Yale University Library

39002029129799

YALE UNIVERSITY
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
LIBRARY

The Abbey of "Our Lady of the Fountains.'

THE
RUINED ABBEYS OF
GREAT BRITAIN

BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
F.A.I.A., F.R.G.S.
Author of " Church Building,'^ etc.

NEW YORK
JAMES POTT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

FOREWORD
I HUMBLY crave leave, before I advance
any farther, publickly to profess myself to
be a sincere, though very unworthy Mem
ber of the Church of England, and that I have
as true and as hearty Affection for her Interest
as perhaps any other Person whatsoever. And
yet I cannot but here publickly declare that I
think it would have been more happy for Her,
as well as for the Nation in general had King
Henry VIII. only reformed and not destroyed
the Abbeys and other Religious Houses. Mo
nastic Institution is very ancient, and it had been
very laudable had he reduced the Manner of
Worship to the Primitive Form."
From the preface to Dugdale's Monasticon edition of 1718.

CONTENTS
Page
IJST OF ILLtrSTEATIONS xi
I INTRODUCTION 1
n GLASTONBURY 27
III LINDISPARNE AND WHITBY 48
IV BEAULIBU AND NETLEY 72
V TINTERN 94
VI GISBURGH AND BOLTON 113
vn JEDBURGH AND KELSO 132
Vm RIEVAULX AND BYLAND 153
IX MELROSE AND DRYBUBGH 171
X KIRKSTALL 192
XI ST. Mary's york 209
XII MALMESBURY 229
XIII OUR LADY OF THE FOUNTAINS 247
XIV CONCLUSION 271

[ix]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOUNTAINS ABBEY Frontispiece FACING PAGE
GLASTONBURY — doorway of st. Joseph's chapel 1
NETLEY 5
FOUNTAINS — JOHN of Kent's "ninb aivtahs" 12
WHITBY 16
GLASTONBURY THE SOUTH CHOIR AISLE 27
THB RUINS FROM THE EAST 33
BT. JOHN'S TOWER FROM THB RUINS 37
THE WEST DOOR OP THE GREAT CHURCH 40
A TRANSEPT CHAPEL 40
THE abbot's KITCHEN 44
LINDISPARNE AND WHITBY
WHITBY — FROM THB SITE OF THB HONKS' GBAVETARD 48
WHITBY ABBBy FROM OVER THE MONKS' FIBH POND S3
WHITBY — WHERE THE WINDS HAVE GNAWED AT WILL 56
WHITBY — THE GHOST OF GREATNESS 60
UNDISFARNB — THB NAVE, LOOKING WEST 65
LINDISFARNE — THE NORTH AISLE 65
LINDISFARNE — VIEW OF THE ABBEY FROM THE WEST 69
BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
NETLEY — IN THE CLOISTERS 72
NETLBT — THE MONKS' GARDEN 76
NETLEY — THE MONKS' DOOR TO THE CHURCH 80
NETLEY 85
BEAULIEU — THE CLOISTER GARTH 92
BEAULIEU — THE CHAPTER HOUSE PORTAL 92

[xi]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TINTERN TACING PAGE
TINTERN ABBEY — THE CROSSING 97
IINTEBN ABBEY — FROM THE RIVER WYE 101
TINTERN ABBET — THE WEST FRONT 104
TINTERN ABBET — THE NORTH TRANSEPT AND CLOISTER GARTH 108
TINTERN ABBET — THE INTERIOR, LOOKING EAST 112
GISBURGH AND BOLTON
GISBURGH ABBEY FROM THB GARDEN 117
GISBURGH ABBET — A RUINED SANCTUARY 120
BOLTON ABBEY — PRIOR MOON's UNFTNISHED TOWER 124
BOLTON ABBET — FROM THE SITE OP THE PRIOR's LODGINGS 129
JEDBURGH AND KELSO
JEDBURGH ABBEY — THE WRECK OF GLORY 133
JEDBURGH ABBET AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER 136
THE WEST FRONT OF JEDBURGH ABBEY 140
JEDBURGH ABBET — THE CLOISTER DOOR 144
KEISO ABBET ¦ — A FEUDAL SANCTUARY 149
IN THE CLOISTER — GARTH OF KElaO 152
RTEVAULX AND BYLAND
RIEVAULX ABBET 156
RIEVAULX — THE MONKS' VALLEY 161
RIEVAULX — A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY MASTERPIECE 165
ALL THAT IS LEFT OF PROUD BTLAND 168
MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
WEST DOOR OF DRYBURGH 172
DRYBURGH ABBET 176
UNDER THE TOWER OF MELROSE 181
MELROSE — THE TRAIL OP THE ENGLISH ARMT 184
MELROSE ABBET 188
KIRKSTALL IN THE CHAPTER HOUSE 193
KIRKSTALL BEFORE ITS RESTORATION 197
KIRKSTALL ABBET 200
KIRKSTALL FROM THE RIVER BANK 204
KIRKSTALL ABBEY 208

[Xii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ST. MARY'S, YORK pacing page
YORK — THE HIGH TIDE OF CHRISTIAN ART 213
YORK — THE LAST OF THE TOWER PIERS 216
YORK — THE WEST FRONT 220
MALMESBURY MALMBSBURT — THE NORMAN DOOR 225
MALMESBURY — THE SHATTERED NAVE 229
MALMESBURT ABBEY 236
MALMESBURY — THB NAVE THAT OLIVER CROMWELL WRECKED 240
FOUNTAINS FOUNTAINS — THE UNDERCROFT 245
FOUNTAINS — THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY TOWER 248
FOUNTAINS — THE CHOIR 252
FOUNTAINS — WITHIN THE CLOISTER-GARTH 257
FOUNTAINS — THE SHARDS OF MAJESTT 261
POUNTAINS — NAVE LOOKING EAST 268
MELROSE MELROSE — A GLIMPSE OF THE PRESBYTERIAN WALL 272

[xiii]

Glastonbury — Doorway of St. Joseph's Chapel.

INTRODUCTION
TO the monks England owed her con
version, and to them, in large measure,
her civilization. For a thousand years
monasticism flourished within her borders, suffer
ing sometimes from failure, more often and more
grievously from uncontrolled success, majestic
always, and beneficent, though not always after
the same model. In five years the material fabric
was annihilated, but its memory remains, and
will endure forever; this alone persecution was
powerless to destroy.
It is hard for us of the twentieth century to
form an adequate idea of the enormous propor
tions of English monasticism during the Middle
Ages, or of the position it occupied in the life
and economy of the times. We have been
taught (as we have inherited the implicit belief)
that, however pure it may have been in some
mythical, far-off time, monasticism at the acces
sion of Henry VIII. had degenerated into a
poisonous canker in the body politic, richly
meriting the sudden and terrible fate that then
[1]

INTRODUCTION
befell; or, at the best, "whatever benefits the
monks had conferred upon mankind, and these
were neither few nor slight, they had become
fetters on the advancement of freedom, educa
tion and true religion. . . . They were the un
yielding advocates of an ideal that was passing
away. ... It was unfortunate that they had
thrown themselves down before the car of pro
gress, but there they were, they would not get
up, the car must roll on, for so God Himself
had decided, and hence they were crushed in
its advance."*
We have come to regret, as amateurs, the
unfortunate destruction of noble buildings, price
less books, and wonderful works of art, even
feeling disposed at times to deplore the somewhat
violent and sweeping measures of the Tudor
king and his agents. That English monasticism
was in its essential character no more deserving
of destruction in the years 1536-40 than at any
other time during its life of a thousand years,
and that anything suffered except art, are
thoughts that seldom suggest themselves.
We look on the monastic system as on a special
and peculiar form of religious enthusiasm and
activity, the existence or extinction of which
could have a bearing only on spiritual affairs;
*Prof. A. W. Wishart: " A Short Histoiy of Monks and Monasteries."
[2]

INTRODUCTION
we quite fail to understand that it was a power
in society rivalling even the civil government so
far as the mass of the people were concerned,
and that Henry's blow, while struck ostensibly
at a detail of religious life, fell in actuality on
the most highly organized form of Christian
society then existing.
A monastery was, of course, a house of con
secrated men vowed to poverty, chastity, and
obedience, and bound to praise and glorify God
night and day; but besides this it was a centre
of law, order, education, and mercy, a Christian
citadel in the midst of civil disorder. Some
where, almost as far away as Heaven, were a
king and his court, names only. At close inter
vals armies went raging across the country; why,
few knew, and fewer cared. Now and then
came laggard word of a king slain and of
another reigning in his stead: these were the
affairs of the nobles, the king's men, and they
paid for their knowledge in service and money;
for the people, the thousands over against the
tens, they were matters of profound insignifi
cance. The parish priest was the spiritual
guide, the visible agent of the Church but the
abbey, priory and convent were the signs of
Christian society organized, unfailing, perma
nently operative. [3]

INTRODUCTION
We are prone to forget this aspect of the case,
holding in mind always the idea of consecrated
men and women withdrawn from the world for
the better chastening of their human nature and
the more absolute and unintermittent worship of
God. We fail to remember that the many short
comings and occasional impotence of the civil
government had forced the orders to become
what we should now consider civil as well as
religious agents. The greater orders possessed
vast landed estates freely given by numberless
benefactors, who were themselves originally bene
ficiaries, — estates managed far more justly and
generously than those of secular landlords.
These same orders held other estates in trust,
and acted as guardians for orphans and minors;
they undertook the education of children, the
preparation of candidates for holy orders, the
maintenance of hospitals and asylums, the med
ical service of the neighbourhood, the relief of
the poor, the entertainment of travellers. They
were the teachers of the agricultural population
in all things pertaining to their industry; they
were themselves great producers of grain and
wool; they employed large numbers of men in
building, carving, printing, bell founding; they
were the fosterers of architecture, painting, sculp
ture, illumination, embroidery, gold-smithery,
[43

Netley — Looking down the Nave into the Choir.

INTRODUCTION
and organ building. They were at the same
time fallible men, and their vast responsibilities
sometimes bred failure, sometimes were respon
sible for a grievous falling off in spiritual things ;
but even if they failed now and then as religious,
they succeeded as guardians of society. We
read with amazement it may be of the majestic
pageantry of some abbot's life; but we must
remember that he was not only the head of a
religious house, but as well a chief of the people,
less a monk than a great Christian ruler, taking
the place of secular powers that were frequently
impotent for good. Viewed in this light, con
sidering his enormous responsibilities and the
amazingly varied nature of the functions he was
called upon to perform, we shall find ourselves
able to make allowance for him and for the
priors and monks over whom he ruled. Called
by the insistent clamour of the times to duties
never contemplated by St. Benedict or St.
Robert, the orders lost undoubtedly some por
tion of their original spirituality and self-abne
gation; but, though they acquired a measure of
worldliness, they acquitted themselves nobly of
their new responsibilities, and for century after
century were the guardians, the leaders, the
benefactors of the people.
As we search through England for the melan-
[5]

INTRODUCTION
choly shards of this marvellous institution, find
ing here and there at wide intervals a bit of
crumbling wall, finding sometimes only a name,
it is hard for us to realize how absolutely monas
ticism was a part of the intimate daily experience
of all the people. Fate has left us in general the
ruins of houses aloof from the common routes
of travel and the present centres of population;
it has wiped out utterly even the memory of
hundreds of stately foundations; others have
become cathedrals, and we think of them as
having always been such, but the truth is that
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, one
could not travel a day's journey in any direction
without coming upon some religious house
where hospitality was to be had for the asking.
Indeed in large sections of the country a man
could safely count on leaving the guest house
of one monastery in the morning, dining at
midday at another, supping and sleeping in a
third, and all without overexertion in travel.
Bell answered bell from Lindisfarne in the north
to Netley in the south, and from Yarmouth to
Strata Florida. Thirteen hundred in number
they were and more, counting abbeys, priories,
nunneries, cells, and hospitals, besides twenty-
three hundred and seventy-four free chapels and
chantries. To the common people they were
[6]

INTRODUCTION
the one great material fact in life, as they had
been for generations unnumbered, as they would
be, it surely seemed, for their children and their
children's children to the end of time.
Another point to be remembered is that at
this time, viz., the accession of Henry VIII., the
Church apart from the monasteries was in a
bad way. Early in the fourteenth century the
civil power, exemplified by the French monarchy,
had asserted and established an unwholesome
and impossible supremacy over the Church:
the result had been the exile of the Papacy at
Avignon which, brought to an end by St.
Catherine of Sienna, only gave place to a greater
evil, the Great Schism. "The Babylonian Cap
tivity" lasted seventy-five years, the scandal
of the anti-popes, thirty-five years more. Bishop
Stubbs has called the thirteenth century "the
golden age of the Church." It was this in the
fullest degree, but at the very moment when
Christian civilization had reached its highest
point, the fostering power, the Church, suc
cumbed to secular attacks, was beaten down
into the dust, and through Avignon and the
anti-popes was paralyzed and rendered im
potent to stop the flood of paganism that was
fast rising into the deluge of the Renaissance.
But for the malignant hands of Philip the Fair
[7]

INTRODUCTION
and Charles V., the Church, preserved from
exile, royal tyranny, and schism, might have
successfully resisted the new paganism even
then dawning over the world, but this mercy
was not to be, and the scandals of the fourteenth
century made possible the still greater scandals
of the fifteenth and the cataclysm of that which
followed. In spite of reforming Popes such as Nicholas V.
and Pius II. , Avignon and the Schism bore their
inevitable fruit. Alexander VI., Julius II. and
Leo X. followed, and chaos had come again.
The flood of sin and deadly horror that over
spread the Church on the continent broke on
the cliffs of England and there was stayed; but
if she escaped in a large measure, she was by no
means unscathed, and at this time there were
sufficient evidences of the terrible corruption
that had disgraced the fifteenth-century Church.
The bishops were only too often either ab
sentee Italians or officials of the State; they
were constantly called to high civil office
with all that meant in loss of spirituality and
abandonment of religious functions; pluralism.
non-residence, and alienism were rampant; only
the religious orders, and particularly the Bene
dictines, held in a measure to their spiritual
duties while discharging most acceptably the
[8]

INTRODUCTION
others that had been forced upon them. When
Henry assailed monasticism he laid the axe not
at the root of the moribund tree, but at that of
the strongest and healthiest growth in the
English Church.
And the people themselves knew this in the
fullest degree. At the beginning of the sixteenth
century the masterful and unscrupulous Henry
held England in the leash of utter terrorism.
"As the royal policy disclosed itself, as the
Monarchy trampled under foot the tradition
and reverence of ages gone by, as its figure rose
bare and terrible out of the wreck of old institu
tions, England simply held her breath. It is
only through the stray depositions of royal spies
that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate
which lay seething under this silence of the
people. For the silence was a silence of terror.
Before Cromwell's rise and after his fall from
power, the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed
no more than the common tyranny and blood
shed of the time. But the years of Cromwell's
administration form the one period in our his
tory which deserves the name that men have
given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the
English Terror. . . . All trust in the older bul
warks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as
daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest
[9]

INTRODUCTION
institutions were degraded into instruments of
terror. . . . Cromwell had at last reached his
aim. England lay panic-stricken at the feet
of the ' low-born knave ' as the nobles called
him, who represented the omnipotence of the
crown." *
There were few of the temper of Bishop Fisher
and Sir Thomas More, but for such as there were
was reserved an identical fate; yet the people
rose against the suppression of the monasteries
as in no other instance where Henry's crimes
were concerned. They knew their friends, and
also they knew Henry, Cranmer, and Cromwell.
The fate of the martyred Carthusian priors,
Houghton, Webster, and Lawrence, who were
hanged, drawn, and quartered, and of the nine
monks of Charterhouse, who were slowly starved
to death, was before them; yet in defence of the
monasteries they started an uprising, led by
Robert Aske, that threatened to send Henry's
throne crashing to destruction had he not
crushed it by solemn promises, which, the mo
ment he had the formidable insurrection in
hand, were promptly broken. Henry played
his hand craftily and well; the nobles were of
his own creation or subsidized by him, in either
case utterly in his power; the episcopate he also
*Green: " A History ot the English People."
[10]

INTRODUCTION
had made his own. With incredible swiftness
he crushed the rebellion, rooted out every vestige
of monasticism, took over its almost incalculable
wealth, and not only left the people helpless for
a time and without leaders, but became possessed
of a body of faithful nobles bribed by monastic
lands and of a treasure chest adequate for the
putting down of any revolt that might again
occur. It was a great game in which men such
as Henry VIII. and Thomas Crumwell could
not lose.
We are sometimes tempted to find a certain
justification for the king's course in the complete
complaisance of the higher nobility, who, it must
be confessed, backed him most heartily in all
his schemes; but it was a very different nobility
to that which had existed a century before.
The Wars of the Roses had practically extermi
nated the families ancient in honour, and Henry
was surrounded by a throng of new creations
without blood and without traditions. His atti
tude toward them was quite different to that of
his father: instead of bullying, he subsidized
them, and one and all they soon saw that the
only road to wealth and preferment lay through
the sovereign's favour. In general they were
rapacious, covetous, unprincipled, and irreligious ;
and they saw, as did the king, that the wealth
[11]

INTRODUCTION
most easily obtainable was the wealth of pre
cisely those men who were powerless to resist
spoliation. Such was the state of things when that extraor
dinary personality. Cardinal Wolsey, rose into
supremacy. At the same time beneficent and
baleful, "insatiable in his requisitions, but still
more magnificent in his expense, of extensive
capacity, but still more unbounded enterprise,"*
"he was a minister of consummate address and
commanding abilities, greedy of wealth and
power and glory," f and was responsible in his
own person for the nature of that which followed,
since in his service was bred that terrible tool,
Thomas Crumwell, "the cloth carder," "Vice-
Gerent and Vicar-General," "than whom none
ever rose so rapidly and no one has left behind
him a name covered with greater infamy and
disgrace,"? and who, on the fall of Cardinal
Wolsey, was taken over of the king to carry out
a project suggested by the very actions of the
cardinal himself.
Determined to emulate the great William of
Wykeham, Wolsey bullied the helpless and hope
less Clement VII. into sanctioning his scheme
*Hume: "History of England."
tLingard: "Histoiy of England."
t F. A. Gasquet, D.D.: " Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries."
[12]

Fountains — John of Kent'.'^ "Nine Altar.s.'

INTRODUCTION
for suppressing enough of the smaller monas
teries to give him money for the founding of his
"Cardinal's College " in Oxford; and the pecu
niary results so excited the admiration of the
king that, Wolsey once out of the way, he con
tinued to develop and exploit the mine that
promised so well.
It was, however, the bitter opposition of the
orders to the divorce of Queen Katherine that
first roused Henry's anger and, in the result,
gave him his first taste of blood and plunder.
Seven houses of Franciscan Observants refused
to take the oath of allegiance to Anne Boleyn,
and were promptly suppressed. The Carthu
sians of the London Charterhouse followed next,
and then the king, with the invaluable aid of
Crumwell, evolved his scheme for suppressing
the smaller monasteries. To bring this about
he directed Crumwell, then in full favour, to
make a "visitation" of all the monasteries,
through his chosen agents. The task was car
ried out to admiration: the "Vicar- General"
chose four men in whom he could trust,
creatures of his own and four of the most
perfect knaves ever recorded in history. Doc
tors London, Layton, Legh, and Ap Rice, and
sent them forth on their unsavoury errand.
Fortunately their letters to their master have
[13]

>>

INTRODUCTION
been preserved, and a more shocking revela
tion of essential depravity is unimaginable.
We know now the nature of these "visitors,
for they have revealed it over their own hands
and seals; and it is so unmitigated in its vile-
ness that no man now would believe any one
of them under oath. "It is not impossible
that even such bad men may have told the
truth in this matter, but the character of wit
nesses must always form an important element
in estimating the value of their testimony, and
the character of such obscene, profligate and
perjured witnesses as Layton and London could
not be worse." *
It is on their unsubstantiated statements that
the lesser and finally the greater monasteries
were condemned. "Condemned".? by whom.?
Not by the king, for he had determined to wipe
them out before Crumwell's emissaries set foot
on their journey : by the Lords ? There was
once a tradition of a certain "Black Book"
which was so awful in its revelations that when
placed before the Lords it brought their pious
condemnation. Yet for the existence of this
"Black Book" there is no shadow of valid evi
dence, and we have every reason for believing
that the Lords doomed the monasteries on the
?Blunt: "The Reformation of the Church of England."
[14]

INTRODUCTION
easy word of the king that he had "knowledge
that the premises be true": by the Commons?
An historian, writing only some sixty years after
the event and recording at least the popular
belief as to the facts, states that when Henry
heard that the Commons were recalcitrant in
this particular affair he called them all to attend
him and, after making them wait all day, came
suddenly among them. "I hear (saith he) that
my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass or
I will have some of your heads":* by the peo
ple? "The Pilgrimage of Grace" and the ris
ings in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are the
answer. After all these centuries and in spite of the
misrepresentations of certain historians, we have
good ground for holding that the "comperta"
of Crumwell's emissaries are little more than
malignant lies, or at best scurrilous stories
gathered from pothouse and hovel, and, as Green
admits in his " History of the English People,"
"grossly exaggerated" at that. It is an actual
matter of fact that every indictment against the
monks and nuns of the period rests on the sole
and totally unsubstantiated word of London,
Legh, Layton, or Ap Rice, and no man would
condemn a dog to-day on the oath of any one
*Sir Henry Spelman: " History of Sacrilege."
[15]

INTRODUCTION
of these worthies. "A dean," says Blunt in
speaking of London, "twice detected in immo
rality and put to open penance for it, and
afterwards convicted of perjury, is not the stuff
of which credible witnesses are made." *
During 1535-6 Henry's policy was to oppress
the remaining monasteries into extinction, and
his brutal methods would have been wholly
successful had he not decided very wisely that
more sudden and radical measures would give
better returns in money. The results of the
suppression of the smaller monasteries were
vastly greater than even he had anticipated, and
proved what a veritable Golconda lay under
his hand. In the first assault three hundred
and seventy-six houses had gone down. Sloane
sets the amount of money really received for the
buildings and treasure at the equivalent of
about $6,000,000 to-day, which is perhaps too
high, but is only a tithe of the extrinsic value.
Usually in the case of a great abbey the bells
and the lead from the roof were considered the
only available assets, the former bringing about
three dollars per pound in our money. What
the intrinsic value of a group of conventual
buildings might have been is shown from the
fact that the lead from the roofs of Bury
* Blunt: " The Reformation of the Church of England."
[16]

INTRODUCTION
St. Edmunds was sold for the equivalent of
$200,000. The buildings themselves, those marvels of
majestic architecture, were considered of no
marketable value; thus, at the destruction of
Bath Abbey the dorter was sold for $600, the
fratry for $360, the cloisters for $480, while all
the buildings of Athelney Abbey were sold for
$1,200. In many cases the people saved the
buildings they loved by purchasing them from
the king's agents, and the prices they paid are
significant: Romsey, a majestic edifice of cathe
dral proportions, was bought for $6,000, Mal
vern $1,200, and St. Albans, now the cathedral,
for $24,000. The examples I have quoted are
from among the greater abbeys suppressed a
year or two later, but they serve as an indication
of the disparity between the actual value of the
property and the prices received.
Of course the king's coffers received only a
small proportion of the proceeds; at least three
fourths went into the hands of his agents, yet in
Lincolnshire alone, in the first six months of the
suppression of the lesser monasteries, John
Freeman, the royal receiver, admitted to having
collected from the sale of buildings and their
contents $375,000, probably about one tenth
the real value. This came from thirty-seven
[17]

INTRODUCTION
houses, the annual rent rolls of which aggregated
$180,000. As a result of this first suppression,
three hundred and seventy-six houses were ex
tinguished with an annual rent roll of $1,800,000,
a real value for lands and buildings of perhaps
$40,000,000. More than two thousand monks
and nuns were dispossessed and distributed
among other houses, and eight thousand depend
ents were reduced to beggary.
Halted by the popular insurrections all over
the north of England, Henry turned for a time
to "dissolution by attainder," a deft process
which invariably gave good results. The method
was this : the agents of the king appeared before
a given abbey and demanded its immediate
surrender; if the demand was complied with,
the abbot and prior were given fat livings, the
monks pensioned; if it was refused, the king at
once charged the abbot with high treason before
Parliament, which, as it was .then constituted,
was safely to be counted on to declare the ac
cused guilty without trial. Thereupon the abbot
was hanged, drawn, and quartered, the monks
were expelled without pepisions, and the entire
property of the abbey came to the king. In
this way fell the three great mitred abbeys of
Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, among
the most glorious and powerful, as well as
[18]

INTRODUCTION
stainless in reputation, of the Benedictine
houses. Shortly before this the priories and nunneries
had been wiped out, and now, Aske and the
Yorkshire abbots having been killed and that
danger well passed, Henry, whose financial needs
were increasing every day, struck finally at the
last of the greater houses, and with incredible
swiftness swept the whole institution into final
ruin. For this action there was no excuse,
except that they were a constant thorn in the
king's flesh through their former opposition
(now largely extinguished by terrorism) to his
entire career, political, religious, and domestic,
and that he preferred to have their property for
his own personal use. Even Crumwell's agents
had rashly admitted, at the time of the introduc
tion of the bill in Parliament for the suppression
of the monasteries with an annual income of
$12,000 or less, that "in divers and great solemn
monasteries of this realm, thanks be to God,
religion is right well kept and observed." This
fact, for fact it was, as proved by eixsting docu
ments, was of no avail. The people could stand
no further taxation and Henry needed such vast
sums for the subsidizing of the nobles, the main
tenance of his international system of bribery
and espionage, and, above all, for his own some-
[19]

INTRODUCTION
what elaborate household, that there was nothing
else to be done. When funds cannot be obtained
legally, they must be acquired otherwise: the
people had little left worth taking; the nobles
would not submit to taxation; the monks, who
possessed very concrete and easily convertible
property, could not resist, and therefore suf
fered. The narrative of the Great Suppression cannot
be reduced to a few words. The facts have
been gathered together and put in the most con
cise form by Doctor Gasquet, to whose " Henry
VIII. and the English Monasteries" any one
may go who cares for details. The destruction
was carried out with all brutality and surrounded
by every conceivable degree of horror, outrage,
and butchery. When the black cloud lifted
there were not any monks, nuns, and friars, nor
any abbeys, priories, or convents remaining in
England. Broken and dishonoured ruins of
majestic wonders of art blasted every county;
hundreds of thousands of acres of land had been
distributed amongst the king's upstart nobility;
and ten thousand religious of both sexes had
been dispossessed. One half this number had
received pensions, ample it is true in the case of
abbots, adequate for priors, but, so far as monks
and nuns were concerned, just enough on which
[20]

INTRODUCTION
to starve ; the other five thousand had either been
killed or turned out to die in poverty. In addi
tion upwards of eighty thousand dependents,
men, women, and children, had been reduced in
a day to absolute beggary : for them was neither
consideration nor mercy.
The events that had taken place had been of
some benefit to the king. He had removed for
ever the only source of dangerous opposition to
his policies, while from the sale of monastic
lands he had received about $52,000,000, prob
ably one third its market value. The buildings,
vestments, sacred vessels, bells, books, and works
of art had brought in $1,500,000, perhaps one fifth
the money actually collected by the receivers.
The intrinsic value cannot be computed, but
to restore the ruined abbeys again to their
former estate would require at least $250,000,000.
The total income of the confiscated estates dur
ing the ten years from 1536 to 1547 had been
$25,000,000. This sum represented a very
small part of the real and potential revenue,
which under the monks themselves had been
about $11,000,000 per year; yet the unbroken
testimony is that the secular landlords were
incalculably more oppressive and greedy than
the monks had been. From April, 1536, to
Michaelmas, 1547, the King's treasury received
[210

INTRODUCTION
£1,338,442, 9*, 2^d, equal to rather more than
$70,000,000 of our money.
We may say then that the destruction of the
English monasteries resulted in unnumbered
murders; the reduction to beggary of one hun
dred thousand men, women, and children; the
total destruction of about $200,000,000 worth of
property; the alienation to those who had no
claim to it whatever of estates, the rentable
value of which was about $11,000,000 per year;
the temporary extinction of education, mercy,
and public charity; the abolition in great sections
of territory and for several millions of people of
the services and ministrations of religion; the
eternal loss of works of art of immeasurable
value; and, as the event proved, "The creation
of a large class of poor to whose poverty was
attached the stigma of crime ; the division of class
from class, the rich mounting up to place and
power, the poor sinking to lower depths: de
struction of custom as a check upon the exac
tions of landlords: the loss by the poor of those
foundations at schools and universities intended
for their children, and the passing away of
ecclesiastical titles into the hands of lay
owners."* I have dealt above with the facts of the Sup-
*F. A. Gasquet, D.D. : " Henry VIII. and the EngUsh Monasteries."
[22 ]

INTRODUCTION
pression, not with the totally different question
as to whether or no monasticism had outlived
its usefulness in England and had to fall if the
Church were to become independent once more
and the English people go on unhampered in
their development. Here there is a chance for
differences of opinion; but I believe there is no
such opportunity when it comes to a considera
tion of monastic morals during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the motives behind the Sup
pression, and the methods pursued in bringing
this about.
The only ground we have for assuming cor
ruption and immorality on the part of the relig
ious of the several orders is the fact that they
were human and therefore fallible. That among
some ten thousand men and women there must
have been instances of failure to live up to their
vows is perfectly certain; that during the long
career of monasticism in England there were
innumerable instances of quarrelling, litigation,
jealousy, oppression, individual immorality, is
equally true. No one has ever claimed for re
ligious exemption from human weaknesses;
there were bad abbots, priors, and monks,
as there were bad bishops and priests, and bad
princes, nobles, and commons. But there is no
evidence whatever to prove that the cloister
[23]

INTRODUCTION
fostered wickedness of any kind, or that its occu
pants were not Uving after a higher standard
than the secular priesthood and those to whom
they ministered. On the other hand, while we
find evidence of serious troubles, particularly
in the fourteenth century, these are curiously
lacking in the latter half of the fifteenth century
and the first years of that which followed,
while the proofs of corruption and failure
among the secular priesthood are too complete
to be denied, even Roman apologists admitting
the fact with such cheerfulness as is possible.
Was this destruction justifiable on the broader
grounds of national policy? Had the monas
teries become indeed "fetters on the advance
ment of freedom, education and true religion" ?
Was it necessary that they should fall in order
that English civilization might advance another
step in its development? Conceivably, yes,
and also conceivably, no. It is a question that
I submit is unanswerable. After a period of
very terrible chaos England did advance, and
it is equally true that the consensus of opinion
is that the Church could not have re-estab
lished her independence of Rome except after
the destruction of monasticism. It is easy to
argue as to what might have happened if
Oliver Cromwell had really been allowed to
[24]

INTRODUCTION
emigrate from England in the early days of
King Charles's reign, if Washington had refused
to take command of the Continental army, if
BlUcher had not come up in time at Waterloo,
if Lincoln had not been assassinated; but the
arguments lead nowhere. In the same way one
might easily prove that the advancement of civil
ization in England and the vigorous develop
ment of her national Church might have been
far more healthful, normal, and sane, with equally
satisfactory results, had the monasteries been
reformed, not suppressed. The argument is
valueless, for it is not susceptible of proof.
The fact remains that by reason of, or in spite
of, this suppression England and the Church
did go on to better things; but is there no ground
for holding that this was due to a destiny no act
of man could turn aside?
One thing however, is sure: the suppression
of the monasteries was conceived and encom
passed by two men who personally cared nothing
for the abstract idea of the progressive develop
ment of national civilization, for the adminis
trative independence of the Church, for the
principle of doctrinal purification alleged by
the continental reformers, or for the rectification
of public morals. Henry determined to destroy
monasticism for the same reason that influ-
[25]

INTRODUCTION
enced him to destroy parliamentary govern
ment: because it was a fetter on his absolute
will as king; because it was in the beginning
bitterly opposed to his break with Rome, his
proclamation of himself as supreme head on
earth of the Church in England, and his di
vorce of Queen Katherine; finally, because he
was in need of vast sums of money and could
get them nowhere else. I am not writing an
apology for monasticism as an institution; it
is possible it was well for England that it
should be shorn of its enormous power, and
even for a space extinguished. I do hold, how
ever, that, if Henry and Crumwell were fighting
the battle of developing civilization, it was with
entire unconsciousness of the part they were
playing, that their only conscious motives were
base and singularly sordid, that the methods
they followed were such as to merit nothing but
unsparing denunciation, and that the immediate
results were most lamentable both for the Nation
and for the Church.

[26]

Glastonbury — The South Choir Aisle.

