The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: The Coming of the Friars

Author: Augustus Jessopp

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6625]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on January 5, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII, with a few ISO-8859-1 characters

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMING OF THE FRIARS ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




THE COMING OF THE FRIARS AND OTHER HISTORIC ESSAYS

BY THE REV. AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D.

Hon. Canon in Norwich Cathedral, Hon. Fellow of Worcester College,
Oxford, and Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge

FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION




TO MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME TUTOR,

FRANCIS WHALLEY HARPER,

CANON OF YORK,

I OFFER THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY GRATITUDE




[These Essays have appeared at various times in "The Nineteenth
Century," and are now printed with some alterations, corrections, and
additions.]




CONTENTS.

   I. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS

  II. VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO

 III. DAILY LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL MONASTERY

  IV. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA

   V. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA (_continued_)

  VI. THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY

 VII. THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD




I.

THE COMING OF THE FRIARS.

Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again!--_Lord
Tennyson._


When King Richard of England, whom men call the Lion-hearted, was
wasting his time at Messina, after his boisterous fashion, in the
winter of 1190, he heard of the fame of Abbot Joachim, and sent for
that renowned personage, that he might hear from his own lips the
words of prophecy and their interpretation.

Around the personality of Joachim there has gathered no small amount
of _mythus._ He was, it appears, the inventor of that mystical
method of Hermeneutics which has in our time received the name of
"the year-day theory," and which, though now abandoned for the most
part by sane men, has still some devout and superstitious advocates
in the school of Dr. Cumming and kindred visionaries.

Abbot Joachim proclaimed that a stupendous catastrophe was at hand.
Opening the Book of the Revelation of St. John he read, pondered, and
interpreted. A divine illumination opened out to him the dark things
that were written in the sacred pages. The unenlightened could make
nothing of "a time, times, and half a time" [Footnote: Dan. xii. 7.]
; to them the terrors of the 1,260 days [Footnote: Rev. xi .3.] were
an insoluble enigma long since given up as hopeless, whose answer
would come only at the Day of Judgment. Abbot Joachim declared that
the key to the mystery had been to him revealed. What could "a time,
times, and half a time" mean, but three years and a half? What could
a year mean in the divine economy but the _lunar_ year of 360
days? for was not the moon the symbol of the Church of God? What were
those 1,260 days but the sum of the days of three years and a half?
Moreover, as it had been with the prophet Ezekiel, to whom it was
said, "I have appointed thee a day for a year," so it must needs be
with other seers who saw the visions of God. To them the "day" was
not as our brief prosaic day--to them too had been "appointed a day
for a year." The "time, times, and half a time" were the 1,260 days,
and these were 1,260 years, and the stupendous catastrophe, the
battle of Armageddon, the reign of Antichrist, the new heavens and
the new earth, the slaughter and the resurrection of the two heavenly
witnesses, were at hand. Eleven hundred and ninety years had passed
away of those 1,260. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth," said
Joachim; "Antichrist is already born, yea born in the city of Rome!"

Though King Richard, in the strange interview of which contemporary
historians have left us a curious narrative, exhibited much more of
the spirit of the scoffer than of the convert, and evidently had no
faith in Abbott Joachim's theories and his mission, it was otherwise
with the world at large. At the close of the twelfth century a very
general belief, the result of a true instinct, pervaded all classes
that European society was passing through a tremendous crisis, that
the dawn of a new era, or, as they phrased it, "the end of all
things" was at hand.

The Abbot Joachim was only the spokesman of his age who was lucky
enough to get a hearing. He spoke a language that was a jargon of
rhapsody, but he spoke vaguely of terrors, and perils, and
earthquakes, and thunderings, the day of wrath; and because he spoke
so darkly men listened all the more eagerly, for there was a vague
anticipation of the breaking up of the great waters, and that things
that had been heretofore could not continue as they were.

Verily when the thirteenth century opened, the times were evil, and
no hope seemed anywhere on the horizon. The grasp of the infidel was
tightened upon the Holy City, and what little force there ever had
been among the rabble of Crusaders was gone now; the truculent
ruffianism that pretended to be animated by the crusading spirit
showed its real character in the hideous atrocities for which Simon
de Montfort is answerable, and in the unparalleled enormities of the
sack of Constantinople in 1204. For ten years (1198--1208) through
the length and breadth of Germany there was ceaseless and sanguinary
conflict. In the great Italian towns party warfare, never hesitating
to resort to every kind of crime, had long been chronic. The history
of Sicily is one long record of cruelty, tyranny, and wrong--
committed, suffered, or revenged. Over the whole continent of Europe
people seem to have had no _homes;_ the merchant, the student,
the soldier, the ecclesiastic were always on the move. Young men made
no difficulty in crossing the Alps to attend lectures at Bologna, or
crossing the Channel to or from Oxford and Paris. The soldier or the
scholar was equally a free-lance, ready to take service whereever it
offered, and to settle wherever there was dread to win or money to
save. No one trusted in the stability of anything. [Footnote: M.
Jusserand's beautiful book, "La Vie Nomade," was not published till
1884, _i.e.,_ a year after this essay appeared.]

To a thoughtful man watching the signs of the times, it may well have
seemed that the hope for the future of civilization--the hope for any
future, whether of art, science, or religion-lay in the steady growth
of the towns. It might be that the barrier of the Alps would always
limit the influence of Italian cities to Italy and the islands of the
Mediterranean; but for the great towns of what is now Belgium and
Germany what part might not be left for them to play in the history
of the world? In England the towns were as yet insignificant
communities compared with such mighty aggregates of population as
were to be found in Bruges, Antwerp, or Cologne; but even the English
towns _were_ communities, and they were beginning to assert
themselves somewhat loudly while clinging to their chartered rights
with jealous tenacity. Those rights, however, were eminently
exclusive and selfish in their character. The chartered towns were
ruled in all cases by an oligarchy. [Footnote: Stubbs,
"Constitutional History," vol. i. Section 131.] The increase in the
population brought wealth to a class, the class of privileged
traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several
_mysteries_ to themselves by vigilant measures of protection.
Outside the well-guarded defences which these trades-unions
constructed, there were the masses--hewers of wood and drawers of
water--standing to the skilled artizan of the thirteenth century
almost precisely in the same relation as the bricklayer's labourer
does to the mason in our own time. The _sediment_ of the town
population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery,
squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the
worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we
hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical
outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that we should
dismiss as incredible such stories as the imagination shrinks from
dwelling on. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the
lower order in the towns was the fact that the ever-increasing
throngs of beggars, outlaws, and ruffian runaways were simply left to
shift for themselves. The civil authorities took no account of them
as long as they quietly rotted and died; and, what was still more
dreadful, the whole machinery of the Church polity had been formed
and was adapted to deal with entirely different conditions of society
from those which had now arisen.

The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and
ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand
one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only
approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle
Ages the parochial system, except as a _civil_ institution, had
broken down.

The other idea, of men and women weary of the hard struggle with sin,
and fleeing from the wrath to come, joining together to give
themselves up to the higher life, out of the reach of temptation and
safe from the witcheries of Mammon,--that too was a grand idea, and
not unfrequently it had been carried out grandly. But the monk was
nothing and did nothing for the townsman; he fled away to his
solitude; the rapture of silent adoration was his joy and exceeding
great reward; his nights and days might be spent in praise and
prayer, sometimes in study and research, sometimes in battling with
the powers of darkness and ignorance, sometimes in throwing himself
heart and soul into art which it was easy to persuade himself he was
doing only for the glory of God; but all this must go on far away
from the busy haunts of men, certainly not within earshot of the
multitude. Moreover the monk was, by birth, education, and sympathy,
one with the upper classes. What were the rabble to him? [Footnote:
The 20th Article of the Assize of Clarendon is very significant:
"Prohibet dominus rex ne monachi... recipiant _aliquem de minuto
populo in monachum,_ vel canonicum vel fratrem," &c.--Stubbs,
"Benedict Abbas," pref. p. cliv.] In return the townsmen hated him
cordially, as a supercilious aristocrat and Pharisee, with the guile
and greed of the Scribe and lawyer superadded.

Upon the townsmen--whatever it may have been among the countrymen--
the ministers of religion exercised the smallest possible
_restraint._ Nay! it was only too evident that the bonds of
ecclesiastical discipline which had so often exercised a salutary
check upon the unruly had become seriously relaxed of late, both in
town and country; they had been put to too great a strain and had
snapped. By the suicidal methods of Excommunication and Interdict all
ranks were schooled into doing without the rites of religion, the
baptism of their children, or the blessing upon the marriage union.
In the meantime it was notorious that even in high places there were
instances not a few of Christians who had denied the faith and had
given themselves up to strange beliefs, of which the creed of the
Moslem was not the worst. Men must have received with a smile the
doctrine that Marriage was a Sacrament when everybody knew that,
among the upper classes at least, the bonds of matrimony were soluble
almost at pleasure. [Footnote: Eleanor of Aquitaine, consort of Henry
II., had been divorced by Louis VII. of France. Constance of
Brittany, mother of Arthur--Shakespeare's idealized Constance--left
her husband, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, to unite herself with Guy of
Flanders. Conrad of Montferat divorced the daughter of Isaac Angelus,
Emperor of Constantinople, to marry Isabella, daughter of Amalric,
King of Jerusalem, the bride repudiating her husband Henfrid of
Thouars. Philip II. of France married the sister of the King of
Denmark one day and divorced her the next; then married a German
lady, left her, and returned to the repudiated Dane. King John in
1189 divorced Hawisia, Countess of Gloucester, and took Isabella of
Angouleme to wife, but how little he cared to be faithful to the one
or the other the chronicles disdain to ask.] It seems hardly worth
while to notice that the observance of Sunday was almost universally
neglected, or that sermons had become so rare that when Eustace,
Abbot of Flai, preached in various places in England in 1200,
miracles were said to have ensued as the ordinary effects of his
eloquence. Earnestness in such an age seemed in itself miraculous.
Here and there men and women, hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, raised their sobbing prayer to heaven that the Lord
would shortly accomplish the number of his elect and hasten his
coming, and Abbot Joachim's dreams were talked of and his vague
mutterings made the sanguine hope for better days. Among those
mutterings had there not been a speech of the two heavenly witnesses
who were to do--ah! what were they not to do? And these heavenly
witnesses, who were they? When and where would they appear?

Eight years before King Richard was in Sicily a child had been born
in the thriving town of Assisi, thirteen miles from Perugia, who was
destined to be one of the great movers of the world. Giovanni
Bernardone was the son of a wealthy merchant at Assisi, and from all
that appears an only child. He was from infancy intended for a
mercantile career, nor does he seem to have felt any dislike to it.
One story--and it is as probable as the other--accounts for his name
Francesco by assuring us that he earned it by his unusual familiarity
with the French language, acquired during his residence in France
while managing his father's business. The new name clung to him; the
old baptismal name was dropped; posterity has almost forgotten that
it was ever imposed. From the mass of tradition and personal
recollections that have come down to us from so many different
sources it is not always easy to decide when we are dealing with pure
invention of pious fraud, and when with mere exaggeration of actual
fact, but it scarcely admits of doubt that the young merchant of
Assisi was engaged in trade and commerce till his twenty-fourth year,
living in the main as others live, but perhaps early conspicuous for
aiming at a loftier ideal than that of his everyday associates, and
characterized by the devout and ardent temperament essential to the
religious reformer. It was in the year 1206 that he became a changed
man. He fell ill--he lay at Death's door. From the languor and
delirium he recovered but slowly--when he did recover old things had
passed away; behold! all things had become new. From this time
Giovanni Bernardone passes out of sight, and from the ashes of a dead
past, from the seed which has withered that the new life might
germinate and fructify, Francis--why grudge to call him Saint
Francis?--of Assisi rises.

Very early the young man had shown a taste for Church restoration.
The material fabric of the houses of God in the land could not but
exhibit the decay of living faith; the churches were falling into
ruins. The little chapel of St. Mary and the Angels at Assisi was in
a scandalous condition of decay. It troubled the heart of the young
pietist profoundly to see the Christian church squalid and tottering
to its fall while within sight of it was the Roman temple in which
men had worshipped the idols. There it stood, as it had stood for a
thousand years--as it stands to this day. Oh, shame! that Christian
men should build so slightly while the heathen built so strongly!

To the little squalid ruin St. Francis came time and again, and
poured out his heart, perplexed and sad; and there, we are told, God
met him and a voice said, "Go, and build my church again." It was a
"thought beyond his thought," and with the straightforward simplicity
of his nature he accepted the message in its literal sense and at
once set about obeying it as he understood it.

He began by giving all he could lay his hands on to provide funds for
the work. His own resources exhausted, he applied for contributions
to all who came in his way. His father became alarmed at his son's
excessive liberality and the consequences that might ensue from his
strange recklessness; it is even said that he turned him out of
doors; it seems that the commercial partnership was cancelled: it is
certain that the son was compelled to make some great renunciation of
wealth, and that his private means were seriously restricted. That a
man of business should be blind to the preciousness of money was a
sufficient proof then, as now, that he must be mad.

O ye wary men of the world, bristling with the shrewdest of maxims,
bursting with the lessons of experience, ye of the cool heads and the
cold grey eyes, ye whom the statesman loves, and the tradesman
trusts, cautious, sagacious, prudent; when the rumbling of the
earthquake tells us that the foundations of the earth are out of
course, we must look for deliverance to other than you! A grain of
enthusiasm is of mightier force than a million tons of wisdom such as
yours; then when the hour of the great upheaval has arrived, and
things can no longer be kept going!

"Build up my church!" said the voice again to this gushing emaciated
fanatic in the second-rate Italian town, this dismal bankrupt of
twenty-four years of age, "of lamentably low extraction," whom no
University claimed as her own, and whom the learned pundits pitied.
At last he understood the profounder meaning of the words. It was no
temple made with hands, but the _living_ Church that needed
raising. The dust of corruption must be swept away, the dry bones be
stirred; the breath of the divine Spirit blow and reanimate them. Did
not the voice mean that? What remained but to obey?

In his journeyings through France it is hardly possible that St.
Francis should not have heard of _the poor men of Lyons_ whose
peculiar tenets at this time were arousing very general attention. It
is not improbable that he may have fallen in with one of those
translations of the New Testament into the vernacular executed by
Stephen de Emsa at the expense of Peter Waldo, and through his means
widely circulated among all classes. [Footnote: See "Facts and
Documents Illustrative of the History, Doctrine, and Rites, of the
Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses," by the Rev. S. R, Maitland,
London, 8vo., 1832, p. 127 _et seq._] Be it as it may, the words
addressed by our Lord to the seventy, when he sent them forth to
preach the kingdom of heaven, seemed to St. Francis to be written in
letters of flame. They haunted him waking and sleeping. "The lust of
gain in the spirit of Cain!" what had it done for the world or the
Church but saturate the one and the other with sordid greed? Mere
wealth had not added to the sum of human happiness. Nay, misery was
growing; kings fought, and the people bled at every pore. Merchants
reared their palaces, and the masses were perishing. Where riches
increased, there pride and ungodliness were rampant. What had
corrupted the monks, whose lives should be so pure and exemplary?
What but their vast possessions, bringing with them luxury and the
paralysis of devotion and of all lofty endeavour? It was openly
maintained that the original Benedictine Rule could not be kept now
as of yore. One attempt after another to bring back the old monastic
discipline had failed deplorably. The Cluniac revival had been
followed by the Cluniac laxity, splendour, and ostentation. The
Cistercians, who for a generation had been the sour puritans of the
cloister, had become the most potent religious corporation in Europe;
but theirs was the power of the purse now. Where had the old
strictness and the old fervour gone? Each man was lusting for all
that was not his own; but free alms, where were they? and pity for
the sad, and reverence for the stricken, and tenderness and sympathy?
"O gentle Jesus, where art Thou? and is there no love of Thee
anywhere, nor any love for Thy lost sheep, Thou crucified Saviour of
men?"

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Knocking at his heart--not merely buzzing in his brain--the words
kept smiting him, "Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your
purses, neither scrip for your journey, neither two coats, nor yet
staves, for the workman is worthy of his meat!" Once men had changed
the face of the world with no other equipment. Faith then had removed
mountains. Why not again? He threw away his staff and shoes; he went
forth with literally a single garment; he was girt with a common rope
round his loins. He no more doubted of his mission, he no more feared
for the morrow than he feared for the young ravens that he loved and
spake to in an ecstasy of joy.

Henceforth there was "not a bird upon the tree but half forgave his
being human;" the flowers of the field looked out at him with special
greetings, the wolf of the mountains met him with no fierce glare in
his eye. Great men smiled at the craze of the monomaniac. Old men
shook their grey heads and remembered that they themselves had been
young and foolish. Practical men would not waste their words upon the
folly of the thing. Rich men, serenely confident of their position,
affirmed that they knew of only one who could overcome the world--to
wit, the veritable hero, he who holds the purse-strings. St. Francis
did not speak to these. "Oh, ye miserable, helpless, and despairing;
ye who find yourselves so unutterably forlorn--so very, very far
astray; ye lost souls whom Satan has bound through the long weary
years; ye of the broken hearts, bowed down and crushed; ye with your
wasted bodies loathsome to every sense, to whom life is torture and
whom death will not deliver; ye whose very nearness by the wayside
makes the traveller as he passes shudder with uncontrollable horror
lest your breath should light upon his garments, look! I am poor as
you--I am one of yourselves. Christ, the very Christ of God, has sent
me with a message to you. Listen!"

It is observable that we never hear of St. Francis that he was a
sermon-maker. He had received no clerical or even academical
training. Up to 1207 he had not even a license to preach. It was only
after this that he was--and apparently without desiring it--ordained
a deacon. In its first beginnings the Franciscan movement was
essentially moral, not theological, still less intellectual. The
absence of anything like dogma in the sermons of the early Minorites
was their characteristic. One is tempted to say it was a mere
accident that these men were not sectaries, so little in common had
they with the ecclesiastics of the time, so entirely did they live
and labour among the laity of whom they were and with whom they so
profoundly sympathized.

The secret of the overwhelming, the irresistible attraction which St.
Francis exercised is to be found in his matchless simplicity, in his
sublime self-surrender. He removed mountains because he believed
intensely in the infinite power of _mere goodness_. While from
the writhing millions all over Europe--the millions ignorant,
neglected, plague-stricken, despairing--an inarticulate wail was
going up to God, St. Francis made it articulate. Then he boldly
proclaimed: "God has heard your cry! It meant this and that. I am
sent to you with the good God's answer." There was less than a step
between accepting him as the interpreter of their vague yearnings and
embracing him as the ambassador of Heaven to themselves.

St, Francis was hardly twenty-eight years old when he set out for
Rome, to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the
Third, and to ask from him some formal recognition. The pontiff, so
the story goes, was walking in the garden of the Lateran when the
momentous meeting took place. Startled by the sudden apparition of an
emaciated young man, bareheaded, shoeless, half-clad, but--for all
his gentleness--a beggar who would take no denial, Innocent
hesitated. It was but for a brief hour, the next he was won.

Francis returned to Assisi with the Papal sanction for what was,
probably, a draught of his afterwards famous "Rule." He was met by
the whole city, who received him with a frenzy of excitement. By this
time his enthusiasm had kindled that of eleven other young men, all
now aglow with the same divine fire. A twelfth soon was added--he,
moreover, a layman of gentle blood and of knightly rank. All these
had surrendered their claim to everything in the shape of property,
and had resolved to follow their great leader's example by stripping
themselves of all worldly possessions, and suffering the loss of all
things. They were beggars--literally barefooted beggars. The love of
money was the root of all evil. They would not touch the accursed
thing lest they should be defiled--no, not with the tips of their
fingers. "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

Beggars they were, but they were brethren--_Fratres (Frres)_.
We in England have got to call them _Friars_. Francis was never
known in his lifetime as anything higher than _Brother Francis_,
and his community he insisted should be called the community of the
lesser brethren--_Fratres Minores_--for none could be or should
be less than they. Abbots and Priors, he would have none of them. "He
that will be chief among you," he said, in Christ's own words, "let
him be your servant." The highest official among the _Minorites_
was the _Minister_, the elect of all, the servant of all, and if
not humble enough to serve, not fit to rule.

People talk of "Monks and Friars" as if these were convertible terms.
The truth is that the difference between the Monks and the Friars was
almost one of kind. The Monk was supposed never to leave his
cloister. The Friar in St. Francis' first intention had no cloister
to leave. Even when he had where to lay his head, his life-work was
not to save his own soul, but first and foremost to save the bodies
and souls of others. The Monk had nothing to do with ministering to
others. At best his business was to be the salt of the earth, and it
behoved him to be much more upon his guard that the salt should not
lose his savour, than that the earth should be sweetened. The Friar
was an itinerant evangelist, always on the move. He was a preacher of
righteousness. He lifted up his voice against sin and wrong. "Save
yourselves from this untoward generation!" he cried; "save yourselves
from the wrath to come." The Monk, as has been said, was an
aristocrat. The Friar belonged to the great unwashed!

Without the loss of a day the new apostles of poverty, of pity, of an
all-embracing love, went forth by two and two to build up the ruined
Church of God. Theology they were, from anything that appears,
sublimely ignorant of. Except that they were masters of every phrase
and word in the Gospels, their stock in trade was scarcely more than
that of an average candidate for Anglican orders; but to each and all
of them Christ was simply _everything_. If ever men have
preached Christ, these men did; Christ, nothing but Christ, the Alpha
and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
They had no system, they had no views, they combated no opinions,
they took no side. Let the dialecticians dispute about this nice
distinction or that. There _could_ be no doubt that Christ had
died and risen, and was alive for evermore. There was no place for
controversy or opinions when here was a mere simple, indisputable,
but most awful fact. Did you want to wrangle about the aspect of the
fact, the evidence, the what not? St. Francis had no mission to argue
with you. "The pearl of great price--will you have it or not? Whether
or not, there are millions sighing for it, crying for it, dying for
it. To the poor at any rate the Gospel shall be preached now as of
old."

To the poor by the poor. Those masses, those dreadful masses,
crawling, sweltering in the foul hovels, in many a southern town with
never a roof to cover them, huddling in groups under a dry arch,
alive with vermin; gibbering _cretins_ with the ghastly wens;
lepers by the hundred, too shocking for mothers to gaze at, and
therefore driven forth to curse and howl in the lazar-house outside
the walls, there stretching out their bony hands to clutch the
frightened almsgiver's dole, or, failing that, to pick up shreds of
offal from the heaps of garbage--to these St. Francis came.

More wonderful still!--to these outcasts came those other twelve, so
utterly had their leader's sublime self-surrender communicated itself
to his converts. "We are come," they said, "to live among you and be
your servants, and wash your sores, and make your lot less hard than
it is. We only want to do as Christ bids us do. We are beggars too,
and we too have not where to lay our heads. Christ sent us to you.
Yes. Christ the crucified, whose we are, and whose you are. Be not
wroth with us, we will help you if we can."

As they spoke, so they lived. They _were_ less than the least,
as St. Francis told them they must strive to be. Incredulous cynicism
was put to silence. It was wonderful, it was inexplicable, it was
disgusting, it was anything you please; but where there were
outcasts, lepers, pariahs, there, there were these penniless
Minorites tending the miserable sufferers with a cheerful look, and
not seldom with a merry laugh. As one reads the stories of those
earlier Franciscans, one is reminded every now and then of the
extravagances of the Salvation Army.

The heroic example set by these men at first startled, and then
fascinated the upper classes. While labouring to save the lowest,
they took captive the highest. The Brotherhood grew in numbers day by
day; as it grew, new problems presented themselves. How to dispose of
all the wealth renounced, how to employ the energies of all the
crowds of brethren. Hardest of all, what to do with the earnest,
highly-trained, and sometimes erudite convert who could not divest
himself of the treasures of learning which he had amassed. "Must I
part with my books?" said the scholar, with a sinking heart. "Carry
nothing with you for your journey!" was the inexorable answer. "Not a
Breviary? not even the Psalms of David?" "Get them into your heart of
hearts, and provide yourself with a treasure in the heavens. Who ever
heard of Christ reading books save when He opened the book in the
synagogue, and then _closed_ it and went forth to teach the
world for ever?"

In 1215 the new Order held its first Chapter at the Church of the
Portiuncula. The numbers of the Brotherhood and the area over which
their labours extended had increased so vastly that it was already
found necessary to nominate Provincial Ministers in France, Germany,
and Spain.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

While these things were going on in Italy, another notable reformer
was vexing his righteous soul in Spain. St. Dominic was a very
different man from the gentle and romantic young Italian. Of high
birth, which among the haughty Castillians has always counted for a
great deal, he had passed his boyhood among ecclesiastics and
academics. He was twelve years older than St. Francis. He studied
theology for ten years at the University of Palencia, and before the
twelfth century closed he was an Augustinian Canon. In 1203, while
St. Francis was still poring over his father's ledgers, Dominic was
associated with the Bishop of Osma in negotiating a marriage for
Alphonso the Eighth, king of Castille. For the next ten years he was
more or less concerned with the hideous atrocities of the Albigensian
war. During that dark period of his career he was brought every day
face to face with heresy and schism. From infancy he must have heard
those around him talk with a savage intolerance of the Moors of the
South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo nearer home. Now his eyes were
open to the perils that beset the Church from sectaries who from
within were for casting off her divine authority. Wretches who
questioned the very creeds and rejected the Sacraments, yet
perversely insisted that they were Christian men and women, with a
clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and Cardinals or
the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and immortal souls,
all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose word doth eat
as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man, and marvelled
that there was no intercessor."

It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance,
determined to war with, but ignorance and error. _These_ were to
him the monster evils, whose natural fruit was moral corruption. Get
rid of them and the depraved heart might be dealt with by-and-by.
Dominic stood forth as the determined champion of orthodoxy. "Preach
the word in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort"--that was
his panacea. His success at the first was but small. Preachers with
the divine fervour, with the gift of utterance, with the power to
drive truth home--are rare. They are not to be had for the asking;
they are not to be trained in a day. Years passed, but little was
achieved.

Dominic was patient He had, indeed, founded a small religious
community of sixteen brethren at St. Ronain, near Toulouse--one of
these, we are told, was an Englishman--whose aim and object were to
produce an effect through the agency of the pulpit, to confute the
heretics and instruct the unlearned. The Order, if it deserved the
name, was established on the old lines. A monastery was founded, a
local habitation secured. The maintenance of the brotherhood was
provided for by a sufficient endowment; the petty cares and anxieties
of life were in the main guarded against; but when Innocent the Third
gave his formal sanction to the new community, it was given to
Dominic and his associates, on the 8th of October, 1215, as to a
house of _Augustinian Canons_, who received permission to enjoy
in their corporate capacity the endowments which had been bestowed
upon them. [Footnote: So "La Cordaire, vie de S. Dominique" (1872),
p. 120. It was, however, a very curious community, as appears from
"Ripolli Bullarium Praedicat:" I.i.]

In the following July Innocent died, and was at once succeeded by
Honorius the Third. Dominic set out for Rome, and on the 22nd of
December he received from the new Pope a bare confirmation of what
his predecessor had granted, with little more than a passing allusion
to the fact that the new canons were to be emphatically
_Preachers_ of the faith. In the autumn of 1217 Dominic turned
his back upon Languedoc for ever. He took up his residence at Rome,
and at once rose high in the favour of the Pope. His eloquence, his
earnestness, his absorbing enthusiasm, his matchless dialectic skill,
his perfect scholastic training--all combined to attract precisely
those cultured churchmen whose fastidious sense of the fitness of
things revolted from the austerities of St. Francis and the enormous
demands which the Minorites made upon their converts. While Francis
was acting upon the masses from Assisi, Dominic was stirring the dry
bones to a new vitality among scholars and ecclesiastics at Rome.

Thus far we have heard little or nothing of poverty among the more
highly educated _Friars Preachers_, as they got to be called.
That seems to have been quite an afterthought. So far as Dominic may
be said to have accepted the Voluntary Principle and, renouncing all
endowments, to have thrown himself and his followers for support upon
the alms of the faithful, so far he was a disciple of St. Francis.
The Champion of Orthodoxy was a convert to the Apostle of Poverty.

How soon the Dominicans gave in their adhesion to the distinctive
tenet of the Minorites will never now be known, nor how far St.
Francis himself adopted it from others; but a conviction that
holiness of life had deteriorated in the Church and the cloister by
reason of the excessive wealth of monks and ecclesiastics was
prevalent everywhere, and a belief was growing that sanctity was
attainable only by those who were ready to part with all their
worldly possessions and give to such as needed. Even before St.
Francis had applied to Innocent the Third, the poor men of Lyons had
come to Rome begging for papal sanction to their missionary plans;
they met with little favour, and vanished from the scene. But they
too declaimed against endowments--they too were to live on alms. The
Gospel of Poverty was "_in the air_."

In 1219 the Franciscans held their second general Chapter. It was
evident that they were taking the world by storm; evident, too, that
their astonishing success was due less to their preaching than to
their self-denying lives. It was abundantly plain that this vast army
of fervent missionaries could live from day to day and work wonders
in evangelizing the masses without owning a rood of land, or having
anything to depend upon but the perennial stream of bounty which
flowed from the gratitude of the converts. If the Preaching Friars
were to succeed at such a time as this, they could only hope to do so
by exhibiting as sublime a faith as the Minorites displayed to the
world. Accordingly, in the very year after the second Chapter of the
Franciscans was held at Assisi, a general Chapter of the Dominicans
was held at Bologna, and there the profession of poverty was formally
adopted, and the renunciation of all means of support, except such as
might be offered from day to day, was insisted on. Henceforth the two
orders were to labour side by side in magnificent rivalry--mendicants
who went forth like Gideon's host with empty pitchers to fight the
battles of the Lord, and whose desires, as far as the good things of
this world went, were summed up in the simple petition, "Give us this
day our daily bread!"

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Thus far the friars had scarcely been heard of in England. The
Dominicans--trained men of education, addressing themselves mainly to
the educated classes, and sure of being understood wherever Latin,
the universal medium of communication among scholars, was in daily
and hourly use--the Dominicans could have little or no difficulty in
getting an audience such as they were qualified to address. It was
otherwise with the Franciscans. If the world was to be divided
between these two great bands, obviously the Minorites' sphere of
labour must be mainly among the lowest, that of the Preaching Friars
among the cultured classes.

When the Minorites preached among Italians or Frenchmen they were
received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the
people; and in the vulgar speech of the people--rugged, plastic, and
reckless of grammar--the message came as glad tidings of great joy.
When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they
signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any
rate, was denied, even to such faith as theirs. They were met with
ridicule. The rabble of Cologne or Bremen, hoarsely grumbling out
their grating gutturals, were not to be moved by the most impassioned
pleading of angels in human form, soft though their voices might be,
and musical their tones. "Ach Himmel! was sagt er?" growled one. And
peradventure some well-meaning interpreter replied: "Zu suchen und
selig zu machen." When the Italian tried to repeat the words his
utterance, not his faith, collapsed! The German-speaking people must
wait till a door should be opened. Must England wait too? Yes! For
the Franciscan missionaries England too must wait a little while.

But England was exactly the land for the Dominican to turn to.
Unhappy England! Dominic was born in the same year that Thomas a
Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral; Francis in the year
before the judgment of the Most High began to fall upon the guilty
king and his accursed progeny. Since then everything seemed to have
gone wrong. The last six years of Henry the Second's reign were years
of piteous misery, shame, and bitterness. His two elder sons died in
arms against their father, the one childless, the other, Geoffrey,
with a baby boy never destined to arrive at manhood. The two younger
ones were Richard and John. History has no story more sad than that
of the wretched king, hard at death's door, compelled to submit to
the ferocious vindictiveness of the one son, and turning his face to
the wall with a broken heart when he discovered the hateful treachery
of the other. Ten years after this Richard died childless, and King
John was crowned--the falsest, meanest, worst, and wickedest king
that ever sat upon the throne of England. And now John himself was
dead; and "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child!" for Henry
the Third was crowned, a boy just nine years old.

For eight years England had lain under the terrible interdict; for
most of the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John
had small need to tax the people: he lived upon the plunder of
bishops and abbots. The churches were desolate; the worship of God in
large districts almost came to an end. Only in the Cistercian
monasteries, and in them only for a time, and to a very limited
extent, were the rites of religion continued. It is hardly
conceivable that the places of those clergy who died during the eight
years of the interdict were supplied by fresh ordinations; and some
excuse may have been found for the outrageous demands of the Pope to
present to English benefices in the fact that many cures must have
been vacant, and the supply of qualified Englishmen to succeed them
had fallen short.

 Strange to say, in the midst of all this religious famine, and while
the Church was being ruthlessly pillaged and her ministers put to
rebuke, there was more intellectual activity in the country than had
existed for centuries. The schools at Oxford were attracting students
from far and near; and when, in consequence of the disgraceful murder
of three _clerics_ in 1209, apparently at the instance of King
John, the whole body of masters and scholars dispersed--some to
Cambridge, others to Reading--it is said their number amounted to
3,000. These were for the most part youths hardly as old as the
undergraduates in a Scotch university in our own time; but there was
evidently an ample supply of competent teachers, or the reputation of
Oxford could not have been maintained.

It was during the year after the Chapter of the Dominicans held at
Bologna in 1220, that the first brethren of the order arrived in
England. They were under the direction of one Gilbert de Fraxineto,
who was accompanied by twelve associates. They landed early in
August, probably at Dover. They were at once received with cordiality
by Archbishop Langton, who put their powers to the test by commanding
one of their number to preach before him. The Primate took them into
his favour, and sent them on their way. On the 10th of August they
were preaching in London, and on the 15th they appeared in Oxford,
and were welcomed as the bringers-in of new things. Their success was
unequivocal. We hardly hear of their arrival before we learn that
they were well established in their school and surrounded by eager
disciples.

Be it remembered that any systematic training of young men to serve
as evangelists--any attempt to educate them directly as preachers
well furnished with arguments to confute the erring, and carefully
taught to practise the graces of oratory--had never been made in
England. These Dominicans were already the Sophists of their age,
masters of dialectic methods then in vogue, whereby disputation had
been raised to the dignity of a science. Then a scholar was looked
upon as a mere pretender who could not maintain a _thesis_
against all comers before a crowded audience of sharp-witted critics
and eager partisans, not too nice in their expressions of dissent or
approval. The exercises still kept up for the Doctor's degree in
Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge are but the shadow of what was a
reality in the past. Whether we have not lost much in the
discontinuance of the old _Acts_ and _Apponencies_, which at
least assured that a young man should be required to stand up
before a public audience to defend the reasonableness of his
opinions, may fairly be doubted. The aim of the Dominican teachers
was to turn out trained preachers furnished with all tricks of
dialectic fence, and practised to extempore speaking on the most
momentous subjects. Unfortunately the historian, when he has told us
of the arrival of his brethren, leaves us in the dark as to all their
early struggles and difficulties, and passes on to other matters with
which we are less concerned. What would we not give to know the
history, say during only twenty years, of the labours of the
Preaching Friars in England? Alas! it seems never to have been
written. We are only told enough to awaken curiousity and disappoint
it.

Happily, of the early labours of the Franciscan friars in England
much fuller details have reached us, though the very existence of the
records in which they were handed down was known to very few, and the
wonderful story had been forgotten for centuries when the appearance
of the "Monumenta Franciscana" in the series of chronicles published
under direction of the Master of the Rolls in 1858 may be said to
have marked an event in literature. If the late Mr. Brewer had done
no more than bring to light the remarkable series of documents which
that volume contains, he would have won for himself the lasting
gratitude of all seekers after truth.

The Dominicans had been settled in Oxford just two years when the
first band of Franciscan brethren landed in England on the 11th of
September, 1224. They landed penniless; their passage over had been
paid by the monks of Fcamp; they numbered in all nine persons, five
were laymen, four were clerics. Of the latter three were Englishmen,
the fourth was an Italian, Agnellus of Pisa by name. Agnellus had
been some time previously destined by St. Francis as the first
_Minister_ for the province of England, not improbably because
he had some familiarity with our language. He was about thirty years
of age, and as yet only in deacon's orders. Indeed, of the whole
company _only one was a priest_, a man of middle age who had
made his mark and was famous as a preacher of rare gifts and deep
earnestness. He was a Norfolk man born, Richard of Ingworth by name
and presumably a priest of the diocese of Norwich. Of the five laymen
one was a Lombard, who may have had some kinsfolk and friends in
London, where he was allowed to remain as warden for some years, and
one, Lawrence of Beauvais, was a personal and intimate friend of St.
Francis, who on his death-bed gave him the habit which he himself had
worn.

The whole party were hospitably entertained for two days at the
Priory of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury. Then brother Richard
Ingworth, with another Richard--a Devonshire youth conspicuous for
his ascetic fervour and devotion, but only old enough to be admitted
to minor orders--set out for London, accompanied by the Lombard and
another foreigner, leaving behind him Agnellus and the rest, among
them William of Esseby, the third Englishman, enthusiastic and ardent
as the others, but a mere youth and as yet a novice. He, too, I
conjecture to have been a Norfolk or Suffolk man, whose birth-place,
_Ashby_, in the East Anglian dialect, would be pronounced nearly
as it is written in Eccleston's manuscript. It was arranged that
Richard Ingworth should lose no time in trying to secure some place
where they might all lay their heads, and from whence as a centre
they might begin the great work they had in hand. The Canterbury
party were received into the Priest's House and allowed to remain for
a while. Soon they received permission to sleep in a building used as
a school during the day-time, and while the boys were being taught
the poor friars huddled together in a small room adjoining, where
they were confined as if they had been prisoners. When the scholars
went home the friars crept out, lit a fire and sat round it, boiled
their porridge, and mixed their small beer, sour and thick as we are
told it was, with water to make it go further, and each contributed
some word of edification to the general stock, brought forward some
homely illustration which might serve to brighten the next sermon
when it should be preached, or told a pleasant tale, thought out
during the day--a story with a moral. Of the five left behind at
Canterbury it is to be observed that no one of them was qualified as
yet to preach in the vernacular. William of Esseby was too young for
the pulpit, though he became a very effective preacher in a few
years. He was, however, doing good service as interpreter, and
doubtless as teacher of English to the rest.

Before long the cheerfulness, self-denial, and devout bearing of the
little company at Canterbury gained for them the warm support and
friendship of all classes. They had a very hard time of it. Sometimes
a kind soul would bring them actually a dish of meat, sometimes even
a bottle of wine, but as a rule their fare was bread--made up into
_twists_, we hear, when it was specially excellent--wheat-bread,
wholesome and palatable; but, alas, sometimes barley-bread, washed
down with beer too sour to drink undiluted with water. Alexander, the
master of the Priest's House at Canterbury, soon after gave them a
piece of ground and built them a temporary chapel, but when he was
for presenting them with the building, he was told that they might
not possess houses and lands, and the property was thereupon made
over to the corporation of Canterbury to hold in honourable trust for
their use, the friars _borrowing_ it of the town. Simon Langton
too, Archdeacon of Canterbury, the primate's brother, stood their
friend, and one or two people of influence among the laity, as Sir
Henry de Sandwich, a wealthy Kentish gentleman, and a lady whom
Eccleston calls a "noble countess," one Inclusa de Baginton, warmly
supported them and liberally supplied their necessities. It is worthy
of notice that at Canterbury their first friends were among the
wealthy, _i.e._, those among whom a command of English was not
necessary.

While Agnellus and his brethren were waiting patiently at Canterbury,
Ingworth and young Richard of Devon with the two Italians had made
their way to London and had been received with enthusiasm. Their
first entertainers were the Dominican friars who, though they had
been only two years before them, yet had already got for themselves a
house, in which they were able to entertain the new-comers for a
fortnight. At the end of that time they hired a plot of ground in
Cornhill of John Travers, the Sheriff of London, and there they built
for themselves a house, such as it was. Their cells were constructed
like sheep-cotes, mere wattels with mouldy hay or straw between them.
Their fare was of the meanest, but they gained in estimation every
day. In their humble quarters at Cornhill they remained preaching,
visiting, nursing, begging their bread, but always gay and busy, till
the summer of 1225, when a certain John Iwyn--again a name
suspiciously like the phonetic representative of the common Norfolk
name of _Ewing_--a mercer and citizen, offered them a more
spacious and comfortable dwelling in the parish of St. Nicholas. As
their brethren at Canterbury had done, so did they; they refused all
houses and lands, and the house was made over to the corporation of
London for their use. Not long after the worthy citizen assumed the
Franciscan habit and renounced the world, to embrace poverty.

