeal to the Pope's court, or, as the phrase was, an appeal to Rome.

Without wis.h.i.+ng for a moment to defend or excuse a state of things which was always vexatious, and at last became intolerable, it is impossible to deny that a great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about these appeals. Almost exactly the same state of things exists in the present day both in civil and ecclesiastical matters.

Pa.r.s.ee merchants fall to loggerheads in Bombay or Calcutta, and bring their disputes before the courts in India; one side feels aggrieved by the sentence, and straightway he removes the case to a court of appeal in London. Or some heretical person in Asia or Africa or somewhere else gets into hot water with an orthodox society for the promotion of religious persecution, and sooner or later the archbishop is appealed to, and the ecclesiastical lawyers have a most delightful time of it. It all costs a great deal of money nowadays, and leading advocates on this side or that are actually so extortionate and exorbitant that they will not do anything for nothing, and insist on receiving the most exorbitant fees. So it was in the old days. The final court of appeal in all matters ecclesiastical was before the Pope at Rome or Avignon, and the proctors and doctors, and all the canonists and officials, actually required to be paid for their work.

When a monastery was in for a great fight with a bishop, it was a serious matter for both parties. But it was much more serious for the bishop than for the convent. The bishop had always his state to keep up and his many houses to maintain, and his establishment was enormously costly. His margin for law expenses was small; and I suspect that a bishop in England during the thirteenth century who had no private fortune outside his mere episcopal revenues would have been likely sooner or later to find himself in serious difficulties.

On the other hand, in a great monastery all sorts of expedients could be resorted to in order to effect a salutary retrenchment--as when the monks of St. Alban's agreed to give up the use of wine for fifteen years, and actually did so, that they might be able to rebuild their refectory and dormitory in the days of John the twenty- first abbot. Moreover, inasmuch as a corporation never dies, the convent could raise very heavy sums on the security of its estates, and take its own time to repay the loans. A bishop could not pledge his episcopal estates beyond his own lifetime, and the result was that, in the days when life a.s.surance was unknown, a bishop who had to raise money for a costly lawsuit would have to pay a rate of interest which would make our blood run cold if we had to pay it, or our hearts leap for joy if we could get it in these days of two and three per cent. The bishop was always at a disadvantage in these appeal cases; he stood to lose everything, and he stood to win nothing at all except the satisfaction of his conscience that he was struggling for principle and right. And thus it came to pa.s.s that the monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely shrank from engaging in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a deputation from the convent to watch the case as it was going on, and there was all the delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a trip, in fact, to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.

But when there was no appeal case going on--and an appeal was too expensive an amus.e.m.e.nt to be indulged in often--there was always a good deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the convent, and to give them something to think about and gossip about nearer home. We have the best authority--the authority of the great Pope Innocent III.--for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth century were extremely fond of beer; but there was something else that they were even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history is almost made up of the stories of this everlasting litigation; nothing was too trifling to be made into an occasion for a lawsuit. Some neighbouring landowner had committed a trespa.s.s or withheld a t.i.the pig. Some audacious townsman had claimed the right of catching eels in a pond. Some brawling knight pretended he was in some sense _patron_ of a cell, and demanded a trumpery allowance of bread and ale, or an equivalent. As we read about these things we exclaim, ”Why in the world did they make such a fuss about a trifle?” Not so thought the monks. They knew well enough what the thin end of the wedge meant, and, being in a far better position than we are to judge of the significance and importance of many a _casus belli_ which now seems but trivial, they never dreamed of giving an inch for the other side to take an ell. So they went to law, and enjoyed it amazingly! Sometimes however, there were disputes which were not to be settled peaceably; and then came what University men in the old days used to know as a ”Town and Gown row.”

Let it be remembered that a Benedictine monastery, in the early times, was invariably set down in a lonely wilderness. As time went on, and the monks brought the swamp into cultivation, and wealth flowed in, and the monastery became a centre of culture, there would be sure to gather round the walls a number of hangers-on, who gradually grew into a community, the tendency of which was to a.s.sert itself, and to become less and less dependent upon the abbey for support. These _towns_ (for they became such) were, as a rule, built on the abbey land, and paid dues to the monastery. Of course, on the one side, there was an inclination to raise the dues; on the other, a desire to repudiate them altogether. Hence bad blood was sure to arise between the monks and the townsmen, and sooner or later serious conflicts between the servants of the monasteries and the people outside. Thus, in 1223, there was a serious collision between the Londoners and the Westminster monks; the mob rushed into the monastery, and the abbot escaped their violence with difficulty by slipping out at a back door and getting into a boat on the Thames. On another occasion there was a very serious fray between the citizens of Norwich and the priory there, in 1272, when the prior slew one man with his own hands, and many lives were lost. At a later time there was a similar disturbance at Bury St. Edmunds, and in the year 1314 the great abbey of St. Alban's was kept in a state of siege for more than ten days by the townsmen, who were driven to frenzy by not being allowed to grind their own corn in their own handmills, but compelled to get it ground by the abbey millers, and, of course, pay the fee.