The Ruined Abbeys
of
Great Britain

TO those who have ever set foot in the
magical Island of Avalon, the word
means immeasurable things, and to its
few and desecrated ruins one turns first among
all the abbeys of England. From every stand
point it demands primary honour and considera
tion, not only as the most famous and glorious
of the houses of the earliest and greatest order
of monks, nor yet as the ground hallowed by
the feet of the holiest and highest of bishops,
priests, and kings, but as in very deed the un
questioned site of the first Christian church in
Britain. Glastonbury lies far from the great con
temporary centres of life, away from the com
mon routes of travel, sequestered among the
low and softly rounded hills of Somerset.
[27]

GLASTONBURY
Casual and infrequent trains crawl thence in
leisurely fashion from the cathedral city of
Wells, but the trains, though useful, are an
impertinence in a way, and seem to feel this in
their halting half-heartedness. Even now, though
few holy places in England have suffered more,
and few have actually so little to show in living
reminder of a deathless past, one cannot avoid
the instinctive feeling that the approach should
be pilgrim fashion and on foot, even as the
founders of this first Christian community in
Britain came to "a certain Royal Island, of old
called Glastonbury," the mystical land of Avalon:
" Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer seas."
Long before arrival, and from whichever
point one may approach, across the swelling
downs and pastures and flowery gardens, through
dips in the low-lying hills, Glastonbury Tor
lifts, ominous and insistent; a sudden steep
hill like a volcanic cone, crowned with the gaunt
spike of a lonely tower, from the base of which
every vestige of church has fallen away. There
is something foreboding in this weird, tower-
topped pyramid: it forces itself on the mind
with curious insistence, and well it may, for,
on a certain day in November, 1539, the last
[28]

GLASTONBURY
act in a ghastly tragedy wore to its bloody close
on its crest, and there the curtain fell forever
on a mighty drama of human life. Apart from
the Tor, there is only gentleness and peace
now to be seen in the land that lies about the
island the Saxons called Ynis-wytren: a softer
and sweeter country one could not call up in
fancy; rich, green, fertile, breathed over by
soft winds and bland in summer sun. And not
so many years ago, the town itself was of a piece
with the land — old, grey, drowsy, with frag
ments here and there of buildings that dated
from the time when the vanished abbey was a
place of pious pilgrimage, and tens of thou
sands of men and women from all over England
gathered here to do honour to the memory of
saints and martyrs and kings, long dead, but,
while the monks remained, unforgotten. Of
late, however, revolution has begun: roads are
being widened, straightened, and blocks of
hideous brick tenements are lining the way
where once unnumbered kings and queens and
nobles, with flaunting retinues, rode up to pay
homage before the "Sapphire Shrine" and the
graves of St. Joseph of Arimathea, St. Patrick
and St. Dunstan, King Arthur and Guinevere,
his queen.
We may accept or reject the narrative of old
[29]

GLASTONBURY
William of Malmesbury : the fashion of doubt has
cast discredit on legend, record, and history, but
his was the faithful belief of all men for a thou
sand years, and in testimony thereof the Island
of Avalon with its church of incredible glory
became the holiest spot in all England and,
shamed and discredited, so it remains to-day.
Pious legends we may reject, if such is the bent
of our minds, but whether or no we believe that
St. Joseph of Arimathea led hither his band of the
Disciples: whether we hold or discard the tra
dition that St. Patrick first organized the scat
tered hermits of Avalon into a semblance of
order, or that Arthur and Guinevere lay here
in a single grave, enough and more than enough
remains, against which even modern criticism
is powerless, to make this the holiest land in all
Great Britain.
The tradition of the founding of the abbey
by St. Philip the Apostle and his twelve dis
ciples, amongst whom was St. Joseph of Ari
mathea, was held from the earliest times until
the reign of Henry VIII. ; it is perfectly credible
and also perfectly unprovable; the question is
one solely of belief. The tale of the coming of
the footsore pilgrims, bearing the Holy Grail,
their rest on Wearyall hill, the genesis of the
holy thorn from Joseph's staff, the building of
[30]

GLASTONBURY
the wattle church and its consecration — these
are all such pious tales as may have grown
either from nothing or from everything; they bear
the mark of monks' fables, and equally they
bear the mark of impeccable tradition. Take
or leave them, there is still the fact that here
was built, in all human probability, the first
Christian church in Britain. And the list of
those who lived within the abbey walls or were
buried in the consecrated ground of their en
closure is large enough, even without the addi
tion of those whom history, arbiter of the
legendary, stigmatizes as such. St. Dunstan,
St. Gildas, St. David, St. Aidan, the Venerable
Bede, King Coel the father of St. Helena, King
Edmund "the Magnificent," King Edgar, King
Edmund "Ironsides," not to name martyrs,
confessors, virgins, bishops, abbots, kings,
princes, nobles, the list of whose names would
run into hundreds. For a thousand years Glas
tonbury was "held in such Veneration that it
was called a Second Rome, for Sanctity."
From all over England and Europe the great
dead were brought here for sepulture, and the
soil was sent away in vast quantities, even as
from Palestine itself. In the fifteenth century
so clamorous were the faithful for burial space
within the walls, that the monks were constrained
[31]

GLASTONBURY
to excavate a crypt beneath the chapel of St.
Mary; and the lead of the crowded coffins there,
less than an hundred years later, formed part
of the spoil of the destroyers. Sacred the place
was and is, beyond measure or computation.
For nearly four centuries it has been subject to
hideous desecration, and is now: the last time
I was there, a few months ago, hundreds of
freshly shorn sheep were herded within the
narrow enclosure, grinding the long grass down
into muck and mire, climbing over the shat
tered walls, snatching at the clinging ivy, filling
the air with a deafening bedlam of foolish cries.
The filth under foot was indescribable. At
another time the sheep were absent, but several
horses were tethered within the nave and aisles,
and in the very Sanctuary itself a miserable
calf, tied to a stake, fell in a fit and kicked out
its life where once stood the tomb of King Arthur
and his queen.
Shall we add these names to the list of those
who have rendered the word immortal? We
are told there is no sure proof that either has
ever lived. It may be so: the matter is unim
portant, for the names of Arthur and Guinevere,
Merlin and Mordred, Launcelot, Galahad, and
Elaine have become so interwoven with the
history of the world that their actual existence
[32]

GLASTONBURY
in time and space is of little moment : they stand
for entities, persistent and operative, that re
main forever. Actualities or emanations, they
are now facts, and no criticism can make them
else. The narrative of the finding of the bodies
of Arthur and Guinevere during the abbacy of
Henry de Soliaco, in the year 1191, goes far
to prove not only its own truth, but the material
fact of real existence as well: it is concise, de
tailed, convincing, full of internal evidences of
perfect veracity; if false, it is a masterpiece
of circumstantial evidence quite unimaginable of
the twelfth century. Giraldus Cambrensis, de
claring himself an eye-witness, sets down the
facts simply and in the most matter-of-fact way.
Between the two mysterious pyramids beside
the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, seven feet be
low the surface, was found a large flat stone, in
the under side of which was set a rude leaden
cross, which, on being removed, revealed on its
inner and unexposed surface the roughly fash
ioned inscription, "Hie jacet sepultus inclitus
Rex Arthurius in Insula Avalonia." Nine feet
below this lay an huge coffin of hollowed oak,
wherein were found two cavities, the larger con
taining a man's bones of enormous size, the
skull bearing ten sword wounds, the smaller
the bones of a woman and a great tress of golden
[33]

GLASTONBURY
hair, that on exposure to the air crumbled into
dust. "The Abbat and Convent receiving their
Remains with great joy, translated them to the
great Church, placing the King's Body by itself
at the upper Part of a noble Tomb, divided into
two Parts, and the Queen at the Feet, in the
Choir before the High Altar, where they rest in
magnificent Manner 'til this Day."
It is impossible to step within the shrunken
precincts without submitting to the spell they
weave. Here facts fall and dissolve : the instant
one stands in the shadow of these mighty crags
of riven masonry, all the inheritance of a thou
sand years comes back, and we know that here
also walked St. Joseph of Arimathea, St. Patrick,
King Arthur and his queen, and that beneath
the vanished vaults once rested the Holy Grail.
For there is no other place exactly like Glaston
bury. Of the abbeys. Fountains and Netley
and Tintern, and Whitby and Melrose are far
more beautiful in the abstract, but in the Island
of Avalon we get back at the heart of things,
come close in touch with the primal life of our
race and Church. It should be warded by im
penetrable walls and guarded like a sanctuary.
None should enter except in reverence, and as
on a pious pilgrimage; every stone should be
cherished and preserved, and on certain days,
[34]

GLASTONBURY
within the roofless chapel and where once stood
the sumptuous choir, the Holy Sacrifice should be
offered with every accompaniment of devotion
and expiation and the sacred spot hallowed
again, instead of being given over, as now, to
barnyard cattle and garrulous "trippers."
Glastonbury, the site of the first Christian
church in Britain and of the first organized re
ligious life, was the most honoured and glorious
of all the Benedictine monasteries, admitting as
rivals only St. Albans, St. Edmundsbury,
Westminster and Canterbury. As it was the
most famous, so was it the richest, with an
annual revenue from its lands of about one
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The
church was the largest in Great Britain and in
many ways the noblest. Princely in its estate,
it was princely in its beneficence and hospitality:
a thousand men were dependent on it for the
maintenance of their families, no poor ever came
to its doors and went away hungry : a large num
ber of men was constantly employed in its clois
ters illuminating missals and breviaries, and
transcribing not only works of theology and de
votion, but of classical and general literature.
The library was the greatest in all England, and
when Leland visited it, in the last days of the
last abbot, he bears witness he was so over-
[35]

GLASTONBURY
whelmed with awe at the sight of such vast
treasures of antiquity that for a time he dared
not enter. To Henry and Cromwell a treasure-
house such as this was of no value : we read in the
official accounts time after time how certain " old
bookes in the choir" of some proud monastery
were sold for 6d or 8d ($1.20 or $1.60).* John
Bale, a contemporary, has recorded the sale of
"two noble libraries for forty shillings price"
($100). These books were illuminated quartos
and folios on vellum and parchment, bound in
richly tooled skin and mounted with silver and
gold: they were mostly bought by grocers and
soap-sellers to be used as wrappings, or, in the
case of books printed on paper, for kindling fires.
Many ship-loads were sent out of the country to
Continental book-binders, and this fact may give
some idea of the immense number of books des
troyed, as well as that other which shows that the
thrifty soul who bought the" two noble libraries"
for $100 used the priceless tomes " instead of gray
paper by the space of more than these ten years,
and yet he hath store enough for as many years
to come." As a result of this singular barbar
ism, we know very little either of the various
English liturgical "uses," or the quite remark-
* Note. —The purchasing power of a pound sterling was, in the six
teenth century, from ten to twelve times what it is now. — Authok.
[36]

GLASTONBURY
able school of national religious music. More
than two hundred and fifty thousand Missals,
Ordinals, Antiphonals and Graduals were thus
destroyed, and the loss liturgically, archaeologi-
cally, and artistically is irreparable.*
Of the worldly estate of Glastonbury we find
an absorbing account in the Chronicles of
William of Malmesbury: here we read how
Michael, the forty-sixth abbot, dying in 1253,
left the abbey with 892 oxen, 60 bullocks, 233
cows, 6,717 sheep, and 327 swine, to quote only
a few items: how during the abbacy of Adam
Sodbury, fifty-third in the succession, Edward
III. and Queen Philippa, with a vast retinue
of nobles, were magnificently entertained at an
expense to the monastery of more than $80,000;
and how one after the other, fifty-nine in all,
the abbots bought land, and extended and em
bellished the enormous church, adding chapels,
altars, statues, sacred vessels and vestments
untU the mere enumeration is like a tale from
the "Arabian Nights." Walter Taunton, for
instance, the fifty-second abbot, " made the Pulpit
in the Church, with ten Images, the Crucifix,
Mary and John. He also gave to the Treasury
the underwritten Ornaments; viz., ten em
broidered copes, the first whereof, being the
* See Maskell's " Monumenta Ritualia."
[37]

GLASTONBURY
richest, contains the history of Christ's Passion,
the ground being Gold, and of a Jasper Colour,"
etc.; also he gave, among other things, "three
embroidered suits," two chasubles, "five pair
of vestments," "ten rich embroidered Ante-
pendiums with a pulpit cloth," two carpets,
two silver candlesticks, silver basons, dishes,
porringers, and spoons, and many books, in
cluding " the new Digest of the Civil Law, with
Clasps." What became of this marvellous store
is indicated by a contemporary chronicler.
"Many private men's parlours were hung with
altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with
copes, . . . many made carrousing cups of the
sacred chalices. ... It was a sorry house, and
not worth the naming, which had not somewhat
of this furniture in it, though it were only a pair
of large cushions made of a cope or altar-cloth." *
Such was the Abbey of St. Mary in Glaston
bury, the first and greatest house of the oldest
and most famous monastic order. First in
England in point of time, the Benedictines
maintained their supremacy until the end. The
most noble of all the abbeys were theirs : Glaston
bury, St. Edmundsbury, St. Mary's, York. Of
the houses of lesser importance, St. Albans,
Gloucester, Peterborough, Westminster (for a
?Heylin: " Ecclesia Restaurata.''
[38]

GLASTONBURY
brief period), Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester,
Worcester, Winchester, Exeter, and Bath be
came secular cathedrals, but none, not even
Gloucester or Westminster, was to be compared
in solemn and perfect architecture with some of
those that have passed away forever, and chief-
est of these was Glastonbury.
Of St. Edmundsbury, St. Augustine of Canter
bury, Battle Abbey and Evesham, not one stone
of the churches themselves remains upon an
other, and there is nothing to tear our hearts
with visions of an architectural glory that is gone
forever. One could almost wish that the same
fate had befallen Glastonbury, and that a green
field lay wide and undefiled over the place of
its sepulture. As it is, there is just enough,
and that in so shameful case, to fill one with
regret and insatiable desire. The unroofed and
dishonoured chapel of the Blessed Virgin, the
fragment of aisle wall, the crumbling stones of
the choir, above all the two Titan piers of the
chancel arch, these are so faultless in their pro
portions, so wonderful in style, so marvellous
in workmanship, that to the architect they are
maddening almost beyond endurance.
Previous to the great fire of 1184, which
destroyed the entire monastery, including the
little and most sacred First Church, of St. Joseph
[39]

GLASTONBURY
of Arimathea, many churches had risen east
ward of the Vetusta Ecclesia, one having been
built by Ine, King of the West Saxons; another
by St. Dunstan; a third by Turstan, the first
of the Norman abbots, in 1082. This latter
was unfinished at the time Herlewin came to
the chair, and believing the plan insufficiently
magnificent, he swept it away and began a
much grander edifice in the year 1101. Abbot
Siegfried, his successor, reigned but six years,
and was followed by Henry of Blois, a monk of
Cluny, of the blood royal, and withal "a Man
renouned for much Literature and adorned with
commendable Behaviour. Through his Indus
try the Church of Glastonbury obtained so
many Advantages that his Memory will there
fore deservedly flourish in the same forever."
He rebuilt all the monastery except the two
churches, and enriched the treasury with num
berless books, sacred vessels, and vestments.
During his abbacy the marvellous "Sapphire
Altar," given by St. David of Wales and lost
since the Danish invasion, when it was hidden
for safe-keeping, was recovered and "Magnifi
cently adorned with Gold, Silver and precious
Stones, as it is to be seen to this Day."
On the death of Henry, the golden days were
succeeded by a period of storm. Between the
[40]

GLASTONBURY
Bishop of Bath and King Henry IL, the abbey
suffered grievously, and as a crowning calamity
came the fire of 1184, which swept everything
away. Then, "King Henry, taking Compas
sion on the Monks," charged Ralph, his cham
berlain, to administer the abbey, and rebuild it
on the most splendid scale, which the worthy
Ralph, who appears to have been a man of
singularly noble character, as well as a great
architect, forthwith proceeded to do. Practi
cally all that remains is his work. So well did
he acquit himself of his task, that no further
architectural additions were necessary for several
centuries, though kings and abbots continued
to load the monastery with books, ornaments,
and vestments until it was richer than ever be
fore. In 1322, however, Adam Sodbury became
abbot, and a new epoch opened that continued
without abatement until the end. Adam was
a princely patron of art; he "adorned the High
Altar with a large Image of the Mother of God,
and a Tabernacle of notable Workmanship."
Also he erected other altars and chapels, added
many statues and shrines to the whole church,
and finally rebuilt the vault of the entire nave,
"and curiously adorned it with pictures." His
gifts of vestments, sacred vessels, and relics were
enormous: among them we read of "a Blue
[41]

GLASTONBURY
Cope, with several Beasts wove in it with Gold,
and curiously embroidered with silver butter
flies," of chasubles of "red Satin embroidered
with several histories of Saints," of others cov
ered with embroidered and jewelled coats of
arms, and even of one of "Green Silk with
Finny Fishes and Gold Birds"! Walter Mon-
ington, who succeeded him in 1341, added two
bays to the choir, the walls of which he raised,
and roofed the whole, probably with some
form of f an- vaulting : he also built the great
retro-choir with its five altars. John Chin-
nock, his successor in 1374, continued the great
work and rebuilt the cloisters, dormitory, and
fratry, and extended and enriched the refectory
and chapter house. Richard Beere, who suc
ceeded to the abbacy in 1495, again took up
the labour of "gilding refined gold," happily
ignorant of the fact that before his plans could
be carried out the whole fabric would be hurled
into fragments by gunpowder, the graves of
saints and kings desecrated, the lands given
over to the destroyers, and his immediate suc
cessor, the last Abbot of Glastonbury, hanged,
drawn, and quartered, like the veriest felon of
the Kingdom. Ignorant of the black fate then
looming large, he built chapels and altars of
infinite richness, founded a new home for aged
[42]

GLASTONBURY
women, and — note the pathos of this — fear
ing for the stability of his adored church,
strengthened and reinforced it in many places,
that it might last for yet other centuries. His
labour was lost: the great church would have
stood well for at least the twenty years that yet
remained of its life.
l^icj^atti dClflitmff. successor of St. Joseph of
Arimathea, St. Patrick and St. Dunstan, fifty-
ninth and last of the abbots of Glastonbury,
was an old man when, in 1524, he took his
place at the head of the abbey as a preliminary
to his martyrdom. No word was ever said
against him: he was renowned for the frugality
of his life, his wisdom, his gentleness, and his
charity. He ruled an house of an hundred
monks with three hundred lay associates, many
of whom were of gentle blood. He supported
a great number of students at the several univer
sities, and the hospitality of the monastery was
so great it is recorded that under him five
hundred knights were frequently entertained at
one time. The annual revenues of the monastery
were, as I have said, not less than one hundred
and seventy-five thousand dollars, and the store
of plate and jewels almost fabulous. Henry
needed all this; and on Friday, September 19,
1539, the royal "visitors," headed by the
[43]

GLASTONBURY
infamous Layton, appeared at Glastonbury
demanding the immediate surrender of every
thing into the king's hands. They searched the
abbot's apartments and found there " a written
book of arguments against the divorce of the
King's majesty and the lady dowager, which
we take it to be a great matter, as also divers
pardons, copies of bulls, and the counterfeit life
of Thomas Becket in print: but we could not
find any letter that was material."*
These terrible evidences of "guilt" and the
unrecorded answers to the inquisition of the
"visitors" showed plainly enough the aged
abbot's "cankered and traitorous mind against
the King's majesty and his succession," and so
they sent him, "being but a weak man and
sickly," to the Tower. Two months later he
was haled back to Wells to be "tried" before a
jury made up of men who knew that the refusal
of a verdict of "guilty" meant death to each and
all of them. As a matter of fact, Cromwell
has recorded in his own handwriting this note:
"Item. The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at
Glaston and executed there." In other words,
the sentence preceded the trial. On the next
day, November 15, 1539, Richard Whiting,
Abbot of Glastonbury and peer of England,
* From the letter of the Commissioners to Crumwell.
[44]

Glastonbury — The Abbot's Kitchen.

GLASTONBURY
old, feeble, and racked by his imprisonment in
the Tower, was dragged on an hurdle to the top
of Tor hill, where "he took his death very
patiently." Then his head was stuck up over
the monastery gate, and the quarters of his
body were distributed between Wells, Bath,
Ilchester, and Bridgewater. Glastonbury Abbey
had ceased to exist.
So complete has been the destruction of this
that was once the proudest church in all Eng
land, there is little to say of it architecturally.
Apart from the awful grandeur of the choir
piers, the forlorn ruins make little appeal to
any except architects and archaeologists. For
them, there is no more important ruin in Eng
land, for it is couched in terms of the earliest
transition from Norman to "Early English,"
and is of a severe and classical type hardly to
be met with elsewhere. It is all Ralph's work,
all but a few tottering panels high in the choir,
that date from the time of Abbot Walter Mon-
ington. The chapel of the Blessed Virgin is
earliest in date, and is round-arched through
out; but the carving of the original doorways,
now blackened and crumbling from long con
tinued and perfectly wilful bonfires, and that
of the bosses and capitals of the interior, is
more beautiful than anything that followed for
[45]

GLASTONBURY
many years after. It is purely and exquisitely
Gothic, fresh, crisp, full of the assurance and
insight of perfectly competent artists. In the
church itself, Ralph has adopted the pointed
arch, half-heartedly at first, later with con
viction. Everywhere, however, are fine, broad
surfaces, masterly clusterings of verticals, grave
restraint and supremely intelligent accentuation.
The workmanship is of the highest type to be
found in England in any period. Here, alone,
all the powers of crescent art seem to have met
together to strike out at once the type of perfect
building. Elsewhere, and only too often, we
find in England workmanship of the poorest,
but here, as though the supreme holiness of the
ground sanctified their labours, Ralph and his
masons glorified God, not only through the
beauty of art, but through faultless workman
ship as well.
If I were asked to name the three most per
fect examples of architecture that ever existed
in England, I think I should say Glastonbury,
St. Mary's, York, and Guisborough, and of
these three only shattered fragments now re
main. Had they been left us it would be
impossible for critics to lift eyebrows at English
Gothic, but they are practically gone: the de
stroyers did their work to the king's taste, and
[46]

GLASTONBURY
in a few weeks the labour of generations, the
proudest records of English glory, were hurled
crashing into dust. At Glastonbury the ex
quisitely chiselled stones of the church itself,
the lacy tracery of the chapels, shrines, and
tombs, the shattered statues and shivered glass
from the painted windows, were hauled away
and used to build a common causeway across
the marshes. It was indeed the end.

[47]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
FROM the low-lying meadows of Somer
set to the wild and wind-swept northern
cliffs that frown on the German ocean
is a long step, but here also are the beginnings
of things to be; not so old by five hundred
years, nor yet so meshed in legends and visions,
and, if you like, fantastic fables, but venerable
indeed, and deeply significant. Here, where
the sudden cliffs break down into the ever-
thundering sea and crabbed islands lift bravely
out of tempestuous breakers, lashed by tumultu
ous winds and drenched by sea-spume and
swirling fog, here were established the first
outposts of the Catholic Faith in the North, in
the year of our Lord 635, when Oswald, King
of Northumbria, called St. Aidan from his
monastery of St. Columba. Ten years before,
Oswald's uncle, Eadwine, asking the hand of
the daughter of the Christian King of Kent,
had gained with his queen a Christian bishop
and missionary in the person of St. Paulinus,
one of the companions of St. Augustine, but
[48]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
sudden war had extinguished the flickering
flame, and St. Aidan came to kindle it anew.
It was a wild and barbarous land and a wild
and barbarous society into which he came. It
is told that the first missionary bishop from
lona became discouraged within a year, and
returned to his monastery, declaring the North
umbrians invincible in their heathenism. Up
rose on the word a monk named Aidan, crying,
"Was it their stubbornness, or your severity?"
Whereupon the entire chapter acclaimed him
as the true Bishop of Northumbria, which he
became indeed, and a saint as well.
Barbarous the people undoubtedly were, but
King Oswald was a man of splendid character,
and the alliance of saint and king was invincible.
Backed by royal favour and heartened by royal
co-operation, Aidan, drawn by love of his island
of lona, sought out that other island of Lindis
farne lying close inshore, and established there
his new monastery. Rome had been evan
gelizing the south; now the Celtic Church took
hold on the north, and with equal success.
Between the two, in all matters of government,
there was a great gulf, and the difference went
further even than this. The Celtic Church
followed an older reckoning of Easter, and in other
ways held by the standards of the East; but the
[49]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
greatest difference lay in the entire mode of
organization, for while in the south Rome was
building up a superb and competent organism,
masterly, logical, and orderly, a veritable Civitas
Dei, St. Columba and the Celts had bred a great
missionary Church, in which the bishops had
become hardly more than channels through
which the sacraments of ordination and con
firmation were administered, without territorial
jurisdiction or any very real administrative
authority, while the whole power and purpose
of the Church were concentrated in monastic
orders; aggregations of zealous missionaries
conquering through their consecrated enthu
siasm. As the Rev. H. J. D. Astley has said
in speaking of the Celtic Church: "It could
arouse, but it could not maintain: it could win,
but it could not govern. The combination of
Celtic self-sacrifice and zeal with the discipline
and culture of Rome was needed before the
English Church could awake to the full respon
sibilities of her mission. The Celtic Church,
tribal and monastic, was wanting in the sense
of unity and Catholicity. Without the help of
Rome there could never have been built up in
England a great organic and cultured Church,
able to hold its own among the storms of Chris
tendom. Without the help of the saints of
[50]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
lona and Lindisfarne, that Church would have
been but a mechanism of bone and flesh, want
ing the life-giving soul."
For thirty years St. Aidan and his successors
ruled in the island monastery, winning the
kingdom to Christianity; and then, in 664, came
the epoch-marking Synod of Streonshalh, where
the Celtic Church very wisely yielded to Roman
law and order, and Abbot Colman, still uncon
vinced, retired with his friends and the relics
of St. Aidan to lona, to be succeeded five years
later by St. Cuthbert, the glory of northern
England. For an hundred years the monastery
continued, revivified by the spirit of Cuthbert,
and then, almost without warning, fell the storm
of Danish invasion, and the Abbey of Lindis
farne was utterly extinguished, the body of St.
Cuthbert being borne across the narrow waters
by the fleeing monks in the glare of conflagra
tion, to travel for seven years of pilgrimage
until it found its final resting place in the great
Abbey of Durham.
Of the Celtic monastery, not one stone re
mains: the solemn ruins are those of a Bene
dictine priory, raised in the eleventh century
by a cell of monks from Whitby, who deter
mined to repossess themselves of the island of
Lindisfarne, now known as Holy Island, by
[51]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
reason of the consecration given it by the lives
of St. Aidan, St. Cuthbert, and the many
martyrs who perished at the hands of the Viking
invaders. For three centuries the land had
lain desolate, yet it was redeemed at last. For
three centuries and a half the same desolation
has existed since the last prior, Thomas Sparke,
with his handful of dispossessed brothers, went
out into the world at the bidding of Henry
VIII., who needed their pitiful yearly income
of three thousand dollars. What has been once
may be again, but when the new missionaries
go back to restore in Holy Island the life of
ordered consecration, they will not find it bar
ren of every vestige of a great past, but dignified
by noble ruins that have defied time and tide
and the wrath of man.
For Lindisfarne, though comparatively small,
is well preserved, as English abbeys go. It was
sturdily built of strong red sandstone laboriously
brought from the mainland, and in a fashion
well calculated to withstand the shock of storm
and the ferocity of the invader. One thing it
was not proof against: the cupidity of spoilers,
who rived the lead from the roofs, and the roofs
from the walls, until all stood bare and desolate.
Then followed century after century of neglect
and petty pilfering. The great red walls have
[52]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
crumbled and fallen away, the tower has sunk
into rubble, the vaults have vanished, but much
has yet remained, while the incredible glories
of Osney and Evesham and Beaulieu have be
come but a dim whisper, echoing out of oblivion.
Such as it is, Lindisfarne is strong English
Norman after the type of Durham, in the pattern
of which it was fashioned. Scott, a great roman-
cist but a most inferior archaeologist, says,
" In Saxon strength that Abbey frowned";
but there is no Saxon here, only honest Norman
as the English workmen fancied it to be, and in
their hands it was good indeed, for even at this
beginning of things they were not content to
copy the work of France, but from the first
modified, translated, enriched, always making
the first Norman and the following Gothic of
whatever period distinctive and national. Lindis
farne is all very strong and frank and manly, an
Englishman's abbey, and, except for its fifteenth
century sanctuary, perfect and untouched, per
haps the most complete example of eleventh
century architecture in England. It is little
visited, for few trains stop at the station from
which one must cross by boat, or, at low tide,
fearsomely on foot, to the yellow island with its
ruddy crown. Yet Holy Island is well worth
[53]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
visiting, for it is a strange and barren spot,
wind-swept and wet with spray and spume,
though glowing in sunlight with a deep splendour
that is full of melancholy. And the feet of St.
Aidan and St. Cuthbert trod every inch of its
surface, making it indeed "Holy Island" forever.
Lindisfarne, in spite of its grim architecture,
is gentle and ingratiating, but Whitby, on the
other hand, so near in fact, so intimately mingled
in its history with Holy Island, is the very haunt
of terror and dismay. And for this there seems
no visible reason; it was never blasted by tragedy
as was Glastonbury; it came to its end in com
parative peace, being tamely surrendered to
Crumwell by the last Abbot, Henry de Vail, in
December, 1539. Unlike so many of its sister
monasteries, it was left to a lingering death.
The altars were destroyed, the roof torn away
and sold, the plate, bells, and ornaments went
into the coffers of the king, but the fabric of the
church itself was never destroyed by man,
though every trace of the conventual buildings
was swept away, the materials going to the
building of a singularly hideous house on the
site of the abbot's lodgings. The great church,
one of the many glories of mediaeval England,
was left to crumble slowly into dust. Perhaps
this very fact is responsible for the atmosphere of
[54]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
gloom that surrounds the gaunt ruins, the evi
dences of slow dissolution so terribly evident
and even now in process of accomplishment.
It is a wild and barren height, this cliff over the
North Sea, and the racked walls, trembling
under the fierce onslaughts of the wind, the
whirl of sand dashed upward from the shingle,
two hundred and fifty feet below, the screaming
of seabirds as they slide down the wind through
the blank lancets of clerestory and transepts, the
black shadow under the single choir aisle, the
heaped-up piles of shattered masonry, even
the long and barren reaches of harsh moor
stretching downward to the east, all combine to
create an atmosphere of forlorn depression that
is quite unusual among the abbeys, and quite
unjustified by recorded history.
Perhaps the approach to Whitby, as we saw
it, has something to do with it all, for, as one
comes from Byland and Rievaulx, the line
traverses the most abandoned and desolate area
of country in all England, a ghastly black valley,
gaunt and poisonous, the very land of Childe
Roland's pilgrimage, and, as we saw it in a
sinister twilight, quite enough to becloud the
days for some time to come. Whitby itself is
cheerful enough, a gay little town full of vivid
personality, but even this was not enough to
[55]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
wash out the memory of the "bog clay and
rubble, sand and stark black dearth," through
which we had travelled the night before. A
strange place for a monastery, this breathless
cliff in the lair of all the winds. Rievaulx was
close behind in memory, a very glade in Para
dise, type of the haunts of the shelter-loving
monks, but this fierce hilltop, seemingly on
the very brink of chaos, was a new note and
unexpected. Crossing the crowded little river, after thread
ing narrow streets where "Whitby jet" is much
in evidence, one mounts to the great ruins by
breakneck steps, past the well-chiselled Celtic
cross in memory of Caedmon, first of English
poets and a monk of Whitby; past the stunted
church of St. Mary, once a fine twelfth century
building, now hideously desecrated and made
ridiculous by seventeenth and nineteenth cen
tury abominations, and so to the desolate,
rocky waste where a mutilated cross marks the
once hallowed site of the monks' graveyard.
From here the splintered, spire-like fragments
tower gloomily against the sun, and the grim-
ness is not lessened as one clambers through
the breeched wall of the north aisle and emerges
into the rough wilderness of heaped-up debris
that fills the space of the demolished nave.
[56]

:'J~.

Whitby — Where the winds have gnawed at will.

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
The effect is curious, for while much of the
north side of the abbey remains, practically
all on the south has been swept away, and over
the tumbled hillocks of weed-grown stones one
looks far out to the south along dreary reaches
of desolate moor, empty of any life.
There is nothing in the architecture of Whitby
Abbey that in itself breeds the unmistakable
feeling of gloom and reserve that falls on one in
the shadow of its disintegrating walls: quite the
contrary, indeed, for it is all of the best period,
a sunny and supple Early English, modulating
into the best type of late Decorated. This is
one of those many buildings the destruction
of which has wrought such irreparable injury
to the credit of English Gothic. Salisbury,
except for its fine plan and well balanced mass,
one of the most discreditable examples of early
Gothic in Great Britain, remains almost intact,
except for most curiously unintelligent "restora
tion"; but Whitby, almost faultless in its archi
tectural style, and worthy to rank with St.
Mary's, York, and Guisborough, has been
suffered to crumble away in criminal neglect,
when its preservation would have meant in
calculable things to the history of English
architecture. The choir, which is earliest in time, is singu-
[57]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
larly noble in its reserve and its classical pro
portions, but the north transept is finer yet, for
it marks that perfect point when early English
was just merging into Geometrical, and it pre
serves all the highly developed qualities of the
former, without manifesting, as yet, any of the
final defects of the latter. Everything is strong,
sure, masterly; pure English, pure Gothic; work
that might be unafraid to stand side by side
with anything else that has been left us from
mediaeval times. What the nave may have
been it is impossible to say definitely: at least it
was supremely good; this much is proved by
the weather-worn wall of the north aisle, with
its tottering window tracery of an unusual and
brilliantly beautiful type. No trace of the nave
arcade or clerestory remains, but the great
ridges of grass-grown debris may perhaps con
ceal enough to make possible a restoration, on
paper at least, of the order, and one's fingers itch
to dig into the big heaps and discover what they
now conceal. Whitby and Rievaulx are almost
alone among the greater abbeys in possessing
these mountains of fallen masonry as yet un
touched, and the temptation they inspire is
almost irresistible.
Altogether, Whitby must have been a singu
larly consistent and united design, a church of
[58]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
the best phases of the best periods, a witness
to the essential greatness of English Gothic
from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
We could have better spared many of the well-
known cathedrals, now the objects of pious
artistic pilgrimage. The story of the slow de
cay of this most noble church is particularly
distressing, for it has perished by sheer neglect.
From the Suppression until the middle of the
seventeenth century the great fabric, together
with the monastic buildings, remained practi
cally intact, so far as their masonry was con
cerned: then, in those, the real "dark ages" of
England, the latter were pulled down to form
material for the existing mansion, and it is
probable that at the same time the south wall
of the choir aisle, and possibly the south tran
sept, were destroyed, to the same end. In
1763 the south wall of the nave was blown
down in a memorable tempest: in 1804 the north
wall fell: in 1830 the great central tower col
lapsed in the midst of a dead calm, and nine
years later a portion of the choir wall fell.
About the same date the west front, with its
vast Perpendicular window, crashed down on
the west porch with its great flight of stately
steps, and the ruin had become complete.
Fifty years later, when little was left to save,
[59]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
the owner of the abbey lands. Colonel Cholm-
ley, set about staying the general wreck, and
since then the shattered fabric has stood safe,
though for how much longer it will stand one
cannot say. The wind sweeps at will through
every opening, and, laden with cutting sand, is
steadily gnawing away the soft red stone; at
any time all that remains may sink in final
destruction, and the last vestiges of another
national monument will be lost to England
forever. Whitby Abbey owes its existence in the first
instance to Oswiu, brother of the royal saint.
King Oswald, who was St. Aidan' s protector.
Penda, the heathen King of Mercia, who had
slain King Oswald in battle, had matched him-
seK against Oswiu, and the latter, on the eve
of the great battle of Winwaedfield, vowed that
if God gave hun victory, he would build a great
monastery and as well consecrate his little
daughter Elfleda to the religious life. So indeed it
befell in the year 657, and the little princess was
given into St. Hilda's hands. Simultaneously was
begun the new foundation at Whitby, of old
called Streonshalh, a great double monastery
for both monks and nuns, and over both the
lady Hilda was set as abbess. Under her wise
direction, Whitby shortly became the great
[60]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
centre of learning and religion in the north
country. Through her favour and sympathy,
the clumsy "cowherd from whose lips flowed the
first great English song," Caedmon, the monk,
interpreted the Bible to the unlearned by means
of wonderful poetic rhapsodies; St. Cuthbert
and numberless famous abbots, monks, and
chroniclers, became identified with its name, and
at the great Synod of Streonshalh the step
was taken that bound all Christian Britain
under one law and one order. The issue was
joined between Rome and the Celtic Church
and definite action was imperative : to the Synod
came, in the year 664, Abbot Colman in de
fence of the Celtic Church, Wilfrid of York to
plead for Rome. St. Hilda, as befitted a dis
ciple of the great Aidan, supported Colman
ardently; but King Oswiu, who presided, gave
judgment in favour of Rome, declaring that the
authority of St. Peter was pre-eminent, and
saying: "I will rather obey the porter of heaven,
lest, when I reach its gates, he who has the keys
in his keeping turn his back on me and there
be none to open."
When St. Hilda died she was succeeded by
the Princess Elfleda, who reigned over Whitby
for thirty years, and was followed by others who
permitted the great abbey to lose nothing of its
[61]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
dignity and power. The Danes who sacked
Lindisfarne in 793 stopped short of Whitby,
but in 867 another invasion swept over the land
and Whitby was as utterly destroyed as its
sister monastery on Holy Island. The relics
of St. Hilda were removed to Glastonbury, as
those of St. Cuthbert had been translated to
Durham, and for two hundred years the sea
winds swept sheer across the blasted cliff, un
broken by buttress, wall, or tower, unmingled
with the sound of any bell.
Ruined and desolate as was the forsaken
abbey of St. HUda, its influence was still opera
tive, it would seem, for at last upon a time a
soldier of William the Norman, Reinfred, "miles
strenuissimtis," passing by on some errand of
his master, halted by the cliff of Streonshalh and,
" strenuissimus" as he was, felt "pricked to the
heart by the tokens of ruin and desolation,"
and to such good purpose that forthwith he
renounced the profession of arms, embraced
the religious life, and, after ten years of
training at Evesham, issued forth, determined
to carry out his cherished plan of establish
ing once more on the windy cliff a monas
tery after the order of St. Benedict. With
him fared two brothers, Ealdwine, Prior of
Winchcumbe, and Oswin; also a patient ass
[62]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
to bear their scanty possessions. At Newcastle
on Tyne the prior established himself, and
Oswin remained in Jarrow, Reinfred alone
coming at last to the site he had picked out
for his future work.
All three of the hardy missionaries prospered
exceedingly in their labours, and Reinfred espe
cially was so zealous and enthusiastic that he
presently gathered a great company about him,
and, with the consent and favour of the house of
Percy, entered into formal possession of the
sacred places on Whitby cliff. William de
Percy, proud, violent, yet, it would seem, pas
sionately devout, and destined to end his days
as a Crusader in the Holy Land, determined
that the modest priory should grow into a mighty
abbey, and his prayer was granted by the then
king, Henry I. For many years the Norse
Vikings continued their piratical raids, but the
monks persisted, retiring to more sheltered spots
when invasion threatened, returning always to
build and rebuild, until at last, with the begin
ning of the fifteenth century, Whitby stood per
fect and complete, a masterpiece of noble and
exalted architecture.
The Order of St. Benedict, to which the
monasteries of Glastonbury, Lindisfarne, and
Whitby belonged, as well as the two hundred
[63]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
and sixty other abbeys, priories, convents, and
cells in England alone, was the most ancient,
as it has been the most enduring, of all forms
of western monachism. Its offshoots have
been many, but offshoots they were, owing, all
of them, primal inspiration to the immortal
Rule that was given from Monte Cassino
early in the sixth century. It would be im
possible to overstate the magnitude of the debt
the world owes to St. Benedict, and it is
hard to believe that he was not the mouth
piece of Divine revelation. In the year of our
Lord, 480, and on the day of St. Benedict's
birth, chaos, black and unmitigated, lay over
the world. "Confusion, corruption, despair,
and death were everywhere; social dismember
ment seemed complete. Authority, morals,
laws, sciences, arts, religion herself, might
have been supposed condemned to irremedia
ble ruin. . . . The Church was worse than
ever infected by heresy, schisms, and divis
ions which the obscure successors of St. Leo
the Great in the Holy See endeavoured in
vain to repress. ... In temporal affairs the
political edifice originated by Augustus — that
monster assemblage of two hundred millions
of human creatures 'of whom not a single
individual was entitled to call himself free,'
[64]

^ w

'/^ flip

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
was crumbling into dust under the blows of
the Barbarians."*
In the year 494, a boy of fourteen, patrician
by birth and through his mother the last scion
of the Lords of Nursia, rose up and went away
from the horrors of a crumbling world, to hide
himseff in the wilderness of the Anio valley.
Naked and starving, he was befriended by a
hermit called Romanus who gave him an old
haircloth shirt and a cloak of the skins of wild
beasts, and who for three years kept him alive
by a daily dole of a loaf of bread. The cave of
the boy-anchorite was quite inaccessible, so
the old hermit and the young rigged up a cord
so that the former might tie his loaf to it and,
pulling it up, ring a little bell that gave word
of the advent of the single daily meal. Little
by little the shepherds, who, when they first
saw him, took him to be a wild animal, spread
reports of the sanctity of the new cenobite, and
disciples flocked to him, drawn by curiosity,
held by the holiness of Benedict's life and words.
Day by day he fought the promptings of the
flesh, rolling himself in brambles when the
impulses were too powerful to yield to will
alone, "until his body was all one wound."
Master of himself at last, he consented to the
* Montalembert: "The Monks of the West"
[65]

LUVDISFARNE AND WHITBY
task of mastering others, and became superior
over a colony of monks near by. The experi
ment was a total failure, and Benedict returned
to his cave only to be overwhelmed by an in
flux of disciples whom he finally organized into
twelve monasteries under his own direction.
Priests and laymen, nobles and peasants,
Romans and Barbarians, crowded in upon him,
all thirsting for the Bread of Life that he alone
seemed able to give. He gave it indeed, but
the price was obedience, chastity, and labour;
one and all, the motley assemblage were set to
work clearing the wilderness, redeeming the
land, earning sustenance from the unwilling
soil. He was bringing righteousness into an
unrighteous world, he was establishing a new
order of things, and the powers as then estab
lished resented the revolution. Hell rose up
against him, all the powers of evil were leagued
to encompass his fall; he realized this, took all
the hatred of the world upon himself, and, to
save his disciples, fled with a few chosen brothers
far to the south into the higher mountains, and
did not rest until he found himself in a forgotten
region where Christianity was unknown and
where the peasants still offered sacrifices to the
heathen gods. It was Monte Cassino, the rock
which at St. Benedict's blow was to yield the
[66]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
fountain that, rising into an enormous flood,
was to sweep over the length and breadth of
Europe, bringing in a thousand years of Chris
tian civilization.
Here for the fourteen years still remaining
of this short and wonderful life, St. Benedict
lived and worked, organizing the multitudes
of disciples that flocked to him, turning the
wilderness into a garden, converting the heathen
inhabitants, spreading the Gospel of Christ,
winning over the Gothic invaders of Italy and
reconciling his own people to them, framing
his immortal Rule and laying the foundations
of Christian civilization. A layman to the day
of his death, God gave him natural and super
natural powers unexampled since the days of
the Apostles, and when "he died standing,
murmuring a last prayer" at the age of sixty-
three, he left to the world an heritage that
guaranteed its glorious and righteous develop
ment for a thousand years.
Nothing marks the sublimity of the Rule
more perfectly than its absolute reasonableness.
Here are no excesses, no savage austerities, but
rather serene edicts based on sound common-
sense and a due regard to the potentialities of
human nature. The Rule of St. Benedict
might almost be called the first promulgation
[67]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
of the fundamental law of Christian society.
In the words of our Blessed Lord may be found
the enunciation of the underlying spirit; the
Rule of St. Benedict is the voicing of this spirit
in detailed and definite terms.
The results were instantaneously visible.
"Less than a century after the death of Bene
dict all that barbarism had won from civiliza
tion was reconquered; and more still, his chil
dren took in hand to carry the Gospel beyond
those limits which had confined the first dis
ciples of Christ. After Italy, Gaul, and Spain
had been retaken from the enemy. Great
Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia were in
turn invaded, conquered, and incorporated into
Christendom. The West was saved. A new
empire was founded. A new world began."*
In the year 1316 a careful inquiry was made
as to the history of the order, and it was found
that even then there had been since its birth
of men who had taken its vows, twenty-four
Popes, two hundred cardinals, seven thousand
archbishops, fifteen thousand bishops, the same
number of abbots who had attained distin
guished eminence, and upwards of forty thou
sand saints and holy men. In the year 1569,
after the work of suppression had begun, it
* Montalembert: " The Monks of the West."
[68]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
was claimed there were still thirty-seven thou
sand Benedictine monasteries containing at
least a million monks.
Its first vast work accomplished and Chris
tian civilization supreme at last throughout all
Europe, Benedictinism fell away from its primal
purity, but from its loins sprang one reforma
tion after another, Benedict of Aniane in the
eighth century, the Cluniacs in the tenth, the
Carthusians and Augustinians in the eleventh,
the Cistercians and Norbertines in the twelfth,
Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites in
the thirteenth century. Each was a child of
St. Benedict and all did his work, whatever the
nomenclature and however changed in minor
matters was the rule.
It is impossible to rehearse here the amaz
ing narrative of the monastic epoch from St.
Benedict to St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dom
inic, but it may be truly said that the mighty
thousand years of mediaevalism rest finally
on the rock of Monte Cassino.
Of the annals of Whitby down to the time
when a Henry consumed what another Henry
had created, little of moment is on record. No
scandals are alleged against it, even by Crum
well's choice aggregation of "visitors." No
tragedy of blood and violence accompanies its
[69]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
downfall. It fell in the terrible year 1539,
when Henry's career of destruction had shown
beyond any question that a refusal of his de
mands meant death in some particularly ghastly
shape; and when the "visitors" arrived in
December of that year Abbot de Vail and his
eighteen monks bowed in submission and signed
away the great abbey, whose doom was thus
inevitably sealed. At this time its annual
revenues amounted to about twenty-five thou
sand dollars. In the fourth year of Edward
VI. , the ruins were granted to that memorable
knave, John, Earl of Warwick, from whom
they passed to Sir Edward Yorke, and thence,
during the reign of Mary I., to the house of
Cholmley, with whom the estate has remained
until now.
Lindisfarne and Whitby, always so closely
allied, are also akin in that they are amongst
the very few examples of monastic ruins which
stand in history for recorded greatness in which
they themselves have no part. In both cases
the great deeds and the greater men are of a
period whereof no architectural memorial sur
vives. The immortality of these two holy
places rests on the records of a past, long since
old and hoary when the eldest stones that are
now in place were fresh from the mason's chisel.
[70]

LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY
An interregnum of hundreds of years lay be
tween the old regime of St. Cuthbert and St.
Hilda, and the new, the memorials of which
still remain. After the refounding of each,
history has little to say, but it does not follow
that their lives were empty and insignificant;
rather is it probable that they were of that
gentle and beneficent type, so busy with duties
ably done and tasks duly accomplished that
brave chronicles are out of mind, and the day's
work is well done, if done in the Name of God.