In the autumn of 1225 Ingworth and the younger Richard left London,
Agnellus taking their place. He had not been idle at Canterbury, and
his success in making converts had been remarkable. At Canterbury and
London the Minorites had secured for themselves a firm footing. The
Universities were next invaded. The two Richards reached Oxford about
October, 1225, and as before were received with great cordiality by
the Dominicans, and hospitably entertained for eight days. Before a
week was out they had got the loan of a house or hall in the parish
of St. Ebbs, and had started lectures and secured a large following.
Here young Esseby joined them, sent on it seems by Agnellus from
London to assist in the work; a year or so older than when he first
landed, and having shown in that time unmistakable signs of great
capacity and entire devotion to the work. Esseby was quite able to
stand alone.

Once more the two Richards moved on to Northampton, where an "opening
from the Lord" seemed to have presented itself. By this time the
whole country was on the tip-toe of expectation and crowds of all
classes had given in their adhesion to the new missionaries. No! it
was _not_ grandeur or riches or honour or learning that were
wanted above all things--not these, but Goodness, Meekness,
Simplicity, and Truth. The love of money was the root of all evil.
The Minorites were right. When men with a divine fervour proclaim a
truth, or even half a truth, which the world has forgotten, there is
never any lack of enthusiasm in its acceptance. In five years from
their first arrival the Friars had established themselves in almost
every considerable town in England, and where one order settled the
other came soon after, the two orders in their first beginning co-
operating cordially. It was only when their faith and zeal began to
wax cold that jealousy broke forth into bitter antagonism.

In no part of England were the Franciscans received with more
enthusiasm than in Norfolk. They appear to have established
themselves at Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich in 1226. Clergy and laity,
rich and poor, united in offering to them a ready homage. To this day
a certain grudging provincialism is observable in the East Anglian
character. A Norfolk man distrusts the settler from "the Shires," who
comes in with new-fangled reforms. To this day the home of wisdom is
supposed to be in the East. When it was understood that the virtual
leader of this astonishing religious revival was a Norfolk man, the
joy and pride of Norfolk knew no bounds. Nothing was too much to do
for their own hero. But when it became known that Ingworth had been
welcomed with open arms by Robert Grosseteste, the foremost scholar
in Oxford--he a Suffolk man--and that Grosseteste's friend, Roger de
Weseham, was their warm supporter, son of a Norfolk yeoman, whose
brethren were to be seen any day in Lynn market--the ovation that the
Franciscans met with was unparalleled. There was a general rush by
some of the best men of the county into the order.

Already St. Francis had found it necessary to include in the
fraternity a class of recognized associates who may be described as
the _unattached_. These were the _Tertiaries_--laymen who were
not prepared to embrace the vows of poverty and to surrender
their all--but well-wishers pledged to support the Minorites, and to
co-operate with them when called upon, showing their good-will
sometimes in visiting the sick and needy, sometimes in engaging in
the work of teaching, or accompanying the preachers when advisable,
and bound by their engagement to set an example of sobriety and
seriousness in their dress and manners.

Up to this time the word _religious_ had been applied only to
such as were inmates of a cloister. Now the truth dawned upon men
that it was possible to live the higher life even while pursuing
one's ordinary vocation in the busy world. The tone of social
morality must have gained enormously by the dissemination of this new
doctrine, and its acceptance among high and low. It became the
fashion in the upper classes to enrol oneself among the Tertiaries,
and every new enrolment was an important accession to the stability,
and, indeed, to the material resources of the Minorites; and when,
apparently within a few days of one another--no less than five
gentlemen of knightly rank, of whom at least one, Sir Giles de Merc,
had only recently been employed as an envoy by the king to his
brother Richard in Gascony, and another, Sir Henry de Walpole, was
amongst the most considerable and wealthy men in the eastern
counties, Henry the Third spoke out his mind and showed that he was
not too well-pleased. Really these friars were going on too fast--
turning men's heads! At Lynn the Franciscans were specially fortunate
in their warden, whose austerity of life, gentle manners, and
profoundly sympathetic temperament obtained for him unbounded
influence. Among others Alexander de Bassingbourne [Footnote: The
name is again changed into _Bissing_burne by Eccleston, who
writes it as he heard it from Norfolk people.]--seneschal of Lynn for
Pandulph, Bishop of Norwich, and, as such, a personage of importance,
became his convert and joined the new order; but the number of
Norfolk clergy and scholars who actually became friars must have been
very large indeed; they were quite the picked men among the
Franciscans in England. Of the first eighteen masters of Franciscan
schools at Cambridge, at least ten were Norfolk men, while of the
first five Divinity readers at Oxford whose names have been recorded,
after those of Grosseteste and Roger de Weseham, four were
unmistakably East Anglians. No one familiar with Norfolk topography
could fail to be struck by this fact, and the queer spellings of some
places, which puzzled even Mr. Brewer, are themselves suggestive.
[Footnote: _E.g._, Turnham represents the Norfolk pronunciation
of _Thornham_. Heddele is _Hadleigh_, in Suffolk spelt phonetically
; Ravingham is _Raveningham_, Assewelle is _Ashwell_ [cf. p. 93,
Esseby for Ashby], Sloler is _Sloley_, Leveringfot is _Letheringset_.]

St. Francis died at Assisi on October 4, 1226. With his death
troubles began. Brother Elias, who was chosen to succeed him as
Minister General of the Order, had little of the great founder's
spirit, and none of his genius. There was unseemly strife and
rivalry, and on the Continent it would appear that the Minorites made
but little way. Not so was it in England; there the supply of
brethren animated by genuine enthusiasm and burning zeal for the
cause they had espoused was unexampled. Perhaps there more than
anywhere else such labourers were needed, perhaps too they had a
fairer field. Certainly there they were truer to their first
principles than elsewhere.

Outside the city walls at Lynn and York and Bristol; in a filthy
swamp at Norwich, through which the drainage of the city sluggishly
trickled into the river, never a foot lower than its banks; in a mere
barn-like structure, with walls of mud, at Shrewsbury, in the
"Stinking Alley" in London, the Minorites took up their abode, and
there they lived on charity, doing for the lowest the most menial
offices, speaking to the poorest the words of hope, preaching to
learned and simple such sermons--short, homely, fervent, and
emotional--as the world had not heard for many a day. How could such
evangelists fail to win their way? Before Henry III.'s reign was half
over the predominance of the Franciscans over Oxford was almost
supreme. At Cambridge their influence was less dominant only because
at Cambridge there was no commanding genius like Robert Grosseteste
to favour and support them.

St. Francis's hatred of book-learning was the one sentiment that he
never was able to inspire among his followers. Almost from the first
scholars, students, and men of learning were attracted by the
irresistible charm of his wonderful moral persuasiveness; they gave
in their adherence to him in a vague hope that by contact with his
surpassing holiness virtue would go out of him, and that somehow the
divine goodness which he magnified as the one thing needful would be
communicated to them and supply that which was lacking in themselves;
but they could not bring themselves to believe that culture and
holiness were incompatible or that nearness to God was possible only
to those who were ignorant and uninstructed. We should have expected
learning among the Dominicans, but very soon the English Franciscans
became the most learned body in Europe, and that character they never
lost till the suppression of the monasteries swept them out of the
land. Before Edward I. came to the throne, in less than fifty years
after Richard Ingworth and his little band landed at Dover, Robert
Kilwarby, a Franciscan friar, had been chosen Archbishop of
Canterbury, and Bonaventura, the General of the Order, had refused
the Archbishopric of York. In 1281 Jerome of Ascoli, Bonaventura's
successor as General, was elected Pope, assuming the name of Nicholas
IV.

Meanwhile such giants as Alexander Hales and Roger Bacon and Duns
Scotus among the Minorites--all Englishmen be it remembered--and
Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among the Dominicans, had given to
intellectual life that amazing lift into a higher region of thought,
speculation, and inquiry which prepared the way for greater things
by-and-by. It was at Assisi that Cimabue and Giotto received their
most sublime inspiration and did their very best, breathing the air
that St. Francis himself had breathed and listening day by day to
traditions and memories of the saint, told peradventure by one or
another who had seen him alive or even touched his garments in their
childhood. It may even be that there Dante watched Giotto at his work
while the painter got the poet's face by heart.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

To write the history of the Mendicant Orders in England would be a
task beyond my capacity, but no man can hope to understand the
successes or the failures of any great party in Church or State until
he has arrived at some comprehension, not only of the objects which
it set itself to achieve, but of its _modus operandi_ at the
outset of its career.

The Friars were a great party in the Church, organized with a
definite object, and pledged to carry out that object in simple
reliance upon what we now call the _Voluntary Principle_. St.
Francis saw, and saw much more clearly than even we of the nineteenth
century see it, that the Parochial system is admirable, is a perfect
system for the village, that it is unsuited for the town, that in the
towns the attempt to work it had ended in a miserable and scandalous
failure. The Friars came as helpers of the poor town clergy, just
when those clergy had begun to give up their task as hopeless. They
came as missionaries to those whom the town clergy had got to regard
as mere _pariahs_. They came to strengthen the weak hands, and
to labour in a new field. _St. Francis was the John Wesley of the
thirteenth century, whom the Church did not cast out_.

Rome has never been afraid of fanaticism. She has always known how to
utilise her enthusiasts fired by a new idea. The Church of England
has never known how to deal with a man of genius. From Wicklif to
Frederick Robertson, from Bishop Peacock to Dr. Rowland Williams, the
clergyman who has been in danger of impressing his personality upon
Anglicanism, where he has not been the object of relentless
persecution, has at least been regarded with timid suspicion, has
been shunned by the prudent men of low degree, and by those of high
degree has been--forgotten. In the Church of England there has never
been a time when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very
_unsafe_ man. Rome has found a place for the dreamiest mystic or
the noisiest ranter--found a place and found a sphere of useful
labour. We, with our insular prejudices, have been sticklers for the
narrowest uniformity, and yet we have accepted, as a useful addition
to the Creed of Christendom, one article which we have only not
formulated because, perhaps, it came to us from a Roman Bishop, the
great sage Talleyrand--_Surtout pas trop de zle!_

The Minorites were the Low Churchmen of the thirteenth century, the
Dominicans the severely orthodox, among whom spiritual things were
believed to be attainable only through the medium of significant
form. Rome knew how to yoke the two together, Xanthos and Balios
champing at the bit yet always held well in hand. At the outset the
two orders were so deeply impressed by the magnitude of the evils
they were to combat that they hardly knew there was anything in which
they were at variance. Gradually--yes, and somewhat rapidly--each
borrowed something from the other. The Minorites found they could not
do without culture; the Dominicans renounced endowments; by-and-by
they drew apart into separate camps, and discord proved that the old
singleness of purpose and loyalty to a great cause had passed away.
Imitators arose. Reformers they all professed to be, improvers of the
original idea, Augustinian Friars, Carmelites, Bethlehemites,
Bonhommes, and the rest. Friars they all called themselves--all
pledged to the Voluntary Principle, all renouncing endowments, all
professing to live on alms.

I have called St. Francis the John Wesley of the thirteenth century.
The parallels might be drawn out into curious detail, if we compared
the later history of the great movements originated by one or the
other reformer. The new orders of Friars were to the old ones what
the Separatists among the Wesleyan body are to the Old Connexion.
They had their grievances, real or imagined, they loudly protested
against corruption and abuses, they professed themselves anxious only
to go back to first principles. Rome absorbed them all; they became
the Church's great army of volunteers, perfectly disciplined,
admirably handled; their very jealousies and rivalries turned to good
account. When John Wesley offered to the Church of England precisely
their successors, we would have no commerce with them; we did our
best to turn them into a hostile and invading force.

The Friars were the Evangelizers of the towns in England for 300
years. When the spoliation of the religious houses was decided upon,
the Friars were the first upon whom the blow fell--the first and the
last. [Footnote: The king began with the Franciscan convent of Christ
Church, London, in 1532; he bestowed the Dominican convent at Norwich
upon the corporation of that city on the 25th of June, 1540.] But
when their property came to be looked into, there was nothing to rob
but the churches in which they worshipped, the libraries in which
they studied, and the houses in which they passed their lives. Rob
the county hospitals to-morrow through the length and breadth of the
land, or make a general scramble for the possessions of the Wesleyan
body, and how many broad acres would go to the hammer?

Voluntaryism leaves little for the spoiler.

As with the later history of the Friars in England, so with the
corruptions of the Mendicant orders--though they were as great as
malice or ignorance may have represented them--I am not concerned.
That the Minorites of the fourteenth century were very unlike the
Minorites of the thirteenth I know; that the other Mendicant orders
declined, I cannot doubt--

     What keeps a spirit wholly true
     To that ideal which he bears?
     What record? Not the sinless years
     That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.

The Rule of St. Francis was a glorious ideal; when it came to be
carried into practice by creatures of flesh and blood, it proved to
be something to dream of, not to live. And yet, even as it was, its
effects upon the Church, nay, upon the whole civilized world, were
enormous. If, one after another, the Mendicant orders declined, if
their zeal grew cold, their simplicity of life faded, and their
discipline relaxed; if they became corrupted by that very world which
they promised to purify and deliver from the dominion of Mammon--this
is only what has happened again and again, what must happen as long
as men are men. In every age the prophet has always asked for the
unattainable, always pointed to a higher level than human nature
could breathe in, always insisted on a measure of self-renunciation
which saints in their prayers send forth the soul's lame hands to
clutch-in their ecstasy of aspiration hope that they may some day
arrive at. But, alas! they reach it--never. And yet the saint and the
prophet do not live in vain. They send a thrill of noble emotion
through the heart of their generation, and the divine tremor does not
soon subside; they gather round them the pure and generous--the lofty
souls which are not all of the earth earthy. In such, at any rate, a
fire is kindled by the spark that has fallen from the altar. By-and-
by it is the fuel that fails; then the old fire, after smouldering
for a while, goes out, and by no stirring of the dead embers can you
make them flame again. You may cry as loudly as you will, "Pull down
the chimney that will not draw, and set up another in its place!"
That you may do if you please; another fire you may have, but the new
will not be as the old.




II.

_VILLAGE LIFE SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO_.


     "The rude forefathers of the hamlet..."


[In the autumn of 1878, while on a visit at Rougham Hall, Norfolk, the
seat of Mr. Charles North, my kind host drew my attention to some
large boxes of manuscripts, which he told me nobody knew anything
about, but which I was at liberty to ransack to my heart's content. I
at once dived into one of the boxes, and then spent half the night in
examining some of its treasures. The chest is one of many,
constituting in their entirety a complete apparatus for the history
of the parish of Rougham from the time of Henry the Third to the
present day--so complete that it would be difficult to find in
England a collection of documents to compare with it.

The whole parish contains no more than 2,627 acres, of which about
thirty acres were not included in the estate slowly piled up by the
Yelvertons, and purchased by Roger North in 1690.

Yet the charters and evidences of various kinds which were handed
over with this small property, and which date _before_ the
sixteenth century, count by thousands. The smaller strips of
parchment or vellum--for the most part conveyances of land, and
having seals attached--have been roughly bound together in volumes,
each containing about one hundred documents, and arranged with some
regard to chronology, the undated ones being collected into a volume
by themselves. I think it almost certain that the arranging of the
early charters in their rude covers was carried out before 1500 A.D.,
and I have a suspicion that they were grouped together by Sir William
Yelverton, "the cursed Norfolk Justice" of the Paston Letters, who
inherited the estate from his mother in the first half of the
fifteenth century.

When Roger North purchased the property the ancient evidences were
handed over to him as a matter of course; and there are many notes in
his handwriting showing that he found the collection in its present
condition, and that he had bestowed much attention upon it.
Blomefield seems to have been aware of the existence of the Rougham
muniments, but I think he never saw them; and for one hundred and
fifty years, at least, they had lain forgotten until they came under
my notice. Of this large mass of documents I had copied or abstracted
scarcely more than five hundred, and I had not yet got beyond the
year 1355. The court rolls, bailiffs' accounts, and early leases, I
had hardly looked at when this lecture was delivered.

The following address gives some of the results of my examination of
the first series of the Rougham charters. It was delivered in the
Public Reading-room of the village of Tittleshall, a parish adjoining
Rougham, and was listened to with apparent interest and great
attention by an audience of farmers, village tradesmen, mechanics,
and labourers. I was careful to avoid naming any place which my
audience were not likely to know well; and there is hardly a parish
mentioned which is five miles from the lecture-room.

When speaking of "six hundred years," I gave myself roughly a limit
of thirty years before and after 1282, and I have rarely gone beyond
that limit on one side or the other.

They who are acquainted with Mr. Rogers' "History of Prices" will
observe that I have ventured to put forward views, on more points
than one, very different from those which he advocates.

Of the value of Mr. Rogers' compilation, and of the statistics which
he has tabulated, there can be but one opinion. It is when we come to
draw our inferences from such returns as these, and bring to bear
upon them the sidelights which further evidence affords, that
differences of opinion arise among inquirers. I really know nothing
about the Midlands in the Middle Ages; I am disgracefully ignorant of
the social condition of the South and West; but the early history of
East Anglia, and especially of Norfolk, has for long possessed a
fascination for me; and though I am slow to arrive at conclusions,
and have a deep distrust of those historians who, for every pair of
facts, construct a Trinity of Theories, I feel sure of my ground on
some matters, because I have done my best to use all such evidence as
has come my way.]

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Few things have struck me more forcibly since I have cast in my lot
among country people, than the strange ignorance which they exhibit
of the _history of themselves_. I do not allude to those
unpleasant secrets which we should be very sorry indeed for our next-
door neighbours to be acquainted with, nor to any such matters as our
experience or memories of actual facts could bring to our minds; I
mean something very much more than that. Men and women are not only
the beings they appear to be at any one moment of their lives, they
are not single separate atoms like grains of sand. Rather they are
like branches or leaves of some great tree, from which they have
sprung and on which they have grown, whose life in the past has come
at last to them in the present, and without whose deep anchorage in
the soil, and its ages of vigour and vitality, not a bud or a spray
that is so fresh and healthful now would have had any existence.

Consider for a moment--Who are we, and what do we mean by
_Ourselves_? When I meet a ragged, shuffling tramp on the road
(and I meet a good many of them in my lonely walks) I often find
myself asking the question, "How did that shambling vagabond come to
his present condition? Did his father turn him out of doors? Did his
mother drink? Did he learn nothing but lying and swearing and
thieving when he was a child? Was his grandfather hanged for some
crime, or was his great-grandfather a ruffian killed in a fight?" And
I say to myself, "Though I do not know the truth, yet I am sure that
man was helped towards his vagabondism, helped to become an outcast
as he is, by the neglect or the wickedness, the crimes or the bad
example of his fathers and forefathers on one side or the other; for
if he had come of decent people on both sides, people who had been
honestly and soberly brought up themselves, as they tried to bring up
their children, yonder dirty tramp would not and could not have sunk
to his present self, for we and ourselves are what we come to, partly
by our own sins and vices, but partly (and much more than some like
to believe) by the sins, negligences, and ignorances of those whose
blood is in our veins.

My friends, it surely must be worth our while to know much more than
most of us do know about _Ourselves_.

Being convinced of this, and believing, moreover, that to most of us
nothing on earth is so interesting as that which most concerns
ourselves at any period of our existence, I resolved, when I was
asked to address you here this evening, that I would try to give you
some notion of the kind of life which your fathers led in this parish
a long, long time ago, and so help you to understand through what
strange changes we have all passed, and what strange stories the
walls of our houses, if they could speak, would have to tell, and on
what wonderful struggles, and hardships, and dangers, and sorrows
yonder church tower of yours has looked down, since, centuries ago,
it first rose up, the joy and pride of those whose hands laid stone
on stone.

When I came to think over the matter, however, I found that I could
not tell you very much that I was sure of about your own parish of
Tittleshall, but that it so happened I could tell you something that
is new to you about a parish that joins your own; and because what
was going on among your close neighbours at any one time would be in
the main pretty much what would be going on among your forefathers,
in bringing before you the kind of life which people led in the
adjoining parish of Rougham six hundred years ago, I should be
describing precisely the life which people were leading here in this
parish where we are now--people, remember, whose blood is throbbing
in the veins of some of you present; for from that dust that lies in
your churchyard yonder I make no doubt that some of you have sprung--
you whom I am speaking to now.

Six hundred years ago! Yes, it is a long time. Not a man of you can
throw his thoughts back to so great a lapse of time. I do not expect
it of you; but nevertheless I am going to try to give you a picture
of a Norfolk village, and that a village which you all know better
than I do, such as it was six hundred years ago.

In those days an ancestor of our gracious Queen, who now wears the
crown of England, was king; and the Prince of Wales, whom many of you
must have seen in Norfolk, was named _Edward_ after this same
king. In those days there were the churches standing generally where
they stand now. In those days, too, the main roads ran pretty much
where they now run; and there was the same sun overhead, and there
were clouds, and winds, and floods, and storms, and sunshine; but if
you, any of you, could be taken up and dropped down in Tittleshall or
Rougham such as they were at the time I speak of, you would feel
almost as strange as if you had been suddenly transported to the
other end of the world.

The only object that you would at all recognize would be the parish
church. That stands where it did, and where it has stood, perhaps,
for a thousand years or more; but, at the time we are now concerned
with, it looked somewhat different from what it looks now. It had a
tower, but that tower was plainer and lower than the present one. The
windows, too, were very different; they were smaller and narrower; I
think it probable that in some of them there was stained glass, and
it is almost certain that the walls were covered with paintings
representing scenes from the Bible, and possibly some stories from
the lives of the saints, which everybody in those days was familiar
with. There was no pulpit and no reading desk. When the parson
preached, he preached from the steps of the altar. The altar itself
was much more ornamented than now it is. Upon the altar there were
always some large wax tapers which were lit on great occasions, and
over the altar there hung a small lamp which was kept alight night
and day. It was the parson's first duty to look to it in the morning,
and his last to trim it at night.

The parish church was too small for the population of Rougham, and
the consequence was that it had been found necessary to erect what we
should now call a chapel of ease--served, I suppose, by an assistant
priest, who would be called a chaplain. I cannot tell you where this
chapel stood, but it had a burial-ground of its own. [Footnote:
Compare the remarkable regulations of Bishop Woodloke of Winchester
(A.D. 1308), illustrative of this. Wilkins' "Conc.," vol. ii. p. 296.
By these constitutions every chapel, two miles from the mother
church, was bound to have its own burying-ground]

There was, I think, only one road deserving the name, which passed
through Rougham. It ran almost directly north and south from Coxford
Abbey to Castle Acre Priory. But do not suppose that a road in those
days meant what it does now. To begin with, people in the country
never drove about in carriages. In such a place as Rougham, men and
women might live all their lives without ever seeing a travelling
carriage, whether on four wheels or two. [Footnote: It is, however,
not improbable that when the Queen came into Norfolk, the eyes of the
awe-struck rustics may have been dazzled by even such an astonishing
equipage as is figured in Mr. Parker's "Hist. Domestic Architecture,"
vol. ii. p. 141.] The road was quite unfit for driving on. There were
no highway rates. Now and then a roadway got so absolutely
impassable, or a bridge over a stream became so dangerous, that
people grumbled; and then an order came down from the king to the
high sheriff of the county, bidding him see to his road, and the
sheriff thereupon taxed the dwellers in the hundred and forced them
to put things straight. The village of Rougham in those days was in
its general plan not very unlike the present village--that is to say,
the church standing where it does, next to the churchyard was the
parsonage with a croft attached; and next to that a row of houses
inhabited by the principal people of the place, whose names I could
give you, and the order of their dwellings, if it were worth while.
Each of these houses had some outbuildings--cowsheds, barns, &c., and
a small croft fenced round. Opposite these houses was another row
facing west, as the others faced east; but these latter houses were
apparently occupied by the poorer inhabitants--the smith, the
carpenter, and the general shopkeeper, who called himself, and was
called by others, the _merchant_. There was one house which
appears to have stood apart from the rest and near Wesenham Heath. It
probably was encircled by a moat, and approached by a drawbridge, the
bridge being drawn up at sunset. It was called the Lyng House, and
had been probably built two or three generations back, and now was
occupied by a person of some consideration--viz., Thomas Middleton,
Archdeacon of Suffolk, and brother of William Middleton, then Bishop
of Norwich. This house was on the east side of the road, and the road
leading up to it had a name, and was called the Hutgong. In front of
the house was something like a small park of 5 acres inclosed; and
next that again, to the south, 4 acres of ploughed land; and behind
that again--that is, between it and the village--there was the open
heath. Altogether, this property consisted of a house and 26 acres.
Archdeacon Middleton bought it on October 6, 1283, and he bought it
in conjunction with his brother Elias, who was soon after made
seneschal or steward of Lynn for his other brother, the bishop. The
two brothers probably used this as their country house, for both of
them had their chief occupation elsewhere; but when the bishop died,
in 1288, and they became not quite the important people they had been
before, they sold the Lyng House to another important person, of whom
we shall hear more by-and-by.

The Lyng House, however, was not the great house of Rougham. I am
inclined to think _that_ stood not far from the spot where
Rougham Hall now stands. It was in those days called the Manor House,
or the Manor.

And this brings me to a point where I must needs enter into some
explanations. Six hundred years ago all the land in England was
supposed to belong to the king in the first instance. The king had in
former times parcelled it out into tracts of country, some large and
some small, and made over these tracts to his great lords, or barons,
as they were called. The barons were supposed to hold these tracts,
called fiefs, as _tenants_ of the king, and in return they were
expected to make an acknowledgment to the king in the shape of some
_service_, which, though it was not originally a money payment,
yet became so eventually, and was always a substantial charge upon
the land. These fiefs were often made up of estates in many different
shires; and, because it was impossible for the barons to cultivate
all their estates themselves, they let them out to _subtenants_,
who in their turn were bound to render services to the lord of the
fief. These sub-tenants were the great men in the several parishes,
and became the actual lords of the manors, residing upon the manors,
and having each, on their several manors, very large powers for good
or evil over the, tillers of the soil.

A manor six hundred years ago meant something very different from a
manor now. The lord was a petty king, having his subjects very much
under his thumb. But his subjects differed greatly in rank and
status. In the first place, there were those who were called the free
tenants. The free tenants were they who lived in houses of their own
and cultivated land of their own, and who made only an annual money
payment to the lord of the manor as an acknowledgment of his
lordship. The payment was trifling, amounting to some few pence an
acre at the most, and a shilling or so, as the case might be, for the
house. This was called the _rent_, but it is a very great
mistake indeed to represent this as the same thing which we mean by
rent now-a-days. It really was almost identical with what we now call
in the case of house property, "ground rent," and bore no proportion
to the value of the produce that might be raised from the soil which
the tenant held. The free tenant was neither a yearly tenant, nor a
leaseholder. His holding was, to all intents and purposes, his own--
subject, of course, to the payment of the ground rent. But if he
wanted to sell out of his holding, the lord of the manor exacted a
payment for the privilege. If he died, his heir had to pay for being
admitted to his inheritance, and if he died without heirs, the
property went back to the lord of the manor, who then, but only then,
could raise the ground rent if he pleased, though he rarely did so.
So much for the free tenants.

Besides these were the _villeins_ or _villani_, or
_natives_, as they were called. The villeins were tillers of the
soil, who held land under the lord, and who, besides paying a small
money ground rent, were obliged to perform certain arduous services
to the lord, such as to plough the lord's land for so many days in
the year, to carry his corn in the harvest, to provide a cart on
occasion, &c. Of course these burdens pressed very heavily at times,
and the services of the villeins were vexatious and irritating under
a hard and unscrupulous lord. But there were other serious
inconveniences about the condition of the villein or native. Once a
villein, always a villein. A man or woman born in villeinage could
never shake it off. Nay, they might not even go away from the manor
to which they were born, and they might not marry without the lord's
license, and for that license they always had to pay. Let a villein
be ever so shrewd or enterprising or thrifty, there was no hope for
him to change his state, except by the special grace of the lord of
the manor. [Footnote: I do not take account of those who ran away to
the corporate towns. I suspect that there were many more cases of
this than some writers allow. It was sometimes a serious
inconvenience to the lords of manors near such towns as Norwich or
Lynn. A notable example may be found in the "Abbrev, Placit.," p. 316
(6. E. ii. Easter term). It seems that no less than eighteen
villeins of the Manor of Cossey were named in a mandate to the
Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, who were to be taken and reduced to
villeinage, and their goods seized. Six of them pleaded that they
were citizens of Norwich--the city being about four miles from
Cossey.] Yes, there was one means whereby he could be set free, and
that was if he could get a bishop to ordain him. The fact of a man
being ordained at once made him a free man, and a knowledge of this
fact must have served as a very strong inducement to young people to
avail themselves of all the helps in their power to obtain something
like an education, and so to qualify themselves for admission to the
clerical order and to the rank of free-man.

At Rougham there was a certain Ralph Red, who was one of these
villeins under the lord of the manor, a certain William le Butler.
Ralph Red had a son Ralph, who I suppose was an intelligent youth,
and made the most of his brains. He managed to get ordained about six
hundred years ago, and he became a chaplain, perhaps to that very
chapel of ease I mentioned before. His father, however, was still a
villein, liable to all the villein services, and _belonging_ to
the manor and the lord, he and all his offspring. Young Ralph did not
like it, and at last, getting the money together somehow, he bought
his father's freedom, and, observe, with his freedom the freedom of
all his father's children too, and the price he paid was twenty
marks. [Footnote: N.B.--A man could not buy his own freedom,
Merewether's "Boroughs," i. 350. Compare too Littleton on "Tenures,"
p 65, 66.] That sounds a ridiculously small sum, but I feel pretty
sure that six hundred years ago twenty marks would be almost as
difficult for a penniless young chaplain to get together as L500 for
a penniless young curate to amass now. Of the younger Ralph, who
bought his father's freedom, I know little more; but, less than one
hundred and fifty years after the elder man received his liberty, a
lineal descendant of his became lord of the manor of Rougham, and,
though he had no son to carry on his name, he had a daughter who
married a learned judge, Sir William Yelverton, Knight of the Bath,
whose monument you may still see at Rougham Church, and from whom
were descended the Yelvertons, Earls of Sussex, and the present Lord
Avonmore, who is a scion of the same stock.

When Ralph Red bought his father's freedom of William le Butler,
William gave him an acknowledgment for the money, and a written
certificate of the transaction, but he did not sign his name. In
those days nobody signed their names, not because they could not
write, for I suspect that just as large a proportion of people in
England could write well six hundred years ago, as could have done so
forty years ago, but because it was not the fashion to sign one's
name. Instead of doing that, everybody who was a free man, and a man
of substance, in executing any legal instrument, affixed to it his
_seal_, and that stood for his signature. People always carried
their seals about with them in a purse or small bag, and it was no
uncommon thing for a pickpocket to cut off this bag and run away with
the seal, and thus put the owner to very serious inconvenience. This
was what actually did happen once to William le Butler's father-in-
law. He was a certain Sir Richard Bellhouse, and he lived at North
Tuddenham, near Dereham. Sir Richard was High Sheriff for the
counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1291, and his duties brought him
into court on January 25th of that year, before one of the Judges at
Westminster. I suppose the court was crowded, and in the crowd some
rogue cut off Sir Richard's purse, and made off with his seal. I
never heard that he got it back again. [Footnote: Abbreviatio Placit.
284, b.]

And now I must return to the point from which I wandered when I began
to speak of the free tenants and the "villeins." William le Butler,
who sold old Ralph Red to his own son, the young Ralph, was himself
sprung from a family who had held the Manor of Rougham for about a
century. His father was Sir Richard le Butler, who died about 1280,
leaving behind him one son, our friend William, and three daughters.
Unfortunately, William le Butler survived his father only a very
short time, and he left no child to succeed him. The result was that
the inheritance of the old knight was divided among his daughters,
and what had been hitherto a single lordship became three lordships,
each of the parceners looking very jealously after his own interest,
and striving to make the most of his powers _and rights_.

Though each of the husbands of Sir Richard le Butler's daughters was
a man of substance and influence--yet, when the manor was divided, no
one of them was anything like so great a person as the old Sir
Richard. In those days, as in our own, there were much richer men in
the country than the country gentlemen, and in Rougham at this time
there were two very prosperous men who were competing with one
another as to which should buy up most land in the parish, and be the
great man of the place. The one of these was a gentleman called Peter
the Roman, and the other was called Thomas the Lucky. They were both
the sons of Rougham people, and it will be necessary to pursue the
history of each of them to make you understand how things went in
those "good old times."

First let me deal with Peter the Roman. He was the son of a Rougham
lady named Isabella, by an Italian gentleman named lacomo de
Ferentino, or if you like to translate it into English, James of
Ferentinum.

How James of Ferentinum got to Rougham and captured one of the
Rougham heiresses we shall never know for certain. But we do know
that in the days of King Henry, who was the father of King Edward,
there was a very large incursion of Italian clergy into England, and
that the Pope of Rome got preferment of all kinds for them. In fact,
in King Henry's days the Pope had immense power in England, and it
looked for a while as if every valuable piece of preferment in the
kingdom would be bestowed upon Italians who did not know a word of
English, and who often never came near their livings at all. One of
these Italian gentlemen, whose name was _John_ de Ferentino, was
very near being made Bishop of Norwich; [Footnote: At the death of
Thomas de Blunville in 1236. John de Ferentino must have been almost
supreme in the diocese. The see was practically vacant for three
years.] he _was_ Archdeacon of Norwich, but though the Pope
tried to make him bishop, he happily did not succeed in forcing him
into the see that time, and John of Ferentinum had to content himself
with his archdeaconry and one or two other preferments.

Our friend at Rougham may have been, and probably was, some kinsman
of the archdeacon, and it is just possible that Archdeacon Middleton,
who, you remember, bought the Lyng House, may have had, as his
predecessor in it, another archdeacon, this John de Ferentino, whose
nephew or brother, James, married Miss Isabella de Rucham, and
settled down among his wife's kindred. Be that as it may, John de
Ferentino had two sons, Peter and Richard, and it appears that their
father, not content with such education as Oxford or Cambridge could
afford--though at this time Oxford was one of the most renowned
universities in Europe--sent his sons to Rome, having an eye to their
future advancement; for in King Henry's days a young man that had
friends at Rome was much more likely to get on in the world than he
who had only friends in the King's Court, and he who wished to push
his interests in the Church must look to the Pope, and not to the
King of England, as his main support.

When young Peter came back to Rougham, I dare say he brought back
with him some new airs and graces from Italy, and I dare say the new
fashions made his neighbours open their eyes. They gave the young
fellow the name he is known by in the charters, and to the day of his
death people called him Peter Romayn, or Peter the Roman. But Peter
came back a changed man in more ways than one. He came back a cleric.
We in England now recognize only three orders of clergy--bishops,
priests, and deacons. But six hundred years ago it was very
different. In those days a man might be two or three degrees below a
deacon, and yet be counted a cleric and belonging to the clergy; and,
though Peter Romayn was not priest or deacon, he was a privileged
person in many ways, but a very unprivileged person in one way--he
might never marry.

It was a hard case for a young man who had taken to the clerical
profession without taking to the clerical life, and all the harder
because there were old men living whose fathers or grandfathers had
known the days when even a Bishop of Norwich was married, and who
could tell of many an old country clergyman who had had his wife and
children in the parsonage. But now--just six hundred years ago--if a
young fellow had once been admitted a member of the clerical body, he
was no longer under the protection of the laws of the realm, nor
bound by them, but he was under the dominion of another law, commonly
known as the Canon Law, which the Pope of Rome had succeeded in
imposing upon the clergy; and in accordance with that law, if he took
to himself a wife, he was, to all intents and purposes, a ruined man.

But when laws are pitted against human nature, they may be forced
upon people by the strong hand of power, but they are sure to be
evaded where they are not broken literally; and this law of
forbidding clergymen to marry _was_ evaded in many ways.
Clergymen took to themselves wives, and had families. Again and again
their consciences justified them in their course, whatever the Canon
Law might forbid or denounce. They married on the sly--if that may be
called marriage which neither the Church nor the State recognized as
a binding contract, and which was ratified by no formality or
ceremony civil or religious: but public opinion was lenient; and
where a clergyman was living otherwise a blameless life, his people
did not think the worse of him for having a wife and children,
however much the Canon Law and certain bigoted people might give the
wife a bad name. And so it came to pass that Peter Romayn of Rougham,
cleric though he were, lost his heart one fine day to a young lady at
Rougham, and marry he would. The young lady's name was Matilda. Her
father, though born at Rougham, appears to have gone away from there
when very young, and made money somehow at Leicester. He had married
a Norfolk lady, one Agatha of Cringleford; and he seems to have died,
leaving his widow and daughter fairly provided for; and they lived in
a house at Rougham, which I dare say Richard of Leicester had bought.
I have no doubt that young Peter Romayn was a young gentleman of
means, and it is clear that Matilda was a very desirable bride. But
then Peter _couldn't_ marry! How was it to be managed? I think
it almost certain that no religious ceremony was performed, but I
have no doubt that the two plighted their troth either to each, and
that somehow they did become man and wife, if not in the eyes of
Canon Law, yet by the sanction of a higher law to which the
consciences of honourable men and women appeal against the immoral
enactments of human legislation.

Among the charters at Rougham I find eighteen or twenty which were
executed by Peter Romayn and Matilda. In no one of them is she called
his wife; in all of them it is stipulated that the property shall
descend to whomsoever they shall leave it, and in only one instance,
and there I believe by a mistake of the scribe, is there any mention
of their _lawful_ heirs. They buy land and sell it, sometimes
separately, more often conjointly, but in all cases the interests of
both are kept in view; the charters are witnessed by the principal
people in the place, including Sir Richard Butler himself, more than
once; and in one of the later charters Peter Romayn, as if to provide
against the contingency of his own death, makes over all his property
in Rougham without reserve to Matilda, and constitutes her the
mistress of it all. [Footnote: By the constitutions of Bishop
Woodloke, any _legacies_ left by a clergyman to his "concubine"
were to be handed over to the bishop's official, and distributed to
the poor.--Wilkins' "Cone." vol. ii. p. 296 b.]

Some year or two after this, Matilda executes her last conveyance,
and executes it alone. She sells her whole interest in Rougham--the
house in which she lives and all that it contains--lands and ground
rents, and everything else, for money down, and we hear of her no
more. Did she retire from the world, and find refuge in a nunnery?
Did she go away to some other home? Who knows? And what of Peter the
Roman? I know little of him, but I suspect the pressure put upon the
poor man was too strong for him, and I suspect that somehow, and, let
us hope, with much anguish and bitterness of heart--but yet somehow,
he was compelled to repudiate the poor woman to whom there is
evidence to show he was true and staunch as long as it was possible--
and when it was no longer possible I _think_ he too turned his
back upon the Rougham home, and was presented by the Prior of
Westacre Monastery to the Rectory of Bodney at the other end of the
county, where, let us hope, he died in peace.

It is a curious fact that Peter Romayn was not the only clergyman in
Rougham whom we know to have been married. As for Peter Romayn, I
believe he was an honourable man according to his light, and as far
as any men were honourable in those rough days. But for the other. I
do not feel so sure about him.

I said that the two prosperous men in Rougham six hundred years ago
were Peter Romayn and Thomas the Lucky, or, as his name appears in
the Latin Charters, Thomas Felix. When Archdeacon Middleton gave up
living at Rougham, Thomas Felix bought his estate, called the Lyng
House; and shortly after he bought another estate, which, in fact,
was a manor of its own, and comprehended thirteen free tenants and
five villeins; and, as though this were not enough, on September 24,
1292, he took a lease of another manor in Rougham for six years, of
one of the daughters of Sir Richard le Butler, whose husband, I
suppose, wanted to go elsewhere. Before the lease expired he died,
leaving behind him a widow named Sara and three little daughters, the
eldest of whom cannot have been more than eight or nine years old.
This was in the year 1294. Sara, the widow, was for the time a rich
woman, and she made up her mind never to marry again, and she kept
her resolve.

When her eldest daughter Alice came to the mature age of fifteen or
sixteen, a young man named John of Thrysford wooed and won her.
Mistress Alice was by no means a portionless damsel, and Mr. John
seems himself to have been a man of substance. How long they were
married I know not; but it could not have been more than a year or
two, for less than five years after Mr. Felix's death a great event
happened, which produced very momentous effects upon Rougham and its
inhabitants in more ways than one.