Thirty years later, again, that man of sin, Sir Philip de Lymbury, lifted up his heel against the Abbey of St. Alban's, and actually laid hands upon Brother John Moot, the cellarer; and on Monday, being market day at Luton in Beds, did actually clap the said cellarer in the pillory and kept him there, exposed to the jeers and contempt of the rude populace, who, we may be sure, were in ecstasies at this precursor of Mr. Pickwick in the pound. But the holy martyr St. Alban was not likely to let such an outrage pa.s.s; and when the rollicking knight came to the abbey to make it up, and was for presenting a peace-offering at the shrine, lo, the knightly nose began to bleed profusely, and, to the consternation of the beholders, the offering could not be made, and Sir Philip had to retire, holding his nose, and shortly after he died--and, adds the chronicler, was speedily forgotten, he and his.

Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the canva.s.sing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a convent might be turned for years into a house divided against itself, the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog.

Nor did it at all follow that because the convent had elected their abbot or prior unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by the king, to whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable instance in Carlyle's ”Past and Present.”] King John kept monasteries without any abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the meantime, and leaving the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an abbot was forced upon a monastery in spite of the convent, as in the case of Abbot Roger Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks not only detested because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they denounced as actually immoral. Sometimes, too, the misconduct of a prior was so abominable that it could not be borne, and then came the very difficult and very delicate business of getting him deposed: a process which was by no means easily managed, as appeared in the instance of Simon Pumice, Prior of Worcester, in 1219, and in many another case.

Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to relieve the monotony which it has been too readily a.s.sumed was the characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent, was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look after them, it was a.s.sumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?

Nor, again, must we suppose that the monks were debarred all amus.e.m.e.nts. On August 29, 1283, there was a great wrestling match at Hockliffe, in Beds, and a huge concourse of people of all sorts were there to see the fun. The roughs and the ”fancy” were present in great force, and somehow it came to pa.s.s that a free fight ensued. I am sorry to say that the canons of Dunstable were largely represented upon the occasion. We are left to infer that the representatives were chiefly the servants of the canons, but I am afraid that some at least of their masters were there too. In the fight one Simon Mustard, who appears to have been something like a professional prize-fighter, ”a bully exceeding fierce,” says the annalist, got killed; but thereon ensued much inquiry and much litigation, and Dunstable and its ”religious” had to suffer vexations not a few. In fairness it should be remembered that these Dunstable people were not monks but canons--regular or irregular--and those canons, we all know, would do anything. We protest against being confounded with canons!

The amus.e.m.e.nts of monks were more innocent. The garden was always a great place of resort, and gardening a favourite pastime. We may be sure there was much lamentation and grumbling at St. Alban's when Abbot John de Maryns forbade any monk, who from infirmity could only be carried on a litter, from entering the garden at all. Poor old fellows! had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the flower-beds? Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion among them; but in the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by his letters, there were other diversions of a far more reprehensible character. Actually at the small Priory of c.o.xford, in Norfolk, the prior and his canons were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was dreadful! In other monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only the abbots, but the common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to be found as monks keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister, Peckham denounces these breaches of decorum as grave offences, which were not to be pa.s.sed over and not to be allowed. What! a black monk stalking along with a bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse than the Jackdaw of Rheims, using bad words in the garth, and showing an evil example to the chorister boys, with his head on one side!

But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all delights to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking.

”Sir, I like my dinner!” said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one thought the worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in a great abbey was clearly a very important event in the day--I will not say it was _the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important one. It must strike any one who knows much of the literature of this age that the weak point in the monastic life of the thirteenth century was the gormandizing. It was exactly as, I am told, it is on board s.h.i.+p on a long voyage, where people have little or nothing to do, they are always looking forward to the next meal, and the sound of the dinner-bell is the most exciting sound that greets the ear in the twenty-four hours.