[71]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
ON either side Southampton Water lie
the ruins of two abbeys that show very
clearly the almost whimsical fate that
has overtaken these monuments of a great past.
Mother and daughter, the one has been utterly
swept away, the other left almost intact down
to a comparatively recent time, even now stand
ing in noble ruins sufficient to enable the archae
ologist to recreate it on paper in all its delicate
beauty. Beaulieu, elder by a generation, proud
and powerful, the seat of a mitred abbot, vast
in its dimensions, rich, domineering, is gone;
utterly vanished away, unless one may count
some fragments of monastic buildings as still
giving it place in space and time. Netley,
the modest offshoot, small, humble, unmarked
of history or legend, one of those unimportant
little centres of religious life and civilization
that did its allotted work without boastfulness
or ostentation, remaining forgotten until Henry
discovered it in its sequestered meadow to its
instant death and destruction — Netley in great
[72]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
part endures, and has become one of the
famous and tourist-haunted incarnations of the
picturesque. Its name is linked with that
of Tintern, Fountains, and Melrose, but who
ever heard of Beaulieu, even under its modern
pronunciation of "Bewley"? It is utterly un
known, no longer even a name.
And such is the fate that has fallen to many
of the greatest abbeys in England. As I have
said before, the most marvellous of all those
that, preserved, would have added a new glory
to England, and as well have proved beyond
question the greatness of her national archi
tecture, St. Edmundsbury, Evesham, Osney,
Beaulieu, have been razed to their very foun
dation stones, or, as in the case of Glastonbury,
York, and Gisburgh, are traceable only from
battered fragments, whilst insignificant houses
like Tintern, Netley and Bolton, spared by
the whim of chance, have become the symbols
of beauty, majesty and awe.
But the two Hampshire abbeys we shall con
sider here are linked more closely than by
neighbourliness of site and the antitheses of
strange fortune: they are both of the same
order, the Cistercian, and as Glastonbury,
Lindisfarne and Whitby were Benedictine, and
therefore of the first great order of monasticism,
[73]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
it is well that we should thus early turn to the
most noble scion of St. Benedict's Rule, the
Cistercian, which, immediately and always
after, appealing most strongly to men, became
in England one of the most efficient and
powerful of the monastic orders.
The congregation of Citeaux (Lat. Cister-
cium) was founded in 1092 by St. Robert of
Molesme, as a protest against the laxness and
luxury that had become only too common among
the great Benedictine houses as a result of the
miraculous favour the order had received and
its resulting wealth and power. St. Robert
found immediate and powerful support in the
person of Hugh, Apostolic Legate, and Arch
bishop of Lyons, and, with twenty-one monks
gathered from the abbey of Molesme, he de
parted thence and sought out the most wild
and forbidding spot within his ken, and there
began the erection of a wooden church and
monastery, and the practise of the Rule of
St. Benedict in all its purity and severity. So
rigid was the manner of life of the new com
munity, it shortly attracted the attention and
favour of Otho, Duke of Burgundy, who aided
St. Robert with money and lands, so that the
new house prospered exceedingly. The great
reform thus instituted worked apace, and in
[74]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
good time the brothers of Molesme prayed
Pope Urban that St. Robert might be sent
back to them in order that they also might
mend their ways: which prayer was granted
and the founder of a new order found himself
back in his old home, now no longer Bene
dictine, but Cistercian, and well won back to
better modes of life, while the Prior of Citeaux
became abbot in his stead.
But the power of the Cistercians was not
alone in the pious simplicity and self-denial
of their lives, it lay in equal measure in their
magnificent and logical organization, the work
of St. Stephen Harding, an Englishman, and
one of the seceders from Molesme. Each
Benedictine house had been practically inde
pendent, but among Cistercians, while each
monastery was a family in itself, preserving
the power of self-perpetuation, all the houses
together formed a great corporation under the
perpetual headship of the Abbot of Citeaux.
Annual Chapters were held at which all abbots
and priors were bound to be present, and
through these General Chapters was obtained
that absolute uniformity in life, discipline, and
teaching which was one of the chief marks of
Cistercianism. The order increased amazingly:
within fifty years five hundred houses had come
[75]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
into existence, in another fifty this number had
increased to fifteen hundred.
Much of this success was undoubtedly due
to the fierce piety and the majestic intellect of
St. Bernard, the greatest single glory of the
Cistercian Order. He became a novice in
Citeaux because of the then poverty and severity
of this house. His fame spread rapidly, Citeaux
became thronged with ardent followers, dis
cipline became lax, and the crowded monks
began to get out of hand, so the abbot gave
twelve of the most zealous of them in charge
of St. Bernard, and sent them off to found in
the "Valley of Wormwood" the new and still
more rigid monastery of Clairvaux.
St. Bernard became undoubtedly the most
famous man of his time. "He was the arbiter
in Papal elections, the judge in temporal quar
rels, the healer of schisms, and a powerful
preacher of the Crusades. He was the em
bodiment of all that was best in the thought
of his age. . . . He was brave, honest and
pure; controlled always by a consuming passion
for the moral welfare of the people."* So
great was his persuasive eloquence that during
his life it was said that "mothers hid their sons,
wives their husbands, and companions their
?[Professor Wishart: "Monks and Monasteries."
[76]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
friends, lest they be persuaded by his eloquent
message to enter the cloister." Materially also
the monks of Clairvaux were a blessing, for
they very shortly changed the desert of Worm
wood into a rich and fertile country, wiped out
the robbers with whom it was once infested,
and became the leaders of the people not alone
in spiritual, but in material things. "His soon
canonized name has shone starlike in history
ever since he was buried, and it will not here
after decline from its height or lose its lustre,
while men continue to recognize with honour
the temper of devoted Christian consecration,
a character compact of noble forces and infused
with self-forgetful love of God and man."*
With such founders as St. Robert of Molesme,
St. Stephen Harding and St. Bernard of Clair
vaux, the Cistercian Order could only succeed,
even though it held up before man the sternest
and most forbidding modes of life and refused
the appeal of splendid ritual and convincing
art. For many years the abbeys of the Cis
tercians were distinguished by their fierce
rejection of the richness and beauty of the Bene
dictines. Bell-towers were forbidden; carving,
stained glass, pictures (except of course the
crucifix and representations of our Lord), were
*Dr. Storrs: "Bernard of Clairvaux."
[77]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
strictly prohibited. Gold and silver vessels
and rich stuffs and embroideries were under
the ban. The churches themselves were of the
utmost simplicity and of the fewest number of
parts. Later, when this curious twelfth cen
tury Puritanism had outgrown its fear of beauty,
the sumptuary laws were much relaxed, but
stern simplicity and restraint always remained
as a mark of the Cistercian Order.
The life of the monastery was ordered on
no less a rigorous scale. The monks wore a
rough white robe without a cowl, and shirt,
gloves and boots were forbidden; the head was
entirely shaved, four hours of sleep was all that
was allowed, meat was never eaten, fish but
seldom, and from Easter until September there
was but one meal a day. The monasteries
were invariably built in the wildest and most
remote places, though always where nature was,
or could be made, most beautiful, and to this
fact is due the merciful preservation of so many
of these noble structures, while those of the
friendly and companionable Benedictines have
been swept into extinction.
Remoteness — it seems strange to postulate
this quality now when one thinks of near and
grimy Southampton — remoteness saved Netley,
or all there was left to save when Henry's
[78]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
"visitors" had gone; but it was powerless in the
case of the vast and far-flung Beaulieu, for it
lay along tide-water, and, enormous quarry
that it was, proved materially available for the
king's purposes. Down to its very footing-
stones it fell, and was shipped down the Exe
for the building of Hurst Castle. With the
exception of one low wall of the south aisle of
the nave, not one stone of the church remains
literally on another. The refectory was spared,
and has become a parish church, adequate
enough in these latter days for the accommo
dation of the handful of local worshippers; the
arches of the chapter house door still stand,
though hardly, leaning now into the cloister-
garth at a perilous angle; the house of the lay
brothers is still intact, in part, and forms a
museum ; but all else is gone, and there remains
little of actual beauty, or even picturesqueness,
of what must once have been one of the wonders
of England.
Fortunately, the place is now in the hands
of a thoughtful and reverent custodian — Baron
Montagu, of Beaulieu — and nothing more
will perish, though in fact there is little enough
left to save. One thing Lord Montagu has
done which deserves the highest commenda
tion: gone is the great church, every vestige of
[79]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
it, but in the close-cropped, emerald turf the
location of every wall and pier has been traced
in tawny sand, and so from a slight elevation
one may look down as upon a vast coloured
plan, three hundred and fifty feet long and
two hundred feet wide. Thus one may trace
the form and disposition of what must once
have been a majestic church: a great nave of
nine bays, a crossing and central tower, a north
transept of five and a south of four bays, and
a complete double aisled choir with a circular
termination, almost the only example of this
purely continental type that had endured in
England down to the Suppression. Here was
a plan as French as might be, so far as its
eastern termination was concerned, yet built by
English masons in the most vital years of the
thirteenth century. It is true the abbot is
believed to have brought over from Rouen a
certain master mason named Durandus, but
his services were undoubtedly confined to work
ing out the great chevet; all else must have been
purely English and contemporary with such
masterpieces as the "Nine Altars," Durham,
the west fronts of Peterborough and Wells,
and the choirs of Whitby and Rievaulx. The
great church was begun in 1221, and conse
crated in the presence of King Henry III. and
[80]

*!"i' ilia

Netley — The Monks' Door to the Church.

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
his Queen; Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of
the Romans and Emperor of Germany, and a
great throng of prelates and nobles, on June 21,
1244. It is impossible to call up in vision any
adequate semblance of what it must have been:
severe, undoubtedly, for such was the Cistercian
ideal, but with equal certainty perfectly propor
tioned, for here this order seldom erred. It
was not of enormous size, being but three hun
dred and sixty feet long and one hundred and
ninety across the transepts, about the dimen
sions, let us say, of Wells cathedral.
The loss of Beaulieu is irreparable in the
history of English architecture. Westminster
was a few years later and possibly patterned
on it, Tewksbury is a full century further ad
vanced. Beaulieu was the first example of the
chevet in England, therefore the most precious.
When Henry crushed such work as this into
building stone he destroyed the most price
less records of the development of English
art. Now, as of old, Beaulieu stands isolated and
aloof; no railway is near, and it lies in an emerald
oasis surrrounded by wild and uncouth moors.
The site itself is exquisite, a dip of gentle valley
sloping toward the sun, just where the salt from
the Channel water mingles with the upland
[81]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
flood of the Exe. Green meadows and flowery
orchards stretch all around, and majestic trees
lean over the winding and cloistered roads.
Although the church itself was not notably large,
the conventual buildings were elaborate, com
plete, and widespread: even now fragments of
grey masonry crop up in scores of unexpected
places, indicating the sites of mills, barns,
granaries, store-rooms, brew-houses and wine
presses. This was once a great country for
grapes, and the old terraces of the monastic
vineyards may still be traced on the hillside to
the north. The precincts of the abbey were
very large, the walls extending over a mile and
a quarter, and the privilege of sanctuary of
which the abbey was possessed reached some
twenty paces farther in all directions. Many
persons sought sanctuary within these walls
at different times; for their protection, except
to murderers, was absolute. Margaret of Anjou,
Queen to Henry VI. , and her son. Prince Edward,
availed themselves of it on their landing in
England at the time of the Battle of Barnet, as
did Anne of Warwick, the Marquis of Dorset,
and Perkin Warbeck after the failure of his
rising in the West. At the time of the Sur
render thirty-two men with their families were
safely ensconced within the walls, but Crum-
[82]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
well made short work of them when once the
abbot was dispossessed.
Some idea of the power of one of these great
monasteries may be gained from traces still
existing of the centre of trade built up by the
monks outside their gates. Here at the head
of tide-water, in a most out-of-the-way spot, a
great stone quay was constructed, to which
came ships from foreign lands. Near by was a
great market-place, now, as then, called Cheap-
side, though commerce exists there no longer.
At the height of monastic glory the religious
houses were actually the chief centres of industry
and civilization, and around them grew up the
eager villages, many of which now exist, even
though their impulse and original inspiration
have long since departed. Of course the pos
sessions of the abbey reached far away from
the walls in every direction, including many
farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys
were then the great land-owners, and bene
ficent landlords they were as well, even in their
last days, for we have many records of the
cruelty and hardships that came to the tenants
the moment the stolen lands came into the
hands of laymen.
Another evidence of the industry and far-
seeing wisdom of the monks may be found in
[83]

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their care for a pure and copious water supply
and adequate drainage. Here at Beaulieu the
water was brought by an underground conduit
from an unfailing spring, a mile away, and this
served for drinking, washing and bathing, the
supply of the fish ponds, and for a constant
flushing of the elaborate system of drainage.
In sanitary matters the monks were as far in
advance of the rest of society as they were in
learning and in agriculture. For century after
century they were the centres of civilization,
from which radiated the influence that has
made English character what it is: to them,
more than to any other single power in the land,
is due the sterling character of our forefathers.
Beaulieu was founded in the year 1204, by
King John, according to legend, in expiation of
his hatred and persecution of the Cistercians,
the wickedness of which had been revealed to
him in a dream. The effective cause does not
seem adequate, but, in any case, his favour be
came pronounced, for he gave the order much
land here in the New Forest, with extraordinary
privileges therein, a grant of money from the
royal treasury, a great store of corn, one hun
dred and twenty cows, twelve bulls, a golden
chalice, and a yearly present of a tun of wine:
a somewhat motley beneficence, but useful
[84]

f* '11'

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
withal: moreover, he ordered all the Cistercian
abbots in England to join in building here a
glorious abbey.
Thirty-five years after this unique exhibition
of generosity on the part of King John, Netley
was founded as a cell of Beaulieu by a colony of
monks from the already rich and numerous
abbey, obtaining its charter from King Henry
IIL in 1239. Modest in its beginnings, it al
ways remained an inconspicuous little house,
hidden away by the low-lying shores of South
ampton Water, until indeed it was discovered to
be one of the most perfectly beautiful little
ruins in all England, when it speedily became a
haunt of the tripper, a Mecca of the excursion
ist: and little wonder, for its beauty and charm
are almost beyond comparison. Also, it is ac
cessible, almost a suburb of Southampton, and
fast being surrounded by the horrible brick
tenements, shoddy "villas," and sordid shops
that mark the van of on-rushing civilization.
Still the pride of the " Jerrybuilder" stops short
of the abbey precincts; the dim and sheltering
wood is still intact, and the shore for a space is
as yet undefiled.
Now, however, even as in the time of Wal
pole, Netley, whether under the sun or moon,
is a mystical vision that quite justifies the
[85]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
rhapsody of Sir Horace: "They are not the
ruins of Netley but of Paradise. Oh ! the Purple
Abbots ! what a spot they had chosen to slumber
in!" From the deep-wooded road one turns
down into a green meadow starred with a galaxy
of glimmering daisies, then to the left opens a
narrow archway in a shattered wall. Nothing
more is visible: no spires of toppling wall, no
blank-windowed tower, nothing but a dense,
impervious screen of luxuriant foliage.
Pass the turnstile and in a breath we are in
the very cloister-garth itself: the cloisters are
vanished utterly, but here is a deep-turfed
court, thick with slim trees, four square, and
bounded by ragged walls hung deep with
glistening ivy. Behind lies the site of the refec
tory, which has been wholly destroyed, except
for its cloister wall; to the left the quarters of
the lay brothers, to the right the wonderful
triple arches of the chapter house, and in front,
seen dimly through the trees, the windowed
wall of the south aisle of the church, with the
transept lifting to the highest point of all in
the angle. All the buildings to the south of the
cloister have been destroyed, rebuilt as a dwell
ing, and destroyed again, but the eastern range
is still fairly complete, though much mutilated
by alterations made by the Marquis of Win-
[86]

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Chester (to whom, as Sir William Paulet, it
was granted at the Suppression) to adapt his
new possessions to the purposes of a dwelling,
and scathed by fire when it was destroyed at the
time of the Great Rebellion, then being in the
hands of the ever faithful Marquis of Hertford.
As we enter through the little door of the
monks and emerge into the church itself we
realize at once how dire has been the destruc
tion, though full knowledge of the exquisite
beauty that then passed away does not come
until we have begun to pore over the fragments
that still remain.
Netley has passed through many hands, none
of them conspicuously tender, until recent years.
On the death of Winchester, in 1572, it came
into the possession of the Earl of Hertford,
thence to that of his heir, Edward Seymour,
who suffered so notably at the hands of the
strenuous Elizabeth because of his marriage to
the sister of Lady Jane Grey. Later another
alliance brought political disgrace to an owner of
Netley, the same loyal Marquis of Hertford who
subsequently stood so strongly for his king. By
marrying the Lady Arabella Stuart he had
brought himself into disfavour with James I.,
had escaped to the Continent and had returned
to prove a faithful servant of King James's
[87]

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lawful successors. Late in the seventeenth cen
tury the abbey came to the Earl of Hunting
don, and it was not until then that the actual
ruin of the church began. The Noble Earl
turned the nave into a tennis court, piously
reserving the choir as his own private chapel,
while the chapter house became a kitchen,
and other of the conventual buildings were
made into stables. For many years the south
transept also was used as a stable, floors having
been introduced at various levels, the beautiful
stonework being ruthlessly hacked into and
weakened in the process: whether this trans
mutation took place under the same Noble Earl
would be hard to say, but we may believe it,
since the combination of tennis court and chapel
and stable would have been singularly pictu
resque and quaintly indicative of the temper
of the seventeenth century. In 1700 Sir Berkeley
Lucy took his turn at ownership and made a fine
revelation of his thrift and practicality by selling
the entire church to one Walter Taylor, a builder
of Southampton, on condition that it be wholly
removed. At this time, incredible as it may
seem, the church remained still perfect in every
structural particular.
The connection of Master Taylor with Netley
Abbey was not happy: a Nonconformist and
[88]

BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
friend of the father of the eminent Dr. Watts,
he had been advised by him to have no part in
the impending sacrilege, as the worthy man did
not hesitate to pronounce it. StilP persisting
in his negotiations with Sir Berkeley, he became
tormented by dreams in which his instant
death was foretold if he laid hands on the
sacred stones. Still determined to win what
profits he could from the sale of the abbey as
so much building stone, he was next visited by
the ghost of a gaunt old monk in a white habit,
who warned him that if he dared so much as-
to begin his evil work the roof should fall and
crush him. Filed with terror, but urged on
by a fierce cupidity, the unhappy man signed
his agreement with Lucy, removed the roof,
destroyed the vaulting of the choir, nave, and
north transept, together with the central tower,
and was beginning on the west end when the
tracery of the great window fell suddenly,
fracturing his skull and inflicting other hurts,
whereof he forwith died.
For a time the course of ruin was stayed.
A Mr. Clift acquired what remained, and in
time transferred it to Sir Nathaniel Holland.
Lady Holland, inspired by the chaste emotions
of the eighteenth century, and desiring an ex
ample of " The Picturesque " in her park, re-
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BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
moved the entire north transept for the purpose
of fabricating a tasteful ruin therein. Here the
wretched story comes to an end. Mr. Chamber
layne, the next owner, was a gentleman, and
as early as 1861 he took steps to preserve such
of the abbey as was left, and it is now safe.
The treatment accorded it has been absolutely
judicious; it has not been furbished up into
smug neatness, as has been the case with Tintern
and Kirkstall; it is not abandoned to cumulative
decay like Rievaulx. The trees and luxuriant
ivy are kept well within bounds, the debris has
been removed, the disintegration stopped. As
a result Netley is a faultless ruin, a thing of
almost unimaginable beauty, half because of
the greatness of its art, half by reason of the
fact that it is regarded, not as an archaeological
specimen, but as a picture, as a living poem.
Viewed in this light, it is perhaps the most
wholly lovely thing amongst all the abbeys of
Great Britain.
Materially, it is one of the smallest. The
church was but two hundred and twenty feet
over all, wholly vaulted in stone; its height in
side was only forty-three feet, yet so exquisite
is it in its proportions, the actual dimensions
when discovered come almost as a shock. In
style it is of that early and noble thirteenth
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BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
century that is so gravely reserved, so pure in
its classicality. Cistercian vigour marks it all,
but also Cistercian seriousness and loftiness of
impulse. It is all a study in subtle proportions
and sensitive line. Greek, if you like, since
the word means a certain perfection; but actually
no classical building ever showed the finality
of the absolutely attained in such measure as
do some examples of pure Gothic, like Netley,
York Abbey, Rievaulx. Such buildings as these
are marvels of complex simplicity; they are
the most highly organized of the works of man.
Nothing could be more severe and masterly
than the shafts of the south transept, nothing
more vibrant with life, yet full of gracious
repose, than the arches of the chapter house.
As late as 1859, the slender shafts of Purbeck
marble still encircled the columns of this per
fect doorway, and remained indeed in many
other parts of the church as well; but a strike
taking place, the men employed on the great
Victoria Hospital near by amused themselves
and obtained a few shillings for drink by tear
ing them all away and selling them to be worked
into chimney-pieces by thrifty manufacturers
of the neighbourhood. We curse the Turk for
his destruction of the classical wonders of Greece;
does it ever occur to us that in our treatment
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BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
of the Gothic wonders of England we have
matched him in his own field ?
Apart from its wonderful classicism, Netley is
full of evidences of the burgeoning vitality of
the thirteenth century. The ponderous Norman
is only a few years behind, and yet here is true
and brilliant Gothic of a very perfect type, full,
too, of that constant reaching out for new ideas
so characteristic of English work. In the
splays of the aisle windows, the development
of the piers, the treatment of arcade, triforium,
and clerestory, the working out of the vaulting,
there is visible an almost passionate originality
and invention, contrasting strangely with the
cold and scientific work of the contemporary
builders in France, who, amongst a certain
class of critics, are held to be the only Gothic
builders in history.
But to the world the charm of Netley will
always lie in its infinite picturesqueness. No
ruin in England has shaped itself into such an
infinite variety of pictures : it is a painter's para
dise, yet none paints it: a poet's inspiration, yet
none seems ever to have fallen under its spell.
One may wander through and around it day
after day finding
"... some knowledge at each pause
Or some new thing to know."
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BEAULIEU AND NETLEY
When the spangled turf is wet with dew and
the mist from the water is veiling the sundered
walls; when the sun rides high and the mellow
stone glows deep and golden, whilst deep
shadows lurk under the transept vaults; when
the light is level at sunset and the grassy pave
ment is slashed with golden bars; in sun and
shadow, in mist or rain, it is the very haunt of
poetry, a dream-like emanation of the past, set
here on the verge of the insistent, clamorous
present. But it is most wonderful of all by moonlight.
The silence is absolute, profound, the harsh
edges of the riven stones are softened, the clos
ing forest mingles with the dark ivy and turf,
and out of the great shadow shafts and arches
grow pale and white, seemingly hung in the
void: or, from another point, vacant windows
closed by splendid arches shape themselves
dark against the luminous sky. "Oh, the
Purple Abbots! What a spot they had chosen
to slumber in," indeed.

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FROM Netley it is no far cry to Tintern,
that other Cistercian abbey on the Wye,
that rivals it in beauty of situation and
classical nobility of style, even though assiduous
care for its preservation has robbed it of the
wild picturesqueness that leaves Netley first
among the absolute epics of monastic England.
Tintern is supremely wonderful for situation
amongst scores of rivals : it lies on the very brink
of the river, in a hollow of the hills of Monmouth,
sheltered from harsh winds, warmed by the
breezes of the channel, a very nook in an earthly
Eden. Somehow, the winter seems to fall
more lightly here, the spring to come earlier,
the foliage to take on a deeper green, the grass
a greater thickness, the flowers a more multi
tudinous variety, a more poignant sweetness.
Here the breakneck hills are clothed to their
crests in deep forests; the intervales and mead
ows are lush and warm; the sky itself is of a
softer splendour. If, as should always be the
case, the pilgrim comes lazily by boat down the
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winding Wye from Ross, he makes a perfect
approach. Behind him is the grateful memory
of a wonderfully good little inn on the very walls
of Ross castle (good in all but its architecture,
which is unspeakable); before him, though he
may not know it as yet, is the promise of equally
generous entertainment in the rambling and
ivy-covered old inn at Tintern, from the garden
of which, as he drinks his tea of an afternoon,
he may watch the low sun turn the stones of
the abbey into burnished gold, so close at hand
that a rose tossed from the terrace would fall
almost at the foot of the walls.
And the voyage itself is something long to
be remembered; a river of infinite moods, now
languid and brooding, now fierce and turbu
lent to such an extent that sharp skill is neces
sary on the part of the boatman to avoid
incontinent shipwreck. The river winds back
and forth, now through level meadows crowded
with ruminant cattle, now between steep-terraced
hills fat with luxuriant foliage, with here and
there red crags of old castles breaking the velvet
pall. No cities or upstart towns clog the banks,
or foul the water; no factory chimneys blast
the view. It is all a sweet and idyllic place.
Now and then white swans float by, perhaps,
if you are fortunate, convoying a little flotilla
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of downy cygnets, though this is a thing seen
no more than once in a decade; in the season
salmon fishers are omnipresent and humanly
prone to resent the disturbing intrusion of the
heedless voyager.
The ruin of Tintern, like that of so many of
the sequestered Cistercian abbeys, is the fruit
of time long continued and of scornful neglect.
When Abbot Wych, the last of a line that had
endured for nearly three centuries, surrendered
the abbey to Henry on September 1, 1537, it was
handed over to the Earl of Worcester, who left
it severely alone as did his successors for genera
tions. Through them it descended to the ducal
house of Beaufort, and with the glimmerings
of renewed civilization in the latter haff of the
nineteenth century its fortunes changed. Every
vestige of vaulting had gone, together with the
central tower, while the north arcade and clere
story of the nave had entirely disappeared;
otherwise the church itself was practically in
tact, barring, of course, the altars, screens, and
window tracery. All the monastic buildings
were in ruins, though none had been wholly
destroyed. On the whole, it was almost the
best preserved of the ruined abbeys of England.
His Grace of Beaufort stopped the disintegra
tion where it stood, and the great monument,
[96]

Tintern — The Crossing.

TINTERN
now having become Crown property, is prob
ably destined to permanent preservation.
Of course this means a certain loss in pic
turesqueness: nearly all the clambering ivy
has been removed, every fragment of cut stone
recovered is carefully cherished, and, when
possible, replaced in a plausible position. The
abbey is now preserved with the most jealous
care, but it has become an archaeological monu
ment and furnishes a startling contrast to Netley,
the mystical haunt of poetry, the apotheosis
of natural beauty. Probably this is all very
wise, for Tintern is a singularly noble and per
fect example of the purest Cistercian Gothic
of the mid-thirteenth century. It is the next
step after Netley, as this followed close in archi
tectural development after Beaulieu. Begun
just thirty years after the corner-stones were
laid at Netley, i.e., A.D. 1269, it represents
that noble transition from the early pointed to
the so-called "geometrical" style. Coeval with
York Abbey, it is a perfect counterfoil; on the
one hand the severe asceticism of the Cister
cians, on the other the opulence and majesty
and the rejoicing in consummate art of the
Benedictines. No sharper contrast would be
possible. In the north the gleaming walls and
pearly interior of the vast fabric wrought of a
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limestone as white and pure as marble, fretted
with infinite enrichment of delicately chiselled
arcades, niches, canopies and pinnacles, and
with jambstones and capitals and corbels all
carved with exquisite, intricate foliage. Here
in the south, these unwrought, unsculptured
walls of ashen grey, slashed with long windows
of severest form : within, cut sandstone for shaft
and string course, archivolt and vaulting rib, the
rest rough rubble, once coated with plain white
plaster : not a cap is carved, and hardly a cor
bel; the great bosses of the vaults that now lie
reversed in the green turf were chiselled indeed,
but one feels that even they were probably an
offence to the first abbots.
Yet north and south, Benedictine and Cister
cian, sundered as are the two structures in
design, material, and detail, they are equally
wonderful in that one greatest quality of great
art — proportion. Here at Tintern one is blinded
by no blandishment of ravishing detail: the
composition stands forth as simple and direct
as that of the Parthenon. All is laid bare, and
we see how pure and how perfect it all is, how
severely classical, how gravely and faultlessly
competent. Here, in a presence like this, we
realize how futile is the contemporary striving
after success through lavished detail, if behind
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TINTERN
it all is not the masterly composition and pro
portion and relation of parts that are the only
beginnings wherefrom success may come. Tin
tern demonstrates at once the things that are
indispensable in art, the things that are super
ficial. It is not a large church, only some two hun
dred and eighty-eight feet in length by one
hundred and fifty-one feet in extreme breadth
across the transepts; the central aisle of the
nave is thirty-three feet wide, while the height
is sixty-nine feet. Here we see at once the great
divergence from the earliest type as at Netley,
where, with about the same nave width, the
height was but forty-three feet. The church is
cruciform, of course, with a short nave of six
bays, a choir of four and transepts of three.
The arcade is singularly noble and well pro
portioned ; the triforium is missing, and its place
is taken by a wide space of unbroken wall sub
divided by the vaulting shafts. The vault
itself springs from the upper course of this
pseudo-triforium, and the clerestory windows
are of two narrow lights rather awkwardly com
prised within the vault triangle. In Netley
the grouped lancets of the earliest English
Gothic, as at Whitby and Rievaulx, have given
place to great windows divided by columnal
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TINTERN
muUions, and here at Tintern there is a still
further advance, the tall, slim-shafted window
of the south transept, seventeen feet wide and
fifty-two feet high, being a stroke of masterly
genius, while the east window is, or was, a
wonderful thing, twenty-seven feet in breadth,
and no less than fifty-five feet in clear alti
tude. Netley, better than any other Cistercian
church, shows the original divisions of the
interior by means of walls of solid stone, some
ten or fifteen feet high. An abbey church of
this order was not one great open space broken
only by piers and columns: it was subdivided
until it really became a series of apartments,
separated from each other by low walls of
masonry. In the first place, both transepts
and the north and south aisles of the choir and
nave were shut off entirely by solid screens
between all the columns of the arcade and reach
ing from the east wall to the west. Midway
the length of the church — here at Tintern one
bay west of the tower — was a transverse wall
— the "pulpitum" — dividing the central en
closed space in two. To the east were the sanc
tuary, choir and crossing, the space reserved
for the monks themselves, and here, beneath
the great east window, was the high altar. The
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TINTERN
enclosure to the west was for the use of the lay
brothers, who frequently largely outnumbered
the monks. The latter came by day for their
many services through the aisle door to the
cloisters, by night down the long flight of steps
in the transept from the "dorter," which was
above the chapter house and day room: the
" conversi," or lay brothers, entered from the
extreme west of the nave, their quarters always
adjoining the church at the west end. In ad
dition to the walls already named there were
those that divided the transept altars one from
another. Sometimes, in Cistercian churches,
the nave was still further subdivided by a rood
screen a bay or two to the west of the pulpitum.
As the churches of the order were invariably
dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, the eastern
Lady chapel was unnecessary, and is never
found in Cistercian establishments.
As we have seen in the case of Netley, the
original principles of the Cistercians forbade
all ornament in the shape of carving, painting,
glass, embroidery, and goldsmith's work; but
it is doubtful if these rigid laws were ever wholly
enforced: as a matter of fact, one of the first
times stained glass is mentioned in England is
in the year 1140, in connection with certain
windows in Rievaulx Abbey, the chief and head
[101]

TINTERN
of all the English Cistercian houses. And
here at Tintern, severe and simple as is the fabric
of the church itself, the random fragments of
defaced sculpture that are piled in heaps indi
cate very clearly that in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the function of art as the
most faithful handmaid of religion had been
duly recognized. The Cistercian and the Puri
tan each rejected beauty for the same reason;
the Puritan never learned his error, the Cister
cian had but to enunciate his doctrine of renun
ciation to prove its fallacy, even to himself:
the first became the synonym for aesthetic igno
rance and wilful blindness to a very potent agency
for salvation: the second left his name linked
forever with one of the noblest phases of a noble
art, and as well with the very foundation of
English civilization.
It is a very terrible thing to scrutinize these
heaped up fragments of wilfully shattered glory,
these shapeless blocks of moss-covered stone,
some one facet of which is sure to show a space
of subtly chiselled tracery or an hand's breadth
of tender foliage wrought with love and enthu
siasm out of the ready rock. As one turns over
stone after stone in search of scraps of art, or
digs with a penknife through deep layers of
moss to free some lovely capital to the eye, one
[102 ]