Up to this time there had been a rector at Rougham, and apparently a
good rectory-house and some acres of glebe land--how many I cannot
say. But the canons of Westacre Priory cast their eyes upon the
rectory of Rougham, and they made up their minds they would have it.
I dare not stop to explain how the job was managed--that would lead
me a great deal too far--but it _was_ managed, and accordingly,
a year or two after the marriage of little Alice, they got possession
of all the tithes and the glebe, and the good rectory-house at
Rougham, and they left the parson of the parish with a smaller house
on the other side of the road, and _not_ contiguous to the
church, an allowance of two quarters of wheat and two quarters of
barley a year, and certain small dues which might suffice to keep
body and soul together but little more. [Footnote: This appears from
the following charter, which it seems worth while to quote: "Pateat
universis... quod nos Robertas de Feletone, Miles, et Hawigia uxor
mea concessimus ... Alicie filie Thome de Rucham... Totum ius
nostrum... in terris... dicte Alicie... in Rucham, que ... habuimus
de dono et dimissione Johannis filii Roberti de Thyrsforde in Rucham
_ante diuorstium_ (sic) _inter eundem Johannem et dictam_ Aliciam
factum... Omnia munimenta et scripta que de dicto tenemento habuimus
eidem Alicie quiete reddidimus... Datum apud Lucham die Dom:
prox: post Annunc: B Mar: Virg: Anno R. R. Edw: fit. Reg. Henr:
tricessimotertio" (28 March, 1305).--_Rougham Charter_, No. 157.]

John of Thyrsfordhad not been married more than a year or two when he
had had enough of it. Whether at the time of his marriage he was
already a _cleric_, I cannot tell, but I know that on October
10, 1301, he was a priest, and that on that day he was instituted to
the vicarage of Rougham, having been already divorced from poor
little Alice. As for Alice--if I understand the case, she never could
marry, however much she may have wished it; she had no children to
comfort her; she became by-and-by the great lady of Rougham, and
there she lived on for nearly fifty years. Her husband, the vicar,
lived on too--on what terms of intimacy I am unable to say. The vicar
died some ten years before the lady. When old age was creeping on her
she made over all her houses and lands in Rougham to feoffees, and I
have a suspicion that she went into a nunnery and there died.

In dealing with the two cases of Peter Romayn and John of Thyrsford I
have used the term _cleric_ more than once. These two men were,
at the end of their career at any rate, what we now understand by
clergyman; but there were hosts of men six hundred years ago in
Norfolk who were _clerics,_ and yet who were by no means what we
now understand by clergymen. The _clerics_ of six hundred years
ago comprehended all those whom we now call the professional classes;
all, _i.e._, who lived by their brains, as distinct from those
who lived by trade or the labour of their hands.

Six hundred years ago it may be said that there were two kinds of law
in England, the one was the law of the land, the other was the law of
the Church. The law of the land was hideously cruel and merciless,
and the gallows and the pillory, never far from any man's door, were
seldom allowed to remain long out of use. The ghastly frequency of
the punishment by death tended to make people savage and
bloodthirsty. [Footnote: In 1293 a case is recorded of three men, one
of them a goldsmith, who had their right hands chopped off in the
middle of the street in London.-"Chron. of Edward I. and Edward II.,"
vol. i. p.--102. Ed. Stubbs. Rolls Series.] It tended, too, to make
men absolutely reckless of consequences when once their passions were
roused. "As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" was a saying that had
a grim truth in it. When a violent ruffian knew that if he robbed his
host in the night he would be sure to be hung for it, and if he
killed him he could be no more than hung, he had nothing to gain by
letting him live, and nothing to lose if he cut his throat. Where
another knew that by tampering with the coin of the realm he was sure
to go to the gallows for it, he might as well make a good fight
before he was taken, and murder any one who stood in the way of his
escape. Hanging went on at a pace which we cannot conceive, for in
those days the criminal law of the land was not, as it is now, a
strangely devised machinery for protecting the wrongdoer, but it was
an awful and tremendous power for slaying all who were dangerous to
the persons or the property of the community.

The law of the Church, on the other hand, was much more lenient. To
hurry a man to death with his sins and crimes fresh upon him, to
slaughter men wholesale for acts that could not be regarded as
enormously wicked, shocked those who had learnt that the Gospel
taught such virtues as mercy and longsuffering, and gave men hopes of
forgiveness on repentance. The Church set itself against the
atrocious mangling, and branding, and hanging that was being dealt
out blindly, hastily, and indiscriminately, to every kind of
transgressor; and inasmuch as the Church law and the law of the land
six hundred years ago were often in conflict, the Church law acted to
a great extent as a check upon the shocking ferocity of the criminal
code. And this is how the check was exercised.

A man who was a _cleric_ was only half amenable to the law of
the land. He was a citizen of the realm, and a subject of the king,
but he was _more_; he owed allegiance to the Church, and claimed
the Church's protection also. Accordingly, whenever a _cleric_
got into trouble, and there was only too good cause to believe that
if he were brought to his trial he would have a short shrift and no
favour, scant justice and the inevitable gallows within twenty-four
hours at the longest, he proclaimed himself a _cleric_, and
demanded the protection of the Church, and was forthwith handed over
to the custody of the ordinary or bishop. The process was a clumsy
one, and led, of course, to great abuses, but it had a good side. As
a natural and inevitable consequence of such a privilege accorded to
a class, there was a very strong inducement to become a member of
that class; and as the Church made it easy for any fairly educated
man to be admitted at any rate to the lower orders of the ministry,
any one who preferred a professional career, or desired to give
himself up to a life of study, enrolled himself among the
_clerics_, and was henceforth reckoned as belonging to the
clergy.

The country swarmed with these _clerics_. Only a small
proportion of them ever became ministers of religion; they were
lawyers, or even lawyers' clerks; they were secretaries; some few
were quacks with nostrums; and these all were just as much
_clerics_ as the chaplains, who occupied pretty much the same
position as our curates do now--clergymen, strictly so called, who
were on the look out for employment, and who earned a very precarious
livelihood--or the rectors and vicars who were the beneficed clergy,
and who were the parsons of parishes occupying almost exactly the
same position that they do at this moment, and who were almost
exactly in the same social position as they are now. Six hundred
years ago there were at least seven of these _clerics_ in
Rougham, all living in the place at the same time besides John of
Thyrsford, the vicar. Five of them were chaplains, two were merely
_clerics_. If there were seven of these clerical gentlemen whom
I happen to have met with in my examination of the Rougham Charters,
there must have been others who were not people of sufficient note to
witness the execution of important legal instruments, nor with the
means to buy land or houses in the parish. It can hardly be putting
the number too high if we allow that there must have been at least
ten or a dozen _clerics_ of one sort or another in Rougham six
hundred years ago.

How did they all get a livelihood? is a question not easy to answer;
but there were many ways of picking up a livelihood by these
gentlemen. To begin with, they could take an engagement as tutor in a
gentleman's family; or they could keep a small school; or earn a
trifle by drawing up conveyances, or by keeping the accounts of the
lord of the manor. In some cases they acted as private chaplains,
getting their victuals for their remuneration, and sometimes they
were merely loafing about, and living upon their friends, and taking
the place of the country parson if he were sick or past work. Then,
too, the smaller monasteries had one or more chaplains, and I suspect
that the canons at Castle Acre always would keep two or three
chaplains in their pay, and it is not unlikely that as long as
Archdeacon Middleton kept on his big house at Rougham he would have a
chaplain, who would be attached to the place, and bound to perform
the service in the great man's chapel.

But besides the clerics and the chaplains and the rector or vicar,
there was another class, the members of which just at this time were
playing a very important part indeed in the religious life of the
people, and not in the religious life alone; these were the Friars.
If the monks looked down upon the parsons, and stole their endowments
from them whenever they could, and if in return the parsons hated the
monks and regarded them with profound suspicion and jealousy, both
parsons and monks were united in their common dislike of the Friars.

Six hundred years ago the Friars had been established in England
about sixty years, and they were now by far the most influential
Religionists in the country. The Friars, though always stationed in
the towns, and by this time occupying large establishments which were
built for them in Lynn, Yarmouth, Norwich, and elsewhere, were always
acting the part of itinerant preachers, and travelled their circuits
on foot, supported by alms. Sometimes the parson lent them the
church, sometimes they held a camp meeting in spite of him, and just
as often as not they left behind them a feeling of great soreness,
irritation, and discontent; but six hundred years ago the preaching
of the Friars was an immense and incalculable blessing to the
country, and if it had not been for the wonderful reformation wrought
by their activity and burning enthusiasm, it is difficult to see what
we should have come to or what corruption might have prevailed in
Church and State.

When the Friars came into a village, and it was known that they were
going to preach, you may be sure that the whole population would turn
out to listen. Sermons in those days in the country were very rarely
delivered. As I have said, there were no pulpits in the churches
then. A parson might hold a benefice for fifty years, and never once
have written or composed a sermon. A preaching parson, one who
regularly exhorted his people or expounded to them the Scriptures,
would have been a wonder indeed, and thus the coming of the Friars
and the revival of pulpit oratory was all the more welcome because
the people had not become wearied by the too frequent iteration of
truths which may be repeated so frequently as to lose their vital
force. A sermon was an event in those days, and a preacher with any
real gifts of oratory was looked upon as a prophet sent by God. Never
was there a time when the people needed more to be taught the very
rudiments of morality. Never had there been a time when people cared
less whether their acts and words were right or wrong, true or false.
It had almost come to this, that what a man thought would be to his
profit, that was good; what would entail upon him a loss, that was
evil.

And this brings me to another point, viz., the lawlessness and crime
in country villages six hundred years ago. But before I can speak on
that subject it is necessary that I should first try to give you some
idea of the every-day life of your forefathers. What did they eat and
drink? what did they wear? what did they do from day to day? Were
they happy? content? prosperous? or was their lot a hard and bitter
one? For according to the answer we get to questions such as these,
so shall we be the better prepared to expect the people to have been
peaceable citizens, or sullen, miserable, and dangerous ruffians,
goaded to frequent outbursts of ferocious savagedom by hunger,
oppression, hatred, and despair.

Six hundred years ago no parish in Norfolk had more than a part of
its land under tillage. As a rule, the town or village, with its
houses, great and small, consisted of a long street, the church and
parsonage being situated about the middle of the parish. Not far off
stood the manor house, with its hall where the manor courts were
held, and its farm-buildings, dovecote, and usually its mill for
grinding the corn of the tenants. No tenant of the manor might take
his corn to be ground anywhere except at the lord's mill; and it is
easy to see what a grievance this would be felt to be at times, and
how the lord of the manor, if he were needy, unscrupulous, or
extortionate, might grind the faces of the poor while he ground their
corn. Behind most of the houses in the village might be seen a croft
or paddock, an orchard or a small garden. But the contents of the
gardens were very different from the vegetables we see now; there
were, perhaps, a few cabbages, onions, parsnips, or carrots, and
apparently some kind of beet or turnip. The potato had never been
heard of.

As for the houses themselves, they were squalid enough for the most
part. The manor house was often built of stone, when stone was to be
had, or where, as in Norfolk, no stone was to be had, then of flint,
as in so many of our church towers. Usually, however, the manor house
was built in great part of timber. The poorer houses were dirty
hovels, run up "anyhow," sometimes covered with turf, sometimes with
thatch. None of them had chimneys. Six hundred years ago houses with
chimneys were at least as rare as houses heated by hot-water pipes
are now. Moreover, there were no brick houses. It is a curious fact
that the art of making bricks seems to have been lost in England for
some hundreds of years. The labourer's dwelling had no windows; the
hole in the roof which let out the smoke rendered windows
unnecessary, and, even in the houses of the well-to-do, glass windows
were rare. In many cases oiled linen cloth served to admit a feeble
semblance of light, and to keep out the rain. The labourer's fire was
in the middle of his house; he and his wife and children huddled
round it, sometimes grovelling in the ashes; and going to bed meant
flinging themselves down upon the straw which served them as mattress
and feather bed, exactly as it does to the present day in the gipsy's
tent in our byways. The labourer's only light by night was the
smouldering fire. Why should he burn a rushlight when there was
nothing to look at? and reading was an accomplishment which few
labouring men were masters of.

As to the food of the majority, it was of the coarsest. The fathers
of many a man and woman in every village in Norfolk can remember the
time when the labourer looked upon wheat-bread as a rare delicacy;
and those legacies which were left by kindly people a century or two
ago, providing for the weekly distribution of so many _white_
loaves to the poor, tell us of a time when the poor man's loaf was as
dark as mud, and as tough as his shoe-leather. In the winter-time
things went very hard indeed with all classes. There was no lack of
fuel, for the brakes and waste afforded turf which all might cut, and
kindling which all had a right to carry away; but the poor horses and
sheep and cattle were half starved for at least four months in the
year, and one and all were much smaller than they are now. I doubt
whether people ever fatted their hogs as we do. When the corn was
reaped, the swine were turned into the stubble and roamed about the
underwood; and when they had increased their weight by the feast of
roots and mast and acorns, they were slaughtered and salted for the
winter fare, only so many being kept alive as might not prove
burdensome to the scanty resources of the people. Salting down the
animals for the winter consumption was a very serious expense. All
the salt used was produced by evaporation in _pans_ near the
seaside, and a couple of bushels of salt often cost as much as a
sheep. This must have compelled the people to spare the salt as much
as possible, and it must have been only too common to find the bacon
more than rancid, and the ham alive again with maggots. If the salt
was dear and scarce, sugar was unknown except to the very rich. The
poor man had little to sweeten his lot. The bees gave him honey; and
long after the time I am dealing with people left not only their
hives to their children by will, but actually bequeathed a summer
flight of bees to their friends; while the hive was claimed by one,
the next swarm might become the property of another.

As for the drink, it was almost exclusively water, beer, and cider.
[Footnote: On a court roll of the manor of Whissonsete, of the date
July 22, 1355, I find William Wate fined "iiij botell cideri quia
fecit dampnum in bladis domini."] Any one who pleased might brew beer
without tax or license, and everybody who was at all before the world
did brew his own beer according to his own taste. But in those days
the beer was very different stuff from that which you are familiar
with. To begin with, people did not use hops. Hops were not put into
beer till long after the time we are concerned with. I dare say they
flavoured their beer with horehound and other herbs, but they did not
understand those tricks which brewers are said to practise now-a-days
for making the beer "heady" and sticky and poisonous. I am not
prepared to say the beer was better, or that you would have liked it;
but I am pretty sure that in those days it was easier to get pure
beer in a country village than it is now, and if a man chose to drink
bad beer he had only himself to thank for it. There was no such
monopoly as there is now. I am inclined to think that there were a
very great many more people who sold beer in the country parishes
than sell it now, and I am sorry to say that the beer-sellers in
those days had the reputation of being rather a bad lot. [Footnote:
The presentments of the beer-sellers seem to point to the existence
of something like a licensing system among the lords of manors. I
know not how otherwise to explain the frequency of the fines laid
upon the whole class. Thus in a court-leet of the manor of Hockham,
held the 20th of October, 1377, no less than fourteen women were
fined in the aggregate 30s. 8d., who being _brassatores vendidere
servisiam_ (sic) _contra assisam_, one of these brewsters was
fined as much as four shillings.

The earliest attempt to introduce uniformity in the measures of ale,
&c., is the assize of Richard I., bearing date the 20th of November,
1197. It is to be found in "Walter of Coventry," vol. ii. p. 114
(Rolls Series). On the importance of this document see Stubbs'
"Const. Hist.," vol. i. pp. 509, 573. On the _tasters_ of bread
and ale cf. "Dep. Keeper's 43rd Report," p. 207.] It is quite certain
that they were very often in trouble, and of all the offences
punished by fine at the manor courts none is more common than that of
selling beer in false measures.

The method of cheating their customers by the beer-sellers was, we
are told, exactly the contrary plan followed by our modern publicans.
Now, when a man gets into a warm corner at the pot-house, they tell
me that John Barleycorn is apt to serve out more drink than is good
for him; but six hundred years ago the beer-seller made his profit,
or tried to make it, by giving his customer less than he asked for.
Tobacco was quite unknown; it was first brought into England about
three hundred years after the days we are dealing with. When a man
once sat himself down with his pot he had nothing to do but drink. He
had no pipe to take off his attention from his liquor. If such a
portentous sight could have been seen in those days as that of a man
vomiting forth clouds of smoke from his mouth and nostrils, the
beholders would have undoubtedly taken to their heels and run for
their lives, protesting that the devil himself had appeared to them,
breathing forth fire and flames. Tea and coffee, too, were absolutely
unknown, unheard of; and wine was the rich man's beverage, as it is
now. The fire-waters of our own time--the gin and the rum, which have
wrought us all such incalculable mischief--were not discovered then.
Some little ardent spirits, known under the name of _cordials_,
were to be found in the better appointed establishments, and were
kept by the lady of the house among her simples, and on special
occasions dealt out in thimblefuls; but the vile grog, that maddens
people now, our forefathers of six hundred years ago had never even
tasted.

The absence of vegetable food for the greater part of the year, the
personal dirt of the people, the sleeping at night in the clothes
worn in the day, and other causes, made skin diseases frightfully
common. At the outskirts of every town in England of any size there
were crawling about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores,
living heaven knows how. They were called by the common name of
lepers, and probably the leprosy strictly so called was awfully
common. But the children must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch,
and the scurvy, and the ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must
have played fearful havoc with the weak and sickly.

As for the dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress at all.
I doubt whether the great mass of the labourers in Norfolk had more
than a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs
bare, with a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a
man's knife was stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread,
sometimes for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton
goods, such as are familiar to you all, they had never been dreamt
of, and I suspect that no more people in Norfolk wore linen
habitually than now wear silk.

Money was almost inconceivably scarce. The labourer's wages were paid
partly in rations of food, partly in other allowances, and only
partly in money; he had to take what he could get. Even the quit-
rent, or what I have called the ground rent, was frequently
compounded for by the tenant being required to find a pair of gloves,
or a pound of cummin, or some other acknowledgment in lieu of a money
payment; and one instance occurs among the Rougham charters of a man
buying as much as 11-1/2 acres, and paying for them partly in money
and partly in barley. [Footnote: In the year 1276 halfpence and
farthings were coined for the first time. This must have been a great
boon to the poorer classes, and it evidently was felt to be a matter
of great importance, insomuch that it was said to be the fulfilment
of an ancient prophecy by the great seer Merlin, who had once
foretold in mysterious language, that "there shall be half of the
round." In the next century it appears that the want of small change
had again made itself felt: for in the 2nd Richard II. we find the
Commons setting forth in a petition to the King, that "_...les ditz
coes n'on petit monoye pur paier pur les petites_ mesures a grant
damage des dites coes," and they beg "Le plese a dit Sr. le Roi et a
son sage conseil de faire ordeiner Mayles et farthinges pur paier pur
les petites mesures... et en eovre de charite...."--Rolls of Parl.,
vol. iii. p. 65.] Nothing shows more plainly the scarcity of money
than the enormous interest that was paid for a loan. The only bankers
were the Jews; [Footnote: I am speaking of Norfolk and Suffolk, where
the Jews, as far as I have seen, had it all their own way.] and when
a man was once in their hands he was never likely to get out of their
clutches again. But six hundred years ago the Jews had almost come to
the end of their tether; and in the year 1290 they were driven out of
the country, men, women, and children, with unutterable barbarity,
only to be replaced by other bloodsuckers who were not a whit less
mercenary, perhaps, but only less pushing and successful in their
usury.

It is often said that the monasteries were the great supporters of
the poor, and fed them in times of scarcity. It may be so, but I
should like to see the evidence for the statement. At present I doubt
the fact, at any rate as far as Norfolk goes. [Footnote: The returns
of the number of poor people supported by the monasteries, which are
to be found in the "Valor Ecclesiasticus," are somewhat startling.
Certainly the monasteries did not return _less_ than they
expended in alms. Note, too, the complaint of the St. Alban's men to
Wat Tyler, who are said to have slandered the abbey "de retentione
stipendiorum pauperum." Walsingham, i. 469.] On the contrary, I am
strongly impressed with the belief that six hundred years ago the
poor had no friends. The parsons were needy themselves. In too many
cases one clergyman held two or three livings, took his tithes and
spent them in the town, and left a chaplain with a bare subsistence
to fill his place in the country. There was no parson's wife to drop
in and speak a kind word--no clergyman's daughter to give a friendly
nod, or teach the little ones at Sunday school--no softening
influences, no sympathy, no kindliness. What could you expect of
people with such dreary surroundings?--what but that which we know
actually was the condition of affairs? The records of crime and
outrage in Norfolk six hundred years ago are still preserved, and may
be read by any one who knows how to decipher them. I had intended to
examine carefully the entries of crime for this neighbourhood for the
year 1286, and to give you the result this evening, but I have not
had an opportunity of doing so. The work has been done for the
hundred of North Erpingham by my friend Mr. Rye, and what is true for
one part of Norfolk during any single year is not likely to be very
different from what was going on in another.

The picture we get of the utter lawlessness of the whole county,
however, at the beginning of King Edward's reign is quite dreadful
enough. Nobody seems to have resorted to the law to maintain a right
or redress a wrong, till every other method had been tried. Starting
with the squires, if I may use the term, and those well-to-do people
who ought to have been among the most law-abiding members of the
community--we find them setting an example of violence and rapacity,
bad to read of. One of the most common causes of offence was when the
lord of the manor attempted to invade the rights of the tenants of
the manor by setting up a fold on the heath, or _Bruary_ as it
was called. What the lord was inclined to do, that the tenants would
try to do also, as when in 1272 John de Swanton set up a fold in the
common fields at Billingford; whereupon the other tenants pulled it
down, and there was a serious disturbance, and the matter dragged on
in the law courts for four years and more. Or as when the Prior of
Wymondham impleads William de Calthorp for interfering with his
foldage at Burnham; Calthorp replying that the Prior had no right to
foldage, and that he (Calthorp) had the right to pull the fold down.
In these cases, of course, there would be a general gathering and a
riot, for every one's interest was at stake; but it was not only when
some general grievance was felt that people in those days were ready
for a row.

It really looks as if nothing was more easy than to collect a band of
people who could be let loose anywhere to work any mischief. One man
had a claim upon another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right
which was denied--had the claim, or fancied he had--and he seems to
have had no difficulty in getting together a score or two of roughs
to back him in taking the law into his own hands. As when John de la
Wade in 1270 persuaded a band of men to help him in invading the
manor of Hamon de Clere, in this very parish of Tittleshall, seizing
the corn and threshing it, and, more wonderful still, cutting down
timber, and _carrying it off_. There are actually two other
cases of a precisely similar kind recorded this same year, one where
a gang of fellows in broad day seems to have looted the manors of
Dunton and Mileham; the other case was where a mob, under the
leadership of three men, who are named, entered by force into the
manor of Dunham, laid hands on a quantity of timber fit for building
purposes, and took it away bodily! A much more serious case, however,
occurred some years after this when two gentlemen of position in
Norfolk, with twenty-five followers, who appear to have been their
regular retainers, and a great multitude on foot and horse, came to
Little Barningham, where in the Hall there lived an old lady,
Petronilla de Gros; they set fire to the house in five places,
dragged out the old lady, treated her with the most brutal violence,
and so worked upon her fears that they compelled her to tell them
where her money and jewels were, and, having seized them, I conclude
that they left her to warm herself at the smouldering ruins of her
mansion.

On another occasion there was a fierce riot at Rainham. There the
manor had become divided into three portions, as we have seen was the
case at Rougham. One Thomas de Hauville had one portion, and Thomas
de Ingoldesthorp and Robert de Scales held the other two portions.
Thomas de Hauville, peradventure, felt aggrieved because some rogue
had not been whipped or tortured cruelly enough to suit his notions
of salutary justice, whereupon he went to the expense of erecting a
brand new pillory, and apparently a gallows too, to strike terror
into the minds of the disorderly. The other parceners of the manor
were indignant at the act, and collecting nearly sixty of the people
of Rainham, they pulled down the new pillory and utterly destroyed
the same. When the case came before the judges, the defendants
pleaded in effect that if Thomas de Hauville had put up his pillory
on his own domain they would have had no objection, but that he had
invaded their rights in setting up his gallows without their
permission.

If the gentry, and they who ought to have known better, set such an
example, and gave their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only
natural that the lower orders should be quick to take their pattern
by their superiors, and should be only too ready to break and defy
the law. And so it is clear enough that they were. In a single year,
the year 1285, in the hundred of North Erpingham, containing thirty-
two parishes, the catalogue of crime is so ghastly as positively to
stagger one. Without taking any account of what in those days must
have been looked upon as quite minor offences--such as simple theft,
sheep-stealing, fraud, extortion, or harbouring felons--there were
eleven men and five women put upon their trial for burglary, eight
men and four women were murdered; there were five fatal fights, three
men and two women being killed in the frays; and, saddest of all,
there were five cases of suicide, among them two women, one of whom
hanged herself, the other cut her throat with a razor. We have in the
roll recording these horrors very minute particulars of the several
cases, and we know too that, not many months before the roll was
drawn up, at least eleven desperate wretches had been hanged for
various offences, and one had been torn to pieces by horses for the
crime of debasing the king's coin. It is impossible for us to realize
the hideous ferocity of such a state of society as this; the women
were as bad as the men, furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts,
without pity, without shame, without remorse; and finding life so
cheerless, so hopeless, so very very dark and miserable, that when
there was nothing to be gained by killing any one else they killed
themselves.

     Anywhere, anywhere out of the world!

Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will
do well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures
butchered in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten
miles from your own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple
of lonely women, apparently living together in their poverty, gashed
and battered in the dead of the night, and left in their blood,
stripped of their little all. The motive, too, for all this horrible
housebreaking and bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of
bacon, and the shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a
hovel, being too paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never
dreaming of making resistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came to
slay rather than to steal.

Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on;
and, before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the
village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer
were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was
not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former
class, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all
had some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two
that he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then
there were no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one
in Rougham who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we
now understand by tenant farmers were a class that had not yet come
into existence. Where a landlord was non-resident he farmed his
estate by a bailiff, and if any one wanted to give up an occupation
for a time he let it with all that it contained. Thus, when Alice the
divorced made up her mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham--perhaps on
a pilgrimage--perhaps to Rome--who knows?--she let her house and
land, and all that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her sister
Juliana for three years. The inventory included not only the sheep
and cattle, but the very hoes and pitchforks, and sacks; and
everything, to the minutest particular, was to be returned without
damage at the end of the term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this
lady, a lady of birth and some position, certainly did not have two
hundred acres under her hands, and would have been a very small
personage indeed, side by side with a dozen of our West Norfolk
farmers today. The difference between the labourer and the farmer
was, I think, less six hundred years ago than it is now. Men climbed
up the ladder by steps that were more gently graduated; there was no
great gulf fixed between the employer and the employed.

I can tell you nothing of the amusements of the people in those days.
I doubt whether they had any more amusement than the swine or the
cows had. Looking after the fowls or the geese, hunting for the hen's
nest in the furze brake, and digging out a fox or a badger, gave them
an hour's excitement or interest now and again. Now and then a
wandering minstrel came by, playing upon his rude instrument, and now
and then somebody would come out from Lynn, or Yarmouth, or Norwich,
with some new batch of songs for the most part scurrilous and coarse,
and listened to much less for the sake of the music than for the
words. Nor were books so rare as has been asserted. There were even
story-books in some houses, as where John Senekworth, bailiff for
Merton College, at Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire, possessed, when he
died in 1314, three books of romance; but then he was a thriving
yeoman with carpets in his house, or hangings for the walls.
[Footnote: Rogers' "Hist, of Prices" vol. i. p. 124.]

There was a great deal more coming and going in the country villages
than there is now, a great deal more to talk about, a great deal more
doing. The courts of the manor were held periodically, and the free
tenants were bound to attend and carry on a large amount of petty
business. Then there were the periodical visitations by the
Archdeacon and the Rural Dean, and now and then more august
personages might be seen with a host of mounted followers riding
along the roads. The Bishop of Norwich was always on the move when he
was in his diocese; his most favourite places of residence were North
Elmham and Gaywood; at both of these places he had a palace and a
park; that meant that there were deer there and hunting, and all the
good and evil that seems to be inseparable from haunches of vension.
Nay, at intervals, even the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, the
second man in the kingdom, came down to hold a visitation in Norfolk,
and, exactly 602 years ago the great Archbishop Peckham spent some
time in the county, and though I do not think he came near Rougham or
Tittleshall, I think it not improbable that his coming may have had
some influence in bringing about the separation between Peter Romayn
and Matilda de Cringleford, and the divorce of poor Alice from John
of Thyrsford.

That year, 1280, or just 602 years ago, when Archbishop Peckham paid
his visit to Norfolk, was a very disastrous year for the farmers. It
was the beginning of a succession of bad seasons and floods even
worse than any that we have known. The rain began on the 1st of
August, and we are told that it continued to fall for twenty-four
hours, and then came a mighty wind such as men had never known the
like of; the waters were out, and there was a great flood, and houses
and windmills and bridges were swept away. Nay, we hear of a sad loss
of life, and many poor people were drowned, and many lost their all;
flocks, and herds, and corn and hay being whelmed in the deluge. In
November there was a frightful tempest, the lightning doing extensive
damage; and just at Christmas-time the frost set in with such
severity as no man had known before. The river Thames was frozen over
above London Bridge, so that men crossed it with horses and carts,
and when the frost broke up on the 2nd of February there was such an
enormous accumulation of ice and snow that five of the arches of
London Bridge blew up, and all over the country the same destruction
of bridges was heard of.

Next year and the year after that, things went very badly with your
forefathers, and one of the saddest stories that we get from a
Norfolk chronicler who was alive at the time is one in which he tells
us that, owing to the continuous rain during these three years, there
was an utter failure in garden produce, as well as of the people's
hope of harvest. The bad seasons seem to have gone on for six or
seven years; but by far the worst calamity which Norfolk ever knew
was the awful flood of 1287, when by an incursion of the sea a large
district was laid under water, and hundreds of unfortunate creatures
were drowned in the dead of the night, without warning. Here, on the
higher level, people were comparatively out of harm's way, but it is
impossible to imagine the distress and agony that there must have
been in other parts of the county not twenty miles from where we are
this evening.

After that dreadful year I think there was a change for the better,
but it must have been a long time before the county recovered from
the "agricultural distress;" and I strongly suspect that the cruel
and wicked persecution of the Jews, and the cancelling of all debts
due to them by the landlords and the farmers, was in some measure
owing to the general bankruptcy which the succession of bad seasons
had brought about. Men found themselves hopelessly insolvent, and
there was no other way of cancelling their obligations than by
getting rid of their creditors. So when the king announced that all
the Jews should be transported out of the realm, you may be sure that
there were very few Christians who were sorry for them. There had
been a time when the children of Israel had spoiled the Egyptians--
was it not fitting that another time should have come when the
children of Israel should themselves be spoiled?

The year of the great flood was the frequent talk, of course, of all
your forefathers who overlived it, and here in this neighbourhood it
must have acquired an additional interest from the fact that Bishop
Middleton died the year after it, and his brothers then parted with
their Rougham property.

Nor was this all, for Bishop Middleton's successor in the see of
Norwich came from this immediate neighbourhood also. This was Ralph
Walpole, son of the lord of the manor of Houghton, in which parish
the bishop himself had inherited a few acres of land. In less than
forty years no less than three bishops had been born within five
miles of where we are this evening: Roger de Wesenham, [Footnote: The
names of several members of the bishop's family occur in the Rougham
Charters as attesting witnesses, and a Roger de Wesenham is found
among them more than once.] who became Bishop of Lichfield in 1245;
William Middleton, who had just died; and Ralph Walpole, who
succeeded him. There must have been much stir in these parts when the
news was known. The old people would tell how they had seen "young
master Ralph" many a time when he was a boy scampering over
Massingham Heath, or coming to pay his respects to the Archdeacon at
the Lyng House, or talking of foreign parts with old James de
Ferentino or Peter Romayn. Now he had grown to be a very big man
indeed, and there were many eyes watching him on both sides of the
water. He had a very difficult game to play during the eleven years
he was Bishop of Norwich, for the king was dreadfully in need of
money, and, being desperate, he resorted to outrageous methods of
squeezing it from those whom he could frighten and force, and the
time came at last when the bishops and the clergy had to put a bold
face on and to resist the tyranny and lawless rapacity of the
sovereign.

And this reminds me that though archdeacons, and bishops, and even an
archbishop, in those days might be and were very important and very
powerful personages, they were all very small and insignificant in
comparison with the great King Edward, the king who at this time was
looked upon as one of the most mighty and magnificent kings in all
the world. He, too, paid many a visit to Norfolk six hundred years
ago. He kept his Christmas at Burgh in 1280, and in 1284 he came down
with the good Queen Eleanor and spent the whole of Lent in the
county; and next year, again, they were in your immediate
neighbourhood, making a pilgrimage to Walsingham. A few years after
this he seems to have spent a week or two within five miles of where
we are; he came to Castle Acre, and there he stayed at the great
priory whose ruins you all know well. There a very stirring interview
took place between the king and Bishop Walpole, and a number of other
bishops, and great persons who had come down as a deputation to
expostulate with the king, and respectfully to protest against the
way in which he was robbing his subjects, and especially the clergy,
whom he had been for years plundering in the most outrageous manner.
The king gave the deputation no smooth words to carry away, but he
sent them off with threatening frowns and insults and in hot anger.
Some days after this he was at Massingham, and one of his letters has
been preserved, dated from Massingham, 30th of January, 1296, so that
it is almost certain the great king passed one night there at least.
It is a little difficult to understand what the king was doing at
Massingham, for there was no great man living there, and no great
mansion. Sometimes I have thought that the king rode out from Castle
Acre to see what state the Walpoles of those times were keeping up at
Houghton. Had not that audacious Bishop Walpole dared to speak
plainly to his Grace the week before? But the more probable
explanation is that the king went to Massingham to visit a small
religious house or monastery which had been recently founded there. I
suspect it had already got into debt and was in difficulties, and it
is possible that the king's visit was made in the interest of the
foundation. At any rate, there the king stayed; but though he was in
Norfolk more than once after this, he never was so near you again,
and that visit was one which your forefathers were sure to talk about
to the end of their lives.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

And these were the days of old. But now that we have looked back upon
them as they appear through the mists of centuries, the distance
distorting some things, obscuring others, but leaving upon us, on the
whole, an impression that, after all, these men and women of the
past, whose circumstances were so different from our own, were
perhaps not so very unlike what we should be if our surroundings were
as theirs. Now that we have come to that conclusion, if indeed we
have come to it, let me ask you all a question or two. Should we like
to change with those forefathers of ours, whose lives were passed in
this parish in the way I have attempted to describe, six hundred
years ago? Were the former times better than these? Has the world
grown worse as it has grown older? Has there been no progress, but
only decline?

My friends, the people who lived in this village six hundred years
ago were living a life hugely below the level of yours. They were
more wretched in their poverty, they were incomparably less
prosperous in their prosperity, they were worse clad, worse fed,
worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed; they were
sufferers from loathsome diseases which you knew nothing of; the very
beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth, and I
do not believe there were any giants in the earth in those days. The
death-rate among the children must have been tremendous. The
disregard of human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive
it. There was everything to harden, nothing to soften; everywhere
oppression, greed, and fierceness. Judged by our modern standards,
the people of our county village were beyond all doubt coarser, more
brutal, and more wicked, than they are. Progress is slow, but there
has been progress. The days that are, are not what they should be; we
still want reforms, we need much reforming ourselves; but the former
days were not better than these, whatever these may be; and if the
next six hundred years exhibit as decided an advance as the last six
centuries have brought about, and if your children's children of the
coming time rise as much above your level in sentiment, material
comfort, knowledge, intelligence, and refinement, as you have risen
above the level which your ancestors attained to, though even then
they will not cease to desire better things, they will nevertheless
have cause for thankfulness such as you may well feel to-night as you
look back upon what you have escaped from, and reflect upon what you
are.




III.

DAILY LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL MONASTERY.


          "Now I think on't,
     They should be good men; their affairs as righteous:
     But all hoods make not monks."


[The commemoration of the birth of Martin Luther, which people would
have called his quater-centenary if they had not been deterred by the
terrific appearance of so huge a word, was the occasion of many
preachments and much lecturing, besides a great deal of heroic talk
in public and private. With so much to encourage cynicism and
persiflage among us it was comforting to find that the instinct of
hero-worship is not quite dead, and that the story of a great man's
life still stirs the heart. It was inevitable that, among the many
utterances with which we were treated in the year 1883, many should
be very foolish, and not a few mischievous and erroneous. Itinerant
Windbags are rarely scrupulous about their facts, and the allusive
style flavoured with stinging invective is far more telling than any
historical narrative, however picturesque and eloquent it may be.
Luther the Monk will always be a more attractive subject in the
lecture hall than Luther the Theologian, and an audience prepared to
be harrowed and shocked will greedily listen to broad hints about
_abominations_-the word is a very favourite one--which the
author could disclose, but mercifully withholds in pity for the
shuddering hearts of a too sensitive assembly. The consequence was
that an altogether disproportionate amount of declamation was wasted
up and down the country by gentlemen on the stump, in girding at
monks and nuns, their vices and crimes, till some men's minds were
not a little exercised, and some, horrified by what they were told,
asked in their perplexity, "Can these things be?" The present writer
knows nothing of the condition of the German Religious Houses in the
fifteenth or the sixteenth century, and not as much as he would wish
to learn of the condition of the English houses during the same
period, but he has been painfully convinced that the peripatetic
orators are about as qualified to lecture upon the subject as he is
to lecture on astronomy.

It was while musing in my solitude upon the harm done by ignorant
pretenders in sowing error broadcast in the waste places of the world
that I received a call from one of the class, who came to beg my
countenance for a lecture upon Luther the Monk and Monkery. He was a
vociferous personage and prodigal of his words. He added to all his
sins this one, that he did not know when to go. He had no tact, only
talk. Irritated at last beyond endurance, my normal suavity forsook
me, and I spoke with brutal plainness. Of course he was wroth, and
pressed for an explanation. In a weak moment I yielded. "To begin
with," said I, "Luther, strictly speaking, was not a monk at all!"
[Footnote: He belonged to the order of Friars Eremite under the
Augustinian Rule.] It was a foolish speech: first, because it made my
friend an offender for a word; and, secondly, because there was more
truth in it than the man was capable of understanding or was prepared
to receive; but it had the effect of ridding me of a bore. As he took
his leave he shot at me this Parthian shaft--" If you are above
learning, sir," he said," perhaps teaching might not be beneath you.
Could you not, for instance, let the world know something about monks
and monasteries some day? Even I, ignorant as you pronounce me, have
heard of your lecturing on a thirteenth-century village. Why not try
a thirteenth-century monastery next?" I politely thanked him for his
valuable suggestion, and promised to give it my respectful attention.
The following sketch is the outcome of our interview. "Facit
indignatio versus."]

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

It may be assumed as a fact which scarcely requires to be more than
stated that there are few subjects which the great mass of Englishmen
are so curiously ignorant of as the History of Monasticism, of the
constitution of the various Orders, of the fortunes of any single
religious house, or the discipline to which its members were, in
theory at least, compelled to submit. The assumption being granted,
it may naturally be asked, How is such ignorance to be accounted for?
It is due to more causes than one, but chiefly and primarily to the
vastness of the subject itself.

When the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII. there was an
utter obliteration of an order of things which had existed in our
island for certainly more than a thousand years, and how much longer
it is impossible to say. The names of religious houses which are
known to have existed before the Norman Conquest count by hundreds;
the names of men and women who presided over such houses during the
centuries preceding that event count by thousands. Some of these
religious houses had passed through the strangest vicissitudes; they
had been pillaged again and again; they had been burnt by Danish
marauders; their inmates driven out into the wilderness or ruthlessly
put to the sword; their lands given over to the spoiler or gone out
of cultivation; their very existence in some cases almost forgotten;
yet they had revived again and again from their ashes. When William
the Conqueror came among us, and that stern rule of his began, there
was scarcely a county in England and Wales in which one or more
religious houses were not to be found, and during his reign of
twenty-one years about thirty new monasteries of one sort or another
were added to those already existing.