And so with the monks in a great monastery which had grown rich, and in point of fact had more money than it knew what to do with: the dinner was the event of the day. It is not that we hear much of drunkenness, for we really hear very little of it, and where it is spoken of it is always with reprobation. Nor is it that we hear of anything like the loathsome and disgusting gluttony of the Romans of the empire, but eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the curtailing the luxury of the refectory.

But the monks were not the only people in those times who had a high appreciation of good cheer. When a man of high degree took up his quarters in a monastery he by no means wished to be put off with salt-fish-and-toast-and-water cheer. Richard de Marisco, one of King John's profligate councillors, who was eventually foisted into the see of Durham, gave the Abbey of St. Alban's the t.i.thes of Eglingham, in Northumberland, to help them to make their ale better--”taking compa.s.sion upon the weakness of the convent's drink,” as the chronicler tells us. The small beer of St. Alban's, it seems, was not so much improved as was to be desired, notwithstanding this appropriation of Church property, for twice after this the abbey had the same delicate hint given to it that its brewing was not up to the mark, when the rectory of Norton, in Hertfords.h.i.+re, and two-thirds of the t.i.thes of Hartburn, in Northumberland, were given to the monastery that no excuse might remain for the bad quality of the malt liquor.

And here let me remark in pa.s.sing that another wide-spread delusion needs to be removed from the popular mind with regard to the relations between the monks and the clergy. We have again and again heard people say, ”Wonderfully devoted men, those monks! Look at the churches all over the land! If it had not been for the monks how could all the village churches have been built? The monks built them all!” Monks build parish churches! Why, the monks were always robbing the country parsons, and the town parsons, too, for that matter.

Every vicarage in England represents a spoliation of the church, whose rectorial t.i.thes had been appropriated by a religious house, the parson being left with the vicarial t.i.thes, and often not even with them, but thrown for his daily bread upon the voluntary offerings of his paris.h.i.+oners. The monks build churches! I could not from my own knowledge bring forward a single instance in all the history of England of a monastery contributing a s.h.i.+lling of money or a load of stone for the repair, let alone the erection, of any parish church in the land. So far from it, they pulled down the churches when they had a chance, and they were always on the look-out to steal the rectory houses and subst.i.tute for them any cheap-and-nasty vicarage unless the bishop kept a sharp look-out upon them and came to the help of his clergy. Of all the sins that the monks had to answer for, this greedy grasping at Church property, this shameless robbery of the seculars, was beyond compare the most inexcusable and the most mischievous. To the credit of the Cistercians it must be told that they _at first_ set themselves against the wholesale pillage of the parochial clergy. I am not prepared to say they were true to their first principles--no corporate society ever was, and least of all a religious corporation--but at starting the Cistercians were decidedly opposed to the alienating of t.i.thes and appropriating them to the endowment of their abbeys, and this was probably one among other causes why the Cistercians prospered so wonderfully as they did during the first hundred years or so after their first coming here; people believed that the new order was not going to live by robbing parsons, as the older orders had done without remorse. The swindler always thinks his victim a fool, and the victim never forgives the smarter man who has taken him in. Accordingly the monks always pretended to think scorn of the clergy, and when the monasteries fell the clergy were the very last people to lament their fall.

And this brings us to the question of the moral condition of the monasteries. Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century ”the golden age of English Churchmans.h.i.+p.” Subject to correction from the greatest of England's great historians--and subject to correction, too, from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable eminence, are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this subject--I venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century was also the golden age of English Monachism. Certainly we know much more about the monasteries and their inner life during this period than at any other time. The materials ready to our hand are very voluminous, and the evidence accessible to the inquirer is very various. I do not believe that any man of common fairness and candour who should give some years to the careful study of those materials and that evidence could rise from his examination with any other impression than that, as a body, the monks of the thirteenth century were better than their age. Vicious and profligate, drunken and unchaste, as a cla.s.s, they certainly were not. Of course there were scandalous brethren. Here and there--but rarely, very rarely--there was a wicked abbot or prior. Of course there were instances of abominations on which one cannot dwell; of course there are stories which are bad to read; stories which find their way into the chronicles because they were strange or startling; but these stories are always told with horror, and commented upon with severity and scorn. Excuse for wickedness or any palliation of it, you simply never find.