TINTERN
realizes what, to art at least, the Suppression
actually meant.
Where they belonged, these poor little frag
ments of pure beauty, it is impossible to say,
many of them in altars, reredoses and shrines,
others undoubtedly in the great rood screen
that separated the monks' choir from that of
the lay brothers, and against which to the west
stood the altar of the conversi. One speculates
in vain as to how this, or any other abbey,
must have looked in the last year of the fifteenth
century. With its great windows filled with
splendid glass (like that perhaps still preserved
at Malvern), its many altars and shrines wrought
in such fashion as all the wealth of a great " cap
tain of industry" could not bring into being
to-day; its myriad lights, its vestments stiff
with needlework and jewels; its long proces
sions of white-robed monks, its longer lines of
cowled conversi; its constant visitors, bishops,
cardinals, nobles, and even kings — it must
have been a marvellous concatenation of varied
beauty. And at midnight, when the great
church was black and silent save for the candles
on the high altar, the lamps before the shrines,
and the tapers at the huge lectern and in the
stalls; when down the transept stairway came
the long file of white brothers, cowled and dumb,
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TINTERN
for the first offices of the new day. Matins and
Lauds ; and when, assembled in the dusky choir,
each monk in his carven and canopied stall,
the antiphonal chants surged back and forth
through the dark, it must have been unparalleled
in its effect of solemnity and awe.
The remains of the monastic buildings are
sufficiently complete to give a clear idea of the
arrangement of such an house as this. The Cis
tercian plan is almost invariable: the cloister
is the centre of everything, and lies almost
always south and west of the south transept.
At Tintern the conventual buildings lay to the
north, probably in order that the slope of the
land toward the river might furnish better
drainage. All the rooms reserved for the monks
and lay brothers — except the infirmary, which
always lay to the east and at a distance, and
in later times the lodgings of the abbot —
opened from the great cloister. This was far
from being a mere passageway — it was the
very centre of the common life, the adjacent
rooms were hardly more than appendages.
Ordinarily, the north cloister, adjoining the
nave of the church, was the one warmed by the
sun, and here were the stone seats for all the
brothers, that of the abbot being next the door
of the church and in a position from which he
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could command a view of both the north and
east cloisters. At the southerly end of the east
cloister the novice-master held his training
school; the west walk belonged to the junior
monks; the south, being always cold and sun
less, was used simply as a passageway, and
contained the great stone basins where the
monks washed before and after meals. Usually
the door from the outer world was at the
western end of the south cloister, jealously
guarded by the porter, that no one might be
"suffered to molest or trouble the said novices
or monks in their carrels while they were at their
books within the cloister."* These "carrels"
were little framed compartments, one for each
monk, where he might give himself to uninter
rupted study of copying or illumination, and
at the same time be somewhat protected from
the cold in winter: they were "finely wain-
scotted and very close, all but the fore part which
had carved work to give light in at their carrel
doors. And in every carrel was a desk to lie
their books on and the carrel was no greater
than from one stanchell of the window to an
other. And over against the carrels, against
the church wall did stand certain great aumbries
of wainscott all full of books, with great store
* " The Rites of Durham."
[105]

TINTERN
of antient manuscripts to help them in their
study ... so that every one did study what
Doctor pleased him best, having the library at all
times to go and study in besides these carrels."*
This description applies more closely to Bene
dictine than to Cistercian monasteries, for the
latter order was not as passionately addicted
to learning as was the former, yet in every
monastery the cloister was the great centre of
common life: unfortunately, not one Cistercian
cloister remains in all Great Britain, therefore
we can know little of its distinctive features.
How important it was is shown by the fact that
here at Tintern, for instance, the Earl of Pem
broke left by will, in 1491, one hundred tons
of stone for the building of a new cloister: the
work had hardly begun at the time of the Sup
pression, and only a few fragments now remain,
showing how rich and elaborate in its Perpen
dicular detail this fine new cloister would have
been. Judging from the stones that still stand,
it would have rivalled even that of Gloucester
itself. Opening from the cloister to the east, and
adjoining the transept wall, are two small rooms,
one a sacristy, the other perhaps a place of
public penance. Next them is the chapter
* "The Rites of Durham."
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TINTERN
house, the executive, spiritual, and disciplinary
centre of the entire monastery. Here were as
sembled daily, after the chapter mass, all the
religious under the presidency of the abbot, or,
in his absence, of the prior, for the reading of
the Martyrology, the morning prayers, legisla
tion, discipline, transaction of temporal busi
ness, affixing of seals, drafting of official letters,
hearing the petitions of postulants, indeed all
the corporate affairs of the community. Ad
joining the chapter house is a small room, pos
sibly a library, then follows the slype, or passage
to the graveyard and infirmary, and at the end
on this side the monks' day room, once a very
beautiful apartment with a vaulted ceiling sup
ported by a central row of slender columns.
Turning the corner of the cloister we come
next to the hall and stairway to the great dormi
tory or "dorter," which took in all the second
story of the eastern range of buildings, abutting
against the transept, where the night stairway
led down into the church. Midway of the north
cloister stood the refectory, commonly called
the "fratry," though this name is sometimes
given the day room. This apartment was
always third in dignity, the church and chapter
house alone taking precedence. Here at Tin
tern it was a very noble room, about eighty feet
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long and nearly thirty feet wide, lighted by
beautiful and interesting windows, showing
the transition from thirteenth to fourteenth cen
tury modes; the pulpit, which has wholly dis
appeared, except for its stairway, occupied its
regular position in the midst of the west wall.
Between the refectory and day room was the
warming room, with a curious chimney that
takes one back almost to the time when fires
were built in the middle of the floor, the smoke
escaping as best it could through an opening
in the roof; here the hearth is full in the midst
of the room, but a great stone hood is over it,
supported on masonry piers, the flue rising
from the apex of the hood : the fire was, of course,
accessible from four sides, and must have
wasted none of its heat, which was undoubtedly
welcome enough to the monks, numb from two
hours of midnight devotions in the icy church
in midwinter. In a corresponding position to
the west of the refectory was the kitchen, and
beyond this, filling in the west side of the cloister,
was the house of the lay brothers.
This was the standard monastic type; the
variants from it, while numerous, were unimpor
tant, except in so far, of course, as the houses of
the Carthusians and Gilbertines were concerned.
Having seen one group such as this at Tintern,
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TINTERN
you have seen all, but in point of plan alone:
their architectural and pictorial variety is meas
ured only by the number of the ruins that still
remain from the dark ages of the early sixteenth
century. The thirteenth century was the great
age of monastic building, and it was so well done
that unless conflagrations made new work neces
sary, little or nothing was added to the monastic
buildings themselves, apart from the churches,
which were receiving constant additions in the
shape of altars, chapels, chantries, and even
new choirs, towers, and cloisters. The archi
tecture of this time has suffered more than that
of any succeeding period through the wilful
destruction of the monasteries, which were the
noblest and most perfect examples of this first
and purest form of English Gothic.
The history of Tintern has largely sunk into
absolute oblivion. When at last the Marquis
of Worcester, for his devoted and whole-souled
loyalty to his king, surrendered Raglan Castle
to the Crumwellian army, after a masterly
defence that has been well recorded in George
McDonald's "St. George and St. Michael,"
the castle was ruthlessly burned, and with it
perished not alone the records of his son's many
inventions and his own great library, but also
the abbey records, which had been removed
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TINTERN
from Tintern when the mutilated monument
was granted to the Marquis's ancestor, the Earl
of Worcester, by Henry VIII. We know that
the first foundation of a monastery on this site
was at the hands of a son of Richard de Bienfaite,
a cousin of William the Conqueror, who assumed
the family name of Clare from one of the Suffolk
manors granted to him by the new king. Walter,
the third son, founded the abbey in 1131, died
without issue, and was buried in the abbey in
1139. He was succeeded by his nephew, Gil
bert "Strongbow," who was also buried at Tin
tern in 1149. His granddaughter Isabel married
William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke; and her
daughter, marrying Hugh Bigod, brought the
estates to the ducal house of Norfolk; her
grand-nephew, Roger Bigod, becoming the true
founder of the Cistercian abbey of Tintern,
A.D. 1269. This was in the midst of me great
days of King Henry IIL, Prince Edward,
Stephen Langton, Robert Grosseteste, Simon
de Montfort, and Gilbert de Clare, Earl of
Gloucester, himself a descendant of the first
founder of Tintern Abbey. Two years before,
the barons had won their fight against Henry
III. for constitutional government in England,
and the people, throwing off the last of their for
eign shackles, had become once more a nation.
[110]

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W^hen the new Cistercian foundation came into
being. Prince Edward was on Crusade, so utterly
was the kingdom at peace; and three years after
the corner-stone was laid he returned to rejuve
nated England as king, and king of all the
people. It is well to remember, in studying these
monastic remains, that it is to the Cistercians
in a very large degree that we owe the arousing
of the English people against Stephen, John,
and those others of the French line of monarchs
who were doing their best to make England
a wilderness, or worse. At the accession of
Stephen, the Church, wholly under the dominion
of Norman bishops, had almost ceased to be the
moral and spiritual head of the people. The
Benedictine order had suffered with the rest,
but the coming of the Cistercians brought a new
and wholesome life. "At the close of Henry's
reign, and throughout the reign of Stephen,
England was stirred by the first of those great
religious movements which it was to experience
afterwards. . . . Everywhere, in town and coun
try, men banded themselves together for prayer :
hermits flocked to the woods: noble and churl
welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed
offshoot of the Benedictine order, as they
spread over the moors and forests of the north.
[Ill]

TINTERN
. . . The paralysis of the Church ceased as the
new impulse bound prelacy and people together,
and at the moment we have reached its power
was found strong enough to wrest England out
of the chaos of feudal misrule."* It was indeed
the bishops who led — men like Theobald of
Canterbury, and St. Thomas a Becket, as earlier
St. Anselm had fought against William Rufus,
as later Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canter
bury, was to set himseff against John. But
the bishops would have been helpless without
the supporting will of the people, and for this
we must thank in great measure the stern and
uncompromising monks who were gathered to
gether by St. Robert of Molesme, organized by
the Englishman, St. Stephen Harding, and in
spired by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This brought
a new righteousness into England, heartened an
oppressed and miserable race, and led to Magna
Carta. The ruined abbeys of Great Britain
stand not alone for a great epoch of art, a mile
stone in the progress of civilization, an absorbing
and unique episode in social progress, they are
as well the visible, yet vanishing, records of a
mighty movement that brought a people out of
bondage, and made England a great, a powerful,
and, for many centuries, a righteous nation.
* Green: " History of the English People."
[112]

Tintern — The Interior, Looking East.

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
WE have already seen something of
the two greatest orders of monas
ticism; first, the Benedictine, sire of
all others, founded by St. Benedict in the sixth
century, the great power that not only saved
the results of classical civilization to the world,
but made of no avail the deluge of barbarism
that swept over civilized Europe during the
Dark Ages, and actually became the creative
force that, more than any other single institu
tion or movement, laid the foundations and
guaranteed the development of that great epoch
of Christian civilization that covered the mighty
thousand years from the promulgation of the
Rule of St. Benedict in the middle of the
sixth century to the final suppression in Eng
land, A.D. 1539. The order that regenerated
the Church, recreated civil society, and brought
order out of chaos; that organized Christianity;
that gave birth to Christian art, that gave to
the Church some of its greatest saints, its most
era-making bishops, and was at one time so
[113]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
supreme in spiritual and temporal matters that
it could boast thirty-seven thousand houses
with, at the smallest computation, one million
monks scattered over the entire known world
— the order that civilized half of pagan Europe
and won to Christ many of the lands now com
prising the great powers of the earth.
Second, the Cistercian, the offshoot from the
parent stem, the creation of St. Robert of Mo
lesme, St. Stephen Harding, and St. Bernard of
Clairvaux, the great order of righteousness and
liberty that was the basic force in the revolts of
the English people against royal tyranny and
incapacity, and to which may be traced without
exaggeration so much that is fundamental and
enduring in the character of our race.
It is now time to turn for a moment to yet
another order, technically independent of Bene
dictinism, yet actually dependent on it for its
ultimate success, the Canons Regular of St.
Augustine, who, though they did not appear
in England until 1108, became almost more
widely popular than any other order, boasting
at the Suppression, one hundred and seventy
houses, at which time the revenues of Gisburgh,
the most powerful of all, were exceeded only
by three houses in the Province of York. As
from the Rule of St. Benedict many other move-
[114]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
ments were derived, so from that called of St.
Augustine grew several powerful and singularly
beneficent offshots, Norbertines or Praemonstra-
tensians, Gilbertines, the only strictly English
order, and others. It was a peculiarly vital
movement, and one which should be very
illuminating and suggestive to us of the present
time. The monks of St. Benedict had at first with
drawn from a world at that time impossible;
the revolt showed itself a little later among the
secular clergy who still remained in the world
and served the cathedrals and parish churches,
retaining the cure of souls. The efforts amounted
to little, so far as we can judge. Chrodegang,
Archbishop of Metz, was the first to impose
on his cathedral clergy a rule of life, with the
customary vows, but without the obligation to
manual labour. After the death of Chrodegang
in 764, an effort was made to extend his rule to
all secular clergy, but the attempt failed com
pletely, and conditions reverted to their original
bad estate. In 856 Amalarius, a canon of
Metz, supported by Charlemagne's son, Louis
the Pious, made another attempt in the same
direction, with only a measure of success. The
Council of the Lateran in 1509 took up the
work, and finally Pope Alexander II. in 1063,
[115]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
formally established the order of Regular Can
ons, which immediately took root in England in
Lanfranc's church of St. Gregory in Canter
bury, whence it spread all over the island king
doms. While known officially as canons, they were
distinctly monks, not friars: they lived in com
munity, observed the vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience, and maintained the same life
of constant prayer and devotion. On the other
hand, the canons were all in priest's orders:
they were not bound to manual labour; they
were very directly under Episcopal control;
they served in person all the parishes and chapels
impropriated to them, and formed in a way a
body of missionaries, upon whom [the ordinary
could call for specified service at any time. Even
their great monastic churches were almost paro
chial, in that the canons were confined to the
choir, while the nave was exclusively for the use
of the laity. Their habit was simply that of
the secular canons, cassock, cloak, and biretta
of black, with a white surplice or rochet; the
Praemonstratensians were clothed wholly in
white, even to their birettas, and were called
"White Canons" as the Augustinians were com
monly known as the " Black Canons."
The hundred and seventy houses were thick
[116]

'm>

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
in the eastern and central counties, but thinly
placed in the north, the west, and in Wales.
Many have become parish churches, as, for in
stance, Cirencester, Ipswich, and Dorchester —
in which latter place one finds with grateful
amazement much of the old order restored,
with services as multitudinous and as rich in
ceremonial as though three and a half centuries
of darkness had not intervened between the old
regime and the new. Two cathedrals only,
Carlisle and Oxford, stand on Augustinian
foundations, whilst the greatest houses of all
have been utterly swept away, remaining only
a vague memory, as in the case of the world-
famous Osney in Oxford (the site of which is
now consecrated to railway sidings and gas
ometers); or in the shape of an even more
tantalizing hint, as at Gisburgh.
The fate of this great abbey is melancholy
in the extreme. During its life of more than
four centuries it was honourable above its
fellows; it was distinguished in its birth, rich,
powerful, and beneficent to an unusual degree,
and as well one of the most noble examples of
fourteenth century Gothic in all England. Ex
alted in its life, it was brought correspondingly
low in death, being granted to the most profligate
and evil of Crumwell's "visitors," Thomas
[117]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
Legh, and by him transferred a little later to
one Chaloner, who turned the ruins of one of the
wonders of England into a stone quarry. It
was once three hundred and eighty feet long,
one hundred and seventy-five feet across the
transepts, and seventy-five feet high to the crown
of the vault. The monastic buildings reached
out in every direction, covering several acres;
there now remains the east wall of the choir,
and nothing more of any kind whatever, except
a few foundation stones in the velvet turf; not
a shaft, not an arch, not a foot of wall, the east
end rising against the sky like an architect's
working drawing, preserved as a consequence
of unwonted laziness or from some still less
wonted dim apprehension of immortal beauty, a
mighty and sorrowful decoration in a gentle
man's pleasure garden.
Gisburgh was founded, a.d. 1129, by Robert
de Brus, of Skelton, his wife Agnes, and his son
Adam, at the instigation of Turstan, Archbishop
of York. He was the eldest son of Robert de
Brus, who came over with William the Norman,
and brother to the founder of the Scottish house
from which came Robert the Bruce. As was
usually the case the monastery remained for
generations under the protection and patronage
of its founder's family, while it became the re-
[118]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
cipient of constant favours from, and the chosen
place of sepulture for, all the neighbouring no
bility. Brus after Brus found interment within
its walls, together with Percys, Nevils, Latymers,
D' Arcys ; and at the very end, during the ominous
reign of Henry himself, a marvellous cenotaph
in honour of the House of Brus, or Bruce, was
erected here at the instance of Margaret Tudor,
only to be crushed into fragments a few years
later, and dispersed abroad, chiselled stones
remaining to this day built up into the altar of
the parish church, forming part of its pavement,
or serving as makeshift building material in the
walls of the same church porch.
From the beginning the abbey was overtaken
by one disaster after another. What became
of the first Norman buildings is unknown; the
second, erected in the great central years of the
thirteenth century, were burned in 1289, through
the carelessness of a "vUe plumber with a wicked
disposition." The third church was completed
about 1300, and again burned, but this time
the fabric was so massive it resisted total destruc
tion, and was rapidly rebuilt, 1320-1330, there
after standing safe until a more devastating
visitation than fire involved all in irreparable
ruin. This sequence of conflagrations, which is
[119]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
typical of mediaeval religious houses generally,
shows very clearly the perils that beset the vast
libraries and the innumerable works of art that
were the pride of Christian civilization during
the great thousand years. From the sixth cen
tury down, we read in record and chronicle
stories of the noble libraries in even the smaller
monasteries, that convey a somewhat different
impression of "monkish ignorance and super
stition" during the curiously misnamed "Dark
Ages" to that acquired from the unscrupulous
statements of special-pleader historians; and
when we take into account the innumerable raids
of barbarians, the assaults and spoliations of
kings, and these same repeated conflagrations, we
can only wonder that one mediaeval manuscript
has come down to us; yet, so constant was the
industry of the monks, thousands of marvellous
books, sacred and "profane," remained to fall a
victim to the Lutherans in Germany, the Calvin-
ists and Huguenots in France, and the brigands
of our own country. Those who care for the evi
dences of the vast learning and the great multi
tude of books that overspread Europe during
mediaeval times have but to consult "The Monks
of the West," by Montalembert; "Henry VIII.
and the English Monasteries," by Dr. Gasquet;
and, above all, Maitland's "Dark Ages," and
[120 ]

Gisburgh — A Ruined Sanctuary.

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
they will find a surplus of proof that books did
exist before the invention of printing, and that
the rebirth of learning and the Renaissance are
by no means synonymous terms.
When the last building was completed, about
1330, the great fabric stood perhaps the most
perfect example of fourteenth century architec
ture in Great Britain. The Black Death that
followed so soon after gave a terrible and almost
fatal blow to English civilization, and for a
time art halted and fell back, but the years that
saw Gisburgh (or Guisborough, as it is now
written, with no show of authority whatever)
grow into greatness — 1290-1330 — were years
of culmination, and the all but vanished church
was a fitting and adequate monument to the
supremacy of a great epoch. The church was
a complete and consistent design, cruciform, of
course, with a central tower and two others
at the western end; it was built of a rich, warm-
coloured stone, hard and fine ; vaulted through
out, and constructed with superb solidity and
massiveness. It was classical in its majesty
and simplicity, a masterpiece of the highest type
of Gothic design, articulate, consistent, organic.
A Gothic building is at its highest point of
development as marvellous in its intricate sim
plicity, its logical organization and its co-ordina-
[121]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
tion of parts, as man himself. Nowhere else
in the range of human achievement is anything
to be found which approaches such a church as
this in sheer wonder of perfect finality, in abso
lute science linked with absolute beauty. Here
stands a forlorn fragment of towering masonry,
a shard saved from destruction, a handful of
chiselled stones, compared with the mountain
that has vanished; yet, so faultless is its art, we
can almost reconstruct the perished wonder,
proving the everlasting truth of the wise saying,
"Ex pede, Herculem."
There is no nobler example of pure and per
fect proportion now existing than this : it is con
summate in its balance, its mass, its relation of
solids to voids, its marvellous sense of intimate
relationship between a multiplicity of parts.
And also it is so reserved, so self-contained, so
reasonably contented with manly achievement,
without the mad hunger for the almost impos
sible. There is no frenzy of dizzy vaults poised
perilously in air at the mercy of a treacherous
scaffolding of laborious flying buttresses: the
arcade shafts are big enough to carry the piers
that take the thrust of the vault conoids down
to the point where the aisle vaults and their
transverse walls transmit the thrust across the
aisles to the outer buttresses. It is all sane,
[122]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
scientific, self-contained, and at the same time
vital with the loftiest and most crescent inspira
tion. In its decoration, also, it is just as reserved
and high-bred. Carving of the richest appears
where the need is insistent, but it is not lavished
with prodigality, and every inch of it is delicate,
exquisite, living.
Ralph of Glastonbury and William of Canter
bury and all the other great builders of the old
days whose names have perished, though from
human records only, have their reward: the
abbeys of Netley, Whitby, Tintern, Rievaulx,
York, Gisburg, have followed in their course;
and Gothic has become the full, sonorous, vi
brant, and mobile language of Christian civili
zation. It is not too much to say that the tragedy
involved in the wilful slaughter of such a build
ing as this is insupportable. There is little
enough absolute beauty in the world, and such
as there is is slowly passing away, with little of
new offered to make good the loss. We are on
the eve of a new epoch, a rediscovery of relative
values, a new consciousness of the relation of
religion to life, of the essential quality of art, and
the connection eternally existing between it
and religion and civilization. That which satis
fied the last four centuries will not serve for us :
[123 ]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
already the revolt is hot against the miserable
changeling that has passed so long for the art
of architecture. The old laws must be re-dis
covered, the old principles restored to life, but
no studious monks have preserved for us through
the true Dark Ages the memorials of a perished
civilization. For generations the hand of every
man was against these perfect records : hate and
greed preyed on them at will, and later a foolish
dilettanteism wrought even greater destruction
under the guise of "restoration." Now, when
we creep back to solve the problem of the essence
of really great art, we are confronted by legends
and traditions of wonders that once rose in fields,
now vacant of any trace; by fabrics that endured
through three centuries of scornful neglect, only
to die at last by the paring and scraping and
substitution of well-meaning restorers, or, per
haps, by ghosts like this of Gisburgh. In
simple truth, the tragedy is unsupportable.
When we turn from this once majestic house
and cross the moors of Yorkshire to that other
Augustinian foundation in the valley of the
Wharfe, we come upon a very different scene,
confront a memorial of the past widely sun
dered in every way from the richest and most
powerful of all Augustinian houses. Gisburgh
was almost a principality, and we read how
[124]

Bolton — Prior Moon's Unflnished Tower.

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
"the Prior kept a most pompous house, inso
much that the towne, consystinge of five hun
dred householders, hade no lande, but lyved
all on the Abbay." It maintained upwards of
thirty parish churches at its own expense in
England, as well as several in Scotland; at the
Suppression its revenues were the equivalent
of nearly $40,000 per annum, but Bolton was a
little church and a little monastery hidden in
the Yorkshire hills with, in its best estate, only
some two hundred souls in its household as
compared with the seven or eight hundred of
Gisburgh, and an annual rent roll at the Sup
pression of but $12,000. Two centuries earlier,
however, conditions were somewhat different,
for in 1299 the annual income was more than
$50,000, the cattle numbered seven hundred and
thirteen, the sheep two thousand one hundred
and ninety-three. It was at this time that the
priory reached its height of material prosperity.
The prior maintained his state on ample and
magnificent lines. Besides himself and his
eighteen or twenty canons, there were a few lay
brothers, twenty or more men-at-arms, each with
his body servant, twenty or thirty free servants
in the house itself, and an hundred more on the
many farms and granges, and finally bond
servants, twenty of whom were assigned to the
[125]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
service of the prior. Among the free servants
are enumerated in the Compotus, a master
carpenter, two cooks, a brewer, a cellarer, a
baker, a master smith, a chief forester, a bell
man, a sackman, and a physician! It was really
a great fedual community, bound together under
the lordship of the prior. That the hundreds
of tenants were mercifully and generously treated
we know from contemporary records; that the
household lived amply is proved by the authen
tic list of one year's provisions: viz., 319 quarters
of wheat flour, 112 quarters of barley meal, 80
quarters of oatmeal, 636 quarters of oats malted
for ale, 64 oxen, 35 cows, 140 sheep, 69 pigs,
113 stone of butter, 4 quarters of fine flour
for pastry, 147 stone of ewe's milk cheese, and,
mirabile dictu, 1,800 gallons of wine! Of course
we must bear in mind that all this vast quantity
of food was not consumed by the two hundred
members of the household alone : every monastery
was an inn, a place of refuge, a centre for wide
charity, and a place of entertainment for the
nobles, knights, and ecclesiastics of the neigh
bourhood. Perhaps, after making due allowance
for hospitality, we shall find that the above list
does not prove so clearly as one might think the
luxury and feasting so often and so carelessly
attributed to the monastic orders. For instance,
[126]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
in 1303, when Bolton entertained Sir William
de Hamelton with his huntsmen and hounds,
twenty-two quarters of wheat were consumed
by the visiting party alone; it is therefore quite
safe to assume that hospitality answers in a
large measure for the long lists of supplies
annually consumed in any house.
In spite of its great wealth during the thir
teenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the
Canons of Bolton were never amongst those who
cared much for great building. The ruins of
the priory show a rather shapeless and casual
structure, incorporating work of many centuries.
The original church was a small cruciform
building, Norman in style, and without aisles
or tower. When in 1154 the house of Augus
tinian Canons that had been founded thirty
years earlier at Embsay by William de Meschines
and his wife Cecilia was translated to Bolton
by their daughter Adeliza, in sorrowful memorial
of her only son, "The Boy of Egremond," who
had been drowned at the Strid, the extension
and rebuilding of the old parish church began.
Little by little it was patched up, added to, em
bellished; but no general rebuilding ever took
place, for although the canons suffered con
stantly at the hands of Scottish invaders, the
church was never wholly destroyed, and on the
[127]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
day of dissolution in 1540 it still remained a
thing of shreds and patches, strangely different
to the princely Gisburgh, yet not without a cer
tain homely charm as a living record of four
centuries of varied history.
Even then, at that last day, scaffoldings
enwrapped the west end of the church, and the
air was full of the sound of mallet and chisel,
for Prior Moon had begun in 1520 the erection
of a fine new west tower which had already
reached the level of the roof ridges — and has
risen no higher since, still standing unfinished
and even roofless, a stern reminder in the
strength and delicacy of its design of the fact
that architecture was even then a living thing
and not a decaying artifice, as some have held
in later times.
The fame of Bolton rests, not on its architec
ture, for it possesses little to boast of, if we judge
it by mediaeval standards, but rather on its
wonderful situation, its environment of exquisite
landscape, the pictorial quality of its ruins, and
a little, perhaps, on the suggestion of its name,
which arouses in our minds childish memory of
a Landseer picture that once formed part of the
decoration of every well-regulated dining-room
some thirty or forty years ago. The long, aisle-
less choir is strong and fine in its proportions,
[128 ]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
poor Prior Moon's never-to-be finished tower
is interesting as an evidence of the persistence
of sound methods even to the end; but the few
architectural excellencies of Bolton are matched
and mastered almost anywhere else. One does
not go there for the finding of great art, but for
the sheer joy of an infinite succession of pictures,
any one of which is worth a day's journey, par
ticularly if by so doing one can get away from
Leeds, which most fortunately can be easily
accomplished. The Yorkshire moors are a singular joy just
here; the valley of the Wharfe is a miracle of
loveliness; there is an inn close by which is a
model of everything an English inn should be,
and altogether Bolton is just the place to seek
refuge in for a day or two, and refresh one's
soul with a few dreams under monastic walls,
a stroll through the luxuriant Wharfe valley,
and a stiff climb up Greenhow Hill. But Satur
days and Bank Holidays are to be sedulously
avoided; then every train brings troops of
"trippers," each armed with a luncheon basket
and a camera, and during their reign, life is an
impossibility. The site of Bolton is indeed ideal, and there
is little wonder it makes its appeal even to the
denizens of Bradford and Leeds. Just here
[129]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
the tumbling Wharfe, cutting its way through
the deep-forested hills, halts for rest in a wide
intervale of meadow and clustered grove. Here,
where the abrupt hills open out into a spacious
amphitheatre, Bolton Priory rests on the last
low headland just over the little river, backed
by terraced verdure, fronted by golden meadows
basking in the sun. It is a place of infinite
peace (barring the Bank Holiday "trippers"),
for in itself it is like a glen in Avalon, while it
has been spared the new environment of mills,
tenements, or trade that makes Kirkstall, Glas
tonbury, and even Netley impulses, not only to
useless regrets but to disquieting mental con
trasts and uncomfortable queries as to the eternal
validity of established standards.
From any point of view, the modest ruins
take on a certain dignity and even grandeur,
lifting as they do with such invincible self-respect
above the deep turf, the great leaning trees, and
the rippling river, that, daunted for the moment
by a sturdy weir, pauses in its course to mirror
the tall sanctuary. Even more beautiful are
the glimpses one gains through crumbling door
ways and vacant arches of long, sloping sward,
still clumps of heavy trees, and far, wide meadows
bright with flowers and sun.
Insignificant though the church most surely
[130]

GISBURGH AND BOLTON
is, the whole group must have been impressive
and convincing, for the wide-spread buildings
around the cloister and the base court, the prior's
lodging and garden to the east and on the brink
of the river, the infirmary away to the south,
with the guest house near by, the great gateway
(now a part of the Duke of Devonshire's shoot
ing box) well to the west, together with barns,
granaries, stables, brew houses, and all the multi
tude of farm buildings, formed a wonderful
group, covering many acres. It was indeed a
great feudal establishment, a self-centred com
munity, tied together by the widely sundered
motives of religious faith and personal well-
being, one of those patriarchal households that
did so infinitely much to develop the sterling
character of the race and the agricultural and
industrial stability of the nation.

[131]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
IN that debatable border-country of the
Scottish Lowlands, the most northerly por
tion of the ancient kingdom of Cumbria,
where "Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,"
winds slowly down to Berwick and the sea,
stands all that English rage and Scottish ruf-
fianry have left of four great abbeys, all owing
their foundation to a king and the son of a
king, a saint and the son of a saint.
Before William the Norman invaded Scotland
and wrung a lagging homage from King Mal
colm Canmore, this was surely a wild and bar
barous country. About the middle of the ninth
century, the region about Jedburgh came into
the possession of the see of Lindisfarne, and
under Bishop Ecgred a church was established
here. A century later Cumbria became a feof
of the English kings, and was held of them by
the King of Scots, the first instance in history
when this relationship was established. WTien
Alexander I. succeeded to the throne, his brother
David became Prince of Cumbria, being the
[132 ]

lUfrS

^^^l^i'^,^,^

Jedburgh — The Wreck of Glory,

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
last to bear that title. Already a man of deep
piety and powerful character, softened and civil
ized by his sojourn at the English court, where
he had gone with his sister Matilda on her mar
riage with Henry I., he showed himself a worthy
son of Malcolm Canmore and St. Margaret,
and set about the progressive civilization of his
principality, re-establishing the bishopric of
Glasgow, severing Teviotdale from the diocese
of Durham, and loyally carrying out the reform
of the Church instituted by his royal parents.
At the instigation of his old friend and teacher,
John, whom he had made Bishop of Glasgow,
he established in Jedburgh about 1118 a house
of Canons Regular of St. Augustine; he had
already founded at Selkirk, a house of Tiro-
nensian monks, who four years after his corona
tion were to be transferred to Kelso. Dryburgh
was not to follow until 1150, and even then was
to owe its existence technically to Lord Lauder
dale, Constable of Scotland, though there is
little doubt that St. David was the moving spirit
in the project, as he proved its most munificent
benefactor and patron. • Besides the abbeys
already named, the same saintly monarch
founded the Augustinian houses of Holyrood,
and Cambuskenneth in Sterling, the Cistercian
Kinloss, Newbattle and many other monasteries,
[133]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
while the Knights Templar and Knights of St.
John of Jerusalem came into the kingdom at
his call. As James I. of Scots said of him, he
was indeed "sair saunct for the croon!"
At first a simple priory, Jedburgh was in the
year 1147 raised to the dignity of an abbey
under Osbert as first Abbot, a man of notable
learning and great piety. Thenceforward the
abbots of Jedburgh were to hold a place of
exceptional dignity in the kingdom. Nicholas
(1255) was a member of the Royal Council and
one of the excommunicators of the traitorous
guardians of the youthful Alexander III. ; later he
was an ambassador of the same king to Edward
IIL, then a prisoner of the Earl of Leicester.
John (1275) was Abbot when Alexander married
Yolande de Dreux in Jedburgh Abbey, chosen
for this purpose on account of its great dignity
and the exceptional beauty of the surrounding
country; later he also was an ambassador to
England anent the conflicting claims of Bruce
and Baliol to the Scottish Crown on the death
without issue of Alexander III. John II.
(1338) was one of those who arranged the treaty
with England in 1342 for the settling of the
Border question. Robert IIL, his successor,
was also an envoy to England, as were Robert
IV. (1473) and Thomas II. (1494).
[134]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
Under James V. began the fatal custom of
appointing "commendatory abbots" — a vicious
and sacrilegious practice borrowed from the
continent, where it was the prime cause of the
degradation of monasticism and its final fall.
"The result of this commende was to bestow this
title of abbot, with the greater part of the rev
enues of a monastery, upon ecclesiastics who
were strangers to monastic life, and too often
upon simple laymen, provided they were not
married. It inflicted thus a deep and radical
taint to these institutions. . . . For the partial
irregularities which, especially in houses not
directly subject to the influence of the great
feudal families, had followed elections, the direct
nominations of the kings, established by the
Concordat of 1516, substituted a criminal,
radical and incurable disorder. The title of
abbot, borne and distinguished by so many
saints, so many doctors, so many illustrious
pontiffs, fell into the mire. Neither residence,
nor any of the duties of the religious life were
any longer compulsory. It was nothing more
than a lucrative sinecure, which the Crown dis
posed of at its pleasure, or at the pleasure of its
ministers, and too often to the proflt of the most
unworthy passions or interests. . . . Let us
imagine to ourselves what could become in most
[135]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
of these monasteries, despoiled of their most
essential prerogatives, of the true motives of
their existence, and metamorphosed into farms
belonging to strangers, of some five or six un
happy monks, abandoned to themselves and
overwhelmed under the weight of their past
glory and their present debasement. Can we
wonder at the progress of corruption, of spiritual
and intellectual decline.'* . . . Under the influ
ence of all these united causes, the monastic
institution hastened more and more to complete
decay. ... Is it needful to ascertain further
the depth of their fall or to explain the true
cause of their ruin .? "*
It is sometimes urged in extenuation of
Henry's course in England that monasticism
there had become a foul canker in the body
politic, and that it did not owe an untimely
destruction to the peculiar personality of Henry
himself, since in France, Italy, Spain, Germany,
it also was destroyed and under other sovereigns.
In this ruinous "commende" however, we find
the true cause of the continental suppressions,
in a custom e>^olved by absolutism to insure its
own persistence after it had destroyed the very
real liberty and freedom that had existed under
the feudalism and limited monarchies of the
* Montalembert; " The Monks of the West."
[136]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
Middle Ages. The commende never obtained
in England, and when Henry struck at monasti
cism, the blow fell on an institution not yet
weakened and vitiated by any such cause as on
the continent and in Scotland, sapped the life
out of it, and left no reason for its continued
existence in its unhappy and degenerate es
tate. John Home, brother to the Great Chamber
lain of Scotland, was the first of the commenda
tory abbots of Jedburgh. His nature may be
read from a charter under the Great Seal granted
in 1549 to John, Alexander, and Matthew Home,
"bastardis filiis naturalibus reverendi in Christo
patris Johannis de Jedburgh abbatis," which
charter was followed by another of similar tenour
in 1572. Andrew Home, nephew of this worthy
successor of a long line of saintly men, was the
next commendatory and the last of those who
bore the title of Abbot of Jedburgh. He assumed
the title in 1560. " Foreseeing that the abolition
of his abbey was imminent, the commendator,
like the abbots and commendators of similar
establishments, made over the lands, etc., be
longing to the monastery to his chief, or
rather to his own mother, who was the widow
of George, fourth Lord Home, and on the
death of Lady Home he made a new grant of
[137]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
the lands of the abbey in favour of his nephew
Alexander."* Title to all the estates of the once glorious
abbey was confirmed in 1606 ; when Lord Home
became an earl they were erected into a barony
called of Coldingham, and the Augustinian foun
dation of St. David, the mighty abbey of Jed
burgh, gave place to "The Earl of Home, Baron
of Coldingham and Lord of Jedburgh and
Dunglas." Better a thousand times would it have been
had Scottish monasticism vanished in blood
and fire and spoliation, together with that of
England, rather than it should have continued
as it did for another fifty years, until the royal
successors of the sainted sovereign who had
brought it into being had made of it an hateful
thing of shreds and patches, only to be utterly
wiped out in scorn and contempt, when it had at
last been done to death by profligate commen
dators. Lying as it did in the track of every army
that crossed the border from either side, Jed
burgh was sacked and burned by the English
again and again: in 1297 by Sir Richard Hast
ings, in 1464 by the Earl of Warwick, in 1523
by the Earl of Surrey, and, "last stage of all,"
?James Watson: " Jedburgh Abbey."
[138 ]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
by Lord Eure in 1544, serving under the Earl
of Hertford, who had been sent by his royal
master to kill, burn, and destroy in revenge for
the refusal of Cardinal Beaton to sell Scotland
under the flimsy guise of an alliance between
Prince Edward and Queen Mary, then a child
of a year or two. Hertford truly reported that
Jedburgh had been "well brent," and that they
had "put to the fyre, and left not past two
houses unbrent in the same; the abbey likewise
they burned as much as they might for the
stonework." One good deed is recorded for
the commendator John Home, otherwise of evil
memory; he restored the burned abbey to such
good effect that eight years later, in 1552, when
in the very last days of the debauched Church,
David Panter, commendator of Cambuskenneth,
was "consecrated" Bishop of Ross, the sacri
legious ceremony took place within its walls
"with great triumph and banquetting," which
we may well believe, if we accept Buchanan's
statement that he lived as if he had been trained
in the school of profligacy, not of piety. Strange
contrast with that other great ceremony in Jed
burgh, the marriage of the good King Alexander
IIL, three hundred years before. Was it in
prophecy of this miserable end to glory and
wide beneficence that the wedding feast ended
[139]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
as it did ? Here is the legend. After the wed
ding, and at night, in the great hall of the abbey,
before the king and queen and half the nobility
and knighthood of the land, was held a great
pageant, a masque of religious and domestic
virtues, of music and the arts, of military and
knightly valour. Suddenly, at the end of the
long procession was seen a grizzly apparition:
" Namely, a mere anatomy, quite bare
His naked limbs, both without flesh and hair,
(As we decipher Death) ¦who stalks about
Keeping true measure till the dance be out.
The King -with all the rest affrighted stand:
The spectre vanished, and then strict command
Was given to break up revels, each 'gan fear
The other, and presage disaster near."*
From St. David and Alexander III. to
James V. and commendatory John Home,
from the founding of abbeys and the building
of triumphs of consummate art to the sale and
mortgage and final burning and perfect de
struction thereof, cause indeed for the coming
at the end of the magical masque of a ghastly
portent "as we decipher Death."
During the terrible anarchy that followed the
death of James V. the abbey, now taken over
for parochial purposes by the Presbyterians,
* Heywood: "Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels."
[140 ]

The West Front ot Jedburgh Abbey.