To begin with, the very word monastery is a misnomer: the word is a
Greek word, and means the dwelling-place of a solitary person, living
in seclusion. But, misnomer though it be, the employment of the word
in a sense so widely different from that which it first bore, until
it got to designate the dwelling-place of a corporate body, among
whom no solitude was allowed and privacy was almost impossible, is of
itself very significant as indicating the stages through which the
original idea of monasticism passed.

It was natural enough, when society was in a condition of profound
disorganization, and sensuality and violence were in the ascendant,
that men and women of gentle nature should become convinced that the
higher life could only be lived in lonely retirement, far from the
sound of human voices and the contact of human creatures, whose very
nearness almost implies sin. But what a vast step from this to that
other conviction which the developed form of monasticism expresses,
when experience has convinced the devout searcher after God that no
great work can be done in improving the world, or raising the tone of
society, or in battling with our own weaknesses and vices, except by
earnest, resolute, and disciplined co-operation. It is when we draw
together that we are strong, and strongest when we are labouring
shoulder to shoulder for some common object, and that no mean and
sordid one; it is then that we best find deliverance from our self-
deception and most inveterate delusions, whilst living in the light
of other's eyes, and subjected to the influence and control of a
healthy and well-instructed public opinion.

In the thirteenth century (and I shall as much as possible confine
myself to the limits of that period), a monastery meant what we now
understand it to mean--viz., the abode of a society of men or women
who lived together in common--who were supposed to partake of common
meals; to sleep together in one common dormitory; to attend certain
services together in their common church; to transact certain
business or pursue certain employments in the sight and hearing of
each other in the common cloister; and, when the end came, to be laid
side by side in the common graveyard, where in theory none but
members of the order could find a resting-place for their bones. When
I say "societies of men and women" I am again reminded that the other
term, "convent," has somehow got to be used commonly in a mistaken
sense. People use the word as if it signified a religious house
tenanted exclusively by women. The truth is that a convent is nothing
more than a Latin name for an association of _persons_ who have
_come together_ with a view to live for a common object and to
submit to certain rules in the ordering of their daily lives. The
monastery was the common dwelling-place: the convent was the society
of persons inhabiting it; and the ordinary formula used when a body
of monks or nuns execute any corporate act--such as buying or selling
land--by any legal instrument is, "The Prior and Convent of the
Monastery of the Holy Trinity at Norwich;" "the Abbot and Convent of
the Monastery of St. Peter's, Westminster;" "the Abbess and Convent
of the Monastery of St. Mary and St. Bernard at Lacock," and so on.

Bearing in mind, then, that the term convent has to do with a
corporation of men or women united into an organized society, and
that the term monastery can strictly be applied only to the
buildings--the _domus_, in which that society has its home--it
will be well at starting that we should endeavour to gain some notion
of the general plan of these buildings first, and when we have done
that that we should proceed to deal next with the constitution of the
society itself and the daily routine of conventual life.

A monastery in theory then was, as it was called, a Religious House.
It was supposed to be the home of people whose lives were passed in
the worship of God, and in taking care of their own souls, and making
themselves fit for a better world than this hereafter. As for this
world, it was lying in wickedness; if men remained in this wicked
world they would most certainly become contaminated by all its
pollutions; the only chance of ever attaining to holiness lay in a
man or woman's turning his back upon the world and running away from
it. It was no part of a monk's duty to reform the world; all he had
to do was to look after himself, and to save himself from the wrath
to come. It is hardly overstating the case if I say that a monastery
was not intended to be a benevolent institution; and if a great
religious house became, as it almost inevitably did become, the
centre of civilization and refinement, from which radiated light and
warmth and incalculable blessings far and wide, these results flowed
naturally from that growth and development which the original
founders had never looked forward to or could have foreseen, but it
was never contemplated as an end to be aimed at in the beginning.
Being a home for religious men, whose main business was to spend
their days and nights in worshipping God, the first requisite, the
first and foremost, the _sine qua non_ was, that there should be
a church.

On the church of a monastery, as a rule, no amount of money spent, no
amount of lavish ornament or splendour of decoration, was grudged.
Sculpture and painting, jewels and gold, gorgeous hangings, and
stained-glass that the moderns vainly attempt to imitate, the purple
and fine linen of the priestly vestments, embroidery that to this
hour remains unapproachable in its delicacy of finish and in the
perfect harmony of colours--all these were to be found in almost
incredible profusion in our monastic churches. You hear some people
work themselves into a frenzy against the idolatrous worship of our
forefathers; but to a monk of a great monastery his church was his
one idol--to possess a church that should surpass all others in
magnificence, and which could boast of some special unique glory--
that seemed to a monk something worth living for. The holy rood at
Bromholm, the holy thorn at Glastonbury, were possessions that
brought world-wide renown to the monasteries in which they were
found, and gave a lustre to the churches in which they were
deposited; and the intense _esprit de corps_, the passionate
loyalty, of a monk to his monastery is a sentiment which we in our
time find it so extremely difficult to understand that we can hardly
bring ourselves to believe that it could exist without some subtle
intermixture of crafty selfishness as its ruling force and motive.

The church of a monastery was the heart of the place. It was not that
the church was built for the monastery, but the monastery existed for
the church; there were hundreds and thousands of churches without
monasteries, but there could be no monastery without a church. The
monks were always at work on the church, always spending money upon
it, always adding to it, always "restoring" it; it was always needing
repair. We are in the habit of saying, "Those old monks knew how to
build; look at their work--see how it stands!" But we are very much
mistaken if we suppose that in the twelfth or the thirteenth or the
fourteenth century there was no bad building. On the contrary,
nothing is more common in the monastic annals than the notices of how
this and that tower fell down, and how this and that choir was
falling into ruins, and how this or that abbot got into debt by his
mania for building. There was an everlasting tinkering going on at
the church; and the surest token that a monastery was in a bad way
was that its church was in a shabby condition.

The church was, almost invariably, built in the form of a cross,
facing east and west, the long limb of the cross being called the
nave, the cross limbs being called the transepts, and the shorter
limb, or head of the cross, being called the choir. The choir, as a
rule, was occupied exclusively by the monks or nuns of the monastery.
The servants, workpeople, and casual visitors who came to worship
were not admitted into the choir; _they_ were supposed to be
present only on sufferance. The church was built for the use of the
monks; it was _their_ private place of worship.

Almost as essential to the idea of a monastery as the church was the
cloister or great quadrangle, inclosed on all sides by the high walls
of the monastic buildings. Its usual position was on the south of the
church, to gain as much of the sun's rays as possible, and to insure
protection from the northerly and easterly winds in the bitter
season. All round this quadrangle ran a covered arcade, whose roof,
leaning against the high walls, was supported on the inner side by an
open trellis work in stone--often exhibiting great beauty of design
and workmanship--through which light and air was admitted into the
arcade. [Footnote: In other words the thirteenth-century monk passed
far the greater portion of his time in the open air, except that
there was a roof over his head. As time went on, and monks became
more self-indulgent, they did not by any means like the draughts and
exposure in the cloister, and the old-fashioned open arcades were
glazed, and the old open walks were turned into splendid lounges,
comfortable and luxurious, such as the cloisters of Gloucester could
be made into at a small outlay at the present day.] The open space
not roofed in was called the _garth_, and was sometimes a plain
grass plat and sometimes was planted with shrubs, a fountain of
running water being often found in the centre, which afforded a
pleasant object for the eye to rest on. The cloister was really the
living-place of the monks. Here they pursued their daily avocations,
here they taught their school, they transacted their business, they
spent their time and pursued their studies, always in society, co-
operating and consulting, and, as a rule, knowing no privacy.

"But surely a monk always lived in a cell, didn't he?"

The sooner we get rid of that delusion the better.

Be it understood that until Henry II. founded the Carthusian Abbey of
Witham, in 1178, there was no such thing known in England as a monk's
_cell_, as we understand the term. It was a peculiarity of the
Carthusian order, and when it was first introduced it was regarded as
a startling novelty for any privacy or anything approaching solitude
to be tolerated in a monastery. The Carthusian system never found
much favour in England. The Carthusians never had more than nine
houses, all told; the discipline was too rigid, the rule too severe,
the loneliness too dreadful for our tastes and for our climate. In
the thirteenth century, if I mistake not, there were only two
monasteries in England in which monks or nuns could boast of having
any privacy, any little corner of their own to turn into, any place
where they could enjoy the luxury of retirement, any private study
such as every boy nowadays, in a school of any pretension, expects to
have provided for himself, and without which we assume that nobody
can read and write for an hour.

The cloister arcade was said to have four _walks_. The south
walk ran along the south wall of the nave, the north walk was bounded
by the refectory or great dining hall, the east walk extended along
the south transept, and where the transept ended there usually came a
narrow passage called _slype_, passing between the end of the
transept and the chapter-house, which may be described as the
council-chamber of the convent. Beyond the chapter-house, and
abutting partly upon the east wall of the cloister, but extending far
beyond it till, in some cases, it made with the refectory a block of
buildings in the form of a T, ran the dormitory or common sleeping-
place for the fraternity. The dormitory was always approached by
steps, for it was invariably constructed over a range of vaulted
chambers, which served for various purposes; one of these chambers
was set apart for the reception of those monks who had been subjected
to the monthly bleedings which all were supposed to require, and
which all were compelled to submit to, that so by a mechanical
process, if in no other way, the flesh might be subdued. The beds of
the monks were arranged along the walls of the dormitory, at regular
intervals; and in some monasteries a wainscot partition separated the
sleepers from each other, thus making for each a little cubicle, with
a low door leading into it. The broad passage, running from end to
end, between the sleeping-places in the dormitory was strewn with
rushes; and at the end opposite to the flight of stairs were the
latrines or washing-places, which were open to the air, and under
which was always a sewer that could be flushed by a water-course hard
by.

In the dormitory and the latrines lights were kept burning through
the night; a provision necessary, if for no other reason, because the
services in the church at night-time had to be kept up and attended
by the whole house. They who went from the dormitory to the church
always passed under cover--sometimes by going through the cloister,
sometimes by passing straight into the transept.

We have been round three sides of the cloister: on the north the
church; on the east the chapterhouse and dormitory; on the south the
refectory. There remain the buildings abutting on the west wall. In
the arrangement of these no strict rule was observed. But generally
the western buildings were dedicated to the cellarer's hall with
cellars under it, the pitanciar's and kitchener's offices or
_chequers_ as they were called, and a guest-chamber for the
reception of distinguished strangers and for the duties of
hospitality, to which great importance was attached.

These were the main buildings, the essential buildings of a monastery
great or small. Where a monastery was rich enough to indulge in
luxuries of "modern improvements and all the best appliances," there
was hardly any limit to the architectural freaks that might be
indulged in. There were the infirmary and the hospital; the
calefactory or warming apparatus, the recreation hall and the winter
hall, the locutorium and the common hall, and I know not what
besides. You observe I have as yet said nothing about the library. I
must remind you that in the thirteenth century the number of books in
the world was, to say the least, small. A library of five hundred
volumes would, in those days, have been considered an important
collection, and, after making all due allowances for ridiculous
exaggeration which have been made by ill-informed writers on the
subject, it may safely be said that nobody in the thirteenth century--
at any rate in England--would have erected a large and lofty
building as a receptacle for books, simply because nobody could have
contemplated the possibility of filling it. Here and there amongst
the larger and more important monasteries there were undoubtedly
collections of books, the custody of which was intrusted to an
accredited officer; but the time had not yet come for making
libraries well stored with such priceless treasures as Leland, the
antiquary, saw at Glastonbury, just before that magnificent
foundation was given as a prey to the spoilers. A library, in any
such sense as we now understand the term, was not only no essential
part of a monastery in those days, but it may be said to have been a
rarity.

But if the thirteenth century monastery possessed necessarily no
great Reading-Room, the Scriptorium, or Writing-Room, was almost an
essential adjunct. In the absence of the printing-press, the demand
for skilled writers and copyists throughout the country was enormous.
In the Scriptorium all the business, now transacted by half a dozen
agents and their clerks, was carried on. The land of the country in
those days was subdivided to an extent that it is now almost
impossible for us to realize, and the tenure under which the small
patches of arable or meadow-land were held was sometimes very complex
and intricate. The small patches were perpetually changing hands,
being bought or sold, settled upon trustees, or let out for a term of
years, and every transaction would be registered in the books of the
monastery interested, while the number of conveyances, leases, and
enfeofments made out in the course of the year was incalculable. In
such an abbey as that of Bury St. Edmunds a small army of writers
must have been constantly employed in the business department of the
Scriptorium alone. Obviously it became a great writing-school, where
the copyists consciously or unconsciously wrote according to the
prevailing fashion of the place; and there have been, and there are,
experts who could tell you whether this or that document was or was
not written in this or that monastic Scriptorium. Paper was very
little used, and the vellum and parchment required constituted a
heavy item of expense. Add to this the production of school-books and
all materials used for carrying on the education work, the constant
replacement of _church_ service books which the perpetual
thumbing and fingering would subject to immense wear and tear, the
great demand for music which, however simple, required to be written
out large and conspicuous in order to be read with ease, and you get
a rather serious list of the charges upon the stationery department
of a great abbey.

But though by far the greater portion of work done in the Scriptorium
was mere office work, the educational department, if I may so term
it, being subsidiary, it must not be forgotten that the literary and
the historical department also was represented in the Scriptorium of
every great monastery. In the thirteenth century men never kept
diaries or journals of their own daily lives, but monasteries did. In
theory, every religious house recorded its own annals, or kept a
chronicle of great events that were happening in Church and State.
Where a monastery had kept its chronicle going for a long time, it
got to be regarded almost as a sacred book, and was treated with
great veneration: it lay in a conspicuous place in the Scriptorium,
and was under the care of an officer who alone was permitted to make
entries in it. When any great piece of news was brought to the
monastery that seemed worth putting on record, the person giving the
information wrote out his version of the story on a loose piece of
parchment, and slipped his communication into the book of annals for
the authorized compiler to make use of in any way that seemed best to
him, after due examination of evidence. This was the rule in all
monastic houses. Unfortunately, however, as it is with the journals
or diaries of men and women of the nineteenth century, so it was with
the journals and diaries of monks of the thirteenth, they evidently
were kept by fits and starts; and before the fourteenth century was
half out, the practice of keeping up these diaries in all but the
larger monasteries had come to an end.

Before passing on from the Library and Scriptorium, on which a great
deal more might easily be said, it is necessary that one caution
should be given; I know not how that notion originated or how it has
taken such hold of the minds of ninety-nine men out of a hundred,
that the monks as a class were students or scholars or men of
learning; as far as the English monasteries of the thirteenth century
are concerned, I am sure that the notion is altogether erroneous. If
we except some few of the larger and nobler monasteries, which from
first to last seem always to have been centres of culture,
enlightenment, and progress, the monks were no more learned than the
nuns. As a class, students, scholars, and teachers they were not.
When King John died, in 1216, a little learning went a long way, and
whatever the Norman Conquest did for England (and it did a great
deal), it certainly was not an event calculated to increase the love
of study, or likely to make men bookish pundits.

I should only confuse my readers if I dwelt more at length upon the
buildings of a monastery. It is enough for the present that we should
understand clearly that the essential buildings were (1) the church,
(2) the cloister, (3) the dormitory, (4) the refectory, (5) the
chapter-house. In these five buildings the life of the convent was
carried on. Having said thus much we will pass on to the corporation
itself--that which strictly was called the convent; and for
convenience and distinctness it will be as well if we use that word
_convent_ in the more accurate sense and employ it only as
signifying the corporate body of persons occupying those buildings of
which I have been speaking, and which in their aggregate were called
a _monastery_.

Once more I think it necessary to start with a caution. Not only do I
propose to take no account here of that large class of conventuals
which comprehended the mendicant order or friars as they are called,
but I must needs pass by with little or no notice the various orders
of regular canons-_i.e._, canons living under a rule. The friars
came into England first in 1220. During the thirteenth century they
were, so to speak, upon their trial; and from the first the monks and
the friars were essentially opposed in the ideal of their daily
lives. So with the very numerous houses of canons regular up and down
the land. They and the monks did not love one another, and when I
speak of monks and their houses it will be advisable to exclude from
our consideration the friars on the one hand and the canons on the
other, and, in fact, to limit ourselves to that view of conventual
life which the great English monasteries under the rule of St.
Benedict afford.

At the time of the Norman Conquest it may be said that all English
monks were professedly under one and the same Rule--the famous
Benedictine Rule. The Rule of a monastery was the constitution or
code of laws, which regulated the discipline of the house, and the
Rule of St. Benedict dates back as far as the sixth century, though
it was not introduced into England for more than a hundred years
after it had been adopted elsewhere. Four hundred years is a very
long time for any constitution or code of law to last unchanged, and
though the English monasteries professedly were living according to
the Benedictine Rule during all the Saxon and the Danish times, yet
there is too much reason to believe that if St. Benedict could have
risen from the dead in the days of Edward the Confessor and made a
visitation of many an English house, he would have been rather
astonished to be told that the monks were living according to his
Rule.

About one hundred and fifty years before the Conquest, a great
reformation had been attempted of the French monasteries, which it
was said had fallen into a state of great decay as far as discipline
and fervour were concerned, and a revision of the old rule had been
found necessary, the reformers breaking away from the old
Benedictines and subjecting themselves to a new and improved Rule.
These first reformers were called _Cluniac_ monks, from the
great Abbey of Clugni, in Burgundy, in which the new order of things
had begun. The first English house of reformed or Cluniac monks was
founded at Lewes, in Sussex, eleven years after the Conquest, by
Gundrada, a step-daughter of William the Conqueror, and her husband,
William, Earl of Warrene and Surrey. The Cluniacs were at first
famous for the simplicity of their lives and the strictness of their
discipline, but as time went on they became too rich and so too
luxurious, and at last they too needed reforming, and a new reformer
arose. In this case the real moving spirit of reformation was an
Englishman, one Stephen Harding, probably a Dorsetshire man, who was
brought up at the Benedictine monastery of Sherborne, and in the
course of events chosen Abbot of the monastery of Citeaux, where St.
Bernard became his ardent disciple, and where the two enthusiasts,
working cordially together, brought about that second reform of the
Benedictines which resulted in the founding of the great Cistercian
order.

Thus, without looking too minutely into the matter, we find that when
the thirteenth century opens, or if you will, when Henry III. came to
the throne in 1216, there were three great orders of monks in
England--the old Benedictines, who had held houses and lands for
centuries; the Cluniacs, who were the reformed Benedictines; and the
Cistercians, who may be styled the reformed Cluniacs. But inasmuch as
the architectural and other reforms among the Cistercians were many
and peculiar, it will again be advisable to pass by these
peculiarities without remark.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The constitution of every convent, great or small, was monarchical.
The head of the house was almost an absolute sovereign, and was
called the Abbot. His dominions often extended, even in England, over
a very wide tract of country, and sometimes over several minor
monasteries which were called Cells. Thus the Abbot of St. Alban's
had under himself the cell of Tynemouth in Northumberland and two
others in Norfolk-_viz._, Binham and Wymondham, the latter of
which eventually became an independent abbey--and the heads of these
cells or subject houses were called Priors. An _abbey_ was a
monastery which was independent. A priory was a monastery which in
theory or in fact was subject to an abbey. All the Cluniac
monasteries in England were thus said to be alien priories, because
they were mere cells of the great Abbey of Clugni in France, to which
each priory paid heavy tribute; while the priors were almost always
foreigners, and always appointed by the Abbot of Clugni, and
responsible to him much in the same way as a Pacha is to his suzerain
the Sultan. On the other hand, the Cistercian houses were all abbeys,
and their abbots sovereigns in alliance or confederation with one
another, and exercising over their several convents supreme
jurisdiction, though recognizing the Abbot of Citeaux as their over-
lord. The abbot not only had a separate residence within the
monastery and lived apart from his monks, but he had his separate
estate for the maintenance of his dignity, and to bear the very heavy
expenses which that dignity necessitated, and he had the patronage of
every office in the convent. These officers were numerous. The first
of them was the prior, who was the abbot's prime minister and head of
the executive and the abbot's representative in his absence. Under
him was the sub-prior, sometimes a third prior, and then a number of
functionaries, to whom, as in the case of the abbot, separate estates
were assigned out of which they were bound to provide for certain
charges which they were called upon to meet as best they could, while
a complicated system of finance provided for the surplus of one
office being applied when necessary for the deficiency of another.

In the great Abbey of Evesham a very elaborate constitution was drawn
up and agreed to in the year 1214, after a long dispute between the
abbot and convent which had lasted for several years, and this scheme
has come down to us.

From it we find that certain officers (obedientiaries was their
technical name) were charged with providing certain articles out of
the revenue of the office. The prior, to whom no mean share of the
revenues was assigned, had to provide the parchment that might be
required for business purposes or for legal instruments and all other
materials for the scriptorium, except ink. The manciple was to pro-
vide all wine and mead, the keeping up the stock of earthenware cups,
jugs, basins, and other vessels, together with the lamps and oil. The
precentor had to find all the ink used, and all colour required for
illumination, the materials for book-binding, and the keeping the
organ in repair. To the chamberlain were assigned certain revenues
for providing all the clothing of the monks, it being stipulated that
the abbot's dress was not to be paid for out of the fund. In the same
way certain small tithes are apportioned for buying basins, jugs, and
towels for the guests' chamber; while all rents levied from the
various tenants paid not in money, but in kind--as, _e.g_.,
capons, eggs, salmon, eels, herrings, &c.--were to be passed to the
account of the kitchener. Every monk bearing office was bound to
present his accounts for audit at regular intervals, and the rolls on
which these accounts were inscribed exist in very large numbers, and
may still be consulted by those who are able to read them.

It looks as if it were the policy of the Benedictines to give as many
monks as possible some special duty and responsibility--to give each,
in fact, a personal interest in the prosperity of the house to which
he belonged--and the vacancies occurring from time to time in the
various offices gave everybody something to look forward to. There
was room for ambition, and, I am bound to add, room for a good deal
of petty scheming, on the one hand, and truckling to the abbot, on
the other; but it all went towards relieving the monotony of the life
in the cloister--a monotony which has been very much over-stated by
those who have never studied the subject. To begin with, it does not
follow that what would be very dull to us would be dull and insipid
to the men of the thirteenth century. Before a man offered himself
for admission to a monastery, he must have had a taste for a quiet
life, and in many instances he had grown tired of the bustle, the
struggle, and all the anxious wear of the work-day world. He wanted
to be rid of _bothers_, in fact; he was pretty sure to have had
a fair education, and he was presumably a religious man, with a taste
for religious exercises; sometimes, and not unfrequently, he was a
disappointed man, who had been left wifeless and childless;
sometimes, too, he was one whose career had been cut short suddenly
by some accident which incapacitated him for active exertion and made
him long only for repose and obscurity. Moreover, in those distant
times the instinct of devotion was incomparably stronger than it is
now, and people found a real and intense delight in the services of
the sanctuary, to say nothing of their entire belief in the spiritual
advantages to be derived from taking part in those services. Add to
this that a monk had to pass through rather a long training before he
was regularly admitted to full membership. He had to submit to a term
of probation, during which he was subject to a somewhat rigorous
ordeal.

A novice had the pride taken out of him in a very effectual way
during his novitiate--he was pretty much in the position of a
_fag_ at a great school nowadays, and by the time that he had
passed through his novitiate he was usually very well broken in, and
in harmony with the spirit of the place in which he found himself. It
was something to have a higher place assigned him at last in the
church and the dormitory, to have some petty office given him, and to
have a chance of being promoted by and by. There was Brother So-and-
so, who was getting infirm, and he could not do the pitanciar's work
much longer; the precentor was getting as hoarse as a raven, and the
sacrist was gouty, or the cellarer was showing signs of breaking up.
Nay, the prior's cough gave unmistakable signs of his lungs being
wrong, and if he _were_ to drop off, which we should of course
all of us deplore--there would be a general move up, it might be;
unless, indeed, Father Abbot should promote his chaplain over the
heads of all of us--for such things have been!

But, when we come to look a little closer, we find that the monotony
of monastic life was almost confined to the frequent services in the
church. There were six services every day, of one kind or another, at
which the whole convent was supposed to be present, and one service
at midnight. [Footnote: Peckham's Register, ii, Preface, p. lxviii,
et seq.] The lay brethren among the Cistercians, and the servants
engaged in field labour, were excused attendance at the nocturnal
service, and those officials of the convent whose business required
them to be absent from the precincts were also excused. Indeed, it
would have been simply impossible for the whole brotherhood to
assemble at all these services; there would have been a dead-lock in
twenty-four hours if the attempt had ever been made in any of the
large monasteries, where the inmates sometimes counted by hundreds,
who all expected their meals punctually, and for whom even the
simplest cookery necessitated that fires should be kept up, the
porridge boiled, the beer drawn, and the bread baked. Hence, they
whose hands were full and their engagements many really had no time
to put in an appearance at church seven times in twenty-four hours.
While, on the other hand, the monk out of office, with nothing
particular to do, was all the better for having his time broken up;
going to church kept him out of mischief, and singing of psalms saved
him from idle talk, and if it did him no good certainly did him very
little harm.

The ordinary life of the monastery began at six o'clock in the
morning, and when the small bell, called the skilla, rang, all rose,
washed themselves at the latrines, put on their day habit, and then
presented themselves at the matin Mass. _Mixtum_ or breakfast,
followed, and that over the convent assembled in chapter for
consultation. After chapter the officials dispersed; the kitchener to
arrange for the meals, and not unfrequently to provide hospitality
for distinguished guests and their retinue; the precentor to drill
his choir boys, to tune the organ, to look after the music, or to
arrange for some procession in the church, or some extraordinary
function; the infirmarer to take his rounds in the hospital; the
cellarer to inspect the brewhouse and bakeries; and each or all of
these officers might find it necessary to go far a-field in looking
after some bailiff or tenant who could not safely be left alone. At
Evesham the sacristan, the chamberlain, and the infirmarer were
allowed forage and the keep of one horse. Meanwhile in the cloister
all was stir and movement without noise. In the west alley the
schoolmaster was teaching his little pupils the rudiments of Latin,
or it might be the elements of singing; in the south alley, where the
light was best, a monk with a taste for art was trying his hand at
illuminating a MS. or rubricating the initial letters; while on the
other side, in the north alley, some were painfully getting by heart
the psalms, or practising meditation--alone in a crowd.

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 nobody 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 passes
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 institution. 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
pronouncing 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 wishing 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.
Parsee 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 assurance 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 pass 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 amusement 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 trespass or withheld a tithe
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 assert
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 pass; 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
canvassing 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 assumed 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 assumed, 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
amusements. 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 pass 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 amusements 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 Coxford, 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 passed 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 ship
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 tithes of Eglingham,
in Northumberland, to help them to make their ale better--"taking
compassion 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 Hertfordshire, and two-thirds of
the tithes 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 passing 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 tithes had been appropriated by a religious house,
the parson being left with the vicarial tithes, and often not even
with them, but thrown for his daily bread upon the voluntary
offerings of his parishioners. 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 shilling 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 substitute 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 tithes 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 Churchmanship." 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 class, 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.

On the other hand, the intense _esprit de corps_ of a convent of
monks went beyond anything that we can now realize, and led to grave
sins against truth and honesty. The forgeries of charters, bulls, and
legal instruments of all kinds for the glorification of a monastery
by its members was at least condoned only too frequently. It can
hardly be doubted that the scriptorium of many a religious house must
have been turned to very discreditable uses by unscrupulous and
clever scribes, with the connivance if not with the actual knowledge
of the convent, for such things were not done in a corner. If the
forgeries succeeded--and that they often did succeed we know--the
monastery got all the advantage of the rascality; no inquiry was
made, and it was tacitly assumed that where so much was gained, and
the pride of "our house" was gratified, the end justified the means.

There remains one question which may suggest itself to our minds as
it has often suggested itself to others. From what class or classes
in society were the monks for the most part taken? This is one of the
most difficult questions to answer. The late Dr. Maitland, who
perhaps knew more, and had read more, about monks and monasteries
than any Englishman of his time, professed himself unable to answer
it; and my friend Dr. Luard--whose labours in this field of research
have gained for him a European reputation, and whose wonderful
industry, carefulness, and profound knowledge, qualify him to speak
with authority on such a point, if any one might pronounce upon it--
hesitates to give a decided opinion. The impression that is left upon
my own mind is, that the thirteenth-century monk, as a rule, was
drawn from the gentry class, as distinguished from the aristocracy on
the one hand, or the artisans on the other. In fact, _mutatis
mutandis_, that the representatives of the monks of the thirteenth
century were the Fellows of Colleges of the nineteenth before the
recent alteration of University and College statutes came into force.
An ignorant monk was certainly a rarity, an absolutely unlettered or
uneducated one was an impossibility, and an abbot or prior who could
not talk and write Latin with facility, who could not preach with
tolerable fluency on occasion, and hold his own as a debater and man
of business, would have found himself sooner or later in a very
ridiculous and very uncomfortable position, from which he might be
glad to escape by resignation.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Three centuries after the time we have been considering, the
religious houses were suppressed--to use that euphonious term which
has become universally accepted--only after they had existed in these
islands in one form or another for at least a thousand years. Century
after century monasteries continued to spring up, and there never was
much difficulty in finding devout people who were ready to befriend a
new order, to endow it with lands, and to give it a fair start. In
other words, there was always a _demand_ for new monasteries,
and the first sure sign that that demand had been met, and more than
met, was when the supply of monks began to fall short, and when, as
was the case before the end of the fifteenth century, the religious
houses could not fill up their full complement of brethren. Is it
conceivable that this constant demand could have gone on, unless the
common sense of the nation had been profoundly convinced, and
continuously convinced, that the religious orders gave back some
great equivalent for all the immense surrenders of wealth which
generation after generation of Englishmen had made--some equivalent
for all the vast stream of benefactions which flowed on from age to
age so strongly that kings and statesmen had to interfere and check,
if it might be, the dangerous prodigality of lavish benefactors? What
that equivalent was, what the real work of the monasteries was, what
great functions they discharged in the body politic, what the nation
at large gained by their continuance and lost by their fall--these
are questions which on this occasion I am not concerned with, and
with which I scrupulously forbear from dealing. But there are moments
when a great horror comes upon some men's minds, and a vision of a
lonely and childless old age rises before them in the gloom of a
dreary twilight, or when the mists of autumn hide the sunbeams, and
they think, "If desolation were to come upon our homes, where could
we hide the stricken head and broken heart?" To that question--a
morbid question if you will--I have never found an answer. The answer
was possible once, but it was in an age which has passed away.

Yes, that age has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is
true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes
the echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single
sound is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the
several parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter that
"flash along the chords and go," the wail of the minor, as if crying
for the theme that has vanished and yet will reappear--"like armies
whispering where great echoes be"--these things are not mere
repetition; they are messages from the Eternal Father to the sons of
men, reminding them that the world moves on. Merely to ape the past,
and to attempt to reproduce in the nineteenth century the tree that
had taken a millennium to grow into its maturity in the thirteenth
and was rudely cut down root and branch in the sixteenth, is about as
wise as it would be to try and make us sing the Hallelujah Chorus in
unison! Let the dead bury their dead.

Meanwhile the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are
rising up around us each after his kind; Pall Mall swarms with them,
hardly less splendid than their progenitors, certainly not less
luxurious. Our modern monks look out at the windows of the Carlton
and the Athenum with no suspicion that they are at all like the
monks of old. Nor are they. They lack the old faith, the old loyalty
to their order, and with the old picturesqueness something else that
we can less afford to miss--the old enthusiasm. We look back upon the
men of the thirteenth century with much complacency. A supercilious
glance at the past seems to give the moderns an excellent opinion of
themselves. But suppose the men of the thirteenth century could turn
the tables upon us, and, from their point of view, pass their
judgment upon the daily life of the conventuals of St. James's, who
are, after all, only survivals, but just conceivably not quite
survivals of the fittest; would the monks of old find all things
quite up to the highest ideal, or would they hide their heads in
shame and confusion of face compelled to acknowledge that the new is
in all things so much better than the old?




IV.

THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA.


     "So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,
       And a famine of strivers silenced strife:
         There were none to love and none to wed,
         And pity and joy and hope had fled,
     And grief had spent her passion in sighing;
       And where was the Spirit of Life?"

From across the Channel during the last few months [Footnote:
February, 1884.] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of
pestilence which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to
some heavy with menace. From Italy, the land beyond the Alps; from
Spain, the land beyond the Pyrenees; from seaports in France and
cities of the plain, we hear that the cholera has been striking down
its victims. The Phantom with the deadly breath has shown strange
caprice in his coming and going; but when he has been suspected to be
nigh at hand, wild-eyed Panic has shown herself as of old. It is sad
and discouraging to find that, spite of all our boasted progress--all
that science has taught us, and all that we are supposed to have
learnt--the attitude of the multitude when certain dangers threaten,
appears to be as it was, and that we still hear of shuddering
wretches trying to fight a dreaded enemy by letting off old muskets
and drenching portmanteaus with Condy's fluid.

Such things have been before. Must they recur again? Philosophers
comfort us with the assurance that our brains are larger than those
of our forefathers. Nay, that the convolutions of the said brains are
more complex. How about the _moral fibre?_ Are we never to have
stouter hearts or more "bowels and mercies?" In the face of the same
circumstances, will men for ever show themselves the same? Or is it
that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy
breaking loose here and there--anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate
and senselessly cruel--are true only of exceptional communities, as
yet unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe
in, and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?

The cholera has abated, we are told; as we were told it would. Thus
far we in England have escaped its ravages. Experts--and experts are
the people whose vocation it is to speak without doubt or hesitation
whenever they speak--experts assure us that London was never more
free from cholera than during this present summer. Other experts--
they too speaking with authority--confidently affirm that our time is
coming, that a severe visitation is impending; that all we have heard
of hitherto of the ravages of the epidemic elsewhere, will prove but
child's play in comparison with that which we shall hear of by and
by. "And then, sir, you'll see!" That is a comforting assurance--at
any rate, _some_ of us will survive.

But what do we know of the march of any mysterious form of death that
has ever appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding
over the earth--"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind
him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful
visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to
mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and
substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any
trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any
great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large
section of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to? How
long would it take to write; or rather, when it was written, how long
would it take to read?

This island of Great Britain has more than once been visited by
pestilence. De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls
"The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little
of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so
marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That
there is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can
doubt. The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of
two years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665
did not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively
trifling. The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a
scale to demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has
the destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire
unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not
one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of
historians; but it is at least significant that among all
contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death--as it
has been agreed to call it--the Black Death in the reign of Edward
III.--there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of
desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures
crying that the wells were poisoned. On the contrary, we have proof
that as a rule men died at their posts during all that trying time,
that those in authority never lost their heads, and that though there
must, of course, have been isolated cases of abject fear, expressing
itself in the maddest extravagances of despair, yet we have to look
long and look far and wide to find such cases--and after all our
search may be fruitless.

As yet the history of the Black Death can hardly be said to have been
investigated at all; and until specialists can be prevailed upon to
examine the evidence ready at hand, we shall continue to be put off
with mere generalities when we ask for more light upon a calamity
which was the most stupendous that ever befell this island.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

We have all heard of Boccaccio's _Decameron_--only naughty
people have _read it_--and how it was written when the plague
was raging at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's
Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then
and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept
over Europe--desolating, devastating--the spectre with the swinging
scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it,
picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that
vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered
for him by the fragrant smoke of aromatic logs burning in huge pyres
round about him night and day. Some have heard of Giovanne Villani,
the historian of Florence, who wrote feebly about that same
pestilence in his native city, and who doubtless would have written
more, and more plainly and more strongly, but that in the midst of
his writing Azrael touched him too, and his pen fell from his hand.
[Footnote: Muratori, "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores," vol. xiii. pp, 1-
771.] Some few, again, have a faint recollection of that Emperor of
the West, John Cantacuzene, who ruled at Constantinople when the
plague was, and who wrote about it. [Footnote: His four books of
Histories are to be found in the "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae
Byzantinae."] Didn't he? Nay! Hadn't he a son, Andronicus, who died
of it? How did it come to pass that Gibbon did not so much as allude
to it? Some, peradventure, think of Rome and of Rienzi, and how it
was about that time that he was potent, or was he in hiding there
among the Fraticelli? And isn't there something too about the plague
visiting Greenland, and putting back the clock that was moving on
steadily, but which suddenly stopped? How vague we are!

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

What was this plague? How did it strike men down?

"It showed itself," says Boccaccio, "in a sad and wonderful manner;
and _different from what it had been in the East_, where
bleeding from the nose is the fatal prognostic, here [at Florence]
there appeared certain tumours in the groin or under the armpits,
some as big as an apple, others as big as an egg; and afterwards
purple spots in most parts of the body: in some cases large and but
few in number, in others less and more numerous, both kinds the usual
messengers of death... They generally died," he adds, "the third day
from the first appearance of the symptoms, without a fever or other
bad circumstance attending."

"It took men generally in the head and stomach, appearing first in
the groin," says Villani, "or under the armpits, by little knobs or
swellings called kernels, boils, blains, blisters, pimples, or
plague-sores; being generally attended with devouring fever, with
occasional spitting and vomiting of blood, whence, for the most part,
they died presently or in half a day, or within a day or two at the
most."

Less precise and minute is the description of the great surgeon,
Guido de Chauliac, who nobly stayed at Avignon for the six months
during which the visitation was at its worst; but he too mentions the
carbuncular swellings in the axillae and the groin, the purple spots,
and the violent inflammation of the lungs, attended by fatal
expectoration of blood.

As for the Emperor John Cantacuzene, his description is so flagrantly
a mere adaptation of the history of the plague at Athens by
Thucydides that it must be received with caution. It is only in what
it omits and in what it adds to the older narrative that it possesses
any great historic value. It agrees with the accounts quoted above in
making mention of the swellings, the blood-spitting, and the awful
rapidity with which the disease ran its course. It omits all mention
of the eruption on the surface of the skin, the flushed eyes, and,
above all, the swollen and inflamed condition of the larynx, the
cough, the sneezing, and the hiccough, which Dr. Collier found so
significant.

Comparing, then, the several accounts which have come down to us,
meagre though they are, it ought to be possible to arrive at some
conclusions regarding the nature of the plague of the fourteenth
century which, for the pathologist, would amount to certainties. The
wonder is that such men as Dr. Hecker and his learned translator
should have shown so much reserve--not to say timidity--in
pronouncing judgment upon the question.

A layman runs a risk of incurring withering scorn at his presumption,
and ridicule at his ignorance who ventures to express an opinion--or
to have one--on any subject which the medical profession claims as
within its own domain; and I should not dare to speak otherwise than
as a very humble inquirer when the learned are silent. There are,
however, some conclusions which may be accepted without hesitation
and which will be admitted by all.

I. The Black Death was _not_ scarlatina maligna, as the plague
at Athens undoubtedly was. [Footnote: "The History of the Plague of
Athens," translated from Thucydides by C. Collier, M.D., London,
1857.]

II. It was _not_ small-pox.

III. It was _not_ cholera.

IV. It probably _was_ a variety of the Oriental plague, which
has reappeared in Europe in more modern times, and regarding which
they who wish to know more must seek their information where it is to
be found.

The next question usually asked is, Where did the new plague come
from? And here the answer is even more uncertain than that to the
other question--What the great plague was.

In fact, a careful comparison of such testimony as comes to hand
leaves the inquirer in a very perplexed condition, and inclines him
rather to accept than reject the old-fashioned theory of a "general
corruption of the atmosphere" as the only working hypothesis whereby
to account for the startling spontaneity of the outbreak and its
appearance at so many and such distant points at the same time.

The Imperial author, who appears to have done his best to gather
information, evidently found himself quite baffled in his attempt to
follow the march of the plague. It had originated among the
Hyperborean Scythians; it had passed through Pontus, and Libya, and
Syria, and the furthest East, and "in a manner all the world round
about." Other writers are just as much in the dark as Cantacuzene,
and it seems mere waste of time to endeavour to arrive at any
conclusion from data so defective and statements so void of
historical basis as have come down to us. This only seems
established, that during the year 1347 there was great atmospheric
disturbance extending over a large area of Southern Europe, and
resulting in extensive failure of the harvest, and consequent
distress and famine; and that in January, 1348, one of the most
violent earthquakes in history wrought immense havoc in Italy, the
shocks being felt in the islands of the Mediterranean, and even north
of the Alps.