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
fell steadily into decay. Commendator John
Home's reparations could have been none too
thorough, for twenty years after we learn that
the great church "is presentlie consumit and
decayit in the rufe and timmer thairof and
within short process of tyme will all uterlie decay
and fall doun gif tymous remeid be not prouidit
thairto." Wherefore it was urged that certain
of the conventual buildings be torn down to
furnish "timmer," which was done. Yet there
was more dead in Scotland than the church
roofs. Little by little those fell at Jedburgh;
columns collapsed, walls were thrown down to
furnish patchwork materials. The parish church
shrunk smaller and smaller. Now one part of
the venerable ruin was roughly closed in to form
a kirk, now another. Finally five bays at the
west of the nave were enough, and this in spite
of the fact that one aisle was excluded from the
makeshift walls; the great roof had long since
gone, and now another was introduced at the
triforium level, above which towered the forlorn
clerestory, gaunt and toppling. This last affair
must have been a dismal place within; all the
stone was covered with plaster, the windows
filled with plain sashes of common glass set in
wood mutins, deal galleries hung on the walls,
and the floor area was divided up into small
[141]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
pens five and a half feet square, "It was
arranged that four of the seats in the middle
of the church were to be movable, in order that
at the time of the sacrament a double row of
tables might be set, one along these seats, and
one along the area opposite with a passage for
the elders along one side of each." The " deco
ration" consisted in the Commandments and
Creed painted on the plaster at the east end,
and a painted text of Scripture over each column.
The history of this time is as forlorn as the
new kirk, of which the frequenters were prob
ably very proud during the eighteenth century.
It is a long chronicle of fights over the owner
ship of cloister, refectory, mills, bams, and lands;
of lawsuits, bickerings, and even murders; of
heart burnings and recriminations as to who
should be buried where and whose pew should be
in one place, when another claimed the right as
his own. The Laird of Hunthill submits to the
presbytery "ane bill compleaning he was wronged
in his seat in the kirk and desyring that he be not
wronged"; the magistrates and heritors find
that "the Marquess of Douglass and his tenants
were to sit betwixt the pillar on the west of
the pulpit according to his valuation, and the
rest of that place for Lanton and the tenants
there"; "Madder's lands having been found to
[142]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
extend to about half the whole valuation of
Lanton, had assigned to them two pews immedi
ately behind Sir John Rutherford's seat, each
seat extending in length from pillar to pillar,
and breadth two feet two inches, a free entry
to be through this locality to Sir John Ruther
ford's seat. The ground immediately behind
Madder's back seat was given to Alexander
Ferguson, to the end that he might erect a half
seat there. The Duke of Buccleuch was to
have a seat extending from the wall on the east
side of the meikle kirk door to the entry that
led into Cavers Carr's seat, keeping always
within the general locality of Lanton."
But enough of the canny but pitifully sordid
squabbling that dragged its crass way through
almost three centuries. An end came, so far
as the poor old abbey was concerned, in 1875,
when the Marquess of Lothian, unable to endure
further the degradation of a great and reverend
monument, bribed the occupants to get out, by
building for them a fine new kirk " in the Early
English style of Architecture." Since then the
house of Lothian has done everything possible
to redeem the trembling ruins: the lath and
plaster kirk has been eradicated, the stones
purged of their whitewash, fallen stones replaced
in position, piers strengthened, walls protected,
[143]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
debris removed, and here and there low walls
added to give a clear idea of the former lines
of the great church. The ruins now stand,
dignified, solemn, self-respecting, and secure;
the real "dark ages" for Jedburgh Abbey have
passed away.
Architecturally, we could have spared many
churches before Jedburgh, and it is a notable
mercy that so much has been preserved from
the fell hands of "heritors" and presbyteries,
and finally that the precious remains should
have fallen at last into the honourable custody
of such as the Marquesses of Lothian. There
are many minor joys as well : a model history of
the abbey by James Watson; good photographs
to be had for small prices; last, but not least,
an old custodian who is a perennial and ever-
new delight. Jedburgh at last has fallen on
gentle days.
As the ruins now stand, they show admirably
the sequence and growth of style in the North.
The first church of St. David's time consisted
of a crossing with transepts, a choir of two bays,
terminated by a semicircular apse and possibly
a short nave of two or three bays, as at Kelso.
Later by about a century, the apse was removed
and the choir extended by three bays, with a
square termination, while the short nave gave
[144]

Jedburgh — The Cloister Door.

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
place to a most noble structure of nine bays,
one hundred and thirty feet in length. About
a century later still, the north transept was
greatly extended, so we have here examples of
three definite periods, the twelfth, thirteenth,
and fourteenth centuries. Of the rehabilita
tion that came after the burning of the abbey
by Warwick, nothing exists except, perhaps, the
exquisite tracery of the south chapel window.
The early Norman work is powerful, original,
deeply interesting; far more French in its con
notation than the contemporary English work.
This is also true of the transitional nave, and
as a matter of fact, French influence is every
where visible in Scottish architecture from the
earliest times to the end; a state of things that
one would quite expect to find in view of the
close and constant connection between the two
kingdoms. The almost complete destruction of
the thirteenth century sanctuary is deeply to
be regretted, the portions that remain being
singularly spontaneous, poetic, and vital. The
nave is wholly admirable, a powerful arcade of
clustered shafts with clean-cut, vigorous capitals
and fine, strong arches, a singularly classical
and delicate triforium and a clerestory still
more sensitive and glittering. From pavement
to roof one may mark the transition from Nor-
[145]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
man to the full-blown style of the thirteenth
century, keeping steady pace with the progress of
the work. The square abacus, the square con
tours of the arch arisses, the contours of the
pier sections, all testify to French, not English
influence. The nave was never vaulted, nor
was this ever contemplated, therefore division
into bays does not exist, and the main lines of
the design are horizontal. It is interesting to
note in the west end an almost complete return
to the round arch and the characteristic orna
ment of a century before. Some have supposed
that the west door was removed to its new po
sition from the ancient church, but it seems to
me that if it is compared with the unquestioned
twelfth century monk's door to the cloisters, it
will appear as once as a copy, not an original.
It is lacking in the vigour, the brilliancy and the
power of the latter work, and is undoubtedly
therefore, an essay in imitation by masons who
had outgrown the older style and, while acquir
ing something far finer, had been unable to
think back into the terms of a previous age.
Of the conventual buildings, nothing is known.
One may indulge in conjecture, no more. Refor
mation "squatters," respectable robbers, and
careless presbyteries have destroyed the last
trace of the great group of buildings that once
[146]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
dropped in terraces down to the lovely river.
Everything is gone, except here and there a
foundation stone. The great cloister is now
a beautiful garden, but the site of chapter house,
refectory, fratry, and abbot's lodgings is blocked
by hideous houses of the last century, or swept
clean to the turf itself.
Kelso, once the richest and most powerful
of all the monastic houses in Scotland, has
suffered more grievously than Jedburgh. Wholly
destroyed by Henry's scourge, the Earl of Hert
ford, the ruins were turned into a barracks,
then divided between a prison and a covenanter
meeting house, and finally, so far as the great
choir is concerned, razed to the ground and
given over to secular purposes, while, following
the fashion of the time, the local gentry quar
relled for privilege of sepulture and the raising of
cheerful headstones within the dismantled walls
and the confines of the close. No Marquess of
Lothian has come to guard the wreck with jeal
ous care, no historian to organize the annals of a
house, the abbot of which once claimed priority
before the Bishop of St. Andrews himself: the
gaunt walls are jostled by crowding houses,
paved streets cut through close and graveyard,
and a most unhandsome village has circled the
august wreck with prison walls.
[147]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
Fortunately, the most important part of the
abbey, speaking architecturally, the nave, cross
ing, and transepts, still remains, with two walls
of the central tower. This is most fortunate,
for so we can gain a good idea of a very unusual
type of design, the castellated church of the
Border as it was in the twelfth century. Kelso
is unique and priceless. Apart from the ex
traordinary naveless type, the design is consum
mately interesting, for it is of a powerful and
majestic late Norman, vigorous and masterly.
Nave and transepts were about of the same
length; the huge tower rose from their intersec
tion, and therefore tells for its full value, while
the great masses of the three projections buttress
it perfectly and build up into a great and awe-
inspiring mass. It is Roman in its grave and
self -restrained majesty, a masterpiece of splendid
and competent design. Within it is almost
startlingly rich and supple for the period. All
the arcade and wall arches are round, those of
the crossing slightly pointed. The walls to the
west are piled up of range over range of arched
motives, those of the choir consist in great low
arches on powerful piers, surmounted by a kind
of triforium gallery of delicate shafts supporting
an unbroken sequence of semicircular arches
with, for clerestory, a modification of the same
[148]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
scheme. There is something almost of the
South in this fragment of choir, something of
North France in the transepts, something even
of the legendary Saxon in the much bepraised
north portal; altogether a supremely interesting
building, well deserving of a happier fate.
Kelso was founded by St. David in 1128, who
then established there a house of Tironensian
monks, an offshoot of the Cistercian order most
unfamiliar in Great Britain. It was primarily
almost a labouring order. Hard work and
plenty of it was the founder's safeguard against
temptation. Every monk was a workman, a
labourer. Some were husbandmen, some car
penters, some stone-cutters and masons, while
others, who were not fitted for such arduous
tasks, were diligent illuminators. The fame of
Kelso, in this last direction, spread over the
entire kingdom. Through the enormous indus
try of these monks and the universal respect
they inspired, whereby they benefited by a long
series of bequests, Kelso became possessed of
vast estates reaching down into Northumberland,
and north as far as Aberdeen. At the very end,
after the English had destroyed the abbey, and
the monks, dispossessed, had been driven forth
to subsist on the charity of other houses, the rev
enues of the lands alone, perhaps half of which
[149]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
had already been alienated, were estimated at
nearly four thousand pounds Scots, or over
twenty-two thousand dollars of our own time.
The siege and reduction of Kelso Abbey by
the Earl of Hertford in 1545 is one of the fine,
fierce tales of the Border. Churchmen and
townspeople held the close for a long time against
the bombardment of Hertford's artillery and the
repeated assaults of his infantry. Breached by
cannon, the close became untenable, and for a
while the defenders fought off one attack after
another, retreating through the conventual build
ings until they made their last stand in the church
itself. Once more the artillery, now at close
range, made a breach in the sacred walls, but
none came forward to the final assault, until
Hertford offered a reward to any who would
volunteer. At last a band of Spanish merce
naries yielded to the bribe, scaled the walls, ob
tained a lodgment, drove back the handful of
defenders, and cleared a way for the more cau
tious English, who now poured into the dese
crated sanctuary and put all to the sword, except
two or three monks, who retreated to the top
most platform of the tower, which they held all
night, killing every man who ventured up the
winding stone stairway. It is one of the joys
of history to know that, in some way or other,
[150]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
this handful of doughty monks and splendid
patriots managed to escape at dawn and make
their way to safety in the North.
This was of course the end of the abbey. For
a time it served as a barracks, a part of the
covenanting army being quartered there after
it had treacherously sold its king to the Parlia
mentary forces of England in 1647. In 1699
a portion of the ruin was enclosed, as at Jed
burgh and for the same purpose, except that
the ramshackle structure continued "a double
debt to pay," the loft being used as a common
prison. In 1760 a part of the aisle vault fell
during a service in the kirk, which so frightened
the people, who bore in mind an old prophecy
of Thomas the Rhymer, that they abandoned
the place forthwith and erected for themselves
a fine new kirk, more consonant with the en
lightened times in which they lived, later pro
nounced by one carping critic to be "without
exception the ugliest and least suitable in its
architecture of all the parish churches in Scot
land — and that is saying a good deal — but
it is an excellent model for a circus." Last of
all, the abbot and monks were succeeded by a
firm of manufacturers of threshing machines,
who were ousted in 1805 and the place purged
of its many miserable accretions. In the mean-
[151]

JEDBURGH AND KELSO
time every trace of conventual buildings had
disappeared, the materials going to the erection
of the town hall and other public and private
works; the great gardens and orchards of the
abbey had become the paved and desolate
market place that now rejoices the eye — the
market place where in "the Fifteen" James III.
and VIII. was proclaimed King of Great Britain,
Ireland, and France. The "Dark Ages" were
at an end, and bell and prayers and chanting,
learning, industry, and mercy had yielded place
to kirk, prison, and wheelwright, and to that
foul emanation of the eighteenth century, the
"Holy Matin Club" of infamous memory.
The Renaissance and Reformation had con
quered mediaevalism at last.

[152]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
OF the Cistercian houses in the south we
have already seen something in Beaulieu,
Netley, and Tintern; but the chief of all
was far to the north in that cradle of monas
ticism, Yorkshire, surrounded by a cluster of
the noblest examples of architecture England
could boast. Rievaulx, Byland, Fountains, Jer-
vaulx, Kirkstall, Roche, what an epic of monastic
grandeur the names evolve. Meaux and Sawley,
two other Cistercian foundations, are almost for
gotten, whilst all trace of them has been practi
cally obliterated; yet we do not need them, for
the sextet of greater houses is sufficient in itself.
Each was as different to the other as a Cistercian
church could be, and each marked some noble
stage in the development of Gothic in England.
It was in the reign of Henry I. and in the
year 1131 that Rievaulx, premier abbey of all
the Cistercian foundations, was established by
Walter I'Espec, a noble Norman, and a great
soldier. Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx and third
in the line of thirty-three incumbents, writes of
[153]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
him as "an old man and full of days, quick
witted, prudent in council, moderate in peace,
circumspect in war, a true friend and a loyal
subject. His stature was passing tall, . . . his
hair was still black, his beard long and flowing,
his forehead wide and noble, his eyes large and
bright, his face broad, but well featured, his
voice like the sound of a trumpet, setting off his
natural eloquence of speech with a certain maj
esty of sound." A fine pen-portrait of a most
commanding personality. As is quaintly re
corded by Dugdale: "The aforesaid Walter
I'Espec had a Son, call'd also Walter, who
having unfortunately broken his Neck, by a Fall
from his Horse, his Father resolv'd to make
Christ Heir of Part of his Lands, and accordingly
founded three Monasteries." Rievaulx was the
third of these communities that owed their exist
ence to the piety and grief of a sorrowful old
man ; and its establishment, at the suggestion of
the great Archbishop Turstan, of York, was
placed in the hands of certain monks sent over
from Clairvaux by St. Bernard himself.
Naturally the fact that the first monks of
Rievaulx were personal friends of the great
saint gave the house a singular distinction,
which it retained until the end. Chief of all
the Cistercians in England the Abbot of Rie-
[154]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
vaulx not only supervised the whole order in
the islands, but he was as well constantly called
to act as arbitrator in ecclesiastical, monastic,
and civil disputes. As was always the case, the
abbey was under the constant patronage of the
neighbouring nobility, and many of them were
buried within its walls. First of these was the
venerable founder, who, "an old man and full
of days," finally took the cowl, spending the
last few years of his noble and strenuous life as
a monk in the peace and rest of the cloister he
had built, and, dying on March 9, 1153, was
buried at the door of the chapter house, where
he still sleeps beneath a mound of grass-grown
ruins hurled down in futile fury by the destroyers
of that which manly piety had wrought.
Very far away from any line of ordinary
travel, hidden in a deep glen of the Yorkshire
moors, forgotten of all but archaeologists and
architectural pilgrims, Rievaulx still remains the
most typical and perfect ruin of monastic Eng
land. One leaves the train at the little market
town of Helmsley, where the red crags of Helms-
ley castle lift above great elms blotted by busy
rookeries. The castle itself is full of historical
interest, for "Helmsley, once proud Bucking
ham's delight," had fallen finally into the hands
of that engaging knave who served his king so
[155]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
well and yet so ill, dying at last by the dagger
of Felton in 1628. Sixteen years later Colonel
Crossland, a fine, brave type of Cavalier, held
it against great odds, while Fairfax battered it
from every side, finally reducing it to ruin and
compelling the surrender of the little garrison of
two hundred men.
The road thence to Rievaulx climbs up and
up some three or four miles over the swelling
moors, and at last on the height of land a
breakneck path drops down into thick forest.
Winding back and forth, it leads deep down
through a cleft in the hills; a squalid village
brings it to an end, and, of a sudden, to the left
lift the splendid ruins, held close in the vise of
parallel lines of terraced hills that fall away to
the east, where the Rye valley opens out into a
wide meadow, basking in the sun.
A lovelier and more sheltered haven one could
not find: the great hills shut off all ungentle
winds, and the valley lies like an eddy of still
water in the turbulent course of some mountain
torrent. As one stands within the glorious
choir, the sky is hardly visible through any arch
or window, only a curtain of living green turf
and luxuriant trees: the whole place is the
apotheosis of earthly and spiritual calm.
I have called Rievaulx a perfect ruin; and so
[156]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
it is, for since the day when the destroyers drew
away from the deadly wreck their hands had
wrought, the dead past has been left to bury its
dead. Daily one stone after another has loos
ened and dropped to earth, the merciful ivy has
crept higher and higher in vain effort to stay the
slow dissolution, trees have sprung up, waxed
great, perished, and given place to their succes
sors. Early in the last century the choir and
transepts were cleared down to the pavement
level, but this is the only evidence of man's care
in the space of two and a half centuries, during
which the bells of Rievaulx have been silent in
the valley of the Rye.
Of the once great church nothing now remains
but the interior arcades and walls of the choir
(the aisle walls have wholly vanished) and the
transepts: the nave is nothing but a mountain
range of debris, green with grass and great trees.
The walls of the refectory still stand, as do some
of those of the dormitory, though these latter
are falling daily; beyond lies a dark and won
derful court choked with fallen masonry and
thick with trees: this was the quadrangle of the
abbot's lodgings; and the last remains of this
great building still stand in part as they were
left after the destruction of the house at the
time of the Great Rebellion, for it is evident
[157]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
that, as so often happened, this portion of the
house was transmuted into a secular dwelling
and served as such for the century between the
Suppression and the Civil Wars.
If Whitby is a gnawing temptation to the
archaeologist and architect as a field for research,
Rievaulx is ten times greater in the same direc
tion. Beneath these huge green mounds lie the
solutions of many problems, the possibility of
much artistic treasure-trove. The utter wilder
ness of the monastic buildings is so weirdly
beautiful that he would be a brave man who
would lay hands thereon; but this is not true of
the nave of the church, which is piled twenty feet
high with grass-grown wreck. Here one hungers
to dig and clear away, tracing the lines of walls
and arcades, opening up a level view from west
to east, sweeping away the pig styes and hen
roosts that cumber the walls, and laying bare
once more the form of the great church in all its
integrity. It is an open secret that some years ago the
papers were all prepared, restoring after three
and a half centuries, the venerable and sacred
ruins to monastic hands. The papers were
never signed, but they still may be, and some
day Rievaulx may fall again into the keeping
of religious, who have at last become a part of
[158]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
the revivified Anglican Church ; then will be the
time for further investigation and rehabilitation :
the glorious choir may be again roofed in, closed
by new aisle walls, consecrated once more to
the service of God, and again may the bells of
Rievaulx be heard among the waiting hills and
over the patient fields. "A consummation de
voutly to be wished" indeed; and, if accom
plished, perhaps only the first of a sequence of
acts of restitution that, even if they rob the
tourist of certain beautiful goals, will do some
thing toward wiping out a terrible stain and
building up on earth new "cities of God."
The architectural glory of Rievaulx lies in its
wonderful choir, which, but for its vaulting and
its aisle walls, has been mercifully preserved
intact. Originally three hundred and forty-
three feet long, the church has, as I have said,
been reduced to choir and transepts, the entire
nave having fallen into mountainous ruin. The
lower portions of the transepts are Norman in
date, and probably belong to Sir Walter's first
church, as did as well (though of this we cannot
be sure as yet) the vanished nave. The original
"eastern" termination was unquestionably of
the established Cistercian type, aisleless, short,
and flanked by transept chapels. About 1230
'the Puritanical rigidity of St. Bernard's archi-
[159]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
tectural principles having been relaxed, and the
rival Byland only a few miles away having dared
to erect a true Benedictine choir with aisles and
eastern "processional path," Rievaulx, not to
be outdone in splendour by a junior house, de
termined to build a greater choir still, which
was done forthwith, and the work was finished,
so Sharpe says, and none could know better
than he, not later than 1240. Byland was out
done, and almost all the other monasteries of
England as well, for Rievaulx choir is one of
the very noblest examples of English Gothic
existing to-day. It is one hundred and forty-
four feet long, and thirty feet wide from wall to
wall; to the crown of the vault the height was
sixty-four feet. In every way it is organic, mas
terly, even sublime. Purely English, it contains
no trace of French influence whatever and marks
our own thirteenth century Gothic at the highest
point of its development. Throughout it is
supple, varied, competent; no halting, no doubt
fulness, no hesitation; the sure and confident
work of great men who built as they lived, serene,
manly, self-reliant.
Calm on the highest crest of a triumphant
civilization, the abbot watched the guilds of
masons as, with the unfailing instinct of the bee,
they wrought impeccably, [160]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
" For out of thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature kindly gave them place.
Adopted them into her race
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat."
Day by day, without pause or questioning, " The
conscious stone to beauty grew," until the noblest
work of man stood ready for consecration; and
from all over the land came bishops, abbots,
monks — yes, even the Legate himself — to join
in the final hallowing of that which was already
sacred through the "love and terror" that had
done honour to God and added another lustre
to human history. Three centuries passed, and
again men gathered for a high visitation, but
this time with letters of confiscation, not with
litanies and psalms; with picks and torches and
gunpowder in place of crozier, candles, and in
cense, with curses instead of benisons. The
last mass was said, the last bell pealed over hill
and moor, the last prayer rose from the lips of
men, and, exiled, dispossessed, blotted with the
indelible stain of infamous pensioning, abbot
and monk filed out of the consecrated enclosure,
abandoning it forever to the tender mercies of
the vindictive and the covetous, and the haunt
ing bats by night and flapping rooks by day.
[161]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
It is while in a presence like this of Rievaulx
choir that one remembers, half with pitying con
tempt, half with a kind of whimsical glee, the
dictum that once appeared in The Spectator,
many years ago: "Let anyone reflect on the
disposition of mind he finds in himseff at his
first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome and
how the imagination is filled with something
great and amazing; and at the same time con
sider how little, in proportion, he is affected with
the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be
five times larger than the other; which can arise
from nothing else but the greatness of the man
ner in the one, and the meanness in the other."
Oh, the poor and pitiful little eighteenth century,
so purblind, so self-sufficing; it has passed as a
dream, in laughter and without regret.
Sixteen years after the founding of Rievaulx
by the hardy old warrior, Walter I'Espec, another
Cistercian house was established only a few miles
away in a wide valley beneath the Hambleton
hills by a second sturdy fighter in posse, Roger
de Mowbray. The beginnings of Byland are
touching in their austerity and their manifold
hardships, and are as well indicative of the
general upheaval of the time when a great
spiritual and moral convulsion was shaking
England and bringing to light the underlying
[162]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
force and righteousness that, operative at last
under the control of great Churchmen, were to
crush royal tyranny, create Magna Carta, and
fix the strong type of EngUsh character for
generations. The revolt signalized and made triumphant
by St. Bernard on the continent was in Eng
land coincident rather than sequent; indeed, the
learned Marquis of Ripon, the tender guardian
of the ruins of Fountains Abbey, most beautiful
of all Cistercian monuments, says: "It would
seem that the small band who dissented from
what they thought the laxity of the Benedictine
Rule, as observed at St. Mary's at York, were
spontaneously actuated in the same direction as
St. Bernard, and that it was not until some time
after they had seceded from the abbey at York,
and obtained a foothold on the banks of the
Skell, that they sought the council of that great
light and adopted willingly the ascetic rules then
imposed upon them." If this is so, and the
dates indicate its truth, then it is probable also
that, when the superior and his twelve brothers
seceded from Furness in 1134, they went, not at
the instigation, or in emulation, of St. Bernard,
but because revolt and regeneration were in the
air; the acceptance of the Cistercian Rule would,
therefore, be at the hands of Archbishop Turstan
[163]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
of York, to whom the thirteen applied for
guidance in their difficulties.
In any case, the secession took place in 1134,
only three years after the founding of the first
Cistercian community at Rievaulx. The pro-
testants against monastic laxity fled first to
Calder, chose one Gerald as their abbot, and
were about to begin the erection of a monastery
when an incursion of the Scots drove them forth
into the wilderness again. Back to Furness they
went, but the doors were shut against them, and
wearily they turned around to seek the council
of Archbishop Turstan, who already had done
so much to establish both Rievaulx and Foun
tains, and who they knew would sympathize
with their righteous motives. And so in the
year 1138, appeared in the streets of Thresk, or
Thirsk, as it is now written, a pitiful procession
of thirteen footsore pilgrims accompanied by an
ox-wain laden with books, sacred vessels, and
a few shreds of clothing. The seneschal of the
castle of Thresk, taking pity on the travellers,
gave them entertainment and then told the Lady
Gundreda, mother of Roger de Mowbray, then
a minor, what he had done. "And when the
said lady, in a certain upper chamber, had
peeped secretly through a certain window and
seen their poverty, for very piety and pity she
[164]

^ ^

Rievaulx — A Thirteenth Century Masterpiece.

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
melted into tears." Gerald and his monks were
commanded to remain under the protection of
the lady Gundreda, and at first for their main
tenance they received a tithe of all things that
came to the castle larder. This charitable plan
worked ill, so the young Roger gave the pilgrim
monks his own cow pasture at Cambe, while his
mother from her own dower granted them the
vill of Byland on the Moor, or Old Byland.
This gave them about seven hundred acres, but
there was little space for proper conventual
buildings, and besides the site was quite too
near Rievaulx, just across the river Rye in
point of fact: "The two houses were too near
each other to allow of it, for at every hour of
the day and night the one convent could hear
the bells of the other; and this was unseemly,
and could not in any way long be borne," so in
1147 Roger gave them two carucates of land
under the hill of Blackhow, where a new stone
church and monastery, small but seemly, were
erected and used for upwards of thirty years.
Old Byland still being retained for a time as a
cell or priory under the abbot at Stocking, as
the new place was called. It was from Old
Byland that the monks went forth to found
Jervaubc, when, in all probability, Rievaulx was
left in sole occupation of the vaUey of the Rye.
[165]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
At last, in 1177, the peregrinations of Gerald's
monks came to an end: the last removal was
made to the place where now stand the splintered
fragments of a vast and glorious church ; success,
wealth, favour had come to the pilgrims ; a great
monastery was erected, and for three hundred
and fifty years Byland continued to grow in
power and in beauty; here, in the splendid church
that had arisen on the land he had granted and
as a result of his own and his mother's mercy,
old Roger de Mowbray, now a famous Crusader,
after all his fighting and his two journeys to
Jerusalem, took the cowl as an humble Cister
cian monk, and, "after life's fitful fever," lay
down to die in sanctity, being buried next his
mother under a great stone whereon was carven
a long Crusader's sword. Here he slept in peace
through the glory and the shame that fell on
Byland until the year 1819 when, his bones
being discovered, they were conveyed, with nota
ble piety, by one Martin Stapylton to the church
at Myton, where now they rest.
Of the once magnificent monastery little now
remains: almost every trace of the conventual
buildings is gone and of the church itself the
fragments still standing give little idea of its
original design; the west front, half-way up the
round of the rose-window, is still extant, while
[166]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
some of the aisle walls mantled with deep ivy
remain, but every trace of arcade, triforium and
clerestory is gone; it is a shattered shell, no more.
Yet Byland was a thing we can ill spare: one
complete and consistent design unmodified by
later changes, it was an example of the earliest
Gothic in England, a work mingled in Norman
and true Gothic motives, round and pointed
arches being used indifferently, together with
broad flat piers or pilasters and jutting but
tresses. Bound to report in France at the Gen
eral Chapter on Holy Cross day in every year,
the Cistercian abbots always brought back some
new idea worth working out in the great devel
opment of the national Gothic style, for the
growth of which they were so largely respon
sible; and here at Byland were many proofs of
this continental influence, among them being
the great rose window. It must be noted, how
ever, that in no case was there absolute copying.
Every hint was a hint only: in its development
it became thoroughly English, and neither here
nor elsewhere can we find a peg whereon to
hang the current charge that English Gothic
was at best no more than a barbarous imitation
of the pure style as it was in France. Ideas
were accepted wherever found, whether in
France or in the Holy Land; but each was com-
[167]

lEVAULX AND BYLAND
pletely assimilated, and when it acquired ex
pression in masonry, it was an English thing,
consistent, national, individual.
Byland was, again, the first example in Eng
land of the Cistercian abandonment of the orig
inal ascetic plan. Here the aisleless choir gave
place to the magnificent full-aisled church, the
vaulted passage-way continuing down both sides
of the choir and around the eastern end. When
Byland was built, the architectural expression
of Cistercianism had ceased to retain its original
character so far as plan was concerned, though
the pristine severity of detail and simplicity of
parts remained. Henceforward the Cistercians
were to be at one with the Benedictines in their
grateful labour of developing Gothic as a logical
style indivisible for all England.
The peculiar austerity and beneficence of
this great order lasted less than two centuries.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century it
had grievously fallen away from the ideals of
its saintly founders and those of its greatest
exponent. At the time of the Suppression it
furnished few martyrs to Henry's greed as com
pared with the Benedictines, who had taken
on a new lease of life. Only too often the Cis
tercian houses were tamely surrendered to the
"visitors," pensions and preferment being ac-
[168]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
cepted in quit claim of sacred and inalienable
rights. Of course it must be borne in mind
that by the time the blow fell on the greater
houses Henry had shown quite unmistakably
that some horrible form of death was the only
thing to be expected by those who dared to resist
his robbery; and it took the splendid spirit of
martyrs to resist him, as did the immortal abbots
of the great Benedictine houses of Glastonbury,
Reading, and Colchester, knowing as they did
that such resistance would not stay his hand
for a day, and that it would end only in their
own death. Rievaulx surrendered, and Byland ;
John Leeds, last of the line in the latter house,
with his twenty-four monks gave over the vast
possessions they held in trust, in the year 1540,
at which time the lands formed nearly all of
fifty-three townships with rights and privileges
in twenty-eight others. The revenues amounted
to the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars per
annum, not a large sum by any means, while the
plate aggregated only five hundred and sixteen
ounces. Six years later Byland was granted to
Sir William Pickering, from whom it passed to
Stapleton of Wighill, later to Myton of Swale.
For generations unnumbered it has stood as a
common stone quarry, its fragments being found
built into the walls of every cottage in the neigh-
[169]

RIEVAULX AND BYLAND
bourhood. It is now desolate and forsaken; un-
cared for, neglected, despised. The ground
within the walls has been partly cleared, but
mounds of debris still cry for excavation, while
the ivy runs riot over crumbling walls, and day
by day its dust is returning to dust.

[170]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
WITH the dawn of the fourteenth
century the gathering dusk around
the Cistercian Order deepened into
night. It had done a vast work, this wonder
ful emanation from the brains of St. Robert
and St. Stephen Harding, into which, under God,
St. Bernard had breathed a soul, compelling
and creative, if yet not defended from mor
tality. The day of its supremacy had passed,
and a new agency for righteousness was to
enter England, in the persons of the friars of the
mendicant orders, to take up the work that for
a time was being ill done by the older and more
dignified orders of monasticism. The twelfth
century had been the great age of Benedictine
building, the thirteenth, that of the Cistercians.
The friars, who rejected all vested interests,
refused endowments, settled in slums and
Jewries, and built hardly at all, failed to fix any
mark on the architecture of the fourteenth cen
tury. The Augustinians were crescent then,
and, as we have seen at Gisburgh, wrought often
[171]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
gloriously, but the architecture of the fourteenth
century, so far as monastic work is concerned,
was largely an architecture of substitution,
enlargement, embellishment; except when, as
at Gisburgh and now far north in the Kingdom
of Scotland, at Melrose, fire and sword anni
hilated some earlier structures and so made
complete new building imperative.
Already we have seen at Byland in the very
first years of the thirteenth century the begin
nings of backsliding on the part of the Cis
tercians in the abandonment of an ascetic archi
tecture in favour of the highly developed and
majestic Benedictine type with its threefold
structural order and its complete system of
processional aisles. At Rievaulx the renuncia
tion has gone a step further as the century
reached its meridian: stained glass has been
accepted, and sculpture also, in all probability,
though decorative carving has been eschewed,
indeed, I suspect that the great crag of masonry
near the site of the chapter house betrays a lofty
and majestic bell tower, reared in final violation
of Cistercian doctrine and discipline. For the
last step in the abandonment of their asceticism
we must pass north across the border to that
lovely valley of the Tweed, where Scotland's three
great Kings, St. David, Alexander IIL, and
[172]

West Door of Dryburgh.

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
Robert the Bruce, have left in the abbeys of
Jedburgh, Kelso, Dryburgh, and Melrose, a
memorial of their piety and, though degenera
tion has done its best to blot this out, a record
of the artistic power of a nation once great,
independent, and, as well, splendidly devoted to
the Catholic Faith.
Kelso, Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose are
in themselves a complete architectural history
from St. David to Robert the Bruce, a period of
two hundred and fifty years: from the frowning
keep of Kelso, half castle and half sanctuary,
Norman in every line, through the earliest transi
tional Gothic of Jedburgh, the later and fuller
"Early Pointed" of Dryburgh, to the opulent
"Decorated" of Melrose and even to the Scot
tish parallel of the then contemporary "Perpen
dicular" of the southern Kingdom.
Melrose is marvellous, no less. Haunted of
history, legend, and tradition, fretted with ex
quisite carving and embroidered with intricate
tracery, glittering with all the specious para
phernalia of flying buttresses, canopied niches,
panel-work, and pinnacles, shattered into infinite
picturesqueness, and aureoled with the halo of
fine writing, it is one of the show places of Great
Britain, thronged with sightseers and trippers:
death and dissolution turned into a spectacle,
[173]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
a pageant, and cannily rendered profitable by
the tribute of gate money. Beautiful it is indeed,
a wonder of sorrowful pictures ; priceless also as
a record of the mutations and modulations of
architectural style ; and yet, judged by the stand
ards of York Abbey and Whitby, Rievaulx and
Gisburgh, it is not great architecture, for it
lacks directness and co-ordination, it is want
ing in that quality of inevitable organization,
that masterly incarnation of the principles of
proportion, composition, development of struct
ure, and the relationship of parts, that raises
the true masterpieces of British building to the
highest levels of human achievement.
And having granted this it is possible to sit
down before the church of Our Lady of Melrose
and abandon one's self to utter enjoyment and
admiration. Magisterial classicism is absent,
but in its place is a spontaneous originality and
a poignant personality greater, perhaps, than
one may find in any other single piece of mo
nastic architecture in all Great Britain. The
work is casual, episodical, part of it without
rhyme or reason; but in the end one does not care
in the least, for at every point one finds beauty
and charm and magic witchery. The earlier
monks "built in a sad sincerity," but here is the
work of guilds of jolly laymen, and at every
[ 174 ]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
point the stones proclaim the fact that when
they worked at Melrose these freemasons were
on one great holiday. Is a colloquialism ad
missible? If so, one may say that "they were
having the time of their lives."
St. Bernard was forgotten, the fourteenth
century had come and asceticism was out of
favour, the abbey was rich, the ground had been
cleared of the stern old church of the monks
that had come from Rievaulx bearing the Gospel
according to St. Bernard, for Bannockburn
had been fought, the English were utterly routed,
and in frantic vengeance the fleeing hosts had
paused long enough to wreak vengeance on
every unarmed thing that stood in their way.
Melrose was utterly destroyed, but the founda
tions remained and for some unrevealed reason
were permitted to fix the lines of the eastward
termination, so Melrose stands in form a typical
Cistercian church with aisleless sanctuary; but
in every other respect the bars were down, and
the enthusiastic freemasons were given a free
hand and even incited to outdo themselves in
all the wonders of their craft.
It was a carnival of aesthetic license and of the
emulation of ambitious and clever artists; the
day of the abbot who traced the lines of his
church on the greensward with the tip of his
[175]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
jewelled crozier that his monks with kilted cas
socks might hew and lay the stones, had passed
forever, and instead had come the epoch of
architect and mason. It was a complete and
utter revolution, and here the line was drawn;
here, in the walls of Melrose is cut the name
and superscription of one of the architects of
the new regime, John, surnamed Morvo,
Morow, or Murdo, as the case may be, for he
was indifferent as to spelling, though very
far therefrom in the matter of honest pride
in his work and a desire that his name, in
some form or other, should survive. Over the
turret door in the south transept is cut in
beautiful "black-letter" about a shield having
crossed compasses between three fleur-de-lys
the following words :
" Sa gaes ye compass even about sa truth and laute do but
doubte behalde to ye hende q John morvo."
Nor was this enough; so a little above is a
second inscription, viz.:
"John morow: sum tyme: callit: was: i: and born: in
parysse: certainly: and had: in: kepping: all: mason: work:
of: santan: druys: ye: hye: kyrk: of: glasgu: melros: and:
pasley: of: nyddysdall: and: of: galway: i: pray: to: god: and:
mary: baith: and: sweet: st: John: keep: this: haly: kirk:
frae : skaith : "
[176]

Dryburgh — The Cloisters.

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
Was this some " Jean Moreau," who was "born
in parysse certainly," a true Frenchman, or was
he christened John Murdo and born of Scottish
parents living in France ? It matters little, for
the work he did for the " haly kirk" of " Melros "
is French only in its impulse and suggestion: Eng
lish it is not in any way or fashion, for from the
day of Robert the Bruce the Scotch would have
learned of any paynims on earth sooner than
from the Southrons; but though "John of
Parysee" brought to the rebuilding of Melrose
all the enthusiasm won from the witnessing of
what France was then about, he and his lodge
of freemasons (the first, with that of Kilwinning,
in Scotland) showed no inclination to duplicate
continental work; instead they started off on a
new tack, invented all manner of new devices,
became good Scots, and went lustily to work to
develop a national style.
And they accomplished wonders: they were
not mighty classicists like the builders of Rie
vaulx and Whitby and York; they were poets,
romanticists; form did not interest them, but
decoration did, also the discovery of all man
ner of new motives for pier sections, arch
mouldings, clerestory windows, tracery, vault
shafts. Who built King Robert's church we
do not know, certainly not the pious John of
[177]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
Paris. Whether he arrived on the scene with
his band of freemasons in time to begin the re
building, after the visitation of Richard II. in
1389, I confess I cannot say, though it must be
on record. Lacking the information, I am in
clined to assume that here also the rehabilita
tion was begun by an unknown master and
only carried on towards completion by John
Mordo during the last years of the fifteenth and
the first of the sixteenth centuries. The line
of demarcation between the first two periods
is explicit: the earliest and purest, viz., the
three existing bays of the nave with the north
and west walls of the north transept and the
bay next the crossing in the west wall of the
south transept, together with the lower stages
of the south wall of this same transept, is a
model of noble art; while the first of the new
work, dating from the end of the fourteenth and
the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, if more
scrupulous and ornate, is on a far lower plane
of imagination. As the work went on it degen
erated slowly, showing a new hand quite unmis
takably, and this new hand was, I fancy, that
of Parisian John. The oldest work is wonder
ful in its nobility and its mobile freedom joined
to a pure and almost perfect beauty, the younger
is overloaded, luxurious, and in its last estate
[178]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
angular and sometimes mechanical, while at the
same time trivial and even lawless.
The church Robert the Bruce caused to be
built with his princely gift of the equivalent of
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to-day
must have been as purely beautiful as anything
in Great Britain. The original design did not
include the great south range of aisle chapels,
while, if there were flying buttresses at all, they
were simple in form and minus the richly niched
and crocketed pinnacles that are now so impor
tant a part of the mise-en-scene. Rich and
supple as is the work done at the command of
Robert the Bruce, it is rich with the splendour
of brilliant and well controlled imagination:
all is firm, sure, gentlemanly. As for the carv
ing of cap, boss, corbel, crocket, and string course,
it is finally perfect: flowers and vegetables of
field and garden have been used as models; the
stone employed was fortunately one that hard
ened into iron, and in spite of one calamity after
another ending with three and a half centuries
of utter neglect, the crisp chiselling is as keen
to-day as it was when it left the hand of the
mason. No decorative sculpture more beauti
ful than this has ever owed its existence to the
hand of man.
The rebuilding after the terrible visitation of
[179(1

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
the English king must have been done slowly
and by degrees. It probably occupied a space
of nearly a century, at least down to and includ
ing the incumbency of Abbot Hunter, 1450-
1460. If not this, then the central tower must
have fallen about this time, necessitating an
other rebuilding, for the shafts next the eastern
piers of the tower are unmistakably late fifteenth
century and poor, the sanctuary dating from
the same period, and the westernmost of the aisle
chapels also, while the eastern nave chapels
and the upper portion of the south transept are
much earlier, though surely a century later than
King Robert's work. Abbot Hunter's monogram
appears in many places in the work towards
the east and as well in the earlier of the
nave chapels; the last buttress of all bears the
royal arms and the date 1505, and, though it
may have been inserted in earlier work, prob
ably proves that the rebuilding and extension
were constant and uninterrupted from the visi
tation of Richard II. until the final destruction
of the abbey by the English in 1545. So com
plete is the ruin and so puzzling the laudable
practice of the renovators in using over again
material from the more ancient church, Melrose
is a veritable enigma and a fruitful field for the
architect and archaeologist. [180]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
But whether or no we give it absolute praise
as art, linking it with York and Gisburgh, as a
picture and as an impulse to every kind of poetic
emotion it finds rivals only in Glastonbury,
Netley, and Fountains. All this follows, how
ever, from the peculiarly effective nature of the
ruins and from the thronging memories and
associations that haunt its walls like grey ghosts.
Hard as was the fate of the English abbeys,
that of those in Scotland has been immeasurably
more bitter. Robbed and ruined by "com
mendatory abbots," sacked and burned by
invading armies, dying by treachery, and aban
doned at last to canny "squatters," the great
fabrics have not only served as parish stone-
quarries, they have fallen a prey to thrifty citi
zens who parcelled out the lands and buildings
among themselves, reserving some portion of
the church itself for the uses of the local " pres
bytery." Instead, therefore, of lonely ruins
hidden in shielding forests, forgotten often of
man, we find the glories of ancient Scotland
jostled by hovels, workshops, and inns, rising
sheer, not from green meadows or amongst
tangled thickets of thorn, but out of unseemly
assemblages of shops and houses crowding up
into cloister and graveyard, obliterating every
trace of chapter house, refectory, dorter, even,
[181]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
in some cases, of portions of the church
itself. Here at Melrose, while there is one good view
from the highway to the south across gardens
and the eighteenth century graveyard, and
another from the east, all to the north and west
has become a sordid huddle of modern edifices
blotting out all trace of the original monastic
buildings and the greater part of the close. A
tiny triangle of turf is all that remains of the
cloister-garth; the rest, with the site of all the
many buildings of the monastery itself, is over
run with cheap dwellings and crowded gardens :
the "Abbey Hotel" almost touches the last stones
of the nave, narrow alleys thread the once sacred
precincts, and everywhere is the connotation of
meanness and encroaching greed. The Duke
of Buccleuch has done and is doing all he can
to save what still remains, but there is a burning
need of some general action that will seize the
whole area once included in the close to the
north and west, sweep it clear of the cumber
ing buildings, and trace again the lines of the
once vast monastery, pressing back into bounds
the lawless holdings of the laity, leaving the
splendid ruin isolated once more and purged of
its unworthy neighbours.
But there is another crying need more impor-
[182 ]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
tunate yet perfectly possible of achievement:
when in 1618 the desecrated wreck fell into
the hands of the local "presbytery" the three
bays of the nave that still remained, about a
tenth of the original church, were found quite
sufficient for the religious needs of the growing
town under the new order of things, and they
were walled in and rehabilitated after a fashion
that in its horrible barbarism is a lasting com
mentary on the relationship between the fifteenth
and the seventeenth centuries. These crude
masses of savage masonry, preaching insistently
the terrible change that had come over the minds
and the powers of men, still stand, hiding the
whole north arcade, beheading the exquisite
order of the clerestory, substituting in place of a
once wonderful and delicate vaulting a bar
barous barrel vault of clumsy masonry. The
lesson this contrast teaches is important, but
now that it is learned the shameful records may
be destroyed and the noble ruin purged of an
hateful intruder.
Apart from the wonderful charm of Melrose
as a ruin and a thing of strange, almost unearthly
beauty, lies another power over the imagination
almost equal in its potency. The mere name
brings up an endless succession of memories,
dreams of those whose mortal parts once lay
[183]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
within the walls in peaceful sepulture. Here
rested the good King, Alexander IL, and his
Queen; Douglasses unnumbered; Sir William
of Lothian; William, first Earl of Douglass; an
other William, called "the Dark Knight of
Liddesdale, the Flower of Chivalry" ; the " Good
Sir James," who, faithful to the death, brought
back from the Holy Land "the Heart of
Bruce," that it might be buried beneath the high
altar in the church he had made glorious. Here
also were buried the dark and mysterious
Michael Scott, " The Race of ye Hous of Zair,"
"Scotts of Gala," "Pringles of Galashiels,"
"Bostons of Gattonside"; of these last four
families many who died long after the ruin of
the abbey, but who still sought burial, as their
fathers had done, within the sacred walls. Dust
and ashes are dispersed and have become united
with the dust and ashes of the perished abbey,
but the chiselled records still last in the hard
stone of the walls or in shards of tomb and tablet.
Of an hundred statues that once looked
down from fretted niche and windy pinnacle
some few still stand. The Presbyterians wrecked
the greater part, but curiously enough St. Bridget
still remains in her niche, St. Peter, St. Paul,
St. John Baptist, St. Andrew, and, most wonder
ful of all when one thinks of the temper of the
[184]

.a

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
time, a coronation of the Blessed Virgin, and
another statue of Our Lady with the Holy Child
in her arms. When in 1649 a certain zealot
climbed to the buttress pinnacle to shatter this
last statue, the first fragment split off struck
and broke his arm, and ever since the sacred
image has been left in peace. On either side
the south transept are figures of monks bearing
scrolls, on which are written in abbreviated
Latin words that are strangely prophetic : to the
east, "He suffered because He Himself willed
it " ; to the west, " When comes Jesus the Medi
ator darkness will cease."
With Melrose may be linked another abbey,
the Praemonstrateiisian monastery of Dryburgh,
partly because of its geographical propinquity,
partly because of its foundation under the patron
age of the same royal saint. King David, partly
from its close association with Melrose in the
love and devotion of Sir Walter Scott, who rever
enced Melrose, but lies buried in Dryburgh,
partly for the reason that the latter house is one
of the few in Scotland that is not insulted by
"squatter sovereignty." Dryburgh, utter ruin
that it is, and small and modest as it was in its
best estate, is a thing of pure beauty, lapped in
thick verdure, tenderly cherished by its present
proprietor, G. O. H. E. S. Erskine, Esquire.
[185]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
The approach is just what it should be: a
walk or drive from Melrose or St. Boswells
through quiet country lanes, a passage of the
Tweed by the long, unstable foot-bridge, a
plunge into forest, a sudden outcoming into
a sunny little glade where, ringed by great oaks
and submerged in an everlasting peace, all that
is left of Dryburgh basks in the sun. It is not
supremely important architecturally: nothing
remains of the church but the east wall of the
north transept and two bays of the north choir
wall, with three aisle bays at the angle, the
gable of the south transept, a fragment of that
to the north, and the lower stages of the west
wall. The conventual buildings are better pre
served, the eastern range being nearly intact,
while the cloister is clearly marked by standing
walls. The refectory, which in monasteries of
this order lay parallel to the church, is gone, all
but portions of its undercroft, and its beautiful
west end with the delicate rose window. The
easterly buildings, including the chapter house
and fratry, are early transitional Norman, the
church a fine North version of what in the South
would be called " Early English," the refectory,
early fourteenth century, evidently dating from
the rebuilding made necessary by the visitation
of Edward II. after Bannockburn. The earlier
[186]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
work is probably a part of the original construc
tion provided for by Hugo de MorviUe, Lord
Lauderdale, and his wife Beatrix de Beauchamp,
in 1150. Why or when the new church was
built we do not know; but it was a fine, strong
piece of early Gothic, consistently differentiated
from the contemporary work in England. It is
particularly interesting in that it shows how the
Scotch clung to the round arch long after the
rest of their work had become thoroughly Gothic ;
not only is the thirteenth century door of the
monks round arched, though with purely Gothic
mouldings and capitals, but the fourteenth cen
tury west door, built after the burning of the
abbey by Richard II. in 1385, is the same. No
where in Great Britain did Gothic builders
attach any particular sanctity to the pointed
arch, and in Scotland especially, arches of all
possible centrings were used at will.
Dryburgh is one of the few ruins remaining
of the houses of Praemonstratensian monks, or
friars, as they were more commonly called; in
deed it is practically the only one in Great Britain
that is more than a legend and a tradition. At
the Suppression there were but thirty houses in
England, and perhaps a fourth as many in Scot
land. An offshoot of the great Augustinian
reformation, the order was the creation of St.
[187]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
Norbert, a noble of Xanten, near Cologne, who,
having tried in vain to bring the canons of
Laon under some orderly rule of life, retired to
a marshy valley called Premontre, in Picardy,
where he forthwith founded for himself an order
of great distinction, the rules of which, based on
those said to have been drawn up by St. Augus
tine himself, were of notable rigour and severity.
None was admitted as a canon who was not a
Latin scholar; absolute and unquestioning obe
dience was exacted; and an unusual amount of
time was assigned to manual labour, which was
obligatory upon all. It appears also from the
Rule and the records that singular insistence
was laid on the virtues of thoughtfulness for
others, courtesy, good manners, and scrupulous
ceremonial. The name of Dryburgh has been associated
with those of many men eminent in their day:
Abbot Oliver, royal ambassador to England;
Canon Patrick, poet and man of letters; Ralph
of Strode, the friend of Chaucer and lusty an
tagonist of Wiclif; Chaucer himself, who lived
here for a time; and finally, during the early
sixteenth century, a line of commendators,
some of whom were less infamous than the gen
eral run of these royal bloodsuckers who were
responsible for the ruin and fall of monasticism
[188]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
in Scotland. Of the first of these, Andrew
Forman, no good can be said, except that he
was a clever though profligate and unscrupu
lous diplomat. He rivalled even Wolsey as a
pluralist, and ruin followed his footsteps wher
ever they feU in abbey or cathedral. Ogilvie
and Hamilton followed, the latter a natural son
of Lord Hamilton, father of the Earl of Arran;
and finally came James Stuart, who tried in
vain to stem the tide of simony, sacrilege, and
depredation that was engulfing the Scottish
Church. The end came in 1545. A year before that
choice aggregation. Sir Ralph Eure, Sir George
Bowes, and Sir Brian Layton, at the head of the
invading English army had burned Dryburgh
town and laid waste a great area of fertile coun
try. This action so charmed Henry VIII. he
promised Eure and Layton a feudal grant of
the land they had devastated; thereupon Archi
bald Douglass, Earl of Angus, true to the spirit
of his great house, promised "to write the deed
of investiture upon their skins with sharp pens
and bloody ink." And he did so in a year, for
there fell one of those acts of retribution that
brighten the pages of history. Back again on
their evil errand and anxious to make good
their title to their new estates, Eure and Lay-
[189]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
ton, with three thousand mercenaries, fifteen
hundred English foot, and a few hundred
disaffected Scots, swept through the lowlands,
burned Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh, and four
more abbeys, sixteen castles, five great towers,
two hundred and forty-three villages, etc., and
so turned homeward with light hearts. But a
just fate lay waiting them on the field of Ancrum
Moor: there they were confronted by the fear
less Earl of Angus, Norman Lesly, and Sir Walter
Scott of Buccleuch. Eure and Layton attacked
desperately, but the Scottish lances bore down
their men, the lowlanders went over to their
own people, Eure and Layton were slain in the
field, and the entire English force was put to
utter rout, eight hundred being killed, more
than a thousand taken. It was too late to save
the great abbeys that were the pride of Scot
land; but at least we may rejoice that Eure and
Layton were killed within hail of the sanctuaries
they had despoiled and by the Douglass, the
tombs of whose ancestors they had dishonoured
in Melrose Abbey.
The throne and the new spirit of the age had
with simony, confiscation, and abbots com
mendatory, brought down in ruins the Church
of Scotland and the spiritual fabric of monas
ticism, but the abbeys themselves owe their
[190]

MELROSE AND DRYBURGH
ruin in the first instance less to lay favourites of
a dishonoured royal house than to the fire and
sword of English invaders sent by the king who
already had wrought his will on the Church in
England.

[191]

KIRKSTALL
ONCE upon a time, far in the south of
England, a certain hermit dwelt by
himself, apart; and in the watches of
the night a voice called him by name and said
"Seleth, arise! Go thou unto the province
of York, and there thou shalt find a certain
valley hidden in deep-bosomed forests far from
the footsteps of men. In Airedale it lies, and
its name is called Kirkstall; there shalt thou
prepare for the Brotherhood a home where they
may serve my Son."
"And who is thy Son whom we must serve.'*"
"I am Mary, and my Son is called Jesus of
Nazareth, the Saviour of the World."
Thereupon Seleth arose, and, taking certain
other holy men with him, journeyed towards
the north until he found the valley that is called
Kirkstall, and there he and his brethren abode
in prayer for a time.
And upon a day came before him a certain
abbot, Alexander by name, and superior of the
Cistercian abbey of Mt. St. Mary. Now the
[192]

Kirkstall — In the Chapter House.

KIRKSTALL
abbot was troubled in his mind ; for it was ill with
his house, and incessant quarrels with the neigh
bouring secular priests, coupled with great adver
sity, had filled him with sorrow. The Lord Henry
de Lacy, mercifully recovered from a deadly
sickness, had granted land and money for the
founding of a religious house under the direc
tion of the Abbot of Fountains, but already on
this land there were secular priests, and warfare
got between them and the monks from Foun
tains, to such degree that in sudden rage he,
Alexander the Abbot, had pulled down the parish
church, because of which he had been accused
before the Pope himself, and, though justified
by the Holy See, his conscience was troubled
and he no longer loved the lands where his new
house stood.
The peace of God brooded over this sunny
and hidden valley; none knew thereof save the
humble hermits striving to serve God though
without rule or order; the beauty of the place
with its little river, its deep meadows ringed with
untrodden woods, its many flowers and its song
of birds, struck to the heart of the impatient and
unhappy abbot, and, finding that the hermits
were not averse to accepting the Rule of the
blessed Saint Robert, the abbot departed and,
coming before de Lacy, prayed that he might
[193]

KIRKSTALL
remove from St. Mary's and begin again in the
gentle valley of the Aire. The which was per
mitted, for William de Poictu, the lord of the
lands, at the petition of his friend granted Kirk
stall to the monks, in perpetuity, at the rent of
five marks per year.
The transfer was made; the hermits became
Cistercian monks; and forthwith Alexander
began the erection of a great abbey which was
speedily completed, the while an ever increasing
household laboured to reduce the wilderness
and bring it under cultivation. It was in the
year of Our Lord 1153 that Alexander brought
his monks to Kirkstall; for thirty years there
after he lived and worked, and, when he died,
he left the vast monastery perfect and finished
and almost as it stands to-day.
Rather, as its hopeless ruins stand, for after
three centuries and a half it was given over to
ruin and sacrilege, and for yet another three
hundred and fifty years the wreck stood desolate,
whilst the wilderness crept back over the lands
the monks had cleared: like advancing armies,
rank on rank the steady trees sprung up nearer
and nearer, the vines and wild plants crept up
and over the walls, and in cloister and sanctuary
and unroofed rooms tall trees flourished un
checked, while the crystal Aire vanished once
[194 ]

KIRKSTALL
more in the midst of trees and shrubs and clam
bering vines.
Fifty years have brought a sea-change of
deepest melancholy. As late as the year 1835
one might sit in the inn at Kirkstall Bridge (an
experience one does not repeat a second time
in this year of Grace 1905) and look across still
fields to where by the then untainted Aire, the
ivy-hung ruins rose silent, reproachful, yet
serene. Now one leaves the singularly repellant
and obnoxious city of Leeds, buried in its fog of
filthy smoke, turbulent with a tide of strident
mill-hands, glad even of the screeching train
that removes him from a scene of such superb
commercial activity. A few minutes serves to
bring him to the black little station at Kirkstall;
he crosses the bridge, and then, off to the left,
he sees the shattered tower of the abbey, not
over lush fields, but between harsh walls of
clamouring mills and through the gaunt palings
of foul chimneys belching dull clouds of smoke
into the already overladen air. And the limpid
river, the gentle stream that was once so clear
and pure it justified the old spelling of " Chrys-
tall" Abbey: where is it.? There still, in a way,
but how hideously changed: "where once the
deer, wild boar and white bull were wander
ing in unfrequented woods or wading in un-
[195]

KIRKSTALL
tainted waters," harsh piles of festering refuse
break down into a slow tide creeping shamefully
onward, glittering with the noxious iridescence
of sewers and waste-pipes, clogged by rubbish,
thickened with slime. We turn away in disgust,
but to the right the prospect is equally evil.
Every vestige of forest and field is gone, and the
great roll of hillside is scored across by parallel
streets, newly laid out, foolishly named, and half
built up with blocks of the cheapest, ugliest,
and most criminal tenements conceivable to
the imagination. A more loathsome suburb one
could not find: it possesses every known ele
ment of the sordid and the savage that is the
inevitable concomitant of industrial civilization.
Again one looks away, this time towards the
venerable abbey now close at hand. Waiting
for the clanging passage of several trolley-cars,
bedizened with glaring advertisements, and
avoiding a dray or two of clanking scrap-iron,
one enters the monastic precincts and finds —
a smug and neatly tended public park, with
nice cinder paths, neat beds of party-coloured
flowers, iron palings, varnished garden seats,
and printed signs and warnings at every turn.
From the abbey itself every sign of tree or
shrub or vine or flower has been eliminated;
it now stands gaunt and naked, as harsh and
[196]

KIRKSTALL
crude as when it was left by the despoilers nearly
four centuries ago. An elegant and commodi
ous band-stand fronts the west portal; a section
of one of the monastic buildings has been turned
into a shop for the sale of engaging and inexpen
sive souvenirs, light refreshments, and ginger-
pop, whilst alluring penny-in-the-slot machines
are ranged in serried ranks along the venerable
walls. Well, it is all a good breathing-space for the
languid mill-hands of Leeds: here on a shiny
bench an old man is dozing peacefully; beside
him a young mechanic is poring over congenial
news in a cheap sporting paper; along the paths
a lanky girl trundles her Uttle brother in a shabby
perambulator, whilst a pale and evidently sickly
father leads a querulous and equally sickly child
around the cloister walks. The old has suc
cumbed to the new, and now the new, weary
and unsatisfied and broken, turns again for
refreshment to the ruins of the old: a strange
curve, not yet prolonged into a perfect ring.
Kirkstall is not, nor ever was, an abbey of
distinguished beauty: it is too early in date for
that; but it is practically all of one period,
unusually well preserved, quite untransformed
by later additions of Benedictine choir or sump
tuous accessories of any kind, therefore it is
[197]

KIRKSTALL
deeply interesting, and profoundly valuable as
a perfect type of the earliest and most character
istic Cistercian architecture.
Once, and not so long ago, it was picturesque
and beautiful as well, for the walls were mantled
with deep ivy, wall-flowers and eglantine grew
along the crests, and great trees sheltered the
poor ruins and made them all a part of nature
itself. I found in a little shop some photographs
of Kirkstall as it was ten years ago, and these
will serve to show, in contrast with those of
to-day, how much of pure beauty has been lost
through the well-meaning efforts of archaeologists
and curators. It all seems pitifully unneces
sary; so the wreck had stood for three hundred
and fifty years, and no harm had come from the
kindly guardianship of gentle vegetation; will
the record of the future be more satisfactory
now that the walls stand bare and lifeless, forti
fied with crude supports and braced by rigid
tie-rods ?
And it is all so well-intentioned, yet so inade
quate. If Kirkstall must cease to be merely a
perfect picture, if it must become a pleasure
ground and breathing space for ugly Leeds,
how much better it would have been had the
reparation not ceased when it did : had the work
continued, the vaults and roofs risen again, the
[198]

KIRKSTALL
great tower continued to its ancient estate,
the windows been filled with painted glass, the
altars restored in sanctuary aiid chapel, and
all turned over again to consecrated men. Then
might have been resumed after the long silence
the sequence of prayers and praise and the inces
sant pleading of the Sacrifice of Calvary; then
might have begun anew the services of teaching
and mercy, charity and consolation; and the
precincts of Our Lady of Kirkstall would have
come to be something more than one in a series
of municipal improvements, an active, not a
passive beneficence.
In many instances such rehabilitation would
be impossible, whilst the sites of many abbeys
would prevent their use as active and immedi
ate agencies of assistance and leadership. We
can not think of Netley shorn of its perfect
beauty of nature's vestments, whilst Glaston
bury, Gisburgh, W^hitby, York, have been
wrecked beyond reparation; but Kirkstall stands
so nearly complete that, now its quality of beauty
has been swept away, it seems clamorously
imperative that it should be restored again to
its sacred uses, particularly since its nearness
to one of those festering centres of industry and
progressive degradation, that cry to-day for
spiritual leadership, makes the possibilities of
[ 199 ]

KIRKSTALL
its beneficence so perfectly assured. As one
stands in the great, gaunt nave, one dreams
inevitably of the time when the music from the
band-stand shall give place to solemn Gregorians
beating antiphonally beneath the curving vaults
of the great sanctuary; when the smoke of in
cense shall rise within the walls in place of the
fumes of cheap tobacco; when penny-in-the-slot
machines shall be superseded by the Church's
Sacraments ; and when the poor, the spiritually
as well as the materially poor, shall come, not to
look in dull wonder on blasted ruins, but to find
the active and potent aid that comes from the
hearts and hands of tried and proven men,
bound under Divine law for the cure and salva
tion of souls.
Curiously enough I find in an amusing old
hand-book for the abbey, printed in 1876 and
written with all due regard to the traditional
"monkish ignorance and superstition" that
were once supposed so fully proven, an indica
tion that exactly this course was once contem
plated. It seems that "Colonel Ackroyd, M.P.,
and a committee of gentlemen formed for the
purchase and partial restoration of Kirkstall
Abbey," called in that great architect, the late
Sir Gilbert Scott for the very purpose of indi
cating to them whether the abbey church could
[200]

Kirkstall Abbey.

KIRKSTALL
be restored to its former estate, and if so, at
what cost. Sir Gilbert's report is a master
piece of reverential feeling. He says in part
"where its stonework is hopelessly decayed, it
must be renewed, though only in such extreme
cases which will, I hope, be but a few, but I
would never think of obliterating the corrosions
of stones which three hundred winters have made
upon the interior, but would leave these marks
in commemoration, however humiliating, of all
these long centuries of neglect. Externally the
old bemossed surfaces would, of course, remain,
as should be the case with any other ancient
church." His estimates of the total cost necessary for
restoring the church itself to its former estate,
together with altars, furniture, organ, decora
tion, and chairs, amounted to but thirty-four
thousand two hundred and fifty pounds. It
would seem then that even to-day the compara
tively small sum of two hundred thousand
dollars would be sufficient to make the church
itself sound, whole, and complete once more,
and ready for occupation.
Kirkstall is the most complete of all the ruined
abbeys of Great Britain. The church itself
is intact except for the roofs of the nave and
transepts, which were never vaulted, and the
[201]

KIRKSTALL
central tower; the eastern end with its vaulted
sacrarium and six transept chapels is complete.
The fifteenth century tower, the only violation
of Cistercian order perpetrated at Kirkstall,
fell sometime in the eighteenth century, but the
ruin was by no means complete, one entire wall
and part of a second still standing, whilst the
injury to the main fabric wrought by this catas
trophe was comparatively slight. Of the mo
nastic buildings the major part remains: the
infirmary and the range of buildings apportioned
to the lay brothers were torn down immedi
ately after the Suppression at the order of the
town council of Leeds, the material being used
for widening bridges and for road metal. All
the rest is singularly perfect, so far as the lower
walls are concerned, the remains of the abbot's
lodgings being particularly complete. It is all
in a massive, late Norman style, powerful and
absolutely simple, without elaboration or orna
ment of any kind ; the round arch is used through
out, except in the nave arcade and in the
later additions, such as the great east window
and the upper stage of the tower. Stern,
almost forbidding in its design, it is a noble
type of the architectural style first developed
by the ascetic Cistercians, though immediately
abandoned for the true Gothic, this order
[202 ]

KIRKSTALL
was so instrumental in bringing to its highest
estate in England.
The history of Kirkstall shows few episodes
of great moment to any except the brothers
therein. Alexander, the first abbot and great
architect, was succeeded by Ralph Hageth "a
religious man, and renouned for all sanctity,"
but doomed to adversity through the malice
of the Crown. During his' abbacy matters
grew steadily worse until at last the poor abbot
was driven to close his house and disperse the
brothers amongst neighbouring abbeys, " chiefly
because they hoped by these means to incline
the Prince to compassion." Disappointed in
this they gathered again at Kirkstall. Ralph
was translated to Fountains, and an old monk,
Lambert by name, assumed the crozier. Affairs
ran no better under him: land was stolen from
the monastery, granges were burned by the
lawless tribes of the neighbourhood, and year
after year Kirkstall sank under a heavy load
of debt. Turgsius, the fourth abbot, strove by
the savage severities of his life and his copious
and unremitting tears, " whereof he shed so great
a flood that he did not seem to weep but to rain
down tears, in so much that the sacerdotal vest
ments he wore (at mass) could scarce be used by
any other," to avert Divine anger from his house.
[203]

KIRKSTALL
But all in vain: abbot after abbot succeeded,
and died after brief incumbencies, until at last,
when Hugh Grimstone was chosen in 1284, he
found matters in a scandalous state. The mon
astery possessed but 16 draught cattle, 84 cows,
and no sheep whatever, whilst the debts had
arisen to the enormous and improbable sum of
,£5248. 15s. Id., or more than $300,000 of our
own time. Here was an heritage from cen
turies of mismanagement, indeed, but KirkstaU
had a master at last. Abbot Grimston ruled
twenty years, and just before his death the
returns of the abbey he had so well administered
show that then it was possessed of 216 oxen,
160 cows, 152 yearlings and bullocks, 90 calves,
and 4000 sheep, and the gigantic debt had been
reduced to £160. Surely a wonderful record
of businesslike administration: one would will
ingly know more of Abbot Hugh, who so suc
cessfully brought order out of chaos, prosperity
out of insolvency; but the chronicles are silent
as to his personality, though unduly full of
details as to his predecessor, Turgsius of the
unquenchable tears.
Bad as must have been the century of misrule
for the unhappy monks, it is probably to this
very fact that we owe the primitive state of
Kirkstall Abbey and aU it demonstrates as to the
[204]

KIRKSTALL
original form of the Cistercian type of church.
The thirteenth century was the great period of
architectual activity on the part of this order,
and during this period the monks of Kirkstall
were too harassed by debts to think of adding
to the glory of their church, so to the end the
Puritanical choir served them well, and still
stands in evidence of the rigid severity that
marked Cistercianism in its earliest estate.
Following Abbot Hugh came seven successors,
of none of whom is any notable thing recorded,
and finally John Ripley came into his heritage
of sorrow on the 21st of July, 1509. He sat
for thirty-one years, and until the day when
Henry's emissaries demanded the surrender of
the abbey with all its lands, and, the shameful
paper signed under duress, evicted Abbot Ripley
and his monks on the 22nd of November, 1540.
The abbot himself was assigned a pension of
the equivalent of about three thousand dollars
per year; whether he ever accepted this blood-
money or not we do not know, but it would
seem not since it is said the old man stubbornly
refused to leave the precincts, housing himself
in a narrow cell over the great gate, where he
lingered until 1553, dying at last almost within
the shadow of the great abbey, now dismantled,
silent, and forlorn. [205 ]

KIRKSTALL
Kirkstall, in spite of Abbot Grimston, was
never a wealthy house, and at the Suppression
its net annual rent roll was only seventeen
thousand dollars. The lands and ruins were
granted early in the reign of "Saint" Edward
to Cranmer and his heirs, from whom it passed
in a few years to the Crown, and was granted
again to William Downynge and Peter Ash ton.
The Savilles were the next holders and from
them it passed through the Duke of Montague
to the Earl of Cardigan, and finally in 1888 was
sold at public auction, being purchased by
Colonel North of Leeds and by him presented
to his native city to be used as a common recrea
tion ground forever.
Sad indeed is the fate of Kirkstall Abbey,
where so many generations of men have prayed
and toiled and wept over their sins and the un
ceasing blows of adversity, now contending on
unequal ground for a share of popular interest
with band-stands, ginger-pop, and penny-in-the-
slot machines. Yet in spite of its environment,
in spite of the tainted waters of what was once a
"delicate river, calm and clear," the clanging
troUey-car, encroaching ranks of sordid tene
ments, foul smoke from factory chimneys, and
a general atmosphere of sporting papers and the
great unemployed, it lifts proudly and with
[206]

KIRKSTALL
invincible dignity above the miasma of trium
phant industrialism. Cleaning and tinkering
and the fussing of careful custodians cannot
destroy its solemn majesty, or neutralize its
eternal teaching power. In their wreck and
desolation the stones preach, even though the
human voices that once sounded within are
hushed and silent forever.
It was not so in the nineteenth century, per
haps, but men's ears hear now much that was
inaudible then. In a conscientious work by a
worthy Professor Phillips, I find the following
cheerful and philosophical reflections which
may serve to show the curious gulf that has
opened so suddenly and unexpectedly between
the last century and our own.
" Since the day when Henry de Lacy brought
the Cistercians to this sweet retreat, how changed
are the scenes which the river looks upon. Then
from the high rocks of Malham and the pastures
of Craven, to Loidis in Elmete the deer, wild
boar, and white bull were wandering in unfre
quented woods, or wading in untainted waters,
or roaming over boundless heaths. Now, hun
dreds of thousands of men of many races have
extirpated the wood, dyed the waters with tints
derived from other lands, turned the heath into
fertUe fields and filled the valley with mills and
[207]

KIRKSTALL
looms, water wheels and engine chimneys! Yet
is not all the beauty of Airedale lost; nor should
the thoughtful mind which now regards the
busy stream of the Aire lament the change. The
quiet spinner is happier than the rude and vio
lent hunter; the spirit of true religion fills these
populous villages, as well as once it filled these
cloistered walls: the woods are gone, and in
their place the iron road; but the road conducts
the intelligent lover of beauty to other hills and
dales where art has had no contest with nature,
and, by enabling him to compare one region
with another, corrects his judgment, heightens
his enjoyment, and deepens his sympathy with
man." One may question, perhaps, the accuracy of
the antithesis beween "the quiet spinner" and
the " rude and violent hunter " ; doubt even,
while threading the devious purlieus of Leeds
through the smudge of stifling smoke, the uni
versality of the contemporary "spirit of true
religion," but of the magnificent periods of the
final demonstration of the essential services ren
dered by " the iron road " the exalted truth can
never be gainsaid.

[208 ]

Kirkstall Abbey as seen from the river.