It is at least curious that the date of the earthquake coincides very
closely with the date which has been given by Guido de Chauliac for
the first appearance of the plague at Avignon. He tells us expressly
that it broke out in that city in January, 1348, and I think it would
be difficult to produce trustworthy evidence of any earlier outbreak
than this, at any rate, in Europe. [Footnote: One of our monastic
chroniclers states expressly that it began about St. James's Day in
1347. I _feel_ certain that the date is wrong, and that it could
be proved to be wrong without much difficulty by reference to
documentary evidence which might be consulted.] "It appeared at
Florence," says Villani, "at the beginning of April, and at Cesena,
on the other side of the Apennines, on the 1st of June." It is
asserted that it reached England at the beginning of August, is said
to have lingered for some months in the west, and to have devastated
Bristol with awful severity.

There can be no doubt that in the towns of Italy and France there was
a dreadful mortality; but when we are told that 100,000 died in
Venice, and 60,000 in Florence, and 70,000 in Siena, it is impossible
to accept such round numbers as anything better than ignorant
guesses. Whether the great cities of the Low Countries were visited
by the pestilence with any severity, or how far the towns of Germany
were affected, I am unable to say, nor am I much concerned at present
with such an inquiry; that I leave to others to throw light upon. But
as to the progress, the incidence, and the effect of the Black Death
in England--when it came and where it showed itself, how long it
lasted, and what effects followed--on these questions the time has
come for pointing out that we have a body of evidence such as perhaps
exists in no other country--evidence, too, which hitherto has hardly
received any attention, its very existence entirely overlooked,
forgotten, nay! not even suspected.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Let us understand where we are, and look about us for a little while.

When King Edward III. entered London in triumph on the 14th of
October, 1347, he was the foremost man in Europe, and England had
reached a height of power and glory such as she had never attained
before. At the battle of Crei France had received a crushing blow,
and by the loss of Calais, after an eleven months' siege, she had
been reduced well-nigh to the lowest point of humiliation. David II.,
King of Scotland, was now lying a prisoner in the Tower of London.
Louis of Bavaria had just been killed by a fall from his horse, the
Imperial throne was vacant, and the electors in eager haste
proclaimed that they had chosen the King of England to succeed. To
their discomfiture the King of England declined the proffered crown.
He "had other views." Intoxicated by the splendour of their sovereign
and his martial renown, and the Success which seemed to attend him
wherever he showed himself, the English people had gone mad with
exultation--all except the merchant princes, the monied men, who are
not often given to lose their heads. They took a much more sober view
of the outlook than the populace did--they had an eye to their own
interests and the interests of the trade and commerce in which they
were engaged. They were very much in earnest in asserting their
rights and protesting against their wrongs, and they presented their
petitions to the King after the fashion of the time--petitions which
must have seemed rather startling protests in the fourteenth century,
betraying, as they did, some advanced opinions for which the world at
large was hardly then prepared.

Students of the manual, compendium, and popular handbook style of
literature may possibly be hardly aware that the war of protection
_versus_ free trade, and the other war concerned with the
incidence of taxation upon property, real and personal, had already
begun. Even my distinguished friend, Mr. Cadaverous, who never made a
mistake in his life, and whose memory for facts is portentous--even
Mr. Cadaverous assures me that he has never met with any mention of
the above fact in all his study of history.

History! What is history but the science which teaches us to see the
throbbing life of the present in the throbbing life of the past?

Note that these "gentlemen of the House of Commons," who made
themselves somewhat disagreeable in the Parliament of 1348, were not
the warriors who had gone out to fight the King's battles, but the
burghers who stayed at home, heaped up money, and grumbled. It was
otherwise with the roistering swash-bucklers who came back in that
glorious autumn. They are said to have returned laden with the spoils
of France, the plunder of Calais, and so on and so on. Calais must
have been rather a queer little place to afford much _plunder_
after all that it had gone through. The swash-bucklers doubtless
brought prize-money home, but it did not all come from France--that
is pretty certain. Villani, our Florentine friend, tells us of an
unexampled commercial crisis at Florence about this time--brought
about, observe, by the English conqueror of France not paying his
debts. So the Bardi and the Peruzzi actually stopped payment; for the
King owed them a million and a half of gold florins, and there was
lamentation and distress of mind, and the level of the Arno rose by
reason of the flood of tears that fell "from tired eyelids upon tired
eyes." All that made no difference to the swash-bucklers, and up and
down England there was wild extravagance, and money seemed to burn in
people's pockets. Feasting and merriment, and all that appertains
thereto, were the order of the day, and all went merry as a marriage
bell.

The King got all he could get out of the Parliament, but he did not
get, he could not get, all he wished. What was to be done next? The
Pope said, "Make peace!" and his Holiness did his little best to
bring about the desired end. The summer of 1348 had come, and it
seems that at Avignon the plague had by this time spent itself,
people were no longer afraid to go there now, and the Pope would
peradventure come out of his seclusion and receive an embassy. So on
the 28th of July Edward III. wrote a letter to Pope Clement, and
announced his intention of sending his ambassadors to Avignon to
treat about terms. The negotiations fell through, and on the 8th of
October the King announced by proclamation that he was once more
going to make an inroad upon France with an armed force. He did not
keep his word. In November a truce was patched up somehow; and on the
first of the next month we find the King once more at Westminster,
and there he seems to have remained over Christmas. If the dates are
correctly given, the news from the west of England about this time
was not likely to have provoked much merriment.

Are the dates correct? Gentlemen of an antiquarian turn of mind, out
in the west there, might do worse than spend some weeks in looking
into this matter.

Meanwhile, it is at this point that we get our first direct,
unquestionable proof, that the plague had reached our shores. On the
1st of January, 1349, the King wrote to the Bishop of Winchester,
informing him that although the Parliament had been summoned to meet
on the 19th of the month, yet because a _sudden visitation of
deadly pestilence had broken out at Westminster and the
neighbourhood,_ which was increasing daily, and occasioning much
apprehension for the safety of any great concourse of people, should
it assemble in that place at the time appointed; therefore it had
been determined to prorogue the Parliament to Monday, the 27th of
April.

I gather from the wording of this document that the Government did
not look upon the outbreak with any very grave apprehension, that
they did not regard it as anything more than an epidemic which would
be confined to narrow limits, and one likely to pass off after a
little time as the spring advanced; and that they can hardly as yet
have received any very disturbing intelligence of its ravages, such
as must have soon come in from all points of the compass. Two months
passed, and the situation had seriously changed. On the 10th of March
the King issued another letter, in which, after referring to the
previous proclamation, he further prorogued the meeting of Parliament
_sine die._ The reason for this step is explained to be "because
the deadly pestilence in Westminster, _and in the City of
London,_ and in other places thereabouts, was increasing with
extraordinary severity" _(gravius solito invalescit)._

It is to be observed that, in the first notice of prorogation, no
mention is made of the City of London, only of Westminster and its
neighbourhood. In the second, we hear that the plague had already
extended over a wider area, and was showing no signs of abating. Nay,
by this time the King and his advisers had taken alarm--there was no
knowing where the mortality would stop.

Two days after this (12th of March, 1349) William Bateman, Bishop of
Norwich, received his letters of protection as ambassador for the
King in France. His safe conduct--for himself and his suite--was to
extend till Whitsuntide next ensuing (31st of May, 1349). The suite
consisted of eight persons, all Norfolk men; two were wealthy laymen,
two were distinguished ecclesiastics, three were country parsons, of
one I know nothing. I believe they all got back safely, but the three
country parsons returned to their several cures only to be smitten by
the plague. The Bishop had not shown himself again in his diocese
many weeks before they were all three dead. In making this last
statement, I am a little anticipating the course of events, but only
a little. The Angel of Death moves at no laggard pace when once he
begins his march with his sword drawn in his hand.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Thus far I have been quoting from, or referring to, authorities which
are accessible to any one with an adequate command of books at his
elbow--the chroniclers and the historians named, the Foedera, the
Rolls of Parliament, and such authorities as whoever chooses may
consult for himself. These printed authorities, which have all been
consulted and looked into again and again, have told us very little,
but they have given us certain notes of time--furnished us, in fact,
with a _terminus a quo_. We have learnt this, at any rate, that
about Christmas, 1348, the plague appeared at Westminster and its
vicinity, and that it had increased alarmingly in London and
elsewhere by the beginning of March, 1349.

We have next to deal with that other evidence to which I have
alluded--the unprinted documentary evidence ready to our hands--I
mean the Institution Books in the various Diocesan Registries and the
Rolls of the Manor Courts, which still exist in very great abundance,
though they are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. It
is necessary that I should trespass upon my reader's attention while
I endeavour to explain the nature and the value of these two classes
of documents before proceeding to deal with their testimony.

I. Students of English history know that few aggressions of the Pope
of Rome during the thirteenth century caused more deep discontent
among the laity than those which threatened interference with their
right of patronage to ecclesiastical benefices, and actually did
interfere with those rights. The disgraceful recklessness with which
Italians, ignorant of our language, were forced into English livings,
and the best preferment was claimed for Papal nominees, produced an
amount of irritation and revolt against Roman interference which had
never been known before. The feeling of the laity became more and
more outspoken, and at last Innocent IV. gave way, and the rights of
private patronage were assured to the great lords--assured, at any
rate, in word--though the Papal rescript "paltered with them in a
double sense" and the quibbles and reservations, which could always
be resorted to under colour of the _non obstante_ clause,
constantly afforded excuse for fresh encroachments and evasions when
the opportunity occurred. The jealousy of Roman interference
continued to increase, and the legislation of the first half of the
fourteenth century was largely taken up with enactments to guard the
rights of English patrons, from the King downwards. But there was
always a feeling of insecurity on the part of those who had any
benefices in their gift, and a corresponding feeling on the part of
those who were candidates for preferment. This led to a vicious
system, whereby appointments were made with almost indecent haste to
every vacant cure; institution was granted to an applicant for a
benefice with the least possible delay after a vacancy had once been
made known; the patron was willing to exercise his right in favour of
any one, rather than not exercise it at all; the candidate for the
living knew that it was a case of now or never; the Bishop had
nothing to gain, and something to fear, from asking too many
questions; and there is some reason to think that the parishioners
had more voice in the matter than they have now. That followed which
was likely to follow, namely, that the institutions to vacant
benefices were made as a rule within a very few weeks, or even days,
after the death of an incumbent. A man who had got his nomination
lost no time in presenting himself to the Bishop. There was no widow
or family of his predecessor to consider; and for every reason, the
sooner the new man got into the parsonage the better for all parties
concerned. Moreover, to guard against all chances of a disputed
claim, the Bishops' Registers of Institution were kept with the most
scrupulous care, and while enormous masses of ecclesiastical records
in every diocese in England have perished, the Institution Books have
been preserved with extraordinary fidelity, have survived all the
troubles and wars and spoliation that have gone on, and, speaking
within certain limits, have been preserved for five hundred years
from one end of England to the other. It is no exaggeration to say
that there are hundreds of parishes in England of whose incumbents
for centuries not only a complete list may be made out, but the very
day and place be set down where those incumbents received institution
into the benefice either at the hands of the Diocesan or his
official. This is certainly the case in the great East Anglian
diocese of Norwich, which comprehended, in the fourteenth century,
the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and a portion of Cambridgeshire.
We may safely say that we are able to tell approximately--within a
few weeks or days--when any living fell vacant during the period
under review, who succeeded, and who the patron was who presented to
the cure. Nor is this true only of the secular or parochial clergy.
Jealous as the religious houses were of their rights and privileges,
the heads of monasteries, as a rule, were compelled to receive
institution too at the hands of the Bishops of the see in which they
were situated. They too presented themselves to their Diocesan that
their elections might be formally recognized; and thus the
Institution Books contain not only the records of the various changes
in the incumbency of the secular clergy, but also of such as were
occasioned by the death of all abbots, or priors or abbesses as
presided over that large number of religious houses as were not
exempt from Episcopal jurisdiction. It is obvious that these Records
constitute an invaluable body of evidence, from which important
information may be drawn regarding our parochial and ecclesiastical
history. The Institution Books, as might be expected, contain a great
deal of curious matter besides the mere records of admission to
benefices, but with this I am at present not concerned.

II. I come now to the Court Rolls, which throw much more light upon
our parochial history than any other documents that have come down to
us; their information is concerned exclusively with the civil,
domestic, sometimes with the political life of our forefathers; about
their religious life, or their contentions with ecclesiastics, they
have rarely a word to say.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

All who have at any time owned or purchased what is known as copyhold
land might be supposed to know something of the nature of the title
on which such land is held. If they do not it is not for want of
being reminded from time to time, in a very vexatious way, that they
are in theory and in fact not so much owners of their several
holdings as _tenants_ of the Lord of the Manor to which such
holdings appertain. But inasmuch as a great deal of ignorance
prevails as to the nature of this tenure, and as it is impossible to
estimate the value and importance of the evidence which the Rolls of
the Manor Courts supply in the inquiry on which we are engaged, I
feel it necessary to introduce at this point a few paragraphs
introductory to and explanatory of what follows.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

In the thirteenth century it may be said that _in theory_ the
land of England belonged to the sovereign. The sovereign had indeed
assigned large tracts of territory to A or B or C; but under certain
circumstances, of no very unfrequent occurrence, these tracts of
territory came back into the hands of the sovereign, and were re-
granted by him at his will to whom he chose. In return for such
grants, A or B or C were bound to perform certain _services_ in
recognition of the fact that they were _tenants_ of the king;
and by virtue of such _services_-the equivalents of what we now
understand by _rent_-they were called _tenants in chief_, or
tenants _in capite_.

The tracts of territory held by A or B or C were in almost every case
made up of lands scattered about over all parts of the kingdom. The
tenant in chief had his castle or capital mansion, [Footnote: Experts
will object to the use of this term and other terms as strictly
inaccurate. I am not writing for experts.]which was supposed to be
his abode; but as far as the larger portion--immensely the larger
portion--of his possessions, he was necessarily a non-resident
landlord, getting what he could out of them either by farming them
through the agency of a bailiff, or letting out his estates to be
held under himself in precisely the same way as he held his
_fief_, or original grant, from the King.

_In theory_, the tenant in chief could not sell his land; he
could sublet it to a _mesne tenant_, who stood to himself
precisely in the same relation as he--the tenant _in capite_--
stood to the sovereign, the mesne tenant in his turn being bound to
render certain _services_ to his over lord, and liable to
forfeit his _lease_--for in theory it was that--if certain
contingencies happened. It was inevitable that, as time went by, the
mesne tenant should regard his estate as his own, and that the same
necessities which compelled the tenant _in capite_ to relax his
hold over an outlying landed estate would compel the mesne tenant to
follow his example. The process went on till it was becoming a
serious difficulty to discover how the King was to get his
_services_ from the tenant _in capite_, who had practically
got rid of two-thirds of his _fief_, and how he again was to get
_his services_ from the mesne tenant, who had parted with two-
thirds of _his_ estate to half a dozen under tenants. Obviously,
when the King's _scutage_ had to be levied, there was no telling
who was liable for it, or how it should be apportioned.

It was to meet this difficulty, and to check the prevailing sub-
division of land--_sub-infeudation_ men called it then--that the
statute of _Quia Emptores_ was passed in the eighteenth year of
King Edward I. [A.D. 1290]. The result of all the sub-division that
been going on had been that the number of what we now call _landed
estates_ had largely increased, each of them administered on the
model of the larger _fiefs_ originally granted to the tenants
_in capite_. There was a capital mansion in which the _lord_
resided, or was supposed to reside, and sub-tenants holding
their land under the lord, and paying to him periodically certain
small money rents and rendering him certain _services_. The
_estate_ comprehended the capital mansion with its appurtenances
and the domain lands in the lord's occupation, the common lands over
which the tenants had certain common rights, and the lands in the
occupation of the tenants, which they farmed with more or less
freedom for their own behoof,--the whole constituting a manor
whose owner was the lord. At certain intervals the tenants were
bound to appear before their lord and give account of themselves;
bound, that is, to show cause why they had not performed their
_services_; bound to pay their quit rents, whether in money or
kind; bound to go through a great deal of queer business; but above
all, as far as our present purpose is concerned, _to do fealty_
to the lord of the manor in every case where the small patches of
land had changed hands, and pay a fine for entering upon land
acquired by the various forms of alienation or by inheritance. In
some manors, if a tenant died the lord laid claim to some of his live
stock as a _heriot_, which was forthwith seized by the bailiff
of the manor; and in all manors, if a man died without heirs, his
land _escheated_ to the lord of the manor; that is, it came back
to the lord who _in theory_ was the owner of the soil.

These periodical meetings at which all this business and a great deal
else was transacted were called the _Courts_ of the Manor, and
the Records of these Courts were kept with exceeding and most jealous
scrupulousness; they were invariably drawn up in Latin, according to
a strictly legal form, and were inscribed on long _rolls_ of
parchment, and are known as Manor Court Rolls. This is not the time
to say much more about the Court Rolls. They are not very easy
reading--they require a somewhat long apprenticeship before they can
be readily deciphered; but when one has once become familiar with
them, they afford the student some very curious and unexpected
information from time to time, though it must be allowed that you
have to do a good deal of digging for every nugget that you find.

Observe, however, this--that it is not far from the truth to say that
in East Anglia--for I will not travel out of my own province--every
tiller of the soil who occupied a plot of land, however small, was
sure to be a tenant under some lord of the manor; when he died _a
record of his death was entered upon the_ _Court Rolls of the
Manor_; the name of his successor was inscribed; the amount of
fine set down which his heir paid for entering upon his inheritance;
and if he died _without heirs_ the fact was noticed, the lands
which he had held being forfeited, or _escheating_, as it was
called, to the lord.

Thus the Court Rolls of a manor of the fourteenth century--for before
the statute _Quia Emptores_ I suspect that they were kept with
much less regularity and much less care than they were afterwards--
are practically the _registers of the deaths_ of all occupiers
of land within the manor; and, as every householder was an occupier
of land, the death of every householder may be said to be inscribed
upon the Rolls.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Taken together, then, we have in the Diocesan Institution Books, on
the one hand, and in the Court Rolls, on the other, two sources of
information which--as far as they go--furnish us with a mass of
evidence absolutely irrefragable with regard to the mortality of
clergy and laity at any period during the fourteenth century. I say
"as far as they go," for it might happen that a country benefice--and
still more frequently that a town benefice--had been so cruelly
pillaged by a religious house, that little or nothing remained to
support the wretched parson, and that no one could be found who would
accept the cure. Then the cure would remain vacant for years. Where
this happened the death of the previous incumbent would not appear on
the Records for years after it had occurred, nor would any notice be
taken of the long vacancy when the next parson was instituted. In a
period of dreadful mortality, if the parsons died off in large
numbers, it would be inevitable that the impoverished livings would
"go a begging." It might be difficult to get the most valuable pieces
of preferment filled--it would be impossible to fill such as could
not offer a bare maintenance. Hence the Institution Books can only be
accepted as giving a part of the evidence with regard to the clerical
mortality. However startling the number of deaths of clergy within a
certain area during a given period may appear to be, they certainly
will not represent the whole number--only the number of such
incumbents as were forthwith replaced by their successors; and,
taking one year with another, it is fair to say that within any
diocese the _larger the number of institutions_ recorded in a
given time, the _more incomplete_ will be the record of the
deaths among the clergy during that time. When there are more men
than places the places are soon filled. When there are more places
than men there must needs be vacancies--square holes and round ones.

So much for the Institution Books. With regard to the Court Rolls,
there the evidence is even much less exhaustive; for here we have the
registers of the deaths of the landholders within the manor, great
and small--_i.e._, of the heads of families; but, except in rare
instances, we have no notice of any other member of the household, or
of what happened to them. A man's whole household may have been swept
off--young and old, babe and suckling, sister and brother, and aged
mother, and wife, and children, and servant, and friend--every soul
of them involved in one hideous, horrible calamity. The steward of
the manor was not concerned with any but the head of the house--the
tenant of the manor. Was he missing? Then, who was his heir? Any
sons? Dead of the plague! Brothers? Dead of the plague! Wife? Dead of
the plague! Children? Kinsfolk? All gone! Their blackening carcases
huddled in sweltering masses of putrefaction in the wretched hovels,
while the pitiless July sun blazed overhead, "Calmer than clock-work,
and not caring!"

The steward made his entry of one fact only. Thus:--

"The Jurors do present that Simon Must died seized of a Messuage and
4 acres of land in Stradset, and that he has no heir. Therefore it is
fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the lord."

Also that Matilda Stile... was she married or single, widow or mother
or maid? What cared the precise man of business on that 24th of July,
1349, as his pen moved over the parchment?...--"Matilda Stile died
seized of one acre and one rood of land held in Villenage. Therefore
it is fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the
lord until such time as the heir may appear in court."

He never did appear! Next year her little estate was handed over to
another. She was the last of her line.

Such entries as these swarm in the Court Rolls of this year 1349.
They tell their own tale. But it is obvious that their tale is
incomplete, and that we must form our own conclusions from the number
of the deaths recorded as to the probable number of those whose names
have been quite passed over, sometimes, too, these Rolls are eloquent
in their silence. When country parsons were dying by scores and
hundreds, and the tillers of the soil by thousands and tens of
thousands, it could not but be that the lords of manors and their
stewards died also. Yes! they, too, were struck down. In one instance
that I have met with the first half of the entries of the business
carried on at one of these courts in the summer of this year is
written in the ordinary court hand of the time, and the rest is
rudely scrawled by some one whose hand is _not yet formed;_ it
looks like the writing of a lad apprenticed to the scrivener's
business. Was the steward of the manor actually smitten by the plague
as he was holding the court--a subordinate taking his place and
awkwardly finishing the work which his master's glazed eye perhaps
never rested on? Again and again I have found that a series of Court
Rolls of an important Norfolk manor is perfect for the first twenty-
two years of Edward III. and no record remains for the next year or
two. Then they begin once more, and have been preserved with unbroken
regularity. At Raynham, in a parish of 1,400 acres, there were three
small manors. The courts of one of them were held three times in the
year 1348. _Upon the same parchment,_ and immediately following
the records of the previous year, come some scarcely legible notes of
a court held in 1349, the precise day of the month omitted, the
entries scrawled informally by a scribe who not only did not know the
forms of the court, but who was evidently not a professional writer.
He bungled so that he seems actually to have given up his task. The
next court of the manor was not held till three years had gone by. At
Hellhoughton, a manor now belonging to the Marquis of Townshend,
where two courts were held annually, the series of rolls for the
first twenty-two years of Edward III. is complete. Then comes one
which scarcely deserves to be called a Court Roll, so entirely
informal is it, and so evidently drawn up by some one who did not
know his business, and who did not pretend to know it. It is little
more than a collection of rough memoranda of deaths. Twelve of the
_suitors_ of the court had died without heirs; seven others had
come to do fealty to the lord as successors to those whose heirs they
presumably were. Nothing else is recorded. At another manor of Lord
Townshend's, Raynham Parva, between the years 1347 and 1350 no court
seems to have been held, though the lord of the manor, Thomas de
Ingaldesthorp, had died in the interval. The scourge of the plague
had been so awful in its incidence that when the next court was held
on the 24th July, 1350, fourteen men and four women (holders of land,
be it remembered) are named as having died off, not one of whom had
left a living representative behind them. In all cases their little
holdings had escheated to the lord. Amongst them was one "John
Taleour, clericus." Was he the clerk who, up to this time, had kept
the Rolls so neatly, and who could not be easily replaced after he
fell a victim to the plague?

Indeed, the inquirer who is desirous of pursuing researches in this
field must be prepared for frequent disappointment just at the moment
when he thinks he has made a "find." The Court Rolls for this
particular year are comparatively scarce, and this is true not only
for East Anglia, but for the whole of England, as any one may see who
will only cast his eye down those pages of the Deputy-Keeper's Forty-
third Annual Report, which are concerned with the Records of the
Duchy of Lancaster. These _registers of deaths_ are, as I have
before said, only _complete as far as they go._

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now return to the point at which the King's letter of
prorogation left us on the 10th March, 1349. At that time it is
certain that the pestilence was raging fiercely in London and
Westminster, and almost as certain that it had abated in Avignon and
other towns in France. Two or three days after this date the Bishop
of Norwich crossed the Channel, leaving his diocese in the hands of
his officials. Had the plague broken out with any severity in East
Anglia? I think it almost demonstrable that it had not. A day or two
before the Bishop left London he instituted his friend Stephen de
Cressingham to the Deanery of Cranwich--in the west of Norfolk--which
had fallen vacant, but there is nothing to show that the vacancy was
due to anything out of the common. During the year ending 25th of
March, 1349, there were 80 institutions in the diocese of Norwich, as
against 92 in the year 1347 and 59 in the year 1346. The average
number of institutions for the five years ending 25th of March, 1349,
was 77. Between this date and the end of the month there were four
institutions only--that is, there was nothing abnormal in the
condition of the diocese.

East Anglia had not long to wait. In the valley of the Stour, a mile
or two from Sudbury, where the stream serves as the boundary between
Suffolk and Essex, the ancestors of Lord Walsingham had two manors in
the township of Little Cornard--the one was called Caxtons, the other
was the Manor of Cornard Parva. At this latter manor a court was held
on the 31st of March--the number of tenants of the manor can at no
time have exceeded fifty--yet at this court six women and three men
are registered as having died since the last court was held, two
months before.

This is the earliest instance I have yet met with of the appearance
of the plague among us, and as it is the earliest, so does it appear
to have been one of the most frightful visitations from which any
town or village in Suffolk or Norfolk suffered during the time the
pestilence lasted. On the 1st of May another court was held, fifteen
more deaths are recorded--thirteen men and two women. _Seven of
them without heirs._ On the 3rd of November, apparently when the
panic abated, again the court met. In the six months that had passed
thirty-six more deaths had occurred, and _thirteen more
households_ had been left without a living soul to represent them.
In this little community, in six months' time, twenty-one families
had been absolutely obliterated--men, women and children--and of the
rest it is difficult to see how there can have been a single house in
which there was not one dead. Meanwhile, some time in September, the
parson of the parish had fallen a victim to the scourge, and on the
2nd of October another was instituted in his room. Who reaped the
harvest? The tithe sheaf too--how was it garnered in the barn? And
the poor kine at milking time? Hush! Let us pass on.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Little Cornard lies almost at the extreme south of the county of
Suffolk. At the extreme north of Norfolk, occupying the elbow of the
coast, having the Wash on the west and the German Ocean on the north,
lies the deanery of Heacham, a district in which the Le Stranges have
for at least seven centuries exercised their beneficent influence.
Heacham itself is a large township extending over some 4,900 acres.
The manorial rights appear to have extended over the whole parish.
The series of Court Rolls is almost unbroken for the reign of Edward
III. During the years 1346, 1347, and 1348, ten, six, and nine deaths
are registered respectively. The courts were held every two months.
In December, 1348, there is no death recorded; in February, 1349,
again there is none. On the 28th of April a dispute was set down for
hearing to be adjudicated upon by the steward and a jury of the
homage. It was a dispute between a husband and wife on a question of
dower. The man's name was Reginald Goscelin, his wife's name was
Emma. The dispute was never settled. Before the day of hearing came
on, _every one_ of Emma Goscelin's witnesses was dead, and her
husband was dead too. Four other landowners had died. One of these
latter had a son and heir to succeed, but two months later the boy
had gone, and the sole representative of the family was a little
girl, who became straightway the ward of the lord of the manor.

Contiguous to the township of Heacham lies Hunstanton--not the
pleasant little watering-place which the million will persist in
calling by that name, though scarcely forty years ago the maker and
builder of the modern town, the man who marked out its streets and
planned its roads, and foresaw its future before a brick of the place
was laid, gave it the name of St. Edmunds--Hunstanton, I say, in the
fourteenth century was a parish less than half the size of Heacham,
and probably much further from the sea than it is now. When, on the
20th of March, 1349, the steward of the manor of Hunstanton held his
court there he entered the name of only one old woman who had died
within the last month--that is, up to the 20th of March the plague
had not yet appeared. Five weeks after this, on the 23rd of April,
the next court was held. Five petty disputes had been entered for
hearing. Sixteen men were engaged in them as principals or witnesses.
When the day came eleven of the sixteen were dead. On the 22nd of May
again there was a court, and again three suits for debt were set
down. The defendant in one case, the plaintiff in a second, both
plaintiff and defendant in the third, died before the court day
arrived. In June no court was held--was there a panic? Except in this
month and in September the meetings were carried on as regularly as
if it had all been done by machinery. In September things got to
their worst, and in this month the parson died, and was speedily
succeeded by another. When the court of the 16th of October sat, it
was found that in two months sixty-three men and fifteen women had
been carried off. In thirty-one instances there were only women or
children to succeed; in nine cases there were no heirs, and the
little estates had escheated to the lord. Incredible though it may
sound the fact is demonstrable, that in this one parish of
Hunstanton, which a man may walk round in two or three hours, and the
whole population of which might have assembled in the church then
recently built, one hundred and seventy-two persons, tenants of the
manor, died off in eight months; seventy-four of them left no heirs
male, and nineteen others had no blood relation in the world to claim
the inheritance of the dead.

I have no intention of laying before my readers a detailed statement
of the documentary evidence which has passed under my notice. The
time has not come yet for an elaborate report on the case, nor can I
pretend to have done more than break ground upon what must be
regarded still as virgin soil; but this I may safely say, that I have
not found one single roll of any Norfolk manor during this dreadful
23rd year of Edward, dating after April or May, which did not contain
only too abundant proof of the ravages of the pestilence--evidence
which forces upon me the conviction that hardly a town or village in
East Anglia escaped the scourge; and which in its cumulative force
makes it impossible to doubt that the mortality in Norfolk and
Suffolk must have exceeded the largest estimate which has yet been
given by conjecture.

When I find in a stray roll of an insignificant little manor at
Croxton, near Thetford, held on the 24th of July, that seventeen
tenants had died since the last court, eight of them without heirs;
that at another court held the _same day_ at Raynham, at the
other end of the county, eighteen tenements had fallen into the
lord's hands, eight of them certainly escheated, and the rest
retained until the appearance of the heir; that in the manor of
Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could
not possibly have had four hundred inhabitants, fifty-four men and
fourteen women were carried off by the pestilence in six months,
twenty-four of them without a living soul to inherit their property;
that in manor after manor the lord was carried off as well as the
tenants and the steward; that in a single year _upwards of eight
hundred parishes lost their parsons,_ eighty-three of them twice,
and ten of them three times in a few months; and that it is quite
certain these large numbers represent only a portion of the mortality
among the clergy and the religious orders--when, I say, I consider
all this and a great deal more that might be dwelt on, I see no other
conclusion to arrive at but one, namely, that during the year ending
March, 1350, more than half the population of East Anglia was swept
away by the Black Death. If any one should suggest that _many
more_ than half died, I should not be disposed to quarrel with
him.

It must be remembered that nothing has been here said of the
mortality in the towns. I believe we have no means of getting at any
evidence on this part of the subject which can be trusted. In no part
of England did the towns occupy a more important position relatively
to the rest of the population. In no part of England did three such
important towns as Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich, lie within so short a
distance of one another, not to mention others which were then rising
in the number and consideration of their inhabitants. But the
statements made of the mortality in the towns will not bear
examination--they represent mere guesses, nothing more. This,
however, may be assumed as certain--that the death-rate in the towns
at such a time as this cannot have been less than the death-rate in
the villages, and that the scourge which so cruelly devastated the
huts and cabins of the countrymen was not likely to fall less heavily
upon the filthy dens and hovels of the men of the streets. Town life
in the fourteenth century was a very dreadful life for the masses.

How did the great bulk of the people comport themselves under the
pressure of this unparalleled calamity? How did their faith stand the
strain that was put upon it? How did their moral instincts support
them? Was there any confusion and despair? What effects--social,
political, economical--followed from a catastrophe so terrible? How
did the clergy behave during the tremendous ordeal through which they
had to pass? What glimpses do we get of the horrors or the sorrows of
that time--of the romantic, of the pathetic side of life?




V.

_THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA._ (CONTINUED.)


When Bishop Bateman started on his journey upon the King's business,
in March 1349, he can scarcely have turned his back upon his diocese
without some misgivings as to what might happen during his absence.
In some parts of Norfolk a very grievous murrain had prevailed during
the previous year among the live stock in the farms, and though this
had almost disappeared, there was ample room for anxiety in the
outlook. If the plague had not yet been felt to any extent in East
Anglia, it might burst forth any day. London had been stricken
already, and there was no saying where it would next appear in its
most malignant form. It was hoped that the Bishop's mission would be
accomplished in a couple of months, and during his absence the charge
of the diocese was committed as usual to his officials, to one of
whom the palace at Norwich was assigned as a temporary residence.

The good ship, with the Bishop and his suite, had hardly got out of
the channel, when a storm other than that which sailors care for
burst upon town and village in East Anglia. The Bishop's official
found his hands full of work. In April he was called upon to
institute twenty-three parsons to livings that had fallen vacant.
This was bad enough as a beginning, but it was child's play to what
followed. By the end of May _seventy-four_ more cures had lost
their incumbents and been supplied with successors. That is, in a
single month, the number of institutions throughout the diocese had
almost equalled the _annual_ average of the last five years. All
these stricken parishes were country villages, and the larger number
of them lay to the north and east of the county of Norfolk. We take
note of this that we call a fact, and straightway the temptation
presents itself to construct a theory upon it. Who knows not that in
the trying spring-time, the "colic of puff'd Aquilon" makes life hard
for man and beast in Norfolk, and that across our fields the cruel
gusts burst upon us with a bitter petulance, unsparing, pitiless,
hateful, till our vitality seems to be steadily waning? It was in the
month of March that the great plague smote us first:--did it not come
to us on the wings of the wind that swept across the sea the germs of
pestilence, say from Norway, or some neighbour land in which,
peradventure, the Black Death had already spent itself in hideous
havoc? A tempting theory! If I confess that such a view once
presented itself to my own mind I am compelled to acknowledge that I
abandoned it with reluctance. It was hard, but it had to be done. How
we all do hanker after a theory! What! live all your life without a
theory? It's as dreary a prospect as living all your life without a
baby, and yet some few great men have managed to pass through life
placidly without the one or the other, and have not died forgotten or
lived forlorn.

The plague had apparently fallen with the greatest virulence upon the
coast and along the watercourses, but already in the spring had
reached the neighbourhood of Norwich, and was showing an unsparing
impartiality in its visitation. At Earlham and Wytton and Horsford,
at Taverham and Bramerton, all of them villages within five miles of
the cathedral, the parsons had already died. Round the great city,
then the second city in England, village was being linked to village
closer and closer every day in one ghastly chain of death. What a
ring-fence of horror and contagion for all comers and goers to
overpass!

For two months Thomas de Methwold, the official, stayed where he had
been bidden to stay, in the thick of it all, at the palace. On the
29th of May he could bear it no longer. Do you ask was he afraid? Not
so! We shall see that he was no craven; but the bravest men are not
reckless, and least of all are they the men who are careless about
the lives or the feelings of others. The great cemetery of the city
of Norwich was at this time actually within the cathedral Close. The
whole of the large space enclosed between the nave of the cathedral
on the south and the bishop's palace on the east, and stretching as
far as the Erpingham gate on the west, was one huge graveyard. When
the country parsons came to present themselves for institution at the
palace, they had to pass straight across this cemetery. The tiny
churchyards of the city, demonstrably very little if at all larger
than they are now, were soon choked, the soil rising higher and
higher above the level of the street, which even to this day is in
some cases five or six feet below the soppy sod piled up within the
old enclosures. To the great cemetery within the Close the people
brought their dead, the tumbrels discharging their load of corpses
all day long, tilting them into the huge pits made ready to receive
them; the stench of putrefaction palpitating through the air, and
borne by the gusts of the western breeze through the windows of the
palace, where the Bishop's official sat, as the candidates knelt
before him and received institution with the usual formalities. It
was hard upon him, it was doubly so upon those who had travelled a
long day's journey through the pestilential villages; and on the 30th
of May the official removed from Norwich to Terlyng, in Essex, where
the Bishop had a residence; there he remained for the next ten days,
during which time he instituted thirty-nine more parsons to their
several benefices. By this time other towns in the diocese had felt
the force of the visitation. Ipswich had been smitten, and
Stowmarket, and East Dereham--how many more we cannot tell. Then the
news came that the Bishop had returned; Thomas de Methwold was at
once ordered back to Norwich--come what might, that was his post;
there he should stay, whether to live or die.

The Bishop seems to have landed at Yarmouth about the both of June;
he did not at once push on to report himself to the King; urgent
private affairs detained him in his native county. Seventeen or
eighteen miles to the south-west of Yarmouth lies the village of
Gillingham, where the Bishop's brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman, a
man of great wealth and consideration, had been the lord of the
manor. The parish contains about 2,000 acres, and at this time had at
least three churches, only one of which now remains. Besides these
Sir Bartholomew had a private chapel in his house. Here he kept up
much state, as befitted a personage who had more than once
represented Norfolk and Suffolk in Parliament. The plague came, and
the worthy knight was struck down; the parson too fell a victim; and
the Lady Petronilla, Sir Bartholomew's widow, presented to the living
a certain Hugh Atte Mill, who was instituted on the 7th of June. The
first news that the Bishop heard when he landed was that his brother
was dead. He started off at once to Gillingham. Death had been busy
all around, and the plague had broken out in the Benedictine Nunnery
of Bungay and carried off the prioress among others. Straightway the
few nuns that were left chose another prioress; on the morning of the
13th she came for institution, and received it at the Bishop's hands.
Hurrying on to Norwich, the Bishop stayed but a single day, leaving
his official at the palace. He himself had to present himself before
the King to give account of his mission; on the 19th he was in
London; on the 4th of July he was back again in his diocese. During
the twenty days that had passed since he had left Gillingham, exactly
_one hundred_ clergymen had been admitted to vacant cures, all
of them crossing the horrible cemetery where the callous gravediggers
were at work night and day, the sultry air charged with suffocating
stench, poisoning the breath of heaven. Yet there the Bishop's vicar-
general had to stay, eat, drink, and sleep--if he could--and there he
did stay till the Bishop came back and relieved him of the dreadful
work.

Meanwhile the gentry too had been dying. It is clear that in the
upper ranks the men died more frequently than the women, explain it
how you will. During June and July no fewer than fifteen patrons of
livings were widows, while in thirteen other benefices the patronage
was in the hands of the executors or trustees of gentlemen who had
died. During the month of July in scarcely a village within five
miles of Norwich had the parson escaped the mortality, yet in Norwich
the intrepid Bishop remained in the very thick of it all, as if he
would defy the angel of death, or at least show an example of the
loftiest courage. Only towards the end of July did he yield, perhaps,
to the persuasion or entreaty of others, and moved away to the
southern part of his diocese, taking up his residence at Hoxne, in
Suffolk, where he stayed till October, when he once more returned to
his house at Thorpe by Norwich. The palace had become at last
absolutely uninhabitable.

To Hoxne accordingly the newly-appointed clergy came in troops, and
during the first seven weeks after the Bishop's arrival he admitted
no less than eighty-two parsons, a larger number than had been the
average of a whole year heretofore. Did they all betake themselves to
their several parishes and brave the peril and set themselves to the
grim work before them? They could not help themselves. Where the
benefice was a vicarage an oath to reside upon his cure was in every
case rigorously imposed upon the newly-appointed; and though the law
did not sanction this in the case of rectors, yet not a single
instance of a licence of non-residence occurs; the difficulty of
finding substitutes was becoming daily more and more insuperable, and
the penalty of deserting a parish without licence was a great deal
too serious to be disregarded. In the months of June, July, and
August things were at their worst, as might have been expected. In
July alone there were two hundred and nine institutions. During the
year ending March, 1350, considerably more than two-thirds of the
benefices of the diocese had become vacant.

In the religious houses the plague wrought, if possible, worse havoc
still. There were seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk. Five of
them lost their prioresses. How many poor nuns were taken who can
guess? In the College of St. Mary-in-the-fields, at Norwich, five of
the seven prebendaries died. In September the abbot of St. Benet's
Hulm was carried off. Again we ask and receive no answer--what must
have been the mortality among the monks and the servants of the
convent? And yet sometimes we do get an answer to that question. In
the house of Augustinian Canons at Heveringland prior and canons died
to a man. At Hickling, which a century before had been a flourishing
house and been doing good work, only one canon survived. Neither of
these houses ever recovered from the effects of the visitation; they
were eventually absorbed in other monastic establishments.