ST. MARY'S YORK
OF the thousands who go yearly to see the
city of the northern province to wonder
at what is indeed one of the noblest of
English cathedrals, how many realize that down
by the river and just without the line of the
ancient city wall, forgotten in the gardens of an
archaeological society, stand the few scarred
fragments of a church that, though an hun
dred feet shorter than the "Minster," was not
only incomparably more beautiful viewed as
pure architecture, but was as well the most
beautiful church in England and one of the
most perfect examples of consummate archi
tecture in the Christian world.
The fragmentary nature of the wreck explains,
perhaps, the perfect oblivion that has fallen
upon these ruins; but at least one might give a
few minutes of his time to visiting what still
remains, if only in tribute to the fact that it
stands for one of the wonders of the world,
entirely extinguished and wiped out that the
" Defender of the Faith" might acquire an access
[209 ]

YORK
of wealth and later build over the fields he had
devastated and from the rubble to which he
had reduced the most wonderful art of man a
shortlived pleasure house, gone now as utterly
as the incomparable masterpiece so inconti
nently done to death.
To-day the Benedictine Abbey of Our Lady
of York, once the richest of all monastic foun
dations in the north of England, consists in the
crumbling wall of the north nave aisle, one
tower pier cut short at half its height, a fragment
of the west end, and nothing more whatever,
except a few stones of the chapter house and
such foundations below the floor level as have
been exposed through the diligence of the present
owners of the ruins. This is all that remains in
place, but fortunately it is not everything. By
some whim of chance an enormous number of
fragments have been picked up here and there,
dug out of the earth, redeemed from walls where
they have lain for centuries as makeshift building
material, traced far without the limits of the
city and restored. These precious vestiges have
been gathered together and now form, some of
them, retaining walls and decorative borders in
the garden, whilst others are piled together
pell-mell in the lower story of the monastic
guest house, cheek by jowl with Roman tombs
[210]

YORK
and heathen altars. They are unique, these
shards of glory, not only in their number, but
in the almost unimaginable beauty of their art,
and they serve as an heart-breaking hint of the
inestimable loss the world has suffered in the
savage destruction of one of its noblest monu
ments. The ruin that overwhelmed York Abbey was
prompt, terrible, and condign. The whole vast
property with the dreamlike church and majes
tic monastery was retained by the Crown, and
the fairy buildings themselves were doomed
to destruction after they had been rifled of their
splendid plate, their hoard of sumptuous em
broidery and needlework, their stores of parch
ment and vellum folios and manuscripts. The
vast conventual buildings, wonders of masterly
architecture, were blown up and levelled with
the ground; and over their site was erected a
new palace for the king, the carven stones
being roughly hewn down to flt them to serve
as mere rubble for the walls. This palace, or
rather the major part of it, was speedily de
stroyed after Henry died, and that which was
left was joined to the abbot's lodgings, which
were largely rebuilt and made into a residence
for the " Lord's President of the North." Under
James I. extensive changes were made, and again
[211]

YORK
under Charles the Martyr. What remains has
now become a school for the blind.
In the meantime the church itself had been
left, in all probability, to fall slowly into ruin,
such portions as were available being used in the
various schemes of royal building and repara
tion, whilst the town's folk were given leave
to fetch such stones as they could drag away to
aid them in building their houses, sheds, and
styes. With the eighteenth century the final
raid began: in 1701 York Castle, being in need
of repairs, levied on the church itself; four years
later the insignificant church of St. Olave nearby
followed the same course and for the same
reason. George I. graciously granted to the
Minster and to St. Mary's, both in Beverly, so
much stone from the ruin as they might need
for their extensive repairs, and finally, early in
the nineteenth century, the destruction not pro
gressing fast enough, lime-kilns were set up, and
for years sculptured stones worthy to stand in
the British Museum by the Elgin Marbles were
given to the fire that they might acquire a com
mercial value when transmuted into quick-lime.
It is a biting commentary on the civilization
of the nineteenth century that this sacrilege and
vandalism went on without a protest until the
year 1827, when the Yorkshire Historical So-
[212]

YORK
ciety asked for and obtained the site of the awful
destruction. This society did not exhibit an
instant appreciation of its opportunities, for it
forthwith proceeded to erect a neat and elegant
Greek temple over the ruins of a portion of the
fratry and refectory, but as time went on its
eyes were opened and the fact became apparent
that there might be other items of archaeological
interest in ancient Eboracum besides Roman
cippi and the fragments of pagan altars. The
land where once the choir stood was added to
the Society's holdings, and consistent excavation
began with the result that a great store of won
derful sculpture has been unearthed, whilst
to-day the entire foundations of the eastern arm
of the church, together with those of a small
portion of the monastic buildings, have been
exposed. It will be necessary to remove the
Society's building itself before these excavations
can be continued, while small houses that now
cover the site of the chapter house must also be
demolished. The older buildings also of the
school for the blind should be taken down in
order that the material from the abbey may be
sorted out and some portions perhaps restored
to their original position.
As one passes through the narrow alleys ad
jacent to the church, one finds in every wall
[213]

YORK
stones unquestionably from the abbey itself, nor
are they confined to the immediate vicinity; all
over York they crop out in unexpected places,
some of them used even as copings for garden
walls or built into the abutments of bridges.
The fierce centripetal force of sacrilege and
irreligion has hurled them wide over an enor
mous area, but stone by stone they are being
brought back and given in charge of a Society
conscious at last of its sacred trust. As one
pores over the scattered fragments, the pas
sionate desire asserts itself to mark each broken
stone and try if by patient care it would not be
possible to rebuild at least one entire bay of the
nave in order that it might stand as an ever
lasting monument of the highest point reached
by the Christian builders of England.
In the undercroft of the hospitium, as I have
said, has already been gathered together a mass
of marvellous material. I do not like to criticise
any action of a Society that has shown itself
conscientious and careful, but I must submit
that even now it is not fully realized that these
vestiges of mediaeval art are infinitely more
precious than mere classical remains. In this
same undercroft, piled in unorganized, uniden
tified heaps, black with the sifting coal-dust of
the neighbouring railway, thirteenth, fourteenth,
[214]

YORK
and fifteenth century work all jumbled together
in dusty chaos, are some of the most perfect
examples of English mediaeval art to be found
in any place. In some instances the dirt of
their long sepulture still clogs the carving of
caps, bosses, and statues, each one of which is
well worth preservation under glass. It is only
by digging down into the casual heaps that one
may find what actually exists. In simple truth
it may be said that here are gathered together
more precious fragments than in any other place
in England. Let us realize the paramount
glory of our own great thousand years of civili
zation, forget, though only for a day, the charm
of our classical period, and do a laggard honour
to the immortal achievement of our immediate
forbears. From the architectural fragments now
at hand and, please God, soon to be acquired, it
might be possible to restore the nave order of
St. Mary's or, if not that, at least to lift some
portions of the walls and shafts a few feet
higher above the turf. From the shards of
sculpture logically arranged and conserved, it
would be possible to form a chronological se
quence of national styles out of examples of
each period at its noblest and best. The oppor
tunity is glittering in its possibilities; is there
none who will lead the way.-*
[215]

YORK
It really seems that this is true, the apparently
careless statement that all the work at York was
of the best, whatever its period. Why this
should be true is hard to say, though we know
that the Benedictine was the richest order in
England and the one most devoted to the ad
vancement of learning and art, whilst St. Mary's
was one of the richest of all Benedictine houses.
It would seem that whenever anything was done
here it befel that it should be at the best possible
time and that the Abbots of York were content
with no workman who was not a master in his
own art. Go down into the hospitium under
croft and look around; it is impossible to cata
logue the treasures, but here is a tenth century
font of singular value, consigned to the stone
heap at the recent restoration of Hutton Crans-
wick church, and fortunately recovered; here
are Anglo-Norman doorways, caps, and lintels
from the old chapter house of the abbey, unique
in their richness and originality. Here are
scores of caps, corbells, and vaulting bosses,
mostly thirteenth century, wrought in a fashion
that stops the breath with wonder and admira
tion, each one of them more exquisite, more
masterly as absolute art than any bit of carven
acanthus or honeysuckle from the Acropolis or
the Forum. Against the piers are ten life-size
[216]

YORK
statues of prophets and evangelists, fourteenth
century work, strong and powerful, a part of
the great lines that once were ranged rank on
rank down the triforia of the abbey church, once
blazing with colour and gold, now ashen after
their long interment beneath the ruins of their
tabernacle. Most wonderful of all, amongst a
horde of smaller statues, a mutilated fragment
of a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, so
consummate in its faultless art that it deserves
place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every
age and race. Finally here are great pieces of
canopied altars and sedilia of the fifteenth cen
tury, in black Derbyshire marble wrought like
fine lace, as pure in their cutting as a Greek
intaglio and marvellously preserved, every line
as sharp to-day as when it left the sculptor's
chisel. Here in this dim and sooty undercroft
is an epitome of the English art of four centuries,
precious and beautiful beyond the power of
words to describe.
There seems somewhat of the providential in
the manner in which these things have been
preserved. There is unmistakable evidence that
many hands laboured at the Suppression to save
a few vestiges of that which they were hired to
destroy. The triforium statues were carefully
buried together down amongst the foundations
[217]

YORK
of the church and covered by a mass of shattered
window tracery cemented together with the very
material used in the building of Henry's tran
sitory palace. The marvellous bosses of the
warming-room had also been buried together
in the same fashion when the monastery was
razed to give place to the royal dwelling, whilst
the marble canopies were found carefully built
into walls in such a way as to prove they were
given place not as building material but solely
for their own preservation from the fate that
overtook the major part of their fellows, which,
as Thoresby records, were "sold by parcels to
statuaries and others for common use." There
is something infinitely pathetic in these evi
dences of humble appreciation of a great art
doomed to annihilation, on the part of those
who, clearly against their will, were forced to
be the instruments of the destruction of the
things they loved. Their names may never be
known, the names of the poor men who did
their best to save a statue or a bit of lovely
carving, but they deserve a mass for their char
ity and for their love that has proved not all
in vain. Also, and more materially, do they
merit a more tender custody of those things
preserved to us by their gentle piety and their
faithful care. [218]

YORK
Shall we try to restore, in words only, the
Abbey of Our Lady of York?
The walls of the close rise sheer from the
river, and above them only a glimpse is seen here
and there of pale, vaporous towers emerging
from deep masses of foliage. Entering the
water-gate and passing under the big arch of
the guest house we find ourselves suddenly
fronting a gentle slope that rises towards what
almost seems a citadel, so vast is it in extent.
The view is bounded on either hand by low
detached buildings, so that we are in a kind of
vast and irregular quadrangle, the upper side of
which is formed by many low structures strongly
buttressed, pierced by windows full of delicate
tracery, rising to the left into a lofty gable rich
with intricate panelling, fretted with the glim
mering light and shade of deeply cut caps and
bosses and crocketing, and decked with many
statues. Above all, crowning the composition
and tying it all into an aspiring pry amid, lifts a
single lofty tower with its lance-like spire flashing
in the sky. Here in a world of green trees and
greener turf rises a thing like clouds and sea
mists, a mystical presence commingled of fire
and snow, for it is all of pearly white stone,
marble in all but name, that has softened into
a silvery radiance in its exposed parts, while the
[ 219 ]

YORK
hollows of arch and cap and archivolt have
deepened into a golden ivory that glows here
and there as deep as amber. This is no fortress
shrine of granite or ruddy freestone or harsh
black flints; it is a wonderful vision of the New
Jerusalem compact of alabaster and mother-of-
pearl. Pure, crystalline, gleaming like sea foam,
it is a vision, not an actuality in time and space.
In the base of the wall is a single door; pause
long enough to note the almost passionate carv
ing of the vines that creep up the hollows be
hind the shafts and at the top spring suddenly
outward to wreathe themselves into involved
capitals; no more lovely carving than this can
be found in Athens or far Cathay; if it should
perish now, if by some terrible tragedy it were
to be calcined by fire or worn by wind and
rain, what would not the world lose.?
We enter: at first nothing is visible except a
kind of wash of palpitating colour, back and
forth between enclosing walls, then, little by
little we are able to establish ourselves, for de
tails are taking form in the luminous dusk. We
are standing in the lay-brothers' church, the six
westernmost bays of the nave; the great rood
screen closes the view to the east up as high as
the spring of the aisle arches, but above all is
open and the eye pierces on and on past the
[220 ]

YORK
gigantic Calvary flashing with colour and gold,
through slanting lines of myriad-coloured light
from the clerestory windows, until it centres, on
the eastern wall that is as though it were wrought
of precious stones Aladdin himself could not
replace. For eight wide bays the delicately
chiselled shafts with their soaring arches march
towards the great and lofty arches of the tower,
and beyond they begin again and continue for
nine more bays, three hundred and eighty feet
in clear length, the whole wrought of the pale
stone that here has softened to the hues of old
ivory. The great vault branches and curves
above, the natural colour of the stone almost hid
den by an embroidery of colour and gold, from
the midst of which glow proud heraldic achieve
ments, gules and azure and or. Down the tri
forium arcade are ranged countless figures of
saints and prophets, painted, all of them, and
bright with burnished gilding, while the colour
of the vault creeps down over arch and wall
until the whole church is one wonder of ivory
stone and all the hues of the blossoming fields,
the metallic iridescence of butterflies' wings.
Brilliant though it is, — no half tones, no
timorous tertiaries, — the eighty-six windows of
clerestory and aisle with the four vast openings
in nave, choir, and transepts, all filled with
[221 ]

YORK
painted glass smouldering with ardent fire on
the south and west, cool with the myriad hues
of sunrise mists on the north and east, throw ten
thousand pencils of living light across the still
air where smoke-films of incense still curl and
linger, blending all in one resonant chord of full
colour that is like music in its poignancy.
Enter the south aisle and, footing the pavement
of brilliant tiles, go down to the transept. Here
to the south the sun pours full through the great
window forty feet in clear height, a tide of living
light that breaks against the fretted screen of
the monks' choir. To the left opens out all the
wonder and mystery of the crossing, the Titan
shafts like sheaves of giant spears rising to the
four huge arches wrought into subtle curves and
hollows, the shadowy transept stretching far
away into silvery mist dyed with the carmine and
silver and ultramarine of the storied windows.
To the east, under two of the arches, are little
chapels, each with its altar decked with richest
needlework, each with its golden candlesticks,
its fresh cut flowers, its reredos of chiselled stone
or gilded wood, thick with statues of vested
saints, and voiceful with emblems and symbols
of the Redemption.
The third arch gives on the processional aisle
stretching far away to the east, and here, as also
[222]

YORK
in the transept, are myriad tombs and shrines,
and memorial brasses in the tiled floor. Here is
a bishop's tomb wrought of alabaster, the effigy
of my lord himself stretched on the top, mitre on
head, cope decently folded by his side, a jewelled
crozier prone along his arm. Here lies a car
dinal, his tomb thick set with glimmering mo
saic, his red hat hanging from the vault above,
the silken tassels waving slightly in some breath
that strays in from an open door. Here a knight
and his lady sleep in a common tomb, a great
sword and an helmet, black now with years,
suspended above.
You must walk justly here, for the tombs are
very many and each is as beautiful as it is given
to man to fashion. Farther to the east we find
altars against the terminal wall, every one some
masterpiece of art, with votive candles and
flickering lamps burning always before them.
The north aisle is as the south, and the north
transept as well, except that here is the altar of
Our Lady, most beautiful, most marvellous of
all. Enter the doorway in the screen of the
choir. Thus far all has been in a way without
the pale, here we approach the centre of all
things. The slender shafts, the curling arches,
arcade, triforium, clerestory, and vault, are the
same: ivory, gold, and pulsating colour; but here
[223]

YORK
all is enclosed by the choir stalls of oak, each
shaded by its canopy, a miracle of marvellous
fashioning, carven, inlaid, picked out with colour
and gold, an ordered jungle of intricate foliation
that balks the imagination with its revelation of
the powers of man when these are used in the
service of God. Side by side, scores of them in
all, they stand ranged in order away to the east,
where they give place to fellows of finely wrought
marble, spired, pinnacled, charged with bright
coats of arms and the deceitful semblance of all
the flowers of the field. Here the stalls are
backed and cushioned with silk brocade ; blazing
banners of rich needlework, banners both mar
tial and ecclesiastical, hang above and cast long
shadows over the tombs of bishops, abbots, and
the great of earth, tombs that are set thick with
little statues, each in its canopied niche, proud
with the martial array of ancient escutcheons, or
draped, some of them, with splendid palls of
wonderful needlework that cost the labour of
twenty hands for haff that number of years.
And what shall we say of the high altar and
its reredos.? Go to Winchester; look on what
is there, rising forty feet and more sheer from
the pavement and reaching from wall to wall,
then imagine this flickering with burnished gold
and blazing with pigments, fronted with great
[224 ]

Malmsbury — The Norman Door.

YORK
gold candlesticks, flanked by others of bronze
and ivory, with silver lamps hanging in front
like so many flame-bearing angels, and you
may have some idea of what once was in this
place. We may go into the cathedrals still left us
and from their bare stone shafts and vaults,
their few defaced tombs, dusty and faded, their
tall windows where spaces of wonderful colour
still remain surrounded by dead fields of plain
glass, their few and cheerless altars shorn of
all colour save that of a frontal, it may be, gain
some pale, inadequate idea of what once was be
fore the days of Henry the Scourge of England,
but nowhere can we find a hint of the unspeak
able glory that once characterized cathedral and
abbey, when colour, apotheosized, covered them
like the vesture of kings, and the oblations and
memorials of a thousand years filled them with
the wonders of art and with haunting memories.
But the real glory of York Abbey lay, not in
its accessories of glass and sculpture and carving,
tapestry, brocade, and needlework and all the
artifice of the goldsmith, the jeweller, and the
scribe, but in the singular and quite consummate
nature of its architecture. Founded just after
the Conquest, by the monks of Evesham under
the protection of Earl Percy, the abbey was
[225 ]

YORK
altogether rebuilt in its final form by the great
Abbot Simon of Warwick who ruled for forty
years, viz., from 1259 until 1299. During these
years the first epoch of Gothic mounted to its
zenith, and York Abbey stood as the crowning
achievement of the style. From this wonderful
work every hint of Norman and every trace of
French influence had disappeared. Of the hard
mechanism of Salisbury no suggestion is visible,
while the grave and almost ponderous majesty
of Whitby and Rievaulx had given place to a
wonderful lightness and spaciousness. It may
almost be called transitional, for it shows the first
movings of the spirit of the fourteenth century
and so may claim kin not only with the "Nine
Altars" of Fountains and Durham, but with
Gisburgh as well. If it failed at any point it
was in its west front, the remains of which,
except for the greater arches, indicate a certain
hardness and mechanical quality curiously sug
gestive of Salisbury and strongly out of harmony
with all that is within. I am almost inclined to
assign to this west front a date fifty years earlier
than that given to Abbot Warwick's work, as
though a new front had been built for the ancient
church before the great rebuilding of 1270 was
begun, and that this front when overtaken later
by Warwick's masterpiece was incorporated
[226]

YORK
therein and only partially changed, chiefly by
the insertion of new windows and doors.
In spite of minor criticisms, however, the fact
remains that the destruction of York Abbey
meant the elimination not only of one of the
most beautiful buildings in the world, but also
the obliteration of a page in English architec
tural history we can ill spare. Sure, serene, com
petent, perfect in its proportions, exquisitely
organized, marked by subtleties of design in the
sections of piers, the arrangement of mouldings,
the placing and modelling of ornament, a perfect
type of sound, strong, and sensitive English
Gothic, York Abbey was a national monument
the aesthetic and historical value of which was
beyond computation. It is with feelings of
horror and unutterable dismay that, as we stand
beside the few existing fragments, realizing the
irreparable loss they make so clear, we call into
mind Henry's sacrilege in the sixteenth century
and his silly palace doomed to instant destruc
tion, the crass ignorance and stolidity of the
eighteenth century with its grants of building
material, and the mercenary savagery of the
nineteenth century when from smoking lime
kilns rose into the air the vanishing ghosts of
the noblest creations that owe their existence to
the hands of man. [227]

YORK
The tale of St. Mary's Abbey ends on the
26th day of November 1539, when William
Dent, twenty-ninth and last abbot, surrendered
the glory of Yorkshire into the hands of Crum
well, at which time there were fifty monks on
the rolls, one hundred and fifty lay brothers and
servants, and a great number of families depend
ent on the abbey for their maintenance. At
this time the annual revenues amounted to some
thing over one hundred thousand dollars.

[228 ]

Malmsbury — The Shattered Nave.

MALMESBURY
IN writing of England's abbeys it has been
my intention expressly to exclude those that
are now "in commission" in any sort,
whether as cathedrals or as parish churches,
leaving these for study perhaps at some future
time. It might seem that this rule should ex
clude Malmesbury, St. Aldhelm's first Benedic
tine foundation in Wiltshire, but a chance visit
to its desolate site proved that such exclusion
was quite unnecessary. Roofed in and enclosed
is a part of the nave indeed; a makeshift " Com
munion Table" is posited against a roughly
plastered wall; heavy pews clog its narrow area,
and stove funnels thrust themselves through
traceried windows, some of which are filled with
crude stained glass, while there are other in
stances of occasional and mechanical use, but
these things are so manifestly a mere matter of
legal formality they enhance the wreck of glory
rather than mitigate it.
Malmesbury is a ruin, no less in its spiritual
than in its structural aspect. Once a vast erec
tion, three hundred and thirty-two feet long,
[229]

MALMESBURY
with a nave of nine bays, a great crossing, and
a choir of five bays, all crowded with altars,
screens, and tombs, and none too large for the
scores of monks and conversi and faithful lay
men, it is now a mutilated stump of six nave
bays, terminating at either end in brute walls
of cheap masonry. The wonderful fifteenth
century rood screen is gone, its place taken by
a blind wall of plaster. Gone are the twelve
altars of richest workmanship; and in their
place is a thing like a small packing box covered
with grey canvas, railed in by a kind of high
fence, with two big square footstools or "otto
mans," one at the south end, one at the north
of the "Table," and flanking all a huge crude
chair covered with red reps on either hand. A
Brobdignagian eye, like some secret society
symbol, is coarsely painted on the east wall, with
a frame containing the Commandments on one
side and a second with the Lord's Prayer (or
maybe the "forbidden degrees," I do not quite
remember, but the connotation of the place
would suggest the latter) on the other. Not a
candlestick, vase, flower, or even cross appears
to indicate the nature of the crash-covered
packing box; the dust of ages lies in the red-
druggeted " Sanctuary," and all is forlorn, miser
able, neglected. [230]

MALMESBURY
Never have I seen such evidences of dull
indifferentism and spiritual death. All around
are the tottering fragments of shattered majesty,
preaching the faith and devotion that once ren
dered the enormous church all too small, now
a moiety thereof is ample, and well it may be;
for the dull horror of the place is so repellent
it is impossible to imagine taking part in the
worship of God in such an environment.
Curiously enough, and as though by some
singular mercy, it became necessary for us to
hurry across country from Wiltshire into Oxford
shire; we arrived in the evening at a little town
of which, through deep ignorance, we knew
nothing except that it contained an old Augus
tinian priory that was still in use. Finding a
lodging for the night near its low walls, we in
quired of the landlady if the church were open
at that hour. She looked at us with some sur
prise and replied "Certainly, Sir, there'll be
festival vespers there in an half hour for to
morrow is Corpus Christi, when there will be a
sung mass at eight." Greatly marvelling, and
bearing in mind that which we had seen in
Malmesbury, we entered the church to the sound
of summoning bells, and found ourselves in a
gaunt, ascetic place, casual and irregular in
plan, bearing many marks of former desecration,
[231 ]

MALMESBURY
but still a church of God, no less. An high altar
covered with flowers and candles gleamed in
the chancel, and by some magic minor altars
filled the side chapels, while little shrines, each
with its flowers and hanging lamp, were fastened
to the columns of the nave. Statues, banners,
sanctuary lamps, the faint odour of old incense,
all told their grateful tale. The people gathered,
the bell ceased, and presently a long procession
of priests in cassocks, scholars in gowns (amongst
whom we noticed a perfectly black negro)
entered, passed to the Lady chapel on the right,
chanted antiphonally the first vespers of the
festival, and departed. At eight the next morn
ing there was a "sung mass" indeed, with all
the adjuncts of a devout congregation, blazing
lights, rich vestments, incense, and all the splen
did old ceremonial so compelling, so convincing
of the "historic continuity" on which we so
often lay stress in words. What had we found ?"
Simply a parish church in charge of a missionary
college. And in these antitheses, in Malmes
bury and in Dorchester, we found as well a liv
ing evidence of the old that is passing away,
the new-old that happily is taking its place.
It is somewhat unusual however to find in
the hoary old abbeys that have been preserved
for public worship, in whole or in part, the
[232]

MALMESBURY
degree of perfect restoration to the older modes
we found in the tiny Oxfordshire village. Usually
the standard approaches more nearly to that of
the lamentable Malmesbury, though in a most
glorious old abbey in the south, Romsey, of
immortal tradition, the Dorchester type was in
full evidence, with splendid altars, perfect ac
cessories, and a constant sequence of services
from morning until night. Shrines like these
hearten one mightily after sad experiences in
such contrasting places as desolate York Cathe
dral and poor pathetic old Malmesbury.
And so we must count the latter as amongst
the ruined and deserted abbeys of Great Britain.
It is a melancholy fact that this should be so,
for in its history and its architectural quality it
called for a happier fate. Almost thirteen cen
turies ago the hill of Ingelborne Castle was
consecrated to religious uses by Maeldulph,
a Scottish hermit and philosopher, who, driven
from the North by the harassing of robbers and
pirates, built himself here a cell and gathered
around him a little group of devoted scholars.
And the studious atmosphere thus early brought
to Malmesbury never departed for the space
of nine hundred years, when it was very effec
tually exterminated by the first English "De
fender of the Faith " and gave place to the weav-
[233]

MALMESBURY
ing of cloth. St. Aldhelm, the pious and learned
monk and Bishop of the West Saxons, master
of Greek, Latin, and Saxon letters, master of
oratory, master of music, was the founder of the
Benedictine monastery whose ruins have fallen
into such sorry case, and was buried here after
his long and wonderful life on earth had come
to an end. The devout King Athelstan with
his cousins Elwin and Ethelwyne found sepulture
within its walls. Duns Scotus, the witty Scot,
William of Malmesbury, the great chronicler,
Elmer, the monastic Icarus who made for him
self a certain fiying machine, on the first essay
of which he fell "and brake both his legs,"
were all identified with this place. Early in
the thirteenth century Malmesbury had its
own "hostel" in Oxford, and for hundreds
of years thereafter a steady stream of students
went down to the University from the great
Malmesbury schools. Some indication of the
high value set on university degrees is obtained
from one record that tells how in 1298 a Bene
dictine monk from Gloucester on taking his de
gree of D.D. at Oxford "was attended by the
whole of his convent from Gloucester, the Abbots
of Westminster, Evesham, Abingdon, Reading,
and Malmesbury, and an hundred noblemen
and esquires^en horses richly caparisoned."
[234 ]

MALMESBURY
What the library must have been we can only
surmise from certain terrible details of its total
destruction. That it was vast and magnificent,
even for the Middle Ages, we know. For four
hundred years the monks had laboured in scrip
torium and "carel" translating, engrossing,
illuminating, and binding their wonderful works
in tooled and gilded and jewelled covers. Fuller
testifies that "the English monks were bookish
themselves, and much inclined to hoard up
monuments of learning." Of no house was
this so true as of Malmesbury. At Ramsay, a
smaller monastery, there were for choir use
about seventy breviaries, one hundred psalters
and hymnals, thirty-two graduals, thirty-nine
processionals. The number of copies of the
Holy Scriptures, theological books, and works
on law, history, and grammar, together with
volumes of the Greek and Latin classics must
have made up a huge library. This was de
stroyed even to the last folio, and wilfully.
Aubrey writes of the terrible tragedy: "In my
grandfather's day the MSS. flew about like
butterflies. All musick bookes, account bookes,
copie bookes, etc., were covered with old MSS.
and the glovers at Malmesbury made great
havock of them ; and gloves were wrapped up,
no doubt, in many good pieces of antiquity.
[235 ]

MALMESBURY
Mr. W. Stumpe," — the great grandson of the
clothier who had purchased the dismantled
abbey more than a century before — "had
several MSS. of the abbey and when be brewed
a barrell of speciall ale his use was to stop the
bunghole under the clay with a sheet of
the MS." *
From another source we learn that years after
the Suppression a traveller passing through the
town found that even the bakers had not con
sumed all the abbey books in heating their
ovens, whilst he saw many broken windows
patched up with the remants of the most valu
able manuscripts on vellum. The loss in this
direction alone has been incalcuable, irreparable,
and final, not only from a literary and historical
standpoint but from that of art as well, for it
must be remembered that these hundreds of.
thousands of volumes that went to feed bakery
fires and stop bungholes in ale casks were each
and all of them the result of years of devoted
labour, and as such, works of the most precious
art, exquisitely engrossed on vellum, embellished
with delicate illumination, and bound in covers
sometimes of solid gold or silver, wonderfully
wrought, and studded with jewels.
After reading the pitiful narratives of the
* Aubrey: "The Natural History of Wiltshire."
[236 ]

MALMESBURY
destruction of such monastic libraries as this
at Malmesbury, one can hardly wonder how it
was that in the first years following the Suppres
sion "whole ships full" of manuscripts on vel
lum and parchment " were sent over seas to the
bookbinders" and yet that enough remained
for local consumption for generations. The
"Revival of Learning" was manifesting itself
at last in its true colours, though after a some
what unexpected fashion.
Centre of learning that it was, Malmesbury
Abbey, with the exception of the abbot's lodg
ings and stables, was by the "King's Magesty"
as recorded in the "Survey" in the Augmenta
tion office " deemed to be superfluous, appointed
to be razed and sold." The entire monastery
with its gardens, orchards, and park were pur
chased, however, in one lot by a certain "William
Stumpe, clothier," for a sum so out of propor
tion to the ordinary market rates of the time
for this kind of commodity that one suspects
there must be some mistake. The price is
recorded as £1117, 15s. lid., rather more than
thirty thousand dollars to-day, which, for the
time, was a good deal to pay for a lot of useless
buildings that would cost perhaps two million
dollars if the attempt were made to reproduce
them to-day to serve as a particularly glorious
[237]

MALMESBURY
and majestic type of cathedral. Mr. Stumpe
was farseeing, however; the extinction of the
great abbey left the people without spiritual
ministrations of any kind, and, feeling at first
the need of these (custom dying but slowly),
they induced the clothier to sell them the nave
of the abbey to use as a parish church. The
conventual buildings and the more sacred parts
of the abbey were turned into a mill for the
weaving of cloth under Mr. Stumpe's directions,
tenements for his mill hands were erected over
the gardens and orchards, new streets were cut
through the precincts, and altogether it would
seem that the thrifty citizen was probably by
way of making a good thing of his investment.
Whether he did or not we do not know, but in
any case his fortune was not of a permanent
type, his direct descendants being on record
as common labourers in Malmesbury early in
the nineteenth century.
After the death of Mr. Stumpe, the conventual
buildings were, of course, turned into a stone
quarry. In 1650 Aubrey speaks of fine frag
ments still remaining, but to-day not a sign is
left, except the abbot's lodgings, which have
been rebuilt and now serve as an imposing and
beautiful private house. The utter wreck of
the church itself dates from comparatively
[238]

MALMESBURY
recent times. There was formerly at the cross
ing a great central tower "with a mighty high
pyramis, a mark to all the country about,"
twenty feet higher than the spire of Salisbury.
This "pyramis" fell shortly before the Sup
pression but without injuring the tower itself
or any portion of the walls of the church. At
the time of the Great Rebellion the whole fabric
was comparatively complete though of course
only the nave was in use, while the spire had
gone, and a portion of the west front. Malmes
bury held loyally to the King and was furiously
bombarded by Cromwell, as a result of which
the western bays of the nave fell down and the
tower was further weakened. On Restoration
Day, 1660, the tower collapsed owing to "so
many volleys of shot loyally fired" and appar
ently the abbey was then reduced to the present
mutilated stump, every vestige of choir, transept,
and tower being swept away except the great
arch to the nave and that to the north transept.
Since then the abbreviated trunk, shorn of
its towers, choir, transepts, chapels, and west
front, has stood a forlorn reminder of happier
and more pious days; within the last few years
something has been done towards a kind of
restoration, but the direction taken by these
laudable efforts is somewhat startling, though
[239]

MALMESBURY
unquestionably significant. One would have
thought, perhaps, that funds would have been
expended towards the east, the south and east
arches of the tower rebuilt and temporarily
enclosed, thus presenting a decent chancel where
might have been erected an altar, respectful at
least, and reverent, even though simple and
unmarked by the connotations of "Puseyism."
But no, the packing box within its painted
fence and beneath the secret-society emblem
was enough to meet the law, so the money sub
scribed went to the rebuilding two of the bays
of the south wall of the nave that had been
thrown down by Cromwell's artillery. Of course
these bays lay quite without the enclosure of
the present church; they were simply a replica
tion of the other bays of the nave; they could
serve no purpose, devotional or architectural.
Why they should have been chosen for restora
tion is a question beyond solution, unless it was
that being towards the town their absence caused
a shocking gap in the visible wall, while, rebuilt,
they would enhance the neatness and respect
ability of the common prospect. Well, ideals
change and incumbents also. Which is to blame
for the present shocking state of Malmesbury.?
I do not know, but let us hope the time will
come when the rebuilding of the abbey will
[240 ]

Malmsbury — The Nave that Oliver Cromwell wrecked.

MALMESBURY
begin afresh and towards the east, so that the
future pilgrims may not be scandalized by the
evidences of archaeological interest in combi
nation with religious indifferentism.
The holy hill of Malmesbury has known many
churches, several of them standing grouped
together when the vast shrine of St. Aldhelm,
the remains of which still exist, first came into
being. The first little wooden church of St.
Maeldulph, built in 637, was still standing, as
was also the finer stone church erected by St.
Aldhelm himself. William of Malmesbury, who
died in 1112, declares it then to have been su
perior in size and beauty to any ancient church
in England. It was in this church that King
Athelstan and his line found sepulture. Two
other churches, the one dedicated to Our Lady,
the other to St. Michael, stood close at hand,
St. Aldhelm's tomb in St. Mary's, St. Mael-
dulph's in St. Michael's. Yet a fifth church,
built for the use of the townspeople, was dedi
cated to St. Andrew, and in this were buried
the exiled Greek archbisop, Constantine, and,
for a time. Abbot Brithwald IL, fourteenth in
succession. Unfortunately for him, however,
his tomb was so haunted by "fantastic shadows"
that the townspeople rebelled and, breaking open
the tomb, cast the unquiet ashes into a distant
[241 ]

MALMESBURY
marsh. Whereupon peace descended upon St.
Andrew's once more. Finally, towards the end
of the eleventh century, the great abbey was
begun, either under Turold, a monk of Fecamp,
or Godfrey of Jumieges, the student and creator
of the enormous library that was sometime to
become the pride of English monasticism.
As then laid out, St. Aldhelm's remained to
the end, but above the triforium level many
changes took place through the succeeding cen
turies. Probably the work progressed slowly
down to the middle of the twelfth century; it is
all a heavy, rich and massive type of transitional
Norman, with enormous circular piers, bluntly
pointed arches, and vaulting shafts resting on
the pier-caps. In the fourteenth century a
great transformation took place, though under
which abbot we do not know; at this time the
entire Norman clerestory was removed and in
its place was substituted a great range of pointed
windows and a stone vault, for the support of
which fine flying buttresses were flung out over
the aisles; at this time delicate wave-patterned
balustrades of open tracery were applied to the
copings of nave and aisles. In the fifteenth
century the transformation continued: a gigan
tic window was inserted in the west front, the
tower was raised and surmounted by its proud
[242]

MALMESBURY
"pyramis," taller even than Salisbury spire. As
so often happened, however, ambition here over
topped itself, and very shortly the spire fell with
out, however, injuring any portion of the church.
Towards the end of this century a wonderful
rood screen, evidently similar to the work in the
chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster, was
set up between the presbytery and the nave;
this was removed' after the Suppression and
inserted under the west arch of the tower. Now
here a question suggests itself. This very site
is now filled by a rough wall covered with blank
plaster. If the great screen was indeed placed
here, is it not here now, only slabbed over with
lime as happened in Oxford and elsewhere.''
The possibility is engaging and adds another
to the list that might become operative were
Malmesbury Abbey now in more reverent
hands. Malmesbury at the Suppression was one of
the most majestic abbeys in England, though
by no means one of the richest, its resources
being but about twenty-five thousand dollars
yearly. The monastic buildings covered an
area of six acres, while the orchards, gardens,
and "warren" comprised forty more. The
cloister, upwards of an hundred feet square,
with all the monastic buildings lay to the north
[243]

MALMESBURY
on the very brink of the precipitous hill down
the sides of which crept the industrial offices
to the brink of the river, where one of the many
mills is even now in commission. Of all this,
as I have said, nothing now remains, thanks
to Mr. Stumpe, except one humble mill and
the remains of the infirmary; streets have been
slashed ruthlessly through all the abbey pre
cincts, shabby houses crowd toward its walls,
and only a few feet of land remain about the
shapeless ruins in sad memory of the once vast
estates once held in trust by the Benedictine
order in the name of the holy St. Aldhelm. At
the close of the fifteenth century Malmesbury
must have stood second to Durham alone for
majesty of situation and grandeur of aspect,
with its far flung monastery crowning the hill
top and rising from terraced orchards and gar
dens, the huge bulk of St. Aldhelm's church
with its triple towers looming over all.
Malmesbury was not one of the abbeys which,
"when the devil was sick," had been destined
for preservation as a cathedral ; but it might well
have been, not only from its location but because
of its splendid history and traditions and its
majestic beauty. It will be remembered that,
when Henry was importuning Parliament to
give him the greater as well as the lesser houses,
[244 ]

MALMESBURY
he had caused it to be bruited abroad that of his
piety and generosity he would reestablish many
of the great houses as cathedrals. The list in
cluded some twenty monasteries; as soon as the
bill was passed the list was withdrawn and only
Westminster, Oxford, Chester, Gloucester, Bris
tol, and Petersborough actually became see
cities, though seven other cathedrals which were
included in the king's list and served by Bene
dictine monks were turned over to secular
canons. Of the $80,000,000 acknowledged as
received by the Augmentation Office from the
suppression of the monasteries, but $500,000
went to the endowment of new bishopricks.
Forty million dollars were used for the army,
navy, and the prosecution of foreign wars, whilst
thirty-five million were turned into the king's
private purse to be expended by him at will
and after the unsavoury fashion the details of
which have fortunately been preserved for our
instruction and edification.
Malmesbury Abbey was surrendered to the
king on December 15, 1539, by Robert Framp-
ton and his twenty-one monks; the abbot ac
cepted a pension amounting in the money of our
time to almost $8,000 per year, the munificence
of the amount being undoubtedly due to the
faithless abbot's complaisance, cheerful or other-
[245]

MALMESBURY
wise, in the royal schemes. The prior received
$600 annually, the monks but $350. Under
Mary I. but seven still survived to draw the
pensions then continued to them by Cardinal
Pole.