It is one of the consequences of the peculiar privileges granted to
the Friars that no notice of them occurs in the episcopal records.
They were free lances with whom the bishops had little to do. It is
only by the accident of every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a
house in Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their
house was left tenantless, that we know anything of their fate.
Wadding, the great annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the
notorious decadence in the _morale_ of the mendicant orders
during the fourteenth century--a decadence which he does not attempt
to deny--attributes it wholly to the action of the Black Death, and
is glad to find in that calamity a sufficient cause for accounting
for the loss of the old prestige which in little more than a century
after St. Francis's death had set in so decidedly. "It was from this
cause," he writes, "that the monastic bodies, and especially the
mendicant orders, which up to this time had been flourishing in
virtue and learning, began to decline, and discipline to become
slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as from the relaxation of
the rules, in consequence of the pitiable calamities of the time; and
it was vain to look for reform among the young men and the
promiscuous multitude who were received without the necessary
discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty houses
than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How could
it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at least
_nineteen_ religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We
may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren
of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape.
What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and
until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands
in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly
help trying--trying, but failing--to imagine what the place must have
looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it
must have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's
throw of one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer
than the cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and
miracles of splendour within--and outside ghastly heaps of
corruption, and piles of corpses waiting their turn to be covered up
with an inch or two of earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors
of that awful summer? In the desolate swamps through which the
sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly to mingle its waters with the Yare;
by the banks of the Waveney where the little Bungay nunnery had been
a refuge for the widow, the forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in
the valley of the Nar--the Norfolk Holy Land--where seven monasteries
of one sort or another clustered, each distant from the other but a
few short miles--among the ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the
Broads, where the tall reeds wave and whisper, and all else is
silent--the glorious buildings with their sumptuous churches were
little better than centres of contagion. From the stricken towns
people fled to the monasteries, lying away there in their seclusion,
safely, favoured of God. If there was hope anywhere it must be there.
As frightened widows and orphans flocked to these havens of refuge,
they carried the Black Death with them, and when they dropped death-
stricken at the doors, they left the contagion behind them as their
only legacy. Guilty wretches with a load of crime upon their
consciences--desperate as far as this world was concerned, and ready
for any act of wickedness should the occasion arrive--shuddered lest
they should go down to burning flame for ever now that there was none
to shrive them or to give the _viaticum_ to any late penitent in
his agony. In the tall towers by the wayside the bells hung mute; no
hands to ring them or none to answer to their call Meanwhile, across
the lonely fields, toiling dismally, and ofttimes missing the track--
for who should guide them or show the path?--parson and monk and
trembling nun made the best of their way to Norwich; their errand to
seek admission to the vacant preferment. Think of them, after miles
of dreary travelling, reaching the city gates at last, and
shudderingly threading the filthy alleys which then served as
streets, stepping back into doorways to give the dead carts passage,
and jostled by lepers and outcasts, the touch of whose garments was
itself a horror. Think of them staggering across the great cemetery
and stumbling over the rotting carcases not yet committed to the
earth, breathing all the while the tainted breath of corruption-
sickening, loathsome! Think of them returning as they came, going
over the same ground as before, and compelled to gaze again at

  Sights that haunt the soul for ever,
  Poisoning life till life is done.

Think of them foot-sore, half-famished, hardly daring to buy bread
and meat for their hunger, or to beg a cup of cold water for Christ's
sake, or entreat shelter for the night in their faintness and
weariness, lest men should cry out at them--"Look! the Black Death
has clutched another of the doomed!"

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I have said that upwards of 800 of the beneficed clergy perished in
East Anglia during this memorable year. Besides these we must make
allowance for the non-beneficed among the regulars; the
_chaplains,_ who were in the position of curates among ourselves;
the vicars of parishes whose endowments were insufficient to
maintain a resident parson under ordinary circumstances, and the
members of the monastic and mendicant orders. Putting all these
together, it seems to me that we cannot estimate the number of deaths
among regular and secular clergy in East Anglia during the year 1349
at less than _two_ _thousand._ [Footnote: In the diocese of
Ely, where the mortality was less severe than in Norfolk and Suffolk,
57 parsons died in the three months ending the 1st of October, 1349.
When an ordination was held by the Bishop of Ely's suffragan at the
priory of Barnwell on the 19th of September, the newly-ordained were
fewer by 35 than those who had died at their posts since the last
ordination.] This may appear an enormous number at first hearing, but
it is no incredible number. Unfortunately the earliest record of any
ordinations in the diocese of Norwich dates nearly seventy years
after the plague year, but there is every reason for believing that
there were at least _as many,_ and probably many more, candidates
at ordinations in the fourteenth century as presented themselves
in the fifteenth. During the year ending January, 1415, Bishop
Courtenay's suffragan ordained 382 persons, and assuming that
in Bishop Bateman's days an equal number were admitted to the
clerical profession, the losses by death in the plague year would
have absorbed all the clergy who had been ordained during the six
previous years, but no more. Even so this constituted a tremendous
strain upon the reserve force of clergy unbeneficed and more or less
unemployed, and it was inevitable that with such a strain, there
would be a deterioration in the character and fitness of the newly-
appointed incumbents. Yet nothing has surprised me more than the
exceeding rareness of evidence damaging to the reputation of the new
men. That these men were less educated than their predecessors we
know; but that they were mere worthless hypocrites there is nothing
to show, and much to disprove. Nay! the strong impression which has
been left upon my mind, and which gathers strength as I study the
subject, is that the parochial clergy of the fourteenth century,
before _and after_ the plague, were decidedly a better set than
the clergy of the thirteenth. The friars had done some of their best
work in "provoking to jealousy" the country clergy and stimulating
them to increased faithfulness; they had, in fact, made them more
_respectable_; just as the Wesleyan revival acted upon the
country parsons and others four centuries later. Until the episcopal
_visitations_ of the monasteries during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries are made public--they exist in far larger numbers
than is usually supposed--it will be impossible to estimate the
effect of the plague upon the religious houses; but I am inclined to
think that the monasteries suffered very greatly indeed from the
terrible visitation, and that the violent disturbance of the old
traditions and the utter breakdown in the old observances acted as
disastrously upon these institutions as the first stroke of paralysis
does upon men who have passed their prime--they never were again what
they had been.

It must be remembered that in the great majority of the smaller
monasteries, and indeed in any religious house where there were
chaplains to do the routine work in the church, there was nothing to
prevent an absolutely illiterate man or woman from becoming monk or
nun. It was, however, impossible for a man to discharge the duties of
his calling as a parish priest without some education and without at
least a knowledge of Latin. I will not stop to argue that point; they
who dispute the assumption have much to learn. Moreover it is only
what we should expect, that while some were hardened and brutalized
by the scenes through which they had passed, some were softened and
humbled. The prodigious activity in church building--church
_restoration_ is perhaps the truer term-during the latter part
of the fourteenth century in East Anglia is one of many indications
that the religious life of the people at large had received a mighty
stimulus. Here, again, the evidence near at hand requires to be
carefully looked into. In historical no less than in physical
researches, the microscope requires to be used. As yet it has
scarcely been used at all. History is in the empirical stage.
Meanwhile, such hints as that of Knighton's are significant when he
tells us that, as the parsons died, a vast multitude of laymen whose
wives had perished in the pestilence presented themselves for holy
orders. _Many,_ he says--not all--were illiterate, save that
they knew how to read their missals and go through the services
though unintelligently, they hardly understood what they read. Were
they, therefore, the worst of the new parsons? Men bowed down by a
great sorrow, bewildered by a bereavement for which there is none but
a make-shift remedy, men whose "life is read all backwards and the
charm of life undone," are not they whose sorrow usually makes them
void of sympathy for the distressed. Nay! their own sadness makes
them responsive to the cry of the needy, the lonely, and the fallen.
Experience proves to us every day that among such men you may find,
not the worst parish priests, but the best.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I wonder whether John Bonington, steward of the manor of Waltham, was
one of those whom Knighton alludes to.

Sometime during the year 1343 there had been a disastrous fire in the
house of one Roger Andrew; the dwelling, with all that it contained,
was burnt to the ground. Poor Roger lost all his household stuff and
furniture and much else besides; worse than all, he lost all his
title deeds, the evidences and charters whereby he held his little
estate. As for Roger himself, he either perished in the flames or his
heart broke and he died very shortly afterwards. He left a son behind
him, young Richard Andrew, who must have found himself in sorry
plight when he came to take up his patrimony and enter upon his
inheritance. Those were not the days when the weak man and the beaten
man excited much pity in England. No! they were _not,_ whatever
sentimental people may say who maunder about the ages of faith and
refresh themselves with other such lackadaisical phrases. So, poor
Richard being down in his luck, John Bonington, acting for Henry,
Earl of Lancaster, [Footnote: His son and heir, Henry, Earl of Derby,
was created _Duke_ of Lancaster in 1351.] the lord of the manor,
put the screw on, and boldly claimed a heriot from the young man as
the right of the lord. Richard disputed the right, and protested that
his land was not _heriotable._ Bonington pleaded his _might_
in a very effectual way, and took his heriot--to wit, the best horse which
Richard had in his stable, the best and probably the only one.
Then Richard appealed to the homage. The homagers were
afraid to give a verdict against the steward, and timidly objected
that all Richard's evidences had been burnt in the fire. Bonington
trotted off triumphant, leaving Richard to his bitter wrath. Six
years went by, and the plague came. It fell upon the district round
with terrific fury, and the people died in that dreadful April, 1349,
as the locusts die when the hurricane drives them seaward, and they
rot in piles upon the shore. The Roll of the Manor Court is a
horrible record of the suddenness and the force with which the Black
Death smote the wretched Essex people. When the steward's day's work
was done, and the long, long list of the dead had been written down,
he added a note wherein he gives us the facts which have come down to
us; and then he adds that, inasmuch as he, John Bonington, had come
to see that the aforesaid horse had been unrighteously taken from
Richard Andrew six years before, and that the conviction of his own
iniquity had been brought home to his contrite heart, _as well by
the dreadful mortality and horrible pestilence at that time raging as
by the stirring of religious emotion within his soul,_ therefore
the full value of the horse was to be restored to the injured
Richard, and never again was heriot to be levied on his land. After
six years' hard riding and scant feeding, peradventure Richard Andrew
would rather have had the hard cash than the poor brute, which by
this time, probably, had died and gone to the dogs! A shudder of
penitence and remorse had thrilled through John Bonington when the
plague was stalking grimly up and down the land; and this is what we
learn about him--this and no more.

Had John Bonington lost _his_ wife; and was he meditating a life
of usefulness and penitence and prayer?

  Infert se sptus nebula (mirabile dictu)
  Per medics miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli,

A shadowy form looming out from the mists that have gathered over the
ages past, we see him for a moment, and he is gone.

Fill up the gaps and tell all the tale, poet with the dreamy eyes,
eyes that can pierce the gloom--poet with the mobile lips, lips that
can speak with rhythmic utterance the revelations of the future or
the past.

All the lonely ones, and all the childless ones, did not turn parsons
we may be sure; yet it is good for us to believe that John
Bonington's was not a solitary instance of a man coming out of the
furnace of affliction softened, not hardened; purified, not merely
blistered, by the fire.

Was Thomas Porter at Little Cornard somewhat past his prime when the
plague came? It spared him and his old wife, it seems; but for his
sons and daughters, the hope of his eld and the pride of his manhood,
where were they? He and the good wife, cowering over the turf fire,
did they dare to talk with quivering lips and clouded eyes about the
days when the little ones had clambered up to the strong father's
knee, or tiny arms were held out to the rough yeoman as he reached
his home? "Oh! the desolation and the loneliness. No fault of thine
dear wife--nor mine. It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him
good!"

Thomas Porter had a neighbour, one John Stone, a man of small
substance: he owned a couple of acres under the lord; poor land it
was, hardly paying for the tillage, and I suppose the cottage upon it
was his own, so far as any man's copyhold dwelling was his own in
those days. The Black Death came to that cottage among the rest, and
John Stone and wife and children, all were swept away. Nay! not all:
little Margery Stone was spared; but she had not a kinsman upon
earth. Poor little maid, she was barely nine years old and absolutely
alone! Who cared? Thomas Porter and his weeping wife cared, and they
took little Margery to their home, and they comforted themselves for
all that they had lost, and the little maid became unto them as a
daughter. Henceforth life was less dreary for the old couple. But
five years passed, and Margery had grown up to be a sturdy damsel and
very near the marriageable age.

Oh, ho! friend Porter, what is it we have heard men tell? That when
the Black Death came upon us, your house was left unto you desolate
and there remained neither chick nor child. Who is this? Then some
one told the steward, or told the lord, and thereupon ensued inquiry.
What right had Thomas Porter to adopt the child? She belonged to the
lord, and he had the right of guardianship. Aye! and the right of
disposing of her in marriage too. Thomas Porter, with a heavy heart,
was summoned before the homage. He pleaded that the marriage of the
girl did not belong to the lord by right, and that on some ground or
other, which is not set down, she was not his property at all. That
might have been very true or it might not, but one thing was certain,
Thomas Porter had no right to her, and so the invariable result
followed--he had to pay a fine. What else ensued we shall never know.

The glimpses we get of the ways and doings of the old stewards of
manors are not pleasing; I am afraid that as a class they were hard
as nails. Perhaps they could not help themselves, but they certainly
very rarely erred on the side of mercy and forbearance. Is not that
phrase "making allowances for," a comparatively modern phrase? At any
rate the _thing_ is not often to be met with in the fourteenth
century. Yet in the plague year every now and then one is pleased to
find instances actually of consideration for the distress and penury
of the homagers at this place and that. Thus at Lessingham, when the
worst was over and a court was held on the 15th of January, 1350, the
steward writes down that only thirty shillings was to be levied from
the customary tenants by way of tallage, "Because the greater part of
those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the
previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence."

Here and there, too, we come upon heriots remitted because the heir
was so very poor, and here and there fines and fees are cancelled
_causa miseri propter pestilentiam._ Surely it is better to
assume that this kind of thing was done, as our friend Bonington puts
it, _mero motu pietatis su_ than because there was no money to
be had. Better give a man the benefit of the doubt, even though he
has been dead five hundred years, than kick him because he will never
tell any more tales.

If it happened sometimes that the plague brought out the good in a
man, sometimes changed his life from one of covetous indifference or
grasping selfishness into a life of earnestness and devout
philanthropy, it happened at other times--and I fear it must be
confessed more frequently--that coarse natures, hard and cruel ones,
were made more brutal and callous by the demoralizing influences of
that frightful summer.

I am sure it will be very gratifying to some enlightened and
chivalrous people to learn that I have at least one bad story against
a parson.

Here it is!

The rolls of the manor of Waltham show that the plague lingered about
there till late in the spring of 1350. As elsewhere, there must needs
have been much change in the benefices of the neighbourhood. Of
course some of the new parsons were scamps, the laity who survived
being, equally of course, models of all that was lovely and
estimable. One of these clerical impostors had got a cure somewhere
in the neighbourhood--where is not stated, but, inasmuch as his
clerical income had not come up to his expectations or his
necessities, or his own estimate of his deserts, he found it
necessary to supplement that income by somewhat unprofessional
conduct. In fact, the Rev. William--that was his name--seems actually
to have thrown up his clerical avocations and by his flagrant
irregularities had got to himself the notorious sobriquet of William
the One-day priest. I should not be surprised to find out that this
worthy was captain of a band of robbers who infested Epping Forest.
In the end of January, 1351. Matilda, wife of John Clement de
Godychester, was quietly riding homewards when, as she passed by the
sheepfold of Plesset, out came the Rev. William and bade the lady
stand and deliver. Her attendants, it is to be presumed, took to
their heels, and the lady, being unable to help herself, delivered up
her purse--the account says the Rev. William cut it off--and moreover
surrendered a ring of some value, after which she continued her
journey. She raised the hue and cry to some purpose, and the clerical
king of the road was taken and... there is no more. No! It is a story
without an end.

But there were then, as there are now, other ways of preying upon our
fellow-creatures and levying blackmail from them, without going to
the length of highway robbery--cold work, and a little risky at
times.

Henry Anneys, at Lessingham, could work upon the fears of Alice
Bakeman and extort a douceur from her without resorting to violence.
Mrs. Bakeman had succeeded to the property of some dead kinsman, and
Mr. Anneys heard of it. He called on the lady and informed her that
for a consideration he would save her from paying any heriot to the
lord; he had certain information which he could use either way.
Finally, it was agreed that Alice should give the rogue a cow as
hush-money, and with the cow Mr. Anneys departed. His triumph was
brief. When the time for holding the next court arrived, others came
round the poor woman, and made it quite evident that the lands she
had succeeded to were not heriotable at all, and that Henry Anneys
was a swindler. So the case was brought before the homage as usual,
the cow was ordered to be returned, and a substantial fine imposed
upon Anneys.

Almost the first thing that strikes a novice who looks into the
village history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the
astounding frequency of bloody quarrels among the rustics. In the
records of the Courts Leet for Norfolk it is very seldom indeed, that
you can find a court held at which one or more persons, male and
female, are not amerced for "drawing blood" from somebody. Whether it
was by punching their opponents on the nose, or whether they used
their knives, I hesitate to decide; but I suspect, from the frequent
mention of knives and daggers, that sticking one's enemy with cold
steel was not so very un-English a practice as popular prejudice is
wont to assume it to be. One thing is very certain, and that is--that
all over East Anglia, five hundred years ago, there was such an
amount of bloodletting in village frays as would hardly have
disgraced the University of Heidelberg. In Norfolk these sanguinary
fights must have been a passion; but one would have thought that,
while the plague was raging and after it had begun to subside, then,
if ever, men and women would have become less savage and ferocious.
So far from it, such records of the years 1349 and 1350 as I have
examined are fuller than ever of fights and quarrels At Lessingham,
about Christmas time, 1349, there was a free fight of a most
sanguinary character, men and women joining in it freely. It seems to
have arisen from some one finding a horse wandering about the
deserted fields. As a stray it belonged to the lord--the finder took
a different view, somebody cried "Halves!" and somebody else said,
"Til give information," and somebody else replied, "So will I,"
whereupon arose a bloody battle as has been told. About the same time
at Hunstanton, Catherine Busgey, evil-disposed old hag that she was,
had stript a dead man of his leather jerkin. Did she proceed to wear
the manly attire that she might be dagger-proof for the next
encounter? Rash woman! The dead man's friends recognized the well-
known coat, it was forfeited and delivered over to the lord.

It might well be supposed that, while the whole executive machinery
of the country was being subject to a tremendous strain, there would
be in some districts a condition of affairs which differed very
little from downright anarchy. Yet here, again, the existing records
are surprisingly free from any evidence tending to support such an
assumption, England was not governed by the Home Secretary in those
days. Every parish was a living political unit with its own police
and its own local government. However desirable it may appear to some
to bring back such a state of things, the question nevertheless
remains how far it is ever possible to revivify an organization which
has long since died a natural death. That, in the fourteenth century,
the country districts governed themselves there can be no doubt at
all; with what results, as far as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number is concerned, this is not the time or the place to
inquire or to decide. Yet I cannot withhold my conviction that, if
any such gigantic calamity were to fall upon our people now as fell
upon them when the Black Death swept over the face of the land five
centuries ago--a calamity so sweeping, so overwhelming--its
consequences upon the whole social fabric would be incomparably more
disastrous than it was in times when centralization was almost
unknown and practically impossible. Be it as it may, since the days
when the Roman Senate passed a vote of confidence in a beaten general
because he had not despaired of the republic, I know nothing in
history that impresses a student more profoundly with a sense of the
magnificent self-possession, self-control, and self-respect of a
suffering nation, under circumstances of unexampled agony and horror,
than the simple prosaic annals which remain to us of the great plague
year in England.

In only one district in Norfolk have I found evidence of any
widespread lawlessness. Even there one hears of it only to hear of
vigorous grappling with the ruffians, who were not allowed to have it
all their own way.

The hundred of Depwade, lying to the south of Norwich, contains
twenty-three parishes; and at the time we are concerned with had very
few resident gentry of any consideration. Then, as now, the country
parsons were the most important people in the district, and the
benefices were above the average in value. In the summer and autumn,
at least fifteen of these clergymen fell victims to the plague; among
them the rector of Bunwell and the vicar of Tibenham, adjoining
parishes. The vicarage was a poor one; it was worth no one's holding;
the rectory had been held by William Banyard, a near relative of Sir
Robert Banyard, lord of the manor; the plague carried him off in
July, and his successor was instituted on the 25th of the month, but
does not seem to have come into residence immediately. There had been
a clean sweep of the old incumbents from all the parishes for miles
round; the poor people, left to themselves, became demoralized; there
seems to have been a general scramble, and for a while no redress
anywhere. It is recorded that the cattle roamed at will over the
standing corn with none to tend them, and that there had been none to
make the lord's hay; that among others who had died there were five
substantial men among the homagers on whose lands heriots of more or
less value were due; but no heriot was recoverable, inasmuch as since
the last court certain persons unknown had plundered all that could
be carried off--cattle and sheep and horses and goods, and there was
nothing to distrain upon but the bare lands and the bare walls.

It may be presumed that where a scoundrel escaped the contagion
altogether, while others were dying all round him, or where another
recovered after being brought to death's door, in such cases the man
would, as a rule, be a person of exceptional strength and vigorous
constitution. Such fellows, when the evil spirit was upon them, would
be ugly customers to deal with. Gilbert Henry, of Tibenham, was a
somewhat audacious thief when he walked into John Smith's house,
where there was none alive to bar the door, and carried off certain
bushels of malt and barley, with other goods not specified; and, not
content therewith, stripped the dead man of his coat and waistcoat.
The value of these articles of apparel was not assessed very highly--
only sixpence each--and Master Gilbert, after paying the price of the
garments, seems to have gone away with them. It is hardly to be
wondered at that neither steward nor lord greatly coveted that coat
and waistcoat. At the same court, too, William Hessland was amerced
for appropriating the few trumpery chattels of Walter Cokstone, a
_villein_ belonging to the lord. Another wretched pair--a man
and his wife--had deliberately cleared a crop of oats off an acre and
a half of land, and stacked it in their own barn. Their view was that
it belonged to no one; the steward took a different view, and
reminded them that what grew on no man's land was the property of
some one other than the smart man who ventured to lift it.

It was at Bunwell, too, that William Sigge was by way of becoming a
terror to his neighbours. It was laid to his charge, generally, that
he had from time to time during the pestilence carried off and
appropriated various articles of property _(diversa catalla)_
too numerous to specify. They must have been a very miscellaneous
lot, for they included several hurdles and the lead stripped off a
dead man's roof, not to mention such trifles as garments and pots and
pans. Sigge was a very successful plunderer, and, his success rather
turned his head. When the autumn of 1350 came, he refused to do his
autumn service, protested that there was none to do, and was fined
accordingly; not only so, but he was found to have stubbed up a hedge
which had been the boundary of the land of Robert Attebrigge, who had
died with no one to represent him. The women were as bad as the men;
they had their rights in those days. One of these beldames was caught
walking away with a couple of handmills from a plague-struck
dwelling, and another had looted a tenement where John Rucock's
corpse lay; she too had stripped the dead!

It is not a little curious to notice how that love of going to law
which old Fuller two hundred years ago remarked upon as a
characteristic of Norfolk men comes out again when the confusion had
begun to subside. The plague is no sooner at an end than the local
courts are resorted to for the hearing of every kind of odd question
which the complications arising from the abnormal mortality had
occasioned.

When Edward Burt died at Lessingham, he left his widow Egidia all he
had; but he owed Margery Brown the sum of thirty shillings. Egidia at
once provided herself with a second husband, and surrendered herself
and her belongings to Edward Bunting. Mrs. Brown applied for her
little bill. Egidia, now no longer a widow, but lawful wife of Mr.
Bunting, repudiated the debt; she was widow no longer, she had become
the property of another man; the debt, she pleaded, was buried in her
first husband's grave. That little quibble was soon overruled. But
there were often cases which were by no means so easily disposed of.
Robert Bokenham was lord of the manor of Tibenham, and Robert Tate
was one of his tenants. Tate died; then Bokenham died. Bokenham's son
was only nine years old, and no guardian had been appointed when
Tate's son died. Then followed a dispute as to who was guardian of
young Bokenham, and of whom Tate's land was held, and who was the
true heir. A pleasant little brief there for a rising barrister to
hold.

A complication of much the same kind arose at Croxton. William
Galion, a man of some consideration, died in July, leaving his wife
Beatrix with two sons; but he died intestate..Beatrix had just time
to pay a heavy fine to the lord for the privilege of being her eldest
son's guardian when the plague took her. Before she died she left the
guardianship of her first-born son John to her husband's brother
Adam; a few days afterwards the boy John died, and his brother Robert
alone remained; the guardianship of the boy John is of course at an
end, and uncle Adam applies for the guardianship of the surviving
nephew; but by this time he is unable to find the money; whereupon
the child's estate is taken into the hands of the lord till such time
as the uncle can pay the fees demanded.

Walter Wyninge had a wise woman for his wife, and her name was
Matilda. The Black Death left her & widow, but she speedily married
without any license from the lord to William Oberward. The second
husband had a very brief enjoyment of his married life; in a few days
he too died, and Matilda married a third husband, one Peter the
carpenter. At this point Matilda's turn came and she died. All this
had happened in the interval of two months since the last manor court
was held. The steward of the manor claimed a heriot from Wyninge's
land and another from Oberward's. But the astute Peter was equal to
the occasion: he pleaded that, according to the custom of the manor,
no heriot could be levied from a widow till she had survived her
husband a year and a day, and he demanded that the court rolls should
be searched to confirm or correct his assertion. I suspect he knew
his business, and no heriot came to that grasping steward. Who pities
him?

Ladies and gentlemen of the romantic order of mind will be shocked at
the indelicacy of Mistress Matilda--she of the many names. I suspect
that they would be shocked by a great many things in the domestic
life of England five centuries ago. Marrying for love has a sweet
sound about it, but the thing did not exist in the old days. When did
it exist? History is very hard upon romance; History, disdaining
courtesy, lifts one veil after another, opens closed doors, reveals
long-buried secrets, turns her bull's-eye upon the dark corners, and
breaks the old seals. She is very cynical, and will by no means side
with this appellant or with that. Beautiful theories crumble into
dust when they stand before her judgment-seat, and old dreams,
offspring of brains that were wrestling with slumber in the darkness,
pass away as the dawn comes, bringing with it, too often, such
revelations as are not altogether lovely to dwell on. In the
fourteenth century an unmarried woman was a chattel, and belonged to
somebody who had the right to sell her or to give her away. That is
the naked truth. You may make a man an offender for a word if you
will, and object that "sell" is an incorrect term; but the fact
remains, however much some may--

     leave the sense their learning to display,
  And some explain the meaning quite away.

Hence, when a wretched woman was mourning alone over the husband who
had just been hustled into his grave, the men were after her like
wolves, every one of her neighbours knowing exactly what she was
worth even to the fraction of a rood of land, or the last lamb that
had been dropped, or the litter of pigs that were rootling up the
beech-nuts in the woods. They gave her short time to make up her
mind. Sentiment? We in the East--the land of the wise men since time
was young--we know nothing of sentiment. We can hate with a sullen
tenacity of resentment which knows no forgiveness; but love--nay we
leave that for the "intense" of other climes. And women in the good
old times--positively women--love one man more than another? What
_they?_

  "Whose love knows no distinction but of gender,
   And ridicules the very name of choice!"

Why, where were you born?

The records of the marriages on the court rolls of the plague year
are hardly more startling than the deaths. Whether men and women paid
less to the lord for a license than they were compelled to pay if
they married without license I cannot tell; but that hundreds of
widows must have married only a few weeks or a few days after their
husbands' deaths is clear. Matilda's case was not a rare one. Alice
Foghal, at Lessingham, was another of those ladies who in a couple of
months had been the property successively of three husbands--the last
was actually a stranger. Where he came from is not stated, but he
sate himself down by the widow's hearth, claimed it as his own, and
paid a double fee for his successful gallantry. How he managed the
matter remains unexplained, but young brides were plentiful in the
parish just about that time; and at the same court where Alice's
matrimonial alliances were compounded for, no less than fifteen other
young women paid their fees for marrying without license from the
lord. I have only noticed one instance of anything like remission of
_marriage fees_, though I hope it was less uncommon than appears
on the rolls. The lady in this case was a butcher's widow, and it was
too much to expect that she could wait till the next court, wherefore
the steward graciously knocked off seventy-five per cent. of his due;
and, in lieu of two shillings, charged her only sixpence--_ratione
temporis et in misericordia_, as he sententiously observes.
Magnanimous steward!

I have met with no evidence leading to the belief that anywhere in
the country villages there was anything approaching to a panic. Only
a novice would be led astray by what he might read occurred at
Coltishall. Five brothers named Gritlof and two other brothers named
Primrose, being _nativi_, i.e., _villeins born_, and so the
property of the lord, had decamped whither none could tell; the court
solemnly adjudicated upon the case, and decreed that the seven
runaways should be attached _per corpora_, whatever that may
mean. But Coltishall is barely five miles from Norwich, and from the
villages round the great city the _villeins_ were always running
away in the hopes of getting their freedom if they could keep in
hiding within the city walls for a year and a day. Oh, ye seven, had
the yellow primrose less charm for you, and the barley loaves that
were sure for you in breezy Coltishall--gritty though they might be--
less charm than the garbage that might be picked up in Norwich, in
its noisome alleys reeking with corruption, and all that flesh and
blood revolts from? Ah! but to be free--to be free! How that thought
made their poor hearts throb!

That there was panic--mad, unreasoning, insensate panic--elsewhere
than in the country villages there is abundant evidence to prove, but
it was among the well-to-do classes--the traders and the moneyed men,
_bourgeoisie_ of the towns--that a stampede prevailed. Any one
who chooses may satisfy himself of this by looking into Rymer's
_Faedera,_ to go no further.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Enough has been told in the foregoing pages to illustrate the
overwhelming violence with which the Great Plague ran its career in
East Anglia. Only a small part of the evidence still ready to our
hands has been examined; but if no more were scrutinized, the
impression left upon us of the severity of the visitation would be
quite sufficiently appalling. It is, however, when an attempt to
estimate the immediate effects and the remoter consequencs that
followed that our difficulties begin.

Before a man is qualified to dogmatize upon those effects, he must
have gone some way towards making himself familiar with the social
and economic conditions of the country during at least the century
before the plague. Unfortunately the history of economics in England
has never been attempted by any one at all duly qualified for dealing
with so complex and difficult a subject, and the crudest theories
have been substituted for sound conclusions, then only to be accepted
when based upon the solid ground of ascertained fact. In the
childhood of every science dogmatism precedes induction, and in the
absence of clear knowledge, foolish and wild-eyed visionaries have
posed as discoverers again and again. Yet bluster and audacity have
their use, if only to stimulate the timid and the dilatory to quicken
their pace and move forwards. For my part, however, if it be
necessary to choose between the two, I should prefer to err with the
slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former
may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress,
the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last
in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into the
right track.

The great teacher who, with his transcendent genius, has done more to
create a school of English history than all who have gone before him,
who, in fact, has made English history, not what it is, but what it
will be, when his influence shall have permeated our literature, has
spoken on this subject of the Black Death with his usual profound
suggestiveness. The Bishop of Chester looks with grave distrust upon
any theory which ascribes to the Great Plague as a cause "nearly all
the social changes which take place in England down to the
Reformation: the depopulation of towns, the relaxation of the bonds
of moral and social law, the solution of the continuity of national
development caused by a sort of disintegration in society generally."
[Footnote: "Constitutional History," vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 399,
Section 259, edit. 1875.] And yet this appalling visitation must have
constituted a very important factor in the working out of those
social and political problems with which the life of every great
nation is concerned. Such problems, however, are not simple ones;
rather they are infinitely complex; and he who would set himself to
analyse the processes by which the ultimate results are arrived at
will blunder hopelessly if he takes account of only a single unknown
quantity.

I. It is obvious that the sudden exhaustion of the large reserve
force of clergy must have made itself felt at once in every parish in
England. In the diocese of Norwich a considerable number of the
parsons who died belonged to the gentry class. Then, as now, there
were family livings to which younger sons might hope to be presented,
and were presented, as vacancies occurred; but, in the face of the
sudden and widely extended mortality, it was inevitable that
appointments should be made with very little reference to a man's
social grade or intellectual proficiency. Patrons had to take whom
they could get. This of itself would tend to a deterioration in the
character of the clergy; but this was not all. The clergy died; but
other holders of offices, civil and ecclesiastical, were not spared.
There was a sudden opening out of careers in every direction for the
ambitious and the unemployed: young men who ten years before would
never have dreamt of anything but "resorting to holy orders," turned
their eyes to other walks and adopted other views; and it is plain
that a large number of those who presented themselves for admission
to the clerical profession as we now understand it, in many instances
belonged to a lower class than their predecessors. Some were devout
and earnest, such country parsons as Chaucer described--he does not
turn aside to caricature _them_--but others were mere adventurers,
hirelings whose heart was not in their work. These clerical scamps
gave Archbishop Simon Islip a great deal of trouble. The smaller
livings were forsaken, the curate market rose, the chaplains would
neither take the country vicarages nor engage themselves as
regular helpers to the parish priests. London swarmed with
itinerants who preferred picking up a livelihood by occasional
duty, when they could make their own terms, to binding themselves to
a cure of souls. [Footnote: Compare Chaucer's words--"He sette not
his benefice to hire, And lette his sheep accombred in the mire,
_And ran unto London, into Seint Paules To seken him a chanterie
for Soules_"---with Wilkins' "Concilia," vol. iii. I.] The primate
denounced these greedy ones again and again, but it was all in vain;
the bishops found it impossible to draw the reins of discipline as
tightly as they wished, and found it equally impossible to prevent
the extortionate demands of such curates as could be got. The evil
grew to such a height that the faithful Commons took the matter up
and petitioned the King to interfere, inasmuch as "les chappeleins
sont devenuz si chers" that they actually demanded ten or even twelve
marks a year as their stipend--"a grant grevance & oppression du
poeple." The usual methods were resorted to, and if people could be
made good by Act of Parliament the evils complained of would have
disappeared. They did not disappear, and the evil grew. Unhappily the
increased stipends did not serve to produce a better article, and it
is only too plain that the religious convictions and the religious
life of the people suffered seriously. Ten years after the Black
Death the Archbishop expresses his deep sorrow at the neglect of
Sunday, the desertion of the churches and the decline in religious
observances. Yet we must be cautious how we attribute this break-up
in the old habits of the people to the plague exclusively, or even
mainly. Some of the evils complained of had already begun to be felt
before the plague came, and may fairly be attributed, not to the
falling short of the numbers of the clergy, but exactly the reverse.

Already a strong reaction had set in against the friars, their
influence and their teaching had begun to be regarded as menacing to
the stability of existing creeds and existing institutions. Langland
hated them. Chaucer held them up to scorn. Wickliffe denounced them
with a righteous wrath. Fitz-Ralph, Archbishop of Armagh, carried on
open war against them. All these leaders of the chosen bands that
fight the battles of God had arrived at man's estate when the Black
Death came, and all survived it. They certainly were not the product
of the great visitation; they were the spokesmen and representatives
of a generation that had begun to look at the world with larger,
other eyes than their fathers. That which was coming would have come
if there had been no plague at all, and so far from its being certain
that that calamity was in any great degree the cause of the upheaval
that ensued, it is at least as probable that the sudden decrease in
the population served to retard the action of forces already working
mightily in the direction of revolution--revolution it might be for
the better, or it might be for the worse.

2. Whoever else may have been losers or sufferers by the plague,
there was one class which emerged from that dreadful year very much
richer than before. The lords of the manors, the representatives of
what we now call the country gentry, were great gainers. Not only did
the extraordinary amount paid in heriots and fees make up an
aggregate which in itself constituted a very large percentage upon
the capital embarked in agriculture, but the extent of land which
_escheated_ to the lords was very considerable. Moreover, the
manors themselves, or as we should say, the landed property of the
country, came into fewer hands; the gentry became richer and their
estates larger. Knighton draws attention to the fact that in the
towns a large number of houses became ruinous for want of occupants,
but he adds that in the hamlets and villages the same effects
followed, and that everywhere. Here again, the rolls of Parliament
corroborate the assertion and inform us that not only the dwellings
of the homagers but the capital mansions themselves, were deserted
and falling to decay. When, in the next reign, the manor of Hockham
came into the possession of Richard, Earl of Arundel, in right of his
wife, he took the precaution of having a careful survey made of the
condition of the estate as it came into his hands. The manor-house
had not been tenanted for thirty years. It had been a mansion of
considerable pretension and two stories high; on the ground-floor the
doors were all gone; on the upper floor the windows were open to the
air; the chamber "vocata ladyes chambre" was roofless, the offices
were too dilapidated to be worth repair. The enclosing walls and the
moat had been utterly neglected. The offices had formerly been
adapted for a large establishment; there had been extensive farm
buildings, and at least six substantial houses for the bailiff and
other farm servants. Among other buildings there were two
_fishouses_ built of timber and _daubur_, in which apparently
the keeper of the fishponds lived, and some elaborate arrangements
had existed for keeping up the supply of fish in the ponds by methods
of pisciculture to us unknown. The windmill had long ceased to be
used, its very grinding stones had disappeared. Worse than all,
there was no more any gallows or pillory, or even stocks, _pro_
_libertate servanda_, as the jurors quaintly remark. Yet the records
show that at Hockham things had gone on pretty much as before
since the big house was deserted. The courts were held with
exemplary regularity, the fees had been exacted with unwavering
rigour, the homagers settled their own affairs in their own way; but
there was this difference, that for a generation the tenants had been
living under an absentee landlord, who so far from being the poorer
because the big house had been tumbling down, was the richer,
inasmuch as he had one mansion the less to keep up out of his income.
What happened at Hockham must have happened in hundreds of other
parishes; there must have been large tracts of country during the
latter half of the reign of Edward the Third where a resident
landlord was the exception to that which aforetime had been the rule.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

3. In the present condition of our knowledge, any estimate of the
actual numbers who perished in the plague must be the merest
guesswork. It may be that two millions were carried off; it may be
there were three. It is undeniable that a very large proportion of
the inhabitants of this island died in a few months--employers and
employed. We must, however, remember that England in the fourteenth
century was incomparably more self-supporting than it is in the
nineteenth century; that there were no great centres of industry
then; that the rural population was largely in excess of the urban
population; that we exported the wool which the Flemings manufactured
into cloth; and that if there were fewer hands to till the soil,
there were fewer mouths to feed. No one can doubt that the labour
market must have been seriously disturbed, but it is very easy to
exaggerate this disturbance; and whether it were less or more than
has been asserted, we shall certainly err by attributing the rise in
wages, which undoubtedly took place after the Black Death, to it, and
to it alone--_post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is not a safe conclusion.
Granted, as we must grant, that the plague accelerated the rise in
wages, it is certain the upward movement had already begun before
the population had been seriously lessened. The number of clergy,
to be sure, was largely in excess of the needs of the country; the
clerical profession had become "choked" by the influx of young men
presumably with _some_ private means to fall back upon; among
them there must have been, and there was, serious competition for
every vacant post. When the reserve of supernumeraries became
absorbed, the competition turned the other way, and the surviving
clergy could make their own terms. It was otherwise with the masses,
especially with the peasantry. If there were an insufficient number of
labourers to till the land heretofore in cultivation, the worst land
fell out of cultivation, and no one was much the worse. It was all
very well for some landlords to complain that their rents had fallen off.
Yes! Then--as now, as always--the small proprietors suffered severely,
and needy men are wont to be clamorous. Then--as now, as always--
the sufferers looked about them for a cause of their distress, and found
it in any event that was nearest at hand. But we know that the style of
living after the plague was incomparably more luxurious and extravagant
than it was before. The country was producing less, it may be; but the
people, man for man, were much richer than before.

When we find ourselves confronted with the rhetorical stuff which the
literature of preambles and parliamentary petitions in the fourteenth
century flaunts so liberally before our eyes, we must learn to accept
the statements of draughtsmen _cum grano_, and to read between
the lines. The Commons were quite equal to making the most of any
calamity that occurred. When the Parliament, which had not met since
mid Lent, 1348, assembled once more in February, 1350, the plague was
not forgotten. In the petitions presented to the King, the havoc
wrought is dwelt upon and deplored, _not_ with a view to remedy
any of the distress that had ensued, but in the hope that the arrears
of taxation due from the dead might be excused to the survivors who
had succeeded to the others' property. If they complain of the
scarcity and dearness of corn, this is to give point to their protest
against the King's servants taking it for the victualling of his army
and the town of Calais. If, again, they sound a note of alarm at the
outrageous insolence of the labourers who presumed to demand a large
increase of wage, and would not work at the old scale of pay, there
is no pretence that the employers could not afford to accede to the
increased demand; the "grand meschief du poeple" consisted in this,
that the tillers of the soil should have dreamt of asserting
themselves in any way whatever. Moreover, when it came to legislating
against the mutinous labourers, King and Parliament, while sternly
setting their faces against the rise in wages, _do not take the
twenty-third year of the King as the standard year_ by which to
settle what the normal rate of wages should be. They go back to the
twentieth year, _ou cynk ou sis ans devans_. That is to say, the
wages had been steadily rising for ten years before the plague; the
labourers had been getting their share of the increased prosperity of
the country; and the Statute of Labourers was only one of the clumsy
attempts to interfere with the action of a great economical law which
had been working silently for the advantage of the operatives long
before the Black Death had come to perplex and confuse men's minds
and disturb their calculations.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Some of us remember when the science of geology was young--and we
were young too--we remember how there was a certain romance and
fascination about those fearless and richly imaginative theories
which explained all the great changes in the crust of the earth by
magnificent cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack
of doom meant something after all! What had been should be again. Old
times had stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of
systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in
the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself
inside out. Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we
had to comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting
with infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered
ages, the great laws working themselves out without haste or any
tendency to those picturesque paroxysms which have a certain charm
for us in our nonage. When Sociology shall have risen to the dignity
of a science--and that day may come--I think she too will be chary of
resorting to the cataclysm theory; she and her handmaid History will
hardly smile approval upon pretenders who are anxious to discover a
single efficient cause for results which a million influences have
combined to bring about, or who assume that every new phenomenon must
disturb the equilibrium of the world. To take up with theories first
in the hope, and sometimes with the determination, that facts shall
be found to support them at last, is the vice--I had almost said the
crime--of too many of those who now are styled historians.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

If at this point I leave to others the further pursuit of a subject
which deserves a more comprehensive treatment than it has yet
received, it is not because I have not much more that I could tell.
If it be true that the proper study of mankind is man, it is at least
as true that the proper study of Englishmen is the history of
England; that, however, means a great deal more than is usually
understood by the words. It means the history of English
institutions, of the social, the intellectual, and the religious life
of our forefathers--it means a great deal more than the life of our
sovereigns, their wars, their virtues or their follies. Unhappily
historic studies in England, notwithstanding the splendid impetus
that has been given to them of late by the brilliant achievements of
some philosophic enquirers, receive but scant encouragement, and for
the most part a man's labour must be his own reward. In our
elementary schools History is almost utterly ignored. A whole people
is rapidly breaking with the past from sheer ignorance that there is
any past that is worth knowing. Who shall estimate the immeasurable
harm that must be wrought to a nation that has lost touch with the
past? Let men but believe, to their shame, that

     The glories of our birth and state
     Are shadows, not substantial things,

and what becomes of patriotism? Granted, if you will, that English
history has been made too often a dry and repulsive study by those
who have undertaken to teach it and write it; need it remain so? It
must remain so as long as we keep to the old lines and content
ourselves with the old methods. What is wanted to make any science
_interesting_ is that it should push its inquiries into new
fields of research. The means and appliances, and opportunities for
pursuing historical researches open to those whose youth is not all
behind them, are such as we, their seniors, never dreamt of when we
were in our early manhood. There are whole worlds as yet unexplored
and waiting to be won. Do men whimperingly complain that there is no
longer a career for genius? Tush! It is enthusiasm that is wanted.
Give us that, and the career will follow. But the enthusiasm must be
of the real sort--not self-asserting, self-conscious, self-seeking;
but earnest, patient, resolute, and reticent: for science, too, needs
heroism no less than war.

In the domain of Physical Science there has been in our own time no
lack of intelligent co-operation, and volunteers have been many and
earnest, nor have they spared themselves or shrunk from sacrifices.
In the domain of Historical Science the labourers are few and far
between; there research proceeds with lagging steps. No one sneers at
a philosopher who travels to Iceland to investigate the habits of a
gnat, or who counts it the pride of his life to have discovered a new
fungus, but simpletons are pleased to make themselves merry with
caricaturing any student of his country's institutions who is "always
poring over musty old parchments." And yet these minute researches
will have to be made sooner of later, and till we can bring ourselves
to study the structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of
Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards
loathe and fools deride, the light of truth will be dim for us all;
our Ethical, equally with our political Philosophy must remain in a
condition of hopeless sterility. Nevertheless History too has her
mission, though her time has not yet come. It will not always be that
the past will be to us "as the words of a book that is sealed, which
men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee:
and he saith I cannot, for it is sealed; and the book is delivered to
him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he
saith, I am not learned."

No! It will not be always so.




VI.

THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.

     .  .  .  .  "so famous,
     So excellent in art, and still so rising."

Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed
myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride
it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the
important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman,
and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most
memorable moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before,
what seemed to us, a respectable mansion in a respectable street, and
announced to us that "you" was "the Free Kirk _Univairsity_." It
was the first time in my life that I had heard four stone walls with
a roof over them called a University. It was not long, however,
before I discovered that I myself had been living with my head in a
sack and, in more senses than one, had been of those

     Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry,
       And all the world go by them.

Only so could it have come to pass that this new meaning for an old
word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.

          Licuit semperque licebit
     Signatum praesente nota producere nomen.

_Allowable?_ Yes! and much more than merely allowable; it is
inevitable that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to old
words. And if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it that,
when we desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we should
be compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name by which
the thing is designated.

A word at starting upon the remarkable book [Footnote: "The
Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the
Colleges of Cambridge and Eton." By the late Robert Willis, M.A.,
F.R.S. Edited, with large additions, and brought up to the present
time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb. 4
vols. super-royal 8vo Cambridge: The University Press.] which has
suggested the following article. To say of it that it is quite the
most sumptuous work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press,
is to say little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the
most important contributions to the social and intellectual history
of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The title of
the work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of
the encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it
displays, and, least of all, of the abundance of _human
interest_ which characterizes it so markedly. It is because of
this wealth of human interest that the book must needs exercise a
powerful fascination upon those who have a craving to get some
insight into the life of their forefathers; and it is because I
believe the number of such students of history is in our times
rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious to draw attention to some
few of the many matters treated of so ably in these magnificent
volumes.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The term _University_, in its original acceptation, was used to
designate any aggregate of _persons_ associated in a political,
religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common
privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the
members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons
of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were
addressed as a _University_. Nay! when the whole body of the
faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made
use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes
or intentions, is "Noverit _Universitas_ vestra." A University
in this sense, regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be
localized or it might not; its members might be scattered over the
whole Christian world, or they might constitute an inner circle of
some larger community, of which they--though a _Universitas_-
formed but a part. A University in its original signification meant
no more than our modern term an Association. When men associated
together for purposes of trade, they were a trading _Universitas_;
when they associated for religious objects, they were a religious
_Universitas_; when they associated for the promotion of learning,
they were a learned _Universitas_. But the men came first, the bricks
and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely
technical and professional details, could only start at a point where
the University, as an association of scholars and students, had already
acquired power and influence, had been at work for long, and had
got to make itself felt as a living force in the body politic and in the
national life. It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight
of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting
from the assumption that stonewalls make an institution, they professed to
tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their
earliest founders. The authors of this modern _Magnum Opus_ have
set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their
object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in
its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in
the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellowship of living men,"
which constituted the _personal_ University of the eleventh or
the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the brick-and-
mortar Universities of the nineteenth--such Universities as are
springing up all over the world; their teachers advertised for in
_The Times_, and their students tempted to come and be taught in
them by the bait of money rewards.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first made
their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to themselves
from the four winds classes of eager youths hungry for intellectual
food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be content to
leave undetermined. They who like the flavour of the old
antiquarianism may enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose to
hunt up among certain forgotten volumes now grown scarce. They may
read what John Caius (pronounced Keys) wrote as the champion of
Cambridge, and Thomas Caius wrote as champion of Oxford; they may
rejoice their hearts over the Battle of the Keys, and come to what
conclusion they prefer to arrive at. For most of us, however, this
sort of old-world lore has lost its charm. A man lives through his
taste for some questions. The student of history nowadays is inclined
to say with St. Paul, "So fight I not as one that beateth the air,"
and to reject with some impatience the frivolous questions which help
not a jot towards bringing us into closer relation with the life and
personality of our ancestors.

     "I am halt sick of shadows," said
                     The Lady of Shalott;

and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to
the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm
ground on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move onwards.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of Queen
Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a Cambridge
before there was an Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is so. Hide your
diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have us believe that a
thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the wicked king whom the
wolves ate--as was right and fitting they should--built a noble city,
which as time went on "was called _Oxonia_, or by the Saxons
_Oxenfordia_." Alack! it turns out that we must make an enormous
step along the course of time before we can find trace of any such
city or anything like it. It turns out that "the year 912 saw Oxford
made a fortified town, with a definite duty to perform and a definite
district assigned to it." What! Seven years after the great Alfred
had closed his eyes in death, and left to others the work which he
had showed them how to do? Yes! Even so. It may be very hard to have
to confess the odious crime of youth; but it seems almost capable of
demonstration that Cambridge, as a fortress and a a town existed a
thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at
most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels,
hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots. What
have we to do with thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside
while thine elder sister--ay, old enough to be thy mother--takes her
place of honour. She has waited long for her historian; he has come
at last, and he was worth waiting for.

In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in
Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It
contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty
earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer
brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The
Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place.
Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the
conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some
portion of the old one. In their language it was known as
_Caniboritum_. The primeval fortress stood on the left bank of
the river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam; and
for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit to
span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via Devana
pass sheer through the river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist
has pretended that the children of Israel did when they found the
Jordan barring their progress--that is, those Roman creatures
constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish stream, over
which less audacious engineers would have thrown an arch. Through the
water they carried a kind of causeway, and the name of the place for
centuries indicated that it was situated on the _ford_ of the
Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to do, that the people that
came after him found it needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find
that the old fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and
then perforce abandoned, had got to be called Granta-brygge; and this
name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey
was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By
this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river,
and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and
gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the
site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing
that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.

The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of
the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though
even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew
up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of
the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case.
There were no _monks_ at Cambridge at any time; there never were
any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's
journey off, and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only
by water. King Knut, we are told, greatly favoured the Abbey of Ely,
visited it, was entertained there, in fact restored it. But at
Cambridge there were no monks. No _real_ monks; a fact which
ought to be a significant hint to "all educated men," but which,
unhappily, is likely to be significant only to the few who have taken
the trouble to learn what a real monk professed to be. If there were
no monks at Cambridge, there was something else. Outside the walls of
the town there rose up, in the twelfth century, the priory of
Barnwell-a priory of Augustinian _canons_; and, moreover, a
nunnery-the Benedictine nunnery of St. Rhadegunda. Within the walls
there was another house of Augustinians, which was known as St.
John's Hospital; that is, a house where the canons made it part of
their duty to provide a spurious kind of _hospitality_ to
travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of St. Bernard
offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such food and
shelter something more--to wit, the opportunity of worshipping the
Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At St. John's
Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who had found a
refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in recognition of the
kindly treatment he had met with, and it might happen that these free
gifts constituted no small portion of the income on which the canons--
for the most part a humble and unpretentious set of men-kept up
their houses.

With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great revivalists--
the friars. Wherever the friars established themselves they began not
only to preach, but to teach. They were the awakeners of a new
intellectual life; not only the stimulators of an emotional pietism
always prone to run into religious intoxication and extravagance.
With the coming of the friars what may be called the modern history
of Cambridge begins. Not that it can be allowed that there were no
schools of repute on the banks of the Cam till the coming of the
friars; it is certain that learning had her home at Cambridge long
before this time.

As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his
_Expugnatio Hiberniae_ in public lectures, and entertained the
doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars.
[Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern
History," p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more
renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars
settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was
a suitable home for them there--an opening as we say--which the
flourishing condition of the University afforded. There were scholars
to teach, there were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to
criticize, oppose, or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already
strained relations between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge
as at Oxford. The first great "town and gown row" which we hear of
took place at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the
other University mentioned by the historian in close connection with
the event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had seized
three of the gownsmen _in hospitio suo_ and threw them into the
gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three,
guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris assures us. Hereupon
there was intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three
thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we
learn. Oxford for a while was deserted. This was fifteen years before
the Franciscans settled among us. It was the year in which King John
was excommunicated. There were only three bishops left in England;
the king had worried all the rest away. There was misery and anarchy
everywhere. Yet, strange to say, in the midst of all the bitterness
men _would_ have their sons educated, and the Universities did
not despair of the republic. Shadowy and fragmentary as all the
evidence is on which we have to rely for the history of the
Universities during the twelfth century, it is enough to make us
certain that the friars settled at Cambridge because there they found
scope for their labours. There was undoubtedly a University there
long before they arrived. Nevertheless, it is not till the middle of
the reign of Henry the Third (A.D. 1216-1272) that we come upon any
direct mention of a corporation which could be regarded as a
chartered society of scholars at Cambridge, and it is difficult to
resist the conviction that, whatever may have been its previous
history, and however far back its infancy may date, the friars were
to some extent nursing fathers of the University of Cambridge.

And this brings us again to the point from which we started a page or
two back, and gives me the opportunity of quoting a passage from
Professor Willis's introduction, which will serve at once as a
continuation of and comment upon what has been said, while leading us
on to what still lies before us.

The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned men,
associated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the privilege
that no one should be allowed to teach within their dominion unless
he had received their sanction, which could only be granted after
trial of his ability. The test applied consisted of examinations and
public disputations; the sanction assumed the form of a public
ceremony, and the name of _a degree_; and the teachers or
doctors so elected or created carried out their office of instruction
by lecturing in the public schools to the students who, desirous of
hearing them, took up their residence in the place wherein the
University was located. The degree was in fact merely a license to
teach; the teacher so licensed became a member of the ruling body.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

We have arrived at this point--we find ourselves at the beginning of
the thirteenth century face to face with a _University_ at
Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate
condition of an association vaguely aiming at the improvement of the
methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually
grown into a recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and
control over its members; a body, too, which had become so identified
with the interests of culture and research that a change had already
begun in the generally received acceptation of its name, and already
the word "university" had begun to be restricted to such a
_Universitas_ as was identified with the life and pursuits of
learning and learned men. This means that, _pari passu_ with its
increase in power, the University had grown too, in the number of its
members--the teachers and the taught. The time had arrived when the
demands of professors and students for adequate accommodation would
become pressing. Lecturers with popular gifts would expect a hall
capable of holding their audiences. Public disputations could not be
held in a corner. Receptions of eminent scholars from a distance, and
all those ceremonials which were so dear to gentle and simple in the
middle ages, required space, and were the more effective the grander
the buildings in which they were displayed, Yet how little the
Cantabs of the thirteenth century could have dreamt of what was
coming! What a day of small things it was! Six hundred years ago the
giant was in his cradle.

Meanwhile, another need than that of mere schools and lecture-halls
had begun to be felt. The scholars who came for what they could get
from the teachers--the regents and the doctors--flocked from various
quarters; they were young, they were not all fired with the student's
love of learning; they were sometimes noisy, sometimes frolicsome,
sometimes vicious. As now is the case at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, so
it was then at Cambridge, the bonds of discipline were very slight;
the scholars had to take their chance; they lodged where they could,
they lived anyhow, each according to his means; they were homeless.
It was inevitable that all sorts of grave evils should arise.

The lads--they were mere boys--got into mischief, they got into debt
with the Jews; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few; they were
preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand and on the
left; many of them learned more harm than good. The elder men, and
they who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked
what could be done? For a long time the principle of _laissez
faire_ prevailed: the young fellows were left to the tender
mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in
those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into
vogue. Worthy people seemed to have hired a house which they called a
_hostel_ or hall, and sub-let the rooms to the young fellows;
the arrangement appears to have been clumsily managed, and led to
dissensions between town and gown; the townsmen soon discovered that
the gownsmen were gainers by the new plan, and they themselves were
losers. They grumbled, protested, quarrelled. But it was a move in
the right direction, and a beginning of some moral discipline was
made, and that could not but be well. These _hostels_ were set
up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of the thirteenth century,
and how long before we cannot tell; but it was at Oxford that the
first _college_, as we understand the term, rose into being. It
was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the father of
the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon a new
experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of his
life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous _Rule
of Merton_, of which it is not at all too much to say that its
publication constituted an era in the history of education and
learning in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of
Ely, who survived him nine years, appears to have been moved with a
desire to do for Cambridge what Merton had done for Oxford. Balsham
is spoken of as the founder of St. Peter's College, and in one sense
he was so. The bishops of Ely were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop
Balsham asked himself what could be done, and set himself to deal
with the problems which presented themselves for solution in the
condition of his own University. He was not a great man, that seems
clear enough: his schemes were crude; he bungled. The truth seems to
me to be that the feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and
there are indications that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fashion
were opposed to anything like _secular education_. We hear of
money being left to support _priests_ studying theology, and of
an experiment for introducing scholars as residents in the Hospital
of St. John. The canons were to take in the young scholars as
_boarders_ into their house, and look after their conduct and
morals. The plan did not answer. It was an attempt to put new wine
into old bottles. There came an explosion. Cambridge in the
thirteenth century had not the _men_ that Oxford had, so Oxford
kept the lead. Perhaps there was some soreness. Did ecclesiastics
shake their heads as they saw the walls of Balliol College rise, and
learnt that there was just a little too much importance given to mere
scholarship, and no prominence given to theology in those early
statutes of 1282? Did they, without knowing why, anticipate with
anxiety the awakening of a spirit of free thought and free inquiry
among those scholars of the Merton, Rule? Did the orthodox party
resort to prophecy, which is seldom very complimentary or cheerful in
its utterances?

This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there was a
stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to assert themselves
and take their place among the learned. John Giffard started his
great college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It
became, and for centuries continued to be, the resort of the
Benedictine order, and was supported by levies from a large number of
the old monasteries. The inference is forced upon us that the English
monasteries no longer stood in the front rank as seats of learning.
Students and scholars would no longer go to the monks; the monks must
go to the scholars. But the establishment of a seminary for the
reception of young monks at Oxford tended to the strengthening of the
ecclesiastical influence in that University. Cambridge lost in the
same proportion that Oxford gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich
sent its promising young monks to Qxford, passing by the nearer and
more conveniently situated University. As early as 1288 we find
entries in the Norwich Priory Rolls of payments for the support of
the schools and scholars at Oxford. It was long after this that
Cambridge offered any similar attraction to the "religious."

Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we
now understand by a _college_. It was a novelty in English
institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies
that were essentially religious in their character. Some of those
societies, and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes
of learning as well as of devotion; but the main business-the
_raison d'tre_ of monks and nuns and canons-was the practice of
asceticism, the keeping up of unceasing worship in the church of the
monastery--the endeavour to be holier than men of the world need be,
or the endeavour to make the men of the world holier than they cared
to be. The religious orders were religious or they were nothing. Each
new rule for the reformation of those orders aimed at restoring the
primitive idea of self-immolation at the altar--a severer ritual,
harder living, longer praying. Nay! the new rules, in not a few
instances, were actually aimed against learning and culture. The
Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton would not call his
society of scholars a _convent_, as the old monkish corporations
had been designated. That sounded too much as though the mere
promotion of pietism was his aim; he revived the old classical word
_collegium_. There had been _collegia_ at Rome before the imperial
times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were
decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued
certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane
objects. Why should not there be a _collegium_ of scholars? Why
should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other
people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by
his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old
conventual type, but to enter upon a new departure.

The scholars of the new college were to take no vows; they were not
to be worried with everlasting ritual observances. Special chaplains,
who were presumably not expected to be scholars and students, were
appointed for the ministration of the ceremonial in the church.
Luxury was guarded against; poverty was not enjoined. As long as a
scholar was pursuing his studies _bon fide_, he might remain a
member of the college; if he was tired of books and bookish people,
he might go.

When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it to
himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up; sometimes it gets
improved upon; sometimes very much the reverse. For a wise man acts
upon a hint, and it germinates; a fool only half apprehends the
meaning of a hint, and he displays his folly in producing a
caricature. Hugh de Balsham seems to have aimed at improving upon
Merton's original idea. He meant well, doubtless; but his college of
Peterhouse, the first college in Cambridge, was a very poor copy of
the Oxford foundation. Merton was a man of genius, a man of ideas;
Balsham was a man of the cloister. Moreover, he was by no means so
rich as his predecessor, and he did not live to carry out his scheme.
The funds were insufficient. The first college at Cambridge was long
in building. Cambridge, in fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there
was none of the dash and enthusiasm, none of the passion for
progress, which characterized Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius
like Grosseteste to impress his strong personality upon the movement
which the friars stirred, no commanding intellect like that of Roger
Bacon to attract and dazzle and lead into quite new regions of
thought the ardent and eager spirits who felt that a new era had
begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine; no John Wielif to
kindle a new flame--say, rather, to take up the torch which had
dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which the
others had run so well. What a grand succession of men it was!

Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose at
Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the
reign of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no fewer than
seven colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them have
survived to our own days, and two were eventually absorbed by the
larger foundation which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of raising,
and which now stands forth in its grandeur, the most magnificent
educational corporation in the world.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the original
buildings in which the _University_, as a teaching body, pursued
its work, but which also provided the _houses_ in which the
_colleges_ of scholars lived and laboured?

Unhappily, we know very little of the University buildings during
this early period. All the industry of Mr. Clark has not availed to
penetrate the thick obscurity; but this at least is pretty certain,
namely, that the earliest University buildings at Cambridge were very
humble structures clustering round about the area now covered by the
University schools and library, that it was not till the middle of
the fourteenth century that any attempt was made to erect a building
of any pretension, and that the "Schools Quadrangle was not completed
till 130 years after the first stone was laid." The University of
Cambridge was for ages a very poor corporation; it had no funds out
of which to build halls or schools or library. The ceremonies at
_commencement_ and on other great occasions took place in the
churches, sometimes of the Augustinian, sometimes of the Franciscan
friars. In these early times the gownsmen dared not contemplate the
erection of a senate-house wherein to hold their meetings. When the
fourteenth-century schools were planned their erection was doubtless
regarded as a very bold and ambitious experiment. The money came in
very slowly, the work stopped more than once, and when it proceeded
it was only by public subscription that the funds were gathered. In
1466, William Wilflete, Master of Clare Hall and Chancellor of the
University, actually made a journey to London to gather funds from
whatever quarters he could, and he dunned his friends, and those on
whom the University had any claim, so successfully that on June 25 of
that year a contract for proceeding with the work was drawn up and
signed, but it was nearly nine years after this before the schools
were finally completed, together with a new library over them, by the
special munificence of Archbishop Rotherham, who had further enriched
the library with numerous volumes of great value.

The tie which bound the members of the _University_ together was
much weaker than that which united the members of the same
_college_. The colleges were, in almost every case, founded by
private munificence, and in most cases were commenced during the
lifetime of the several founders; but when we come to look into the
sources of the college revenues we find that the actual gifts of
money, or indeed of lands, was less than at first sight appears. A
very large proportion of the endowments of these early colleges came
from the _spoliation of the parochial clergy_. Popular writers
in our own time declaim against the horrible sin of buying and
selling church preferment, as if it were a modern abomination. Let a
man only spend half an hour in examining the _fines_ or records
of transfers of property in England during the fourteenth century and
he will be somewhat surprised to discover what a part the buying and
selling of advowsons played in the business transactions of our
forefathers five centuries ago. Advowsons were always in the market,
and always good investments in those days, But not only so. A pious
founder could do a great deal in the way of making perpetual
provision for the mention of his name by posterity at a small cost if
he took care to manipulate ecclesiastical property with prudence.
There was a crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson could
_appropriate_ the tithes of a benefice to the support of any
corporation which might be considered a _religious_ foundation.
The old monasteries had benefited to some extent from this
disendowment of the secular clergy, the Augustinian canons, during
the twelfth century, being the chief gainers by the pillage. When the
rage for founding colleges came in, and the awful ravages of the
Black Death had depopulated whole districts, the fashion of
alienating the revenues of the country parsons and diverting them
into the new channel grew to be quite a rage. The colleges of secular
priests living together in common, or what it is now the fashion to
call a clergy house, might be and were strictly _religious_
foundations; and could the colleges of scholars, of teachers and
learners who presumably were all priests, or intended for the
priesthood, be regarded as less _religious_ than the others? So
it came to pass that the tithes of parish after parish were diverted
into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which were
professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the
seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy. In
order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was
arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished!

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge
alone! Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford had
attracted the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the
fast ones. How else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's
stringent order in 1342 for the repression of the dandyism that
prevailed among the young scholars? These young Cantabs of the
fourteenth century were exquisites of the first water. Their fur-
trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their shoes of all the colours of
the rainbow; their dainty girdles, bejewelled and gilt, were a sight
to see. And then their hair! positively curled and powdered, and
growing over their shoulders, too; and when they passed their fingers
through the curls, look you, there were rings on their fingers! Call
you these scholars? Chaucer's "Clerk of Oxenforde" was of a very
different type:--

  For all that he might of his frendes hentc
  On books and in learning he it spente.

Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so
many colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new
collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of
readers no part of Mr. dark's great work will prove so attractive as
the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on "The
Component Parts of a College." Here we have traced out for us in the
most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate
idea, from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had
no particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one
another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of
their arrangements.

At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their
favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming
that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It
is almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was
adopted very gradually.

Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older
universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are
themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly
be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding
of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an
attempt to supersede them.

More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first
necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this
being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in
Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was
consecrated in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess
of Pembroke in 1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the
precincts of her new college; and, so far from these convenient
adjuncts to a collegiate establishment having been considered an
essential in early times, no less than eight of the college chapels
at Cambridge and four at Oxford date from a time after the
Reformation. In the fourteenth century and later the young scholars,
as a rule, attended their parish church. Sometimes the college added
on an aisle for the accommodation of its members; sometimes it
obtained a _licence_ to use a room in which Divine Service might
be conducted for a time; once the founder of a college erected a
collegiate quire in the middle of the parish church, a kind of
gigantic _pew,_ for the accommodation of his scholars. Downing
College has never had a chapel to the present hour.

Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has been
more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the fourteenth
century the master of a college was but _primits inter pares,_
and the distance between him and his _fellows_ or _scholars_
was less than that which exists now between the Commanding officer
of a regiment in barracks and his brother officers. The master had no
sinecure; the discipline of the place depended upon him almost entirely,
for in those days the monarchial idea was in the ascendant; the king
was a real king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real master.
Everything was referred to him, everything originated with him,
everything was controlled by him. But as for the accommodation
assigned to him in the early colleges, it was very inferior indeed to
that which every graduate at Trinity or St. John's expects to find in
our time. The Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted by the statutes
to dine apart if he pleased, and to reside outside the precincts of the
college if he chose to provide for himself another residence; but this
was clearly an exceptional case, for the master was at this time the
actual founder of the college, and Adam de Brune might be presumed
to know what was good for his successors in the office for which he
himself had made provision. But for generations the master enjoyed
no more than a couple of _chambers_ at the most, and it was
not till the sixteenth century that an official residence was provided,
and then such residence consisted only of _lodgings_ a little more
spacious and convenient than those of any of the fellows, and in no
case separated from the main buildings of the college. Even when
masters of colleges began to marry (and the earliest instance of this
seems to have been Dr. Heynes, Master of Queens' College, in 1529),
it was long before the master's wife was so far recognized as to be
received within the precincts; and as late as 1576, when the fellows
of King's complained of their provost's wife being seen within the
college, Dr. Goad replied that she had not been twice in the college
"Quad" in her life, as far as he knew. When the great break-up came
in the next century, then the establishment of the master demanded
increased accommodation for his family, and the master's lodge began
to grow slowly, until university architects of the nineteenth century
displayed their exalted sense of what was due to the dignity of a
"head of a house" by erecting two such palaces as the lodges of
Pembroke and St. John's Colleges; for the glorification of the
artist, it may be, but whether for the advantage of the college, the
university, or the occupants of the aforesaid lodges may be
reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge _is at this
moment let,_ presumably for the benefit of the head of the house,
whose official residence it is; and, if things go on as they are
tending, the day may come--who knows how soon?--when Cambridge shall
at last be able to boast of a really good hotel, "in a central and
very desirable situation, commanding a delightful view of"--what
shall we say?--"fitted up with every convenience, and formerly known
as the Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College."

I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture run
to seed.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a
single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of
investigation which he has pursued, or to summarize at all satisfactorily
the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so masterly a
manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning over
the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations
alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and
ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence
of their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark
of imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished
guide can lead them. Do you think that such a work as this tells us
no more than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed
their present form, and court was added to court, and libraries and
museums and lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed
by the professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by
the masons and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.

  Horizons rich with trembling spires
  On violet twilights, lose their fires

if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The
authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else
that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great
national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and
crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the
marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the
questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out
of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the
painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone
through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of
six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you
must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains,
and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the
other. Mr. Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of
university and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound
insight into the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.

How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through
what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries
have rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than
their sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The
outer man is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina
of Englishmen has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are
different; our dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all
other than they were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount
of physical discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors
were called upon to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a
figure which to us would be appalling. We start from a standing-point
in moral, social, and intellectual convictions so far in advance of
that of our forefathers that they could not conceive of such a
_terminus ad quern_ as serves us as a terminus a quo._ In
other words, we _begin_ at a point in the line which they never
conceived could be reached. Yet the more closely we look into the
past the more do we see how history in all essentials is for ever
repeating herself--impossible though it may be to put the clock back
for ourselves.

How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of
building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of
Cambridge--that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the
realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery--never seemed to have
thought that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old
monasteries there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who
passed into the cloister came there once for all--to live _and
die_ within the walls of his monastery. The scholar who came to
get all the learning he could, and who settled in some humble hostel
or some unpretentious college of the old type, came to spend some few
years there, but no more. He came to live his life, and when there
was no more life in him--no more youthful force, activity, and
enthusiasm-there was no place for him at Cambridge, There they wanted
men of vigour and energy, not past their work. Die? No! as long as he
was verily alive it was well that he should stay and toil. When he
was a dying man, better he should go. No college at Cambridge had a
cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead!

Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly--the lad of
feeble frame and delicate organization-to stand that rugged old
Cambridge life. "College rooms" in our time suggest something like
the _ne plus ultra_ of aesthetic elegance and luxury. We find it
hard to realize the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was
expected to have two or three _chamber fellows_ who shared his
bedroom with him; and that his _study_ was no bigger than a
study at the schoolhouse at Rugby, and very much smaller than a
fourth-form boy enjoys at many a more modern public school. At the
hostels, which were of course much more crowded than the colleges
were, a separate bed was the privilege of the few. What must have
been the condition of those semi-licensed receptacles for the poorer
students in the early times, when we find as late as 1598 that in St.
John's College there were no less than seventy members of the college
"accommodated" (!) in twenty-eight chambers. This was before the
second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet these seventy
Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their predecessors
of two hundred years before.

"In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and
closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or
tiled; and their halls and ceilings were unplastered." We have
express testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the
master's lodge had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of
the sixteenth century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed,
dated July 3, 1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's
College, "the wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only
one chair; that the tables were supported on trestles; and that those
who used them sat on forms or stools." As for the chambers and
studies, not only were they destitute of anything in the shape of
stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely bare, while in
the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster between the
tiles and the beams of the roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible
how vitality could have been kept up in the winter under such
conditions. The cold must have been dreadful.

At four only of five earlier and smaller colleges was there any fire-
place in the hall, and the barbaric braziers in which first charcoal
and afterwards coke was burned, were actually the only heating
apparatus known in the immense halls of Trinity and St. John's till
within the last twenty years! The magnificent hall of Trinity
actually retained till 1866 the brazier _which had been in use for
upwards of 160 years!_ The clumsy attempt to fight the bitter cold
which was usual in our mediaeval churches and manor-houses, by
strewing the stone floor with rushes, was carried out too in the
college halls, and latterly, instead of rushes, sawdust was used, at
least in Trinity. "It was laid on the floor at the beginning of
winter, and turned over with a rake as often as the upper surface
became dirty. Finally, when warm weather set in, it was removed, the
colour of charcoal!" Well might the late Professor Sedgwick, in
commenting upon this practice, exclaim; "The dirt was sublime in
former years!"

Yet in the earliest times a lavatory was provided in the college
halls, and a towel of eight or nine yards long, which at Trinity, as
late as 1612, was hung on a hook--the refinement of hanging a towel
on a _roller_ does not appear to have been thought of. These
towels were for use _before_ dinner; _at_ dinner the fellows of
Christ's in 1575 were provided with table-napkins. If they wiped
their fingers on the table-cloth they were fined a penny. The temptation
must have been strong at times, for _no forks were in use_--not even
the iron-pronged forks which some of us remember in hall in our
young days. The oldest piece of furniture in the college halls were
the stocks, set up for the correction of refractory undergraduates
who should have been guilty of the enormity of bathing in the Cam
or other grave offence and scandal.

Of the amusements indulged in by the undergraduates at Cambridge in
the early times we hear but little. The probability seems to be that
they had to manage for themselves as best they could. Gradually the
bowling-green, the butts for archery, and the tennis-courts were
provided by several colleges. Tennis seems to have been the rage at
Cambridge during the sixteenth century, and the tennis-courts became
sources of revenue in the Elizabethan time, It is clear that by this
time the old severity and rigour had become relaxed, the colleges had
become richer, and in another hundred years the combination-rooms had
become comfortable and almost luxurious before the seventeenth
century closed. In Queens' College in 1693 there were actually
_flowers_ in the combination-room, and at Christ's College in
1716 a card-table was provided "in the fellows' parlour."

It may be said that the immense expansion of the University, as
distinct from a mere aggregate of colleges, dates from the beginning
of the eighteenth century. Up to that time the colleges had for four
hundred years been steadily growing into privileged corporations,
whose wealth and power had been too great for the Commonwealth, of
which they were in idea only members. With the Georgian era the new
movement began. When Bishop Moore's vast library was presented by
George II. to the _University,_ when the first stone of the
Senate House was laid in 1722, when the _University_ arranged
for the reception of Dr. Woodward's fossils in 1735--these events
marked the beginning of a new order of things. Whatever confusion may
have existed in the minds of our grandfathers, who had a vague
conviction that the University meant no more than the aggregate of
the colleges, and a suspicion that what the University was the
colleges made it--we, in our generation, have been assured that the
colleges owed their existence to the sufferance of universities; or,
if that be putting the case too strongly, that the colleges exist for
the sake of the University. The new view has at any rate gained the
approval of the Legislature; the University is in no danger of being
predominated over by the colleges in the immediate future; the danger
rather is lest the colleges should be starved or at least
impoverished for the glorification of the University, the college-
fellowships being shorn of their dignity and emoluments in order to
ensure that the University officials shall become the exclusive
holders of the richest prizes.

For good or evil we have entered upon a new career. The old
Cambridge, which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn
ecclesiasticism, its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomalies, its
fascinating picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible
odds and ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and
hall--that old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The
new Cambridge, with its bustling syndics for ever on the move--its
bewildering complexity of examinations--its "sweet girl-graduates
with their golden hair," its delightful "notion of grand and
capacious and massive amusement," its glorious wealth of collections
and appliances and facilities for every kind of study and research,
is alive with an exuberant vitality.

What form will the new life assume in the time that is coming? Will
the Cambridge of six centuries hence be able to produce such a record
of her past as that which she can boast of now? Among her alumni of
the future will there arise again any such loyal and enlightened
historians as these who have raised to themselves and their
University so noble a monument?




VII.

_THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD._


     "Did you ever hear tell of Lodowick Muggleton?"

     "Not I."

     "That is strange. Know then that he was the founder
     of our poor society, and after him we are frequently,
     though oppro-briously, termed Muggletonians, for we
     are Christians. Here is his book; I will sell it cheap."
                                --LAVENGRO.


Scrupulous veracity was hardly a characteristic of the late George
Borrow. A man of great memory, he was also a man of fertile
imagination, and where the two are found in excess, side by side in
the same intellect, they are apt to twine round one another, so to
speak, and the product is something which the matter-of-fact man
abhors. I do not doubt that Borrow did meet a Muggletonian at
Bristol--I think it was there--some sixty years ago; but I am pretty
sure that he knew very little indeed about the Muggletonians, and
that he could have hardly opened the book which he implies that he
purchased, and which I am almost certain he never read. I have a
strong suspicion that he very much antedated the incident which he
narrates, for I myself knew an old secondhand bookseller in a back
street at Bristol, who was a Muggletonian, with whom I made
acquaintance when a lad. He was a slow-speaking, wary, suspicious,
and dirty old man, and as I had not sufficient funds to be a good
customer, I daresay he did not think it worth his while to be
communicative, but he told me one day that he had been one of the
original subscribers to the _Spiritual Epistles_ which were
reprinted in quarto years before I was born; though, as he confessed,
his name does not appear on the list of names printed at the end of
the preface, which list, he assured me, was very incomplete, as he
from his own knowledge could certify. This old man would have been
very old indeed if he had been old when Borrow was a youth; and yet,
as I say, I suspect he was the very man of whom mention is made in
the extract I have given above. He was the only Muggletonian I ever
knew, but he certainly was not the last of his sect, and I should not
be at all surprised to hear that it is a flourishing sect still, and
that it still has its assemblies, its votaries, its literature, and
its propaganda. It is true that the name _Muggletonians_ does
not appear in that astonishing list of religious denominations which
the Registrar-General was enabled to compile for the year 1883; but
that proves little, inasmuch as the closer a religious corporation
is, the more exclusive, the less does it care to register the name of
the building in which it may choose to assemble for worship; and I
observe that the Southcotians are no longer to be found upon that
list, though I happen to know that they are not extinct yet, nor has
their faith in their prophetess and her mission quite died out from
the face of the earth.

This is certain, that as late as 1820 an edition of the _Spiritual
Epistles,_ which must have cost at that time two or three hundred
pounds to print, was subscribed for, and that nine years afterwards
appeared _Divine Songs of the Muggletonians_--they were not
ashamed of the name--printed also by subscription, filling 621 pages,
and showing pretty clearly that there had of late been a strange
revival of the sect: an outburst of new fervour having somehow been
awakened, and an irrepressible passion for writing "Songs" having
displayed itself, which had not been without its effect in
resuscitating dormant enthusiasm. The vagaries of the human mind in
what, for want of any better designation, we call "religious belief"
have always had for me a peculiar fascination, as they have for
others. Epiphanius, whose name is and used to be a terror to her
Royal Highness in days gone by, when I insisted upon reading to her
about the peculiar people who made it a matter of faith to eat bread
and cheese at the Eucharist--Epiphanius is to me positively
entertaining, and Pagitt's _Heresiography_ is none the less
instructive because it is a vulgar catch-penny little book, made up,
like Peter Pindar's razors, to sell. To me it seems that to dismiss
even the wildest and foolishest opinion _which makes way,_ as if
it were a mere absurdity that does not deserve notice, is to show a
certain flippancy and shallowness. Do not all thoughtful men pass
through certain stages of intellectual growth, and are not the
convictions of our youth held very differently from those which we
find ourselves swayed by in our later years? The beliefs which the
multitude take up with are such as the untrained and the half-trained
are always captivated by, whether individually or in the mass. There
are limits to our powers of assimilation according as our development
has been arrested or is still going on, and he who hopes to
understand the course of human affairs or to make any intelligent
forecast of what is coming can never afford to neglect the study of
morbid appetites or morbid anatomy in the domain of mind.

There is a strong family likeness among all fanatics; and this is
characteristic of them all, that they are profusely communicative and
absolutely honest. Prophets have no secrets, no reserve, no doubts,
they are always true men. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton are no
exception to the general rule. We can follow their movements pretty
closely for some years. The book of _The Acts of the Witnesses of
the Spirit_ furnishes us with quite as much as we want to know
about the sayings and doings of the grotesque pair and their early
extravagances; and Muggleton's letters cover a period of forty years,
during all which time he was going in and out among the artisans and
small traders of the city, obstinately asserting himself in season
and out of season, and leaving behind him in his eccentric chronicle
such a minute and faithful picture of London life among the middle--
the lower middle--class during the last half of the seventeenth
century as is to be found nowhere else. The reader must be prepared
for the most startling freaks of language, for very vulgar profanity,
the more amazing because so manifestly unintended. When people break
away from all the traditions of the past and surrender themselves to
absolute anarchy in morals and religion the old terminology ceases to
be employed in the old way, ceases indeed to have any meaning. The
prophet or the philosopher who sets himself to invent a new theory of
the universe or a new creed for his followers to embrace, can hardly
avoid shocking and horrifying those who are content to use words as
their forefathers did and attach to these words the same sort of
sacredness that the Hebrews did to the Divine name. There is no need
to do more than allude to this side of the Muggletonian writing. What
we are concerned with is the story of the prophet's life, which has
been told with the utmost frankness and simplicity; a more
unvarnished tale it would be difficult to find, or one which bears
more the stamp of truth upon its every line.

_The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit_ is a posthumous work
written by Muggleton when he was very old, and left behind him in
manuscript with directions that it should be published after his
death. It is a quarto volume of 180 pages and is a book of some
rarity. It was published in 1699, with an epistle dedicatory to all
true Christian people, apparently written by Thomas Tomkinson, one of
the chosen seed. After preparing us for what is coming by dwelling
upon the wonderful stories in the Old Testament and the New,
Muggleton plunges into his subject by giving us a brief account of
his own and his brother prophet's parentage and early biography. Let
the reader understand that here beginneth the third chapter of _The
Acts of the Witnesses_ at the third verse:--

"3. As for John Reeve, he was born in Wiltshire; his father was clerk
to a deputy of Ireland, a gentleman as we call them by his place, but
fell to decay.

"4. So he put John Reeve apprentice here at London to a tailor by
trade. He was out of his apprenticeship before I came acquainted with
him; he was of an honest, just nature, and harmless.

"5. But a man of no great natural wit or wisdom; no subtlety or
policy was in him, nor no great store of religion; he had lost what
was traditional; only of an innocent life.

"7. And I, Lodowick Muggleton, was born in Bishop-gate Street, near
the Earl of Devonshire's house, at the corner house called Walnut-
tree Yard.

"8. My father's name was John Muggleton; he was a smith by trade--
that is, a farrier or horse doctor; he was in great respect with the
postmaster in King James's time; he had three children by my mother,
two sons and one daughter, I was the youngest and my mother loved
me."

His mother died, his father married again, whereupon the boy was sent
into the country--_boarded out_ as we say--and kept there till
his sixteenth year, when he was brought back to London and
apprenticed to-a tailor--one John Quick--"a quiet, peaceable man, not
cruel to servants, which liked me very well." Muggleton took to his
trade and pleased his master. The journeymen were a loose lot, "bad
husbands and given to drunkenness, but my nature was inclined to be
sober." Hitherto the young man had received no religious training;
when he had served his time, however, "hearing in those days great
talk among the vulgar people and especially amongst youth, boys, and
young maids, of a people called Puritans.... I liked their discourse
upon the Scriptures and pleaded for a holy keeping of the Sabbath
day, which my master did not do, nor I his servant."

This must have been about the year 1630--for Muggleton was born in
June 1610--when the Sabbatarian controversy was at its height, and
the feeling of the country was approaching fever heat, and when
Charles the First had resolved to try and govern without a
Parliament, and when Archbishop Abbot was in disgrace, and Laud had
begun to exercise his predominant influence. Muggleton was but little
impressed by "the people called Puritans," and he went on his old
way. When he had nearly served his time, he began to look about him.
The tailor's trade did not seem likely to lead to much, unless it
were combined with something else, and a brilliant opening offered
itself, as he was at work for a pawnbroker in Hounsditch. "The
broker's wife had one daughter alive. The mother, being well
persuaded of my good natural temper, and of my good husbandry, and
that I had no poor kindred come after me to be any charge or burthen
to her daughter, ... proposed to me that she would give me a hundred
pounds with her to set up.... So the maid and I were made sure by
promise, and I was resolved to have the maid to wife, and to keep a
broker's shop, and lend money on pawns, and grow rich as others did."
Muggleton had not yet been admitted to the freedom of the city, and
the marriage was arranged to take place after he should have done so.
In the meantime he found himself working side by side with William
Reeve, Prophet John Reeve's brother, at this time a "very zealous
Puritan," with whom he talked of his prospects. "I loved the maid,
and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people were
horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a usurer,
and they "threatened great judgments, and danger of damnation
hereafter."

It is clear that the frightful eschatology of the time was exercising
a far greater power upon the imagination of the masses than anything
else. People were dwelling upon all that was terrible and gloomy in
the picture of a future life; the one thought with the visionaries
was this--Save yourselves from the wrath to come. "I was extremely
fearful of eternal damnation," says Muggleton, "thinking my soul
might go into hell fire without a body, as all people did at that
time."

There was evidently a struggle between conviction and inclination,
and it ended as we should have expected--the marriage was broken off.
Then followed some years of vehement religious conflict; "Neither did
I hear any preach in these days but the Puritan ministers, whose hair
was cut short. _For if a man with long hair had gone_ into the
pulpit to preach, I would have gone out of the Church again, though
he might preach better than the other." All through this time visions
of hell and torment, and devils and damnation troubled him; now and
then there were "elevations in my mind, but these were few and far
between; a while after all was lost again." He soon consoled himself
for his matrimonial disappointment; he married and had three
daughters, then his first wife died. He throve in his calling, "only
the spirit of fear of hell was still upon me, but not so extreme as
it was before." He took a second wife, and the civil war began.

"And generally the Puritans were all for the Parliament, and most of
my society and acquaintance did fall away and declined in love one
towards another. Some of them turned to Presbytery, and some turned
Independents; others fell to be Ranters, and some fell to be mere
Atheists. So that our Puritan people were so divided and scattered in
our religion, that I was altogether at a loss; for all the zeal we
formerly had was quite worn out. For I had seen the utmost perfection
and satisfaction that could be found in that way, except I would do
it for loaves, _but loaves was never my aim."_

The civil war ran its course, but Muggleton cared nothing for the
general course of events. What were kings and bishops and Lords and
Commons to him? he was living in quite another world. As for Laud and
Strafford, and Pym and Hampden, he does not even once name them. He
makes not the slightest allusion to the death of Charles the First,
though he was living within half a mile of Whitehall when the king's
head fell on the block. Prophets of the Muggleton type are so busied
about their own souls and their own spiritual condition, that the
battles, murders, and sudden deaths of other men, great or small,
give them no concern whatever.

A couple of years or so after the execution of the king, "it came to
pass I heard of several prophets and prophetesses that were about the
streets.... Also I heard of two other men that were counted greater
than prophets--to wit, John Tannye and John Robins. John Tannye, he
declared himself to be the Lord's High Priest, therefore he
circumcised himself according to the law. Also he declared that he
was to gather the Jews out of all nations,... with many other strange
and wonderful things. And as for John Robins, he declared himself to
be God Almighty. Also he said that he had raised from the dead
several of the prophets, as Jeremiah and others. Also I saw several
others of the prophets that was said to be raised by him, _for I
have had nine or ten of them at my house at a time, of those that
were said to be raised from the dead."_

Is madness contagious? Or is it that, while the sane can exercise but
a very limited power over the insane, there is no limit to the
influence which the insane can gain over one another? Living in a
world of their own, where delusions pass for palpable facts, where
the logical faculty accepts the wildest visions as of equal
significance with actual realities, these dreamers have a calculus of
their own which includes the symbols in use among the sane, but
comprehends besides a notation which these latter attach no meaning
to, reject, and deride.

"Would you be so kind as tell me, sir, what's a ohm?" said the worthy
Mr. Stiggins to me the other day. "It's a modern term used in
electricity, which I am too ignorant to explain to you." He looked
full at me for more than five seconds without a word then he said,
"I'm thinking that this man was a fool to talk about ohms when not
even you knew what a ohm means. And he came from Cambridge College
too, and he's got a vote! I reckon when a man can't talk the same as
other folks he'd ought to be shut up." Indignant Stiggins! But are we
not all intolerant?

John Robins had acquired an almost unlimited ascendency over his
crazy prophets, and speedily acquired the like ascendency over
Muggleton. What specially fascinated him was that all John Robins's
prophets "had power from him to damn any that did oppose or speak
evil of him. So his prophets gave sentence of damnation upon many, to
my knowledge, for speaking evil of him, they not knowing him whether
he was true or false." Muggleton was profoundly impressed, but
according to his own account he was a silent observer, and waited.
One of the prophets often came to his house and was welcome; he
"spake as an angel of God, and I never let him go without eating and
drinking," for Muggleton was a man of large appetite and demanded
large supplies of food, nor did he stint himself of meat and drink or
withhold creature comforts from those he loved.

Just at this time Muggleton "fell into a melancholy." He had arrived
at the prophetic age--he had completed his fortieth year. "Then did
two motives arise in me and speak in me as two lively voices, as if
two spirits had been speaking in me, one answering the other as if
they were not my own spirit." So that our noble laureate was
anticipated by two centuries, unless indeed the "two lively voices"
make themselves heard at times to most men who have ears to hear
them. Muggleton's voices were not very high-toned voices; they were
voices that spake of heaven and hell, nothing more. Love and duty
never seem to have formed the subject of his meditations. "For I did
not so much mind to be saved, as I did to escape being damn'd. For I
thought, if I could but lie still in the earth for ever, it would be
as well with me as it would be if I were in eternal happiness... for
I did not care whether I was happy so I might not be miserable. I
cared not for heaven so I might not go to hell. These things pressed
hard upon my soul, even to the wounding of it."

The battle within him went on fiercely for some time, and it ended as
we should have expected. "I was so well satisfied in my mind as to my
eternal happiness, that I was resolved now to be quiet and to get as
good a living as I could in this world and live as comfortably as I
could here, thinking that this revelation should have been beneficial
to nobody but myself." The "motional voices," and visions, and
questionings, continued from April 1651 to January 1652; and it was
during this time that the intimacy between Muggleton and Reeve became
more closely cemented, for "John Reeve was so taken with my language
that his desires were _extreme earnest_ that he might have the
same revelation as I had. His desires were so great that he was
troublesome unto me, for if I went into one room, into another, he
would follow me to talk to me." His persistence was rewarded, and
just when Muggleton's visions ceased "in the month of January 1652,
about the middle of the month, John Reeve came to me very joyful and
said, Cousin Lodowick, now said he, I know what revelation of
Scripture is as well as thee." Reeve's revelations increased, and
never ceased for two weeks. "First visions, then by voice of words to
the hearing of the ear three mornings together the third, fourth, and
fifth days of February, 1652, and the year of John Reeve's life
forty-two, and the year of my life forty-one."

Two men in this curious ecstatic condition obviously could not stop
at this point. It was a critical moment--would they enter into
rivalry or spiritual partnership? If the latter, then who was to be
the leader, who would make the first move? It was soon settled.

"The first evening God _spake_ to John Reeve he came to my house
and said, Cousin Lodowick, God hath given thee unto me for ever, and
the tears ran down both sides his cheeks amain. So I asked him what
was the matter, for he looked like one that had been risen out of the
grave, he being a fresh-coloured man the day before, but the tears
ran down his cheeks apace." John Reeve was not yet prepared to
deliver his commission with authority; it was coming, but not yet.
Meanwhile he turned to Muggleton's children and pronounced them
blessed, "but especially thy daughter Sarah, she shall be the teacher
of all the women in London." Sarah was hiding on the stairs and was
not a little afraid; she was a girl of fourteen, but she accepted her
mission there and then.

She proved to be a valuable helper, "and several persons came
afterwards to my house more to discourse with her than us, and they
marvelled that one so young should have such knowledge and wisdom."
Next day John Reeve came again, and Muggleton was pronounced to be
the _mouth_ of the new revelation, "as Aaron was given to be
Moses' mouth."

The first thing to be done was to depose the other two prophets,
Robins and Tannye, and to hoise them on their own petard. It had to
be seen who could damn hardest. For one moment even Muggleton's stout
heart failed, he would take another with him to be present at the
great trial of strength. He called upon a certain Thomas Turner to
accompany him, "else you must be cursed to all eternity. But his wife
was exceeding wroth and fearful, and she said, if John Reeve came
again to her husband that she would run a spit in his guts, so John
Reeve cursed her to eternity." Whereupon Turner, appalled by the
sentence, complied with the order and went. The three presented
themselves before the other madman, and John Reeve uttered his
testimony, denouncing him as a false prophet and gave him a month to
repent of his misdeeds. When the month had elapsed Reeve wrote the
sentence of eternal damnation upon him "and left it at his lodging,
and after a while he and his great matters perished in the sea. For
he made a little boat to carry him to Jerusalem, and going to Holland
to call the Jews there, he and one Captain James was cast away and
drowned, so all his powers came to nothing."

The day after the interview with Tannye, the prophets proceeded to
deal with John Robins. He had been thrown into Bridewell by Cromwell,
and there he lay, his worshippers still resorting to him for any one
with money could visit a prisoner in gaol as often as he pleased.
When the prophets appeared at the gate empty handed, the keeper as a
matter of course refused them admittance. Then said John Reeve to the
keeper, "Thou shall never be at peace." By and by they were shown
where Robins's cell was; they summoned him to the window, and a
strange interview took place, which is minutely described. It ended
by Reeve delivering his charge and pronouncing his sentence. Many had
been the crimes of John Robins. He had ruined and deceived men in a
multitude of ways; among others "thou givest them leave to abstain by
degrees from all kinds of food, thou didst feed them with windy
things, as apples and other fruit that was windy, and they drank
nothing but water; therefore look what measure thou hast measured to
others we will measure again to thee."

John Robins was utterly mastered; "he pulled his hands off the grates
and laid them together and said, It is finished; the Lord's will be
done." In two months he had written a letter of recantation, was
released from durance, and is heard of no more.

"Thus the reader may see that these two powers were brought down in
these two days' messages from the Lord."

The world was all before them now. It remained that the new prophets
should have some distinctive dogma, and that the printing press
should be called in as an accessory to spread their fame. Again John
Reeve took the lead, and in 1652 he wrote an account of his divine
commission and published his first work, _A Transcendant Spiritual
Treatise_, which told of his last revelation of the message to
Tannye and Robins.

While the book was passing through the press the prophets lived by
their trade, and made no attempt to preach before any assembly. They
_talked_ incessantly, and they cursed liberally. At last the
children in the streets began to follow Reeve and pelt him, crying
after him, "There goes the prophet that damns people!" Muggleton,
meanwhile, was always ready to meet an inquirer, and to eat and drink
with him. "On one occasion an old acquaintance would needs have me
drink with him, that he might have some talk with me, and there
followed a neighbour of his, a gentleman, as we call them; his name
was Penson, and he sat down in our company." Soon Penson began to
deride and abuse the prophet; whereupon Muggleton calmly "did
pronounce this Penson cursed to eternity." Penson did not like being
damned under the circumstances. "Then he rose up, and with both his
fists smote upon my head... But it came to pass that this Penson was
sick immediately after, and in a week or ten days after he died, much
troubled in his mind, and tormented insomuch that his friends and
relations sought to apprehend me for a witch, he being a rich man,
but they couldn't tell how to state the matter, so they let it fall."

It is pretty clear that John Reeve was from the first disposed to go
beyond his brother prophet; and shortly after the incident of
Penson's death Reeve made a grand _coup_, which produced a
profound impression. Muggleton had damned a _gentleman_. Reeve
tried his power upon the same class, and succeeded in actually
converting two of them, who were influential men among the Ranters.
The Ranters were startled and puzzled. "And it came to pass that one
of these Ranters kept a victualling house and sold drink in the
Minories, and they would spend their money there. So John Reeve and
myself came there, and many of them despised our declaration. So John
Reeve gave sentence of eternal damnation upon many of them, and one
of them, being more offended than all the rest, was moved with such
wrath and fury that five or six men could hardly keep him off, his
fury was so hot. Then John Reeve said unto the people standing by,
'Friends,' said he, 'I pray you stand still on both sides of the
room, and let there be a space in the middle, and I will lay down my
head upon the ground and let this furious man tread upon my head and
do what he will unto me....' So John Reeve pulled off his hat and
laid his face flat to the ground, and the people stood still. So the
man came running with great fury, and when he came near him, lifting
up his foot to tread on his neck, the man started back again and
said, 'No, I scorn to tread upon a man that lieth down to me.' And
the people all marvelled at this thing."

Though Muggleton does not make much of this incident, it appears to
have been a very important one in the early history of the sect, for
from this moment the numbers of Muggletonians began to increase, and
they began to absorb a small army of wandering monomaniacs who were
roaming about London and talking about _religion_, and visions,
and revelations, and attaching themselves first to one body and then
to another, according as they could get admission to the meeting-
houses and be allowed to preach and harangue. Astrologers too, came
and conferred with the prophets, and drunken scoffers laid bets that
they would get the prophet's blessing; and on one occasion a company
of "Atheistical Ranters" made a plot to turn the tables upon
Muggleton, and damn him and Reeve. Three of "the most desperatest"
agreed to do it. "So the time appointed came, and there was prepared
a good dinner of pork, and the three came ready prepared to curse
us." Part of the agreement was that the dinner should follow upon the
cursing. But whether it was that the rogues could do nothing until
they were fortified with drink, or that a sudden spasm of
conscientiousness came upon them, or that they were like
superstitious people who with blanched lips loudly protest that they
do not believe in ghosts, but decline on principle to walk through a
churchyard after dark, these three fellows all ran away from their
engagements at the eleventh hour. "So they departed without their
dinner of pork."

The prophets were becoming notorious. The Ranters and John Robins had
been vanquished; their first book was published and was selling; they
were advertising themselves widely, and being advertised by friends
and foes; but as yet they had not been persecuted, and as yet they
had not put very prominently forward any distinctive or special
theology. They claimed to be prophets, but their mission, What was
it? What were they charged to proclaim?

It was just about this time that the works of Jacob Boehm had begun
to exercise a very great influence upon the visionaries in England.
The _Mercurius Teutonicus_ was first published in an English
translation in 1649, and the _Signatura_ _Rerum_ had appeared
in 1651. Muggleton had certainly read these books, and as certainly
turned them to account. The jargon of the German mystic was exactly
what he wanted in his present state of mind, and there was that
in the new philosophy which commended itself vastly to him. Not
that he, as an inspired prophet, could for one moment admit that he
had received any light from man or was under any obligation to
anything but the divine illumination enlightening him directly and
immediately; but the obligation was there all the same, and to Jacob
Boehm's influence we must attribute the evolution of the distinctive
doctrine of the Muggletonians, which just about this time comes into
obtrusive prominence.

It was at the beginning of the year 1653 that the prophets made their
first important convert. Up to this time they had been heard of only
in the back streets of London. But now a New England merchant named
Leader, who had made a fortune in America, and had come back in
disgust at the intolerance and persecution that prevailed among the
colonists, made advances to Muggleton. Leader was in a despondent
state of mind, and on the lookout for a religion with some novelty in
it. He too had, it seems, been a student of Jacob Boehm, and the
_Signatura Rerum_ had opened out a new line of speculation to
him. "His first question was concerning God--whether God, that
created all things, could admit of being any form of Himself?"

Prophets are never at a nonplus, and never surprised by a question;
the more transcendental the problem, the more need for the prophetic
gift to solve it. In fact, the prophet comes in to help when all
human cunning is at fault.

Accordingly Mr. Leader's question led to a discussion which is all
set down at full for those who choose to read it, and as the result
of that discussion comes out into clearness the astounding
declaration which henceforth appears as the main article of the
Muggletonian theology.

"God hath a body of His own, as man hath a body of his own; only
God's body is spiritual and heavenly, clear as _christial_,
brighter than the sun, swifter than thought, yet a body."

Hitherto the prophets had been groping after a formula which might be
their strength, but they had not been able to put it into shape.
Jacob Boehm's mysticism, passing through the alembic of such a mind
as Leader's, and subjected to that occult atmosphere which Muggleton
lived in, came forth in the shape of a new theology, transcendental,
unintelligible, but therefore celestial and sublime. The prophets
from this moment made a new departure.

Meanwhile, the unhesitating and authoritative damning of opponents
exercised a strange fascination over the multitude. Reeve and
Muggleton lived among the blackguards at their first start, and they
damned the blackguards pretty freely. In numberless instances the
blackguards were to all intents and purposes damned before
Muggleton's sentence was pronounced. They were fellows given over to
drink and debauchery, sots who had not much life in them, scoundrels
who were in hiding, skulking in the vilest holes of the city, whom
the plague or famine would be likely to rid the world of any day.
They died frequently enough after the sentence was pronounced, and it
is quite conceivable that the sentence may have hastened the end of
many a poor wretch who had nothing to live for. Nay, in more cases
than one a timid man, when the sentence was passed, was so terrified
that he took to his bed there and then, and never rose from it, or
became insane, neglected his business, and so was ruined; and as the
number of the damned was always increasing, the chances of strange
accidents and misfortunes would go on increasing also. People heard
of these, and of these only.

What the prophets themselves did, it was only natural that their
followers would try to do also; indeed, it is wonderful that the
damning prerogative was not invaded much oftener than it was. It was
very rarely intruded upon, however. Once, indeed, a misguided and too
venturous believer named Cooper took upon him to usurp authority, and
pronounced the sentence of damnation upon a small batch of fifteen
scoffers who had jeered at him and the prophet's mission. The
precedent was a dangerous one, there was no telling what it would
lead to if such random and promiscuous damning was to go on. Next day
Cooper fell grievously sick, and conscience smote him; he could not
be at peace till he had confessed his fault and been forgiven. He was
forgiven accordingly, but he was admonished to lay to heart the
warning, and to presume no more. "Not but that I do believe," says
Muggleton, "they will all be damned," all the whole fifteen!

The movement was becoming a nuisance by this time, and Reeve got a
hint, and no obscure one, that a warrant would be issued against him,
"either from General Cromwell, or the Council of State, or from the
Parliament." So far from being deterred by the prospect--was there
ever a prophet who was frightened into silence?--he declared that if
Cromwell or the Parliament should despise him and his mission, "I
would pronounce them damned as I do you!" Though no warrant came from
the Council or Cromwell--a matter much to be regretted--yet a warrant
was taken out by five of the opponents, and the prophets were brought
before the Lord Mayor. As usual, a detailed account is given of the
proceedings, which are valuable as illustrating the method pursued in
those days in the examination of an accused person, and the procedure
of the court--so very different from our modern practice. The
prophets were committed for trial; they refused to give bail, and
were thrown into Newgate. It was the 15th of September, 1653, one of
the great festivals among the believers. The hideous picture of
prison life in Newgate deserves to be read even by those who have
some acquaintance with the horrors of our prisons at this time. The
prophets were well supplied with money, and so were spared some of
the worst sufferings of the place; but it was bad enough, in all
conscience, and one night the two narrowly escaped being hanged in
their own room, and were only saved by five condemned men, who came
to the rescue. Muggleton says the highwaymen and _the boys_ were
most set against him; one of the highwaymen, whenever he saw him in
the Hall, "would come and deride at me, and say, 'You rogue, you
damn'd folks.' And so it was with the boys that were prisoners; they
would snatch off my hat, and pawn it for half-a-dozen of drink. So
the boys did, and I gave them sixpence every time they did it, to
please them." Highly gratifying to the boys!

While the two were in Newgate John Reeve wrote a letter to the Lord
Mayor and another to the Recorder, mildly damning them both. If we
are to believe Muggleton, the Recorder was somewhat disturbed and
alarmed by the sentence. When the day of trial came, Reeve bade the
Lord Mayor hold his peace and be silent, as became a damned man in
the presence of the prophets, and we are told the Mayor obeyed and
said nothing more. The two were condemned, nevertheless, and thrown
into Bridewell for seven months. Under the horrors of that dreadful
imprisonment Reeve's constitution broke down. He was never the same
man again. He languished on, indeed, for four years more, but he was
a dying man, and he spent his time in writing books, his followers
kindly ministering to him in his broken health and feebleness. The
end came to him while visiting some convents at Maidstone--good
women, of course. "The one was Mrs. Frances, the eldest; the second,
Mrs. Roberts; the third, Mrs. Boner. This Mrs. Frances closed up his
eyes, for he said unto her, 'Frances, close up mine eyes, lest my
enemies say I died a staring prophet.'"

While Reeve and Muggleton were lying in Newgate, another mystic--are
we to call him a prophet too?--was lying in Carlisle gaol. George
Fox, the Quaker, had fallen into the hands of Wilfrid Lawson, then
High Sheriff for the county, who had not spared him. Just about the
time that the London prophets were discharged, Fox arrived in London
under the custody of Captain Drury, and had that memorable interview
with Cromwell which readers of Fox's Journal are not likely to
forget, though Carlyle has gone far to spoil the story by slurring it
over.

It was a great event to the Quakers to have their leader in London.
He had only once before been in the Metropolis--that was nine years
ago--and then he had been "fearful," had done nothing, was tongue-
tied, and had gladly escaped to itinerate among the _steeple
houses_ in the north. This time he had gained acceptance with the
Protector. No man would meddle with him from henceforth or let them
look to it! The Quakers were, of course, elated; they were going to
carry all before them; they met to organize a grand campaign for
proselytizing all England. The two _commissionated prophets_
were by no means dismayed, by no means inclined to be outdone by the
Quakers; they invited them to a disputation--a trial of the spirits,
in fact. It came off, accordingly, in Eastcheap, and George Fox was
there, and with him two or three of his "ministers whom the Lord
raised up." It is not a little significant that Fox makes no mention
of this meeting in his Journal-significant because he never omits to
speak of his successes, and never tells us anything of his failures.
Nay, he studiously omits all mention of Muggleton's name throughout
the Journal, and in his books against him indulges in really violent
language. Muggleton, on the other hand, speaks of this discussion at
Eastcheap as if it had been a serious check to the Quakers, and from
this time to his death he never ceased to assail them with a resolute
aggressiveness which indicates no sort of misgiving in his power to
deal with his antagonists. The discussion, however, ended in Fox and
his supporters-five in all-receiving the sentence of damnation from
the two prophets, and from this moment there was internecine war
between the Quakers and the Muggletonians; each denouncing the other
fiercely, and issuing books against the other by the score-works
which have happily been long ago forgotten, to the great advantage of
mankind. If, however, any one, curious in such lore, is desirous of
finding out what cursing and swearing, regarded as one of the Fine
Arts, may achieve when skilfully managed by adepts, let him by all
means turn to the pamphlets of Pennington, Richard Farnsworth, and
others of the Quaker body, while delivering their souls against
Muggleton, and the counterblasts of Muggleton, Claxton, and their
friends in reply. One of the choicest diatribes of these _esprits
forts_, as we may well call them, was hurled at the prophet by
William Penn.

Muggleton had some very zealous converts at Cork--for there were
believers everywhere by this time--and as they were people of
substance and much in favour, they were making some way. Of course
they came into collision with the Quakers, and not without success.
Penn had early fallen under the influence of Richard Farnsworth, whom
Muggleton had damned in 1654, and Penn's father had sent him over to
manage his Irish estates, in the hope of getting the new notions out
of the young man's head. The experiment failed, and young Penn, now
only twenty-four years old, had returned to England in 1668 as
staunch a Quaker as ever. There was a leading man among the Quakers,
Josiah Cole by name, whom Muggleton had solemnly damned; he was in
failing health, and he died a few days after the sentence was
pronounced. The Muggletonians were jubilant, and some of the Quakers
were disturbed and alarmed. Penn's heart was moved within him, and
with all the fervid indignation of youth he stepped forward to draw
the sword of the Lord. He printed a letter to Muggleton which should
reassure the waverers. It thundered out defiance. "Boast not," he
says, "thou enemy of God, thou son of perdition and confederate with
the unclean croaking spirits reserved under chains to eternal
darkness.... I boldly challenge thee with thy six-foot God and all
the host of Luciferian spirits, with all your commissions, curses,
and sentences, to touch and hurt me. And this know, O Muggleton: on
you I trample, and to the bottomless pit are you sentenced, from
whence you came, and where the endless worm shall gnaw and torture
your imaginary soul."

Muggleton replied with his usual coolness, and pronounced his
sentence upon the young enthusiast. Neither was a man easily to be
put down; but whereas the prophet's followers were wholly unmoved by
all the attacks upon them, the Quakers found the Muggletonians
extremely troublesome, and it is impossible to resist the conviction
that large numbers of the Quakers were won over to join the opposite
camp. Nay, it looks as if Muggleton had really some strange power
over the weaker vessels among the Quakers, and had actually
_frightened_ some of them. Writing in 1670, he says: "You are
not like the people you were sixteen years ago; there were few
Quakers then, but they had witchcraft fits, but now of late I do not
hear of any Quaker that hath any fits, no, not so much as to buz and
hum before the fit comes. But if you, Fox, doth know of any of you
Quakers that have any of those witchcraft fits as formerly, bring
them to me, and I shall cast out that devil which causeth those
fits." The Quakers could hardly have been as angry as they were, nor
their books have been so many and their writers so voluble during
twenty years and longer, if Muggleton had not been a disputant to be
dreaded, and a prophet with the faculty of drawing others after him.

In the whole course of his career, which extended over nearly half a
century, Muggleton never found any difficulty in maintaining his
authority over his followers. There were indeed two attempts at
mutiny, but they were promptly suppressed, and they collapsed before
they had made any head. The first was in 1660, shortly after the
death of John Reeve. Lawrence Claxton, a "great writer" among the
Muggletonians, had during Reeve's long illness come very much to the
fore as an opponent of the Quakers, and his success had a little
turned his head. In one passage of his writings he had taken rank as
Reeve's equal and representative, and had put himself on a level with
"the Commissionated." It was an awful act of impiety. "For," says
Muggleton, "as John Reeve was like unto Elijah, so am I as Elisha,
and his place was but as Gehazi, and could stand no longer than my
will and pleasure was." Claxton had been formally blessed, therefore
he could never be damned, but excommunicated he could be and was. He
at once dropt out and we hear of him no more.

The second revolt was much more serious. "There were four
conspirators in the rebellion... for which I damned two of them, and
the other two I did excommunicate." This time the fomenter of discord
was a busy Scotchman. Muggleton calls him Walter Bohenan, which
appears to be only a _bhonetic_ representation of Walter
_Buchanan_. That so sagacious a seer as Muggleton should have
been betrayed into associating himself intimately with a canny Scot
is truly wonderful, and illustrates the eternal verity that "we are
all of us weak at times," even the prophets. _Bohenan's_ self-
assertion led him on to dizzy heights of towering presumption, until
at last "he acted the highest act of rebellion that ever was acted."
It was all in vain; he was cut off for ever--perished from the
congregation; utterly damned, and thereupon disappears, swallowed up
of darkness and silence.

Muggleton lived twenty-six years after this last revolt, exercising
unquestioned authority; an autocratic prophet to whom something like
worship was offered even to the last. He was far advanced in his
eighty-ninth year when he died. He was far on towards seventy when he
was brought before Jeffreys, then Common Serjeant, and other
justices, on a charge of blasphemy. Jeffreys was as yet a novice in
those arts of which he became the acknowledged master a few years
after, but already he quite equalled his future self in his savage
brutality to the poor monomaniac. "He was a man," says Muggleton,
"whose voice was very loud; but he is one of the worst devils in
nature." The jury hesitated to bring in their verdict, knowing well
enough what would follow, but Jeffrey's look and manner cowed them.
The prophet was condemned to pay a fine of L 500, to stand in the
pillory three times for two hours _without the usual protection to
his head_, which those condemned to such a barbarous punishment
were allowed. He was to have his books burned by the common hangman,
and to remain in Newgate till his fine was paid. Only a man of an
iron constitution could have come out of the ordeal with his life.
Muggleton bore it all; remained in Newgate for a year, compounded for
his fine in the sum of L 100, which his friends advanced, and was a
free man on the 19th of July, 1677, a day which the Muggletonians
observed as the prophet's Hegira.

As early as 1666 he had many followers on the Continent, and in that
year the _Transcendant Spiritual Treatise_ was translated into
German by a convert who came over to London to confer with the sage.
Except on very rare occasions he never left London, nor indeed the
parish in which he was born. He pursued the trade of a tailor till
late in life, but his books had sold largely, and he managed to get
together a competence, and was at one time worried by his neighbours
and fined for refusing to serve in some parish offices. There was a
fund of sagacity about the man which appears frequently in his later
letters, but an utter absence of all sentiment and all sympathy. He
had no _nerves_. Staid, stern, and curiously insensible to
physical pain, he was absolutely fearless, with a constitution that
could defy any hardships and bear any strain upon it.

When we come to the _teaching_ of Muggleton, we find ourselves
in a tangled maze of nonsense far too inconsequential to allow of any
intelligible account being given of it. Jacob Boehm's mistiest dreams
are clearness itself compared with the English prophet's utterances.
Others might talk of the divine cause or the divine power or the
divine person, "fumbling exceedingly" and falling back in an
intellectual swoon upon the stony bosom of the Unknowable. Muggleton
grimly told you that there was a personal Trinity in the universe--
God, man, and devil--and each had his body. If you pressed him for
further particulars he poured forth words that might mean anything, a
metallic jargon which you were ordered to receive and ponder. Such as
it was, however, you had to accept or reject it at your peril. Why
should an inspired prophet argue?

Something must be set down to the circumstances in which he found
himself, and to the dreadfully chaotic condition which the moral
sentiments and religious beliefs of the multitude had been reduced to
during the wild anarchy of the seventeenth century. There were two
men in England who were _quite certain_--George Fox was one,
Muggleton was the other. Everybody else was doubting, hesitating,
groping for the light, moaning at the darkness. These two men
_knew_, other people were seeking to know. George Fox went forth
to win the world over from darkness to light. Muggleton stayed at
home, he _was_ the light. They that wanted it must come to him
to find it. All through England there was clamour and hubbub of many
voices, men going to and fro, always on the move, trying experiments
of all kinds. Here was one man, "a still strong man in a blatant
land," who was calm, steadfast, unmovable, and always at home. He did
not want you, whoever you were; he was perfectly indifferent to you
and your concerns. Preach? No! he never preached, he never cared to
speak till he was spoken to. If you went to him as an oracle, then he
spake as a god.

Moreover, when the Restoration came and the high pressure that had
been kept up in some states of society was suddenly taken off, there
was a frantic rage for pleasure, which included the wildest
debauchery and the most idiotic attempts at amusement. Then, too, the
haste to be rich agitated the minds of all classes; Westward ho! was
the cry not only of Pilgrim Fathers but of reckless adventurers of
all kinds. From across the sea came the ships of Tarshish bringing
gold, and silver, and ivory, and apes, and peacocks, and a thousand
tales of El Dorado. Muggleton the prophet, with that lank brown hair
of his and the dreamy eye and the resolute lips, waited unmoved.
Pleasure? If he wondered at anything it was to know what meaning
there could be in the word. Riches? What purpose could they serve? To
him it seemed that the Decalogue contained one wholly superfluous
enactment; why should men covet? There would have been some reason in
limiting the number of the commandments to nine; nine is the product
of three times three. Think of that! This man in that wicked age must
have appeared to many a standing miracle, if only for this reason,
that he was the one man in London who was content, passing his days
in a stubborn rapture, as little inclined for play or laughter as the
sphinx in the desert, which the sand storms can beat against but
never stir.

So far from Muggleton's influence and authority growing less as he
grew older, it went on steadily increasing; there was a mystery and
an awe that gathered round him, and latterly he was regarded rather
as an inspired oracle than as a seer. The voice of prophecy ceased;
he had left his words on record for all future ages, but from day to
day his advice was asked, and people soon found it was worth
listening to. In the latter years of his life his letters dealt with
the ordinary affairs of men. People wrote to inquire about their
matrimonial affairs, their quarrels, their business difficulties,
whether they must conform to this or that enactment of the State, how
they might outwit the persecutors and skulk behind the law. Muggleton
replies with surprising shrewdness and good sense, and now and then
exhibits a familiarity with the quips and quirks of the law that he
can only have acquired by the necessity which suffering had laid upon
him. His language is always rugged, for he had received little or no
education; he is very unsafe in his grammar, but he has a plain,
homely vocabulary, forcible and copious, which, like most mystics, he
was compelled to enrich on occasion, and which he does not scruple to
enrich in his own way. His style certainly improves as he gets older,
and in these letters one meets now and then with passages that are
almost melodious, the sentences following one another in a kind of
plaintive rhythm, and sounding as you read them aloud, like a
Gregorian chant. He died of natural decay, the machine worn out. His
last words were, "Now hath God sent death unto me." They laid him on
his bed, and he slept and woke not. Nearly 250 of the faithful
followed him to his grave. It is clear that the sect had not lost
ground as time moved on.

Not the least feature in this curious chapter of religious history is
that the Muggletonians should have survived as a sect to our own
days. As late as 1846 an elaborate index to the Muggletonian writings
was issued, and the _Divine Songs of the Muggletonians_, written
exclusively by believers, show that there has been a strange
continuity of composition among them, and that, too, such composition
as ordinary mortals have never known the like of. Yet Muggleton never
broke forth into verse. Joanna Southcott could not keep down her
impulse to pour forth her soul in metre; Muggleton is never excited,
the emotional had no charm for him. So, too, he never cared for
music, he makes no allusion to it. Nay, he speaks slightingly of
worship, of prayer and praise, especially of congregational worship.
It was allowable to the little men, a concession to the weak which
the strong in the faith might be expected to dispense with sooner or
later. For himself, isolated and self-contained, he could do without
the aids to faith which the multitude ask for and find support in. He
held himself aloof; he had no sympathy to offer, he asked for none;
nay, he did not even need his followers, he could do without them.
The question for them was, Could they do without him? For more than
two centuries they have kept on vehemently answering No!

Of late years a class of specialists has risen up among us who have
treated us to quite a new philosophy--to wit, the philosophy of
religion. To these thinkers I leave the construction of theories on
Muggleton's place in the history of religion or philosophy; to them,
too, I leave the question of what was the secret of his success and
power. Much more interesting to me is the problem how the sect has
gone on retaining its vitality. Perhaps the great secret of that
permanence has been that Muggleton did not give his followers too
much to believe or too much to do. He disdained details, he was never
precise and meddlesome. If the Muggletonians wished to pray, let
them; to sing, there was no objection; to meet together in their
conventicles, it was a harmless diversion. But they must manage these
things themselves, and provide for difficulties as they arose. It was
no part of the prophet's office to make bye-laws which might require
to be altered any day. Thus it came about that the sect was left at
Muggleton's death absolutely unfettered by any petty restraints upon
its freedom of development. The believers must manage their own
affairs. There is one God and Muggleton is His prophet--that was
really the sum and substance of their creed. That followed on a small
scale which is observable on a large scale among the Moslems, the
prophet's followers found themselves more and more thrown back upon
their prophet till he became almost an object of adoration. The creed
of Islam without Mahomet would be to millions almost inconceivable;
the Muggletonian God without Muggleton would not be known.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Says her Royal Highness, looking over my shoulder, "You have written
quite enough about those crazy, vulgar people. It's all old world
talk. There are no prophets now; there never will be any more."

No more prophets! The _prophetical succession_ never stops,
never will stop. When Muggleton died Emanuel Swedenborg was a boy of
ten; twenty years afterwards the new prophet was walking about London
just as the old one had done, living the same lonely life, conversing
with the angels and writing of heaven and hell and conjugal love,
and--well, a great deal else besides; and, odd coincidence, it was in
that same Eastcheap where Muggleton had damned the Quakers in 1653
that the Swedenborgians held their first assembly in 1788, just about
the same time that Joanna Southcott came to London, and before Joseph
Smith and Brigham Young were born or thought of. No, no. The prophets
are not improved off the face of the earth. They never will be. They
will turn up again and again. You can no more hope to exterminate
them by culture than you can hope to produce them by machinery.
_Propheta nascitur non fit_. For once her Royal Highness was
wrong.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMING OF THE FRIARS ***

This file should be named cmfrs10.txt or cmfrs10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, cmfrs11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, cmfrs10a.txt

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*