[246]

OUR LADY OF THE FOUNTAINS
AS we began this cursory study of the
monastic remains of Great Britain
with Glastonbury, so is it fitting that
we should bring it to a close with Fountains.
South and North, Benedictine and Cistercian,
the two abbeys represent the highest point
achieved by the two great Orders that had so
much to do with the building up of that
great epoch of Christian civilization that covered
the wonderful thousand years of mediaevalism.
Together they restored society and civiliza
tion, laid the foundations of British character,
and made possible that community of interest
and consistency of action that established
British nationality. Fountains falls short of
Glastonbury in the glory and significance of its
founding, in the splendour and versatility of its
history, in the grim tragedy of its death; all
monastic foundations must, for Glastonbury
stands alone in England amongst those peaks
of unspeakable majesty that rise above the pla
teaux and foothills of history, but in every other
respect it is singularly eminent, while it can
[247]

FOUNTAINS
claim place with Glastonbury as with other
immortal houses through the martyrdom at
Henry's hands of its last abbot, William Thirsk;
Marmaduke Bradley, who nominally succeeded
the murdered abbot, being but a creature of
Crumwell's, installed by him for the accom
plishment of the ruin of Fountains.
Unlike Glastonbury, unlike nearly all other
existing ruins, indeed, this great Cistercian house
has fallen at last into the hands of a Roman
Catholic nobleman, who sees something in the
forlorn wreck besides its possibilities as a sheep-
walk, and who treats it with the most tender and
reverent regard. It has passed through many
hands since the year 1540, when it was granted
to Sir Richard Gresham, for the curse of failure
of male issue in families holding monastic estates
has held here as elsewhere. In 1846 of the six
hundred and thirty families to which monastic
estates had been granted, only fourteen had not
been extinguished through failure of male issue.
Since then several more have come to an end,
and whether we attribute the fact to judgment
or coincidence, it is certainly notable that shame,
disgrace, violent deaths, and total extinction have
followed the names of all those who took part in
the Suppression, from the House of Tudor,
through its agents, the Lords spiritual and tem-
[248]

Fountains — The XVI. Century Tower.

FOUNTAINS
poral and the Commons who made up the Par
liament in the thirty-first year of Henry, "by
the Grace of God," etc., etc., "Defender of the
Faith"* down to the lay holders of the stolen
estates. Now that the Marquis of Ripon holds
Fountains in trust the steady decay has stopped
and every stone is cared for : the site of the high
altar is cleared, the pavement there relaid, and
on occasion mass is said within the empty walls,
while pious pilgrimages to the sacred ruins are
encouraged and duly welcomed. Lord Ripon has
done everything to make these ruins speak to the
deaf ears of the twentieth century. Not only is
there everywhere the evidence of devout care, but
plans and explanatory notes are placed at various
points, and facilities for refreshment have been
thoughtfully provided, since they are made neces
sary by the isolated position of the ruins. In
every way a generous welcome is extended to all
visitors, and so Fountains stands as the most
attractive shrine in Great Britain for pilgrims
to the sad memorials of a wonderful past. Close
at hand has arisen, also at the hands of the same
nobleman, a new church dedicated to the Blessed
Virgin, and though the monastic habit is no
longer seen in field and wood, nor is there any
sound of convent bell or the chanting of the
* Vid., Sir Henry Spellman: " History of Sacrilege."
[249]

FOUNTAINS
hours, still the Divine liturgy sounds over the
lands once consecrated to the religious life, and
some day, it may be, part of the sacred ruins
may be rehabilitated and the Rule of St. Robert
become operative again within the domains of
" Our Lady of the Fountains."
For absolute beauty of site and architecture
and for pure pictorial quality combined, this
abbey stands easily first of all in Great Britain.
From Ripon three miles away, one walks out
through a shady road to a foot-path that strikes
to the left to the little village of Studley, where
we reach the gates of Studley Royal. Thence
the walk is through a fine old park, under huge
oaks, by placid waterways, through winding and
flowery paths, out through the little valley of the
Skell, until of a sudden, far away, framed by
forest and fronted by a doubled river of still
water and deep grass, rises the ghost of the great
abbey, a silvery vision, silent and alone. As
you approach by the winding path the abbey
disappears now and again, only to reveal itseff
from some new point, so the approach is a long
succession of changing pictures, the last view of
all being from the highest point of the path,
whence one looks down upon the vast ruin and
the wide expanse of shaven turf wherein are
traced the lines of foundations of buildings long
[250]

FOUNTAINS
since destroyed, or from which rise the crags
and shards of others fortunately preserved from
a similar fate. No piles of fallen masonry en
cumber the ground, no trees rise in court or
nave or choir, no ivy mantles the walls; the
vivid picturesqueness and unearthly poetry of
Netley, the tragical desolation of Whitby and
Rievaulx are wanting. Fountains depends for
its power on the sheer wonder and beauty of its
architecture and the fortunate forms into which
the ruins have fallen, but these are sufficient,
and for once one does not miss the adjuncts
nature has added elsewhere to enhance the glory
of the traces of man's consummate handiwork.
Fountains owes its existence to the great relig
ious revival of the first quarter of the twelfth
century, which made itself visible through St.
Robert, St. Bernard, and the vast line of Cister
cian monasteries founded by them and their
successors. It was not a case of one man, even
were he a St. Bernard, rousing a dormant world
by the clarion of his own word: it was a great
general movement amongst all peoples, show
ing itself everywhere at the same moment.
St. Robert, St. Stephen the Englishman, and St.
Bernard were the organizers of revolt, the direc
tors of action, the perpetuators of the victory.
It was in 1132, only four years after St. Bernard
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had sent his first monks to England, and less
than a year after these had appeared in York
shire and, under the protection of the great
Turstan of York and by the generosity of old
Walter I'Espec, had settled down at Rievaulx,
that discontent and the impulse towards reform
showed themselves in the abbey of Our Lady in
York, a Benedictine house then less than fifty
years old. Richard the prior, with the sub-
prior and eleven of the brothers, revolted against
what seemed to them the unrighteous ease and
comfort that obtained under the abbacy of
Geoffrey, an old man weak in discipline, under
whom the monastery had got rather out of hand.
To Turstan of York they went, of course, as
did every one of that day who needed spiritual
succour, and at their instigation the archbishop
fixed on the 6th of October, 1132, for a formal
visitation. Abbot Geoffrey was old, but his
craft was still with him, and he made of the
threatened visitation a test of abbatial vs. epis
copal authority. When the bishop arrived with
his suite he was met at the gates by the redoubt
able old abbot and a great throng of religious,
gathered hastily from neighbouring monasteries,
and refused admittance unless he came alone,
if come he must. But Turstan was a match for
Geoffrey; he refused to submit to dictation and
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entered the cloister. The tumult rose almost
to the pitch of a riot, which was only quelled
when the archbishop thundered out an interdict
against the whole monastery and then solemnly
entered the church and took possession, with all
his train.
Of course after this open quarrel, Richard
and his twelve brothers left at once, taking
nothing with them but the clothes they wore.
At first Turstan looked after them and housed
them in his own palace, but, learning that
Geoffrey had appealed to the Papal legate and
that he had also succeeded in winning back one
of the thirteen (whose place was immediately
filled by Robert of Whitby), he determined to
remove them from the neighbourhood of the
implacable old abbot and so took them to an
estate of his own near Ripon and, midwinter
as it was, assigned them a portion of the land as
their own. Forthwith they elected Richard as
abbot, said farewell to the good archbishop,
and took up their abode, first in the little caves
of the rocky cliffs, later under the shelter of a
cluster of enormous yew trees, weaving hurdles
between the trunks for makeshift protection.
Even then the trees must have been six or seven
hundred years old, yet at the end of the eigh
teenth century seven still remained, and two
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FOUNTAINS
stand now, fourteen hundred years old, having
seen the coming of the monks and their going,
waiting, it may be, only for their coming again.
If hardship and austerity were what Richard
and his men had sought, they received full
measure. Turstan sent them bread at intervals,
and the Skell gave them water. They worked
doggedly at redeeming the utter wilderness,
sometimes with food, more often without. They
accepted St. Bernard as their spiritual lord, and
he sent them another Geoffrey to teach them the
rule and direct them in the building of a proper
house. Their numbers increased rapidly, but
no money was forthcoming; what is now a
smiling garden was then an horrible wilderness,
in spite of their labours, and the earth refused to
give them nourishment. Finally, after two years
of superhuman exertions with no material re
turns, they found themselves reduced to living
on boiled leaves, and then, and only then, they
surrendered, and Richard went sorrowfully and
in person to St. Bernard himself to ask that the
unlucky community be taken bodily to France
and given one of the granges of Clairvaux in
that milder land. The prayer was granted, but
when Richard reached home he found that the
need had passed. None other than the Dean
of York had entered the monastery, bringing a
[254]

FOUNTAINS
fine library and much money. Immediately two
canons followed him and, as says the chronicler,
old Serlo of Kirkstall, "from that forth and
thenceforward the Lord Blessed our valleys with
the blessing of Heaven above and of the deep
that lieth under, extending the vine and giving
to it showers of His benediction."
The days when, sitting around a pot of boiled
leaves, the brothers could sing Te Deum at the
providential arrival of a cart load of bread from
Eustace Fitz John were gone. They had been
tried and were not found wanting. One day,
when a poor pilgrim had begged for food "in
the Name of the Blessed Saviour," the almoner
had gone to the abbot with word that but two
loaves and a half remained, and that these must
go to the lay brothers when their work was done.
" Give the poor man one loaf, and let the workers
have the rest," said Abbot Richard, " as for our
selves, the Lord will provide." So it was done
and in answer came Fitz John's load of loaves,
and much else besides, for now wealth fiowed in
apace and the numbers increased by leaps and
bounds. In four years began that founding of
new colonies that is such an evidence of the
vigorous life in mediaeval monasticism. New-
minster was established in 1138, Meaux in 1150,
and between them five other houses, including
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FOUNTAINS
Kirkstall, owed their existence to the reproduc
tive power of the great abbey that had grown
from the wattled hut beneath the yews, of 1132.
Richard died and went to his reward in 1139;
Richard II. followed in 1143, and was succeeded
by Henry Murdac, under whom the first abbey
was built, and burned as well, for the partisans
of Archbishop Fitzherbert of York, who had
been deposed by the Pope in 1146, accusing
Murdac of being implicated in his fall, had
attacked the monastery and, failing to find the
abbot, though he was prostrate in prayer before
the high altar, had applied the torch to the
then unfinished buildings. Abbot after abbot
followed in swift succession, for all were old
men when they were chosen, and the monastery
was repaired and completed on the original lines.
During the reign of Ralph, seventh in succession,
a terrible famine fell on Yorkshire, and all the
abbey lands were crowded with little huts where
the poor took refuge, living on the bounty of
the monks until a better harvest put them on
their feet again. Then followed three abbots
whose names will be forever remembered as
those of the men who rebuilt Fountains in the
splendid style of the thirteenth century: John of
York, 1203-1211; John Pherd, 1211-1219; and
John of Kent, 1219-1247. John I. rebuilt the
[256 ]

FOUNTAINS
choir on the fine lines now only indicated by
the existing aisle walls; every trace of the pri
mary arcades, with triforium, clerestory, and
vaulting, has gone, but we can still see from
what is left how brilliant and original was the
work. But the great glory of Fountains lies in
the terminal transept to the east, the Chapel of
Nine Altars, one of the noblest creations of
Gothic art in England. Classical in proportion,
perfectly organic in development, possessed of
that inevitable quality that marks great art of
every age and style, it is as spontaneous and
supple as fifteenth century work and demon
strates perfectly the sometimes forgotten fact
that the builders of the thirteenth century could
and did rise to the highest levels of supremely
creative and poetic art. We sometimes think
of this as a hard style and circumscribed by
narrowing laws; as a matter of fact the laws
were only such as were necessary to curb the
tendency of men towards lawlessness. They
hampered no man who was really great, while
they prevented weak men from going far astray.
The fashion in which John of Kent handled his
problem here at Fountains marks him as a truly
great architect: the carrying of the lines of the
main arcade of the church across the transverse
chapel by means of two arches borne on a single
[257]

FOUNTAINS
lofty shaft of consummate design shows an
imagination, a grasp of the large laws of archi
tecture, and a power of composition that apper
tain only to the greatest men. It is a wonderful
thing, this " Nine Altars," and one of the loveliest
in England.
Not content with this supreme triumph, Kent
ish John continued during his long abbacy the
labour of glorifying his house: the cloister, now
wholly gone, was his, also the huge infirmary,
the guest house "for the reception of the poor
of Christ, as well as the princes of the world,"
and many other of the multitudinous buildings
that at the Suppression covered an area of twelve
acres. For two centuries after the death of the great
abbot-architect, John of Kent, Fountains grew
steadily greater in its reputation for learning,
sanctity, and charity, richer in land and herds.
At the Suppression the home estate reached
westward for a distance of thirty miles from the
very walls of Ripon; in Craven the lands com
prised sixty-four thousand acres in one estate
surrounded by a ring fence; other of its landed
property lay in no less than two hundred and
forty lordships. Let it be remembered that the
major part of this land was absolute wilderness
when it came into possession of the monks of
[258]

FOUNTAINS
Fountains, and that it had become rich farming
land, under a high state of cultivation and sup
porting thousands of tenants, when Henry
seized it for his own ends. The abbey close
comprised eighty acres, and adjoining was a
park of two hundred acres. At the Suppression
there were found at Fountains 2,356 cattle,
1,326 sheep, 86 horses, and 79 swine. The an
nual revenues were equivalent to about sixty-five
thousand dollars of the money of to-day; the
gold and silver plate, nearly all in the shape of
sacred vessels and ornaments, was valued at
about forty thousand dollars.
Architecturally the abbey stood at pause
during these two centuries : it was not until the
abbacy of John Dornton, 1478-1494, that work
began again, and then in a shape we can hardly
accept with satisfaction; marvellous as must
have been the enormous east window, sixty feet
high and twenty-four feet wide, which he intro
duced in John of Kent's "Nine Altars," it did
much to destroy the unity and consistency of
the design, and the same is equally true of the
high windows at the north and south ends; on
the other hand, his big west window must have
added greatly to the effect of the nave. Mar
maduke Huby, who next succeeded, was even
more ambitious as an architect, but, instead of
[259i|

FOUNTAINS
transforming the old, he immortalized himself
by an entirely new work which is one of the
supreme beauties of Fountains and his own
enduring monument.
Originally, of course, no well regulated Cis
tercian abbey might glory in a real tower; no
provision was made for this luxury at Fountains,
and when, in spite of slight foundations, a cen
tral tower was finally raised over the crossing,
trouble began to develop ; huge abutments were
hastily reared to strengthen the sinking fabric,
but they were evidently inadequate; the tower
was taken down, and, as at Evesham and Glas
tonbury, a totally new structure was reared at
the end of the north transept where adequate
foundations could be obtained. At Rievaulx
the new tower was, I think, an isolated campa
nile at the angle of the south transept, elsewhere
it took its place at the west end of the nave; but
Abbot Huby's tower is the only northerly one
that still stands, if we except Evesham, which is
complete, but which has lost every trace of the
church to which it was once but an adjunct.
Huby's tower, though the scaffolding must
have been but lately removed when the vast
church was abandoned to destruction, is a
thoroughly noble piece of design, perfect in its
proportions, delicate in detail, in no wise over-
[260]

Fountains — The Shards of Majesty.

FOUNTAINS
loaded or overwrought, a masterpiece of quiet
dignity and power. It dates entirely from the
sixteenth century and is another evidence of the
vitality of architecture up to the very day when
it came to an end under Henry VIII. Originally
it bore some forty statues in as many niches,
together with many beautiful texts, finely cut in
"black-letter." Entrance to this tower was by
a great arch filling the whole north end of the
transept and rising to the very roof; to-day the
view across the transepts through this splendid
archway is one of the most perfect things at
Fountains, for out of the blaze of sun we see
deep into a space of gloom broken by the slender
tracery of a lofty window, where painted glass
has given place to a screen of weaving branches
and flickering leaves, a new "vitraiV of emerald
and gold.
One more abbot sat at Fountains, William
Thirsk, who was elected in 1526, served ten
years, and then, being found recalcitrant by
Henry's emissaries on their first visitation, was
arbitrarily deposed and his place given — or
rather, sold — to one Marmaduke Bradley, who,
offering Crumwell six hundred marks, and
through him the equivalent of sixty thousand
dollars to the king himself, as the price of his
preferment, was found by them to be a man
[261]

FOUNTAINS
after their own hearts, on whom they might de
pend later. The king simply had to have
Fountains; that was all there was about it; its
wealth, its lands, were exceedingly desired by
the "Defender of the Faith," the only question
was how to get hold of them. At this time, it
must be remembered Henry was only experi
menting in confiscation: none of the greater
abbeys had been attacked, but the returns from
the smaller had been encouraging; the new nobles
were clamorous ; the king's needs were pressing,
and the only money in sight was that which
might be obtained in one way or another from
the monastic orders. Fortunately for the king,
rebellion broke out against his course; and in
the suppression thereof he learned that his
power was greater than he had imagined and
that he might safely indulge himself to the full.
The first general uprising occurred in Lincoln
shire, though Northumberland has the honour
of claiming the first rebellion against the king's
authority, when the town of Hexham rose as
one man to defend its abbey. England had
begun to realize what the suppression even of
the smaller monasteries meant. The sight of
the outrages that accompanied the seizure of the
little houses was too much for the people; they
had conceived an hatred for the "Vicar Gen-
[262]

FOUNTAINS
eral," of whom they said "there is no earthly
man so evil believed as the said Lord Crumwell
is with the commoners," that had burst all
bounds; they were particularly incensed against
the prelates Cranmer, Latimer, Hilsey, and
Allen, whom they charged with heresy and
schism and feared as exponents of "the new
learning;" and personally they were feeling the
evil results of the Suppression through loss of
religious and charitable ministrations. Natu
rally, therefore, they rose in rebellion; but at
first they had no leader, no arms, no organiza
tion. They formulated their demands and sent
them to the king, whose reply came in the per
sons of Sir John Russell and the Duke of
Suffolk at the head of an army, and instantly
the rebellion was at an end. Henry issued a
proclamation of full pardon to all involved in
the uprising and immediately arrested one hun
dred of those supposed to be chiefly involved
and had them sent to the Tower. Fifty of these
unfortunates, including two abbots, four canons,
ten monks, and the same number of secular
priests were found guilty after a form of trial
and were forthwith executed.
Another revolt in Cheshire was promptly
crushed by Sir Piers Dutton, and then, like a
summer tempest, broke the storm in the North.
[263]

FOUNTAINS
In a flash all England from the Humber to the
Scottish border was in open revolt; five counties
were suddenly set together in defiance of the
king, in defence of the monasteries and in sup
port of the Papal authority. And here was a
leader at last, one Robert Aske, a man of good
blood, enthusiastic, devout, statesmanlike in his
grasp of conditions and causes, and, withal,
frank, honest, simple hearted, and, unfortu
nately, absolutely without guile. The Pilgrim
age of Grace threatened the throne itself. Henry
saw at once this was no second Lincolnshire
rising but determined and full-fledged revolt
against his cherished policies. The whole North
of England was in revolution: the list of griev
ances was explicit: the Suppression must cease,
and the monks be restored to the houses of
which they had already been dispossessed;
Crumwell must be abolished utterly; the Arch
bishop of Canterbury and the bishops of
Worcester, Rochester, and Dublin, together
with all other leaders of the Reformation, de
posed; and the Papal authority acknowledged
throughout England.
Here was rebellion in solemn earnest : nobility,
gentry, and commons flocked to the standards
of the "Five Wounds" and of St. Cuthbert; in
a short time forty thousand men were under
[264 ]

FOUNTAINS
arms. York fell; Richmond and Durham fell;
the great stronghold of Pomfret surrendered at
last; and of all the northern citadels Skipton and
Scarborough alone held out for the king. The
peril was acute and ominous. Henry met it
with consummate craft. Aske, true patriot that
he was, would countenance no violence or blood
shed until the king should drive him to this
extremity and this, Henry, knowing the temper
of his own troops, was not likely to do. Instead
he sent Norfolk to Doncaster with words of
conciliation and promises of pardon. The plot
nearly failed, for Crumwell got out of hand and
wrote privately to Sir Ralph Eure that if the
North did not submit at once "there should be
such vengeance taken upon them that the whole
world should speak thereof and take example
by them," while Norfolk, evidently desiring two
strings to his bow, tried to bribe Lord Darcy
to murder Aske quietly and without scandal.
Finally, however, the two parties came together
at Doncaster. The insurgents demanded the
undoing of all that had been accomplished by
Henry towards the suppression of monasticism
and secession from Rome, a general pardon for
all in revolt, and a parliament at York for the
adjustment of grievances. It would appear that
Norfolk satisfied Aske and his men absolutely,
[265]

FOUNTAINS
for at the conclusion of the conference the
people "gave a great shout of joy," tore off their
badges and cried, "We will wear no badge or
figure, but the badge of our sovereign lord!"
Unfortunately for them, however, Norfolk had
given the king's promises in the spirit his master
had meant. He had already been reminded of
the attitude he was to assume by the king's
letter saying, "in the end you said you would
esteem no promise that you should make to the
rebels, nor think your honour touched in the
breach and violation of the same." The object
was to procure the dispersal of the threatening
Northern army, and this was easily achieved
when its leader was a man so honourable and
confiding as Aske appears to have been. He was
a great leader indeed, but no match for such a
combination as Henry, Crumwell, and Norfolk.
The danger passed, Henry sat down to wait
his next opportunity; he knew that time only
was necessary to deliver the North into his hands.
Aske was sent for and journeyed to London
with letters of recommendation to the king,
given, as Norfolk wrote Crumwell, only "to lull
the bearer into false security." Here he was
treated with gentle consideration by the king,
and thoroughly pumped of all his information.
Returning safely he found trouble awaiting him.
[266]

FOUNTAINS
Time was passing. Crumwell and Cranmer were
still in high favour, the Suppression was going
on smoothly, there was no prospect of a Parlia
ment at York. " We have all been tricked!" cried
Sir Francis Bigod; and, in spite of the prayers
of Aske and his assurances that the king would
keep his word, he attacked Hull and Beverly,
failed, and was captured. Eight thousand men
surrounded and assailed Carlisle and were
beaten off. The king had used his breathing
space well, and troops had been poured into the
disaffected districts. Now his chance had come;
the unfortunate and purely sporadic revolts gave
him his excuse; he denounced the Treaty of
Doncaster, withdrew his general pardon, and
struck with instant force and decision. Norfolk
fell on York like an avalanche : Aske was seized,
together with every other of the leaders ; martial
law was proclaimed; and the butchery began.
Norfolk's "only regret was that he could not
find iron chains enough in the country to hang
the prisoners in; ropes must serve for some.
He flattered himself, however, that so great a
number put to death at a time had never been
heard of."
As a prelude to the slaughter, Norfolk devised
a clever scheme: he had the accused tried twice,
first by juries made up of their friends and kins-
[267^

FOUNTAINS
men, "to prove their affection whether they will
rather serve his majesty truly and frankly in
this matter, or else to favour their friends, and
if they will not find, then they may have thanks
according to their cankered hearts;" finally and
definitely, as the noble duke himself delcares,
"as for the other inquest, I will appoint such
that I shall no more doubt of than of myself."
Of course in the end all, with the exception of
one Ralph Bulmer, were found guilty "of con
spiring to deprive the king of his dignity, title,
name and royal state, namely of being on earth
the supreme head of the English Church," of
endeavouring to force the king "to summon a
Parliament and Convocation, and other divers
high treasons," and finally of having repeated
their "high treasons" after having once been
pardoned. Robert Aske, freely pardoned and innocent
of any complicity in the second rising, was
hanged in chains at York. The chief leaders
amongst the nobles and gentry were hanged,
drawn, and quartered, together with the abbots
of Jervaulx and Fountains; the priors of Gis
burgh and Bridlington, with many monks, also
went to their deaths, and in a short space Nor
folk had drenched the North with blood and
crushed forever all opposition to his king.
[268 ]

Eh

FOUNTAINS
It was precisely what Henry had waited for;
with consummate skill he had turned a grave
peril into a supreme furtherance of his own will.
There is no evidence whatever that any abbot
or monk was implicated in either the Pilgrimage
of Grace or the second rising. They remained
in their monasteries where they belonged and
took no part in the great revolt of the laymen;
the clergy of Yorkshire did indeed join heartily
in framing and subscribing to the demands that
Henry should cease from his course in ecclesias
tical matters, but no overt act was ever proved
against one of them. The fearful punishment
that fell on the Church in the land of St. Cuth
bert was for politic reasons only: it served as
an awful warning; it gave the king a pretext for
attacking the greater monasteries; and finally it
revealed to him the possibilities of dissolution
by attainder, a simple and effective source of
income, as well as a facile means of extermina
tion without the necessity of Acts of Parliament.
I have written at length of the northern up
rising against Henry's policies, for it was as the
immediate result of this that the last Abbot of
Fountains, William Thirsk, with Adam Sed-
burgh. Abbot of Jervaulx, was brought to his
martyrdom, marking the dawn of the reign of
terror that was to drench England in innocent
[269]

FOUNTAINS
blood, destroy forever the great institution that
had been so closely interwoven with her very
life for five centuries, and finally extinguish in
an ever deepening gloom the flame of Christian
art.

[270]

CONCLUSION
THE total extinction of monasticism in
England which was consummated in
the year 1540, was the first act in the
drama of destruction, the scene of which stretches
over the length and breadth of Europe. Every
where the monastic order was breaking down,
whether beneath the assaults modelled on that
of Henry VIII., though more subtle in their
methods, or as a result of internal corruption
and its consequent disintegration. Events were
marching rapidly: the temper and standards of
the people were changing, and by the end of the
second century following the English Suppres
sion, public opinion had turned against the
religious orders, though two hundred years of
social revolution were necessary to bring this
about. In another century there was none to
say a word for the monks and friars, and we
may admit that by that time matters had reached
such a pass that few good words could honestly
be said. Between the years 1830-35 more than
[271 ]

CONCLUSION
three thousand religious houses were suppressed
in Europe, and till the end of the nineteenth
century the destruction went on, urged now by
the people themselves. For generations the
once vast institution had been sinking lower and
lower in the estimation of men, and it seemed as
though its total destruction could be delayed
only a few years at most.
In the meantime, however, a curious thing
was taking place. Synchronously with the bit
terest, and apparently final, attacks on monasti
cism in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and
Portugal, there appeared a sudden and utterly
inexplicable recrudescence of vitality, as though
the universal purging by fire had bred a phoenix
from its purgatorial flames. An order sup
pressed sprung up anew, a house destroyed ap
peared in another place; passionate defenders
of mediaevalism and advocates of monasticism
such as Digby and Maitland in England, de
Maistre and Montalembert in France, came
forth with their evangel to balk an astonished
world. Back to England came the monks and
friars under the protection of Rome; in the
United States, order after order took root and
thrived beneath the same control, and at last
in the English Church itself, barren of monastic
life for three hundred years, orders of monks
[272 ]

a<

CONCLUSION
and nuns were established, with new designa
tions, but under the same old rule. And to-day,
with the sanction of the Archbishop of York,
Primate of England and Metropolitan, the most
ancient Order of St. Benedict has been re-es-
tabUshed in Yorkshire, and with such apparent
strength that it has been able to send its monks
across the sea, and found, also with episcopal
sanction, a daughter house in a diocese of the
American Church. With the opening of the
twentieth century, suppression ceased, save only
in France, and the re-establishment of monasti
cism began.
What is the meaning of this phenomenon?
Is it simply that action is always followed by
reaction ? Is it that, surfeited by the over
abundant food of the "Age of Reason," man
turns in picturesque affectation to the husks and
shards of a more primitive time ? Many would
give this answer, and yet there is another: that
the consecrated religious life, formulated and
fixed by St. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth cen
tury, was so formulated and fixed for all time:
that he himself was led by God to add a new
power to the Church, necessary then and for
the future so long as the Church Militant should
endure: that monasticism recognizes and satis
fies an indestructible desire in the human soul,
[273 ]

CONCLUSION
while it rounds out and completes the mechanism
of the Church on earth. In a word : monasticism
is, and must forever remain, — transmuted, mod
ified, reorganized perhaps, but essentially the
same, — an integral, indestructible portion of
the visible Church.
This, I believe, is the true answer to the ques
tion that arises when we are confronted by the
fact that monasticism refuses to be destroyed,
and invariably enters upon a new lease of life
when failure, persecution and popular intellec
tual revolt seem finally to have signed its death
warrant. Nothing is harder than for us of the twentieth
century to admit the truth of this; for almost
exactly four hundred years those who have
written on monasticism have been divided into
two classes, they whose interest demanded that
nothing but good should be said of the insti
tution, they whose interests and emoluments
demanded that nothing should be said but iU.
With but few exceptions (the late John Richard
Green being the most honourable of all) the
historians who have become popular both in
England and the United States, and who have
fixed the ideas of generation after generation,
have been those who by reason of their mental
temper or the exigencies of their maintenance,
[274]

CONCLUSION
have seen fit to stigmatize monasticism in the
violent terms employed by Gibbon, Froude,
Milman, Lecky, Robertson, d'Aubigne and
Voltaire. Until the nineteenth century hardly
a voice, save those of continental Roman Cath
olics, was raised in its defence, and until 1850
it was almost impossible to find in England or
America a man whose ideas on the subject were
not such as might have been inculcated by Fox's
"Book of Martyrs." For twelve generations
we had been taught that monasticism " measured
virtue by the quantity of outward exercises in
stead of the quality of the inward disposition,
and disseminated self righteousness and an
anxious, legal and mechanical religion":* that
"a dreary sterile torpor, characterized those
ages in which the ascetic principle has been
supreme,"! that "a cruel, unfeeling temper has
distinguished the monks of every age and
country; their stern indifference, which is sel
dom modified by personal friendship, is in
flamed by religious hatred, and their merciless
zeal has strenuously administered the holy office
of the Inquisition "f and that as our own Bryant
carelessly wrote : —
* Schaff : " History of the Christian Church."
f Lecky: "Histoty ot European Morals."
j Gibbon: " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
[275 ]

CONCLUSION
" Where pleasant was the spot for man to dwell
Amid its fair broad lands, the abbey lay
Sheltering dark orgies it were shame to tell
And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way."
The undoing of the work of four centuries
has been a heavy task, even now far from fin
ished. Little by little, however, the towering
structure of prejudice has been undermined as
stone by stone has been withdrawn from its
foundations, and the toppling edifice of grotesque
fiction is in imminent danger of final collapse.
A subtle effort is being made to prop it up again
by the new and most plausible school of essayists
who deal with history in the most approved
"modern" way, cementing their paradoxes with
"but on the other hand," "the reverse, however,
is equally true," "nevertheless we must not for
get"; blocking their qualified praise with un
qualified doubts, and with the semblance of
judicial temper casting final discredit on that
which they seem to approve. Let me quote a
good example of this able and essentially modern
method. "Monasticism was the friend and the
foe of true religion. It was the inspiration of
virtue and the encouragement of vice. It was
the friend of industry and the promoter of idle
ness. It was the preserver of education and
the teacher of superstition. It was the disburser
[276 ]

CONCLUSION
of alms and a many-handed robber. It was the
friend of liberty and the abettor of tyranny. It
was the champion of the common people and
the defender of class privileges."* This is, of
course, in the end as complete a denunciation of
monasticism as the rank abuse of a Gibbon or
a Robertson, but it will never do to let the
doctrines of Maitland, Montalembert, Cardinal
Newman and Dr. Gasquet supersede those
fondly held for so many generations, nor must
the facts they allege be permitted to speak for
themselves or without a judicious commentary.
No disquieting doubt must be cast upon the
fact that this century is the " heir of all the ages,"
infinitely in advance of those that saw a St.
Benedict, a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, a St.
Anselm or a St. Thomas a Becket. One thing
we must hold to, and that is that "this century
is nobler, purer, truer, manlier and more humane
than any of the centuries that saw the greatest
triumphs of the monks. . . . Their supersti
tions and frauds concealed beneath those 'dis
honoured arches' were infinitely worse than the
noise of machinery weaving garments for the
poor or producing household comforts to in
crease the happiness of the humblest man."-j-
* Wishart: " A Short History of Monks and Monasteries.''
f Wishart: " A Short History of Monks and Monasteries."
[277]

CONCLUSION
We may question the exactness of this beautiful
optimism, particularly in the year of Grace,
1905, surrounded as we are by the multitudinous
revelations of private, corporate and political
corruption, and we may even wonder whether
Pennsylvania is "nobler" than Yorkshire at the
time of Archbishop Turstan; if St. Louis and
Minneapolis are " purer " examples of govern
ment than those so strongly advanced by Stephen
Langton, Anselm and a Becket; if Mr. Dowie
and Mrs. Eddy are "truer" prophets than St.
Thomas Aquinas and St. Gregory the Great; if
Standard Oil and Amalgamated Copper and
United States Steel and the beef trust and the
sugar trust and the Equitable are "manlier and
more humane" than was the discredited epoch
of monasticism, feudalism and the mediaeval
guilds. And as for superstitions and frauds,
why, they are deplorable at any time, no less
so now than in the thirteenth century, and there
is ground for believing that instances may be
culled from the history of certain of the above
named monuments of contemporary civilization
that might perhaps match the recorded cases
that date from the "Dark Ages."
In spite of the energetic efforts of the able
advocates who are pleading the cause of the
sixteenth century and upholding the essential
[278]

CONCLUSION
perfection of the things that followed in its wake,
an idea has gone abroad that after all (to con
fine ourselves to the history of our own race and
Church) no boon, however great, was worth the
price of those years of unspeakable moral de
basement that intervened between the death of
Sir Thomas More and the accession of Elizabeth ;
that a virus then entered society that did much
to counteract the wholesome life that burst out
again after the death of the old regime; and that
the source of our disgrace to-day through the
loss of innate moral sense, lies far back in the
victory of the Renaissance over Christianity, and
the corruption this victory wrought in Church
and State, whereby the former abandoned her
just position and surrendered to the new power
of paganism that had entered the world.
There is a true and a false mediaevalism, a
true and a false Renaissance, a true and a false
Reformation. It is necessary that we should
use a little discrimination in dealing with these
events, and the concrete ideas for which they
stand. The false mediaevalism is one which is
very largely made up of elements and ideas that
did not come into existence until the Middle
Ages had definitely come to an end. The utter
moral obliquity of the race during the malignant
epoch of Edward VI., the same obliquity coupled
[279]

CONCLUSION
with savage bloodthirstiness under Mary I., the
contemptuous and crushing absolutism of Henry
VIII. and his royal contemporaries on the con
tinent, the revolting crimes of the Borgia Popes,
the awful simony and degradation of the episco
pate and the secular clergy during the fifteenth
century, all these things are postulated of me
diaevalism; they are assumed to be the last
evidences of baleful influence of the part of the
spirit of the Middle Ages. The fact is exactly
the reverse; they were the work of the Renais
sance, one and all, and in them mediaevalism
had no part whatever. The Renaissance flrst
debauched the world it had come to destroy,
then assailed it for the very faults and vices it
had instilled into its being.
Nowhere is this fundamental misunderstand
ing more manifest than in the current conceptions
of the historical development of civil govern
ment. Ask the average man what form of
government existed in Europe between the years
600 and 1600 and he will reply "Absolutism;
the unchallenged tyranny of the Crown founded
on the doctrine of the Divine right of kings."
Yet exactly the opposite is true. Absolutism
was a doctrine of the Renaissance, it had no
existence in fact until the mediaeval spirit had
been crushed; it could not exist side by side
[280]

CONCLUSION
with monasticism since this was the only democ
racy the world has ever known which was at the
same time a pure democracy and a success.
The spirit of the Renaissance demoralized the
Church, paralyzed monasticism by the deadly
incubus of the commende, and on the ruins of
the sole defence of the people, operative for a
thousand years, it reared the fabric of absolutism
doomed to fall and disappear in a sea of blood.
So long as monasticism existed as the most
potent executive arm of the Church liberty,
amazing as the statement may sound, was an
actual fact. "The ancient world was bristling
with liberty, the spirit of resistance, the senti
ment of individual right, penetrated it entirely.
. . . That freedom had established everywhere
a system of counterpoise and restraint which
rendered all prolonged despotism absolutely im
possible. . . . Liberty had no existence then in
the condition of a theory or abstract principle
applied to the general mass of humanity, to all
nations, even those who neither desire nor know
her. But freedom was a fact and a right to
many men, to a larger number than possess her
now; and for all who appreciated and wished
for her was much more easy both to acquire and
to preserve."*
* Montalembert: " The Monks of the West"
[281]

CONCLUSION
The misconception on this point is funda
mental and profound, and no less radical are
those made in the matter of mediaeval learning,
economics, industrialism, land tenures, rents,
wages and personal morals. In almost every
case the gross evils that stained the sixteenth
century and followed instantly on the suppres
sion or debauching of the monasteries, are ap
plied to mediaevalism itself as a mark of its
nature, when in actual fact they were the mani
festation of the triumph of a power against
which for ten centuries mediaevalism had warred
with singular success. As Montalembert has
said so well: "It is important to free the true
Middle Ages in their Catholic splendour from all
affinity with that renewed old pagan despotism
which still here and there contends with modern
liberty. . . . An attentive study of facts and
institutions will convince every sincere observer
that there is less difference between the order of
things destroyed in 1789 and modern society,
than between the Christianity of the Middle
Ages and the ancien regime."
Similarly is it very desirable that we should
come to understand that the Renaissance is not
the simple, consistent and definite movement,
essentially beneficent, fixed in its point of de
parture, unmixed in its principles, that has been
[282]

CONCLUSION
held up for our admiration by masters of
redoubtable eloquence.
The Renaissance is one of the most perfect
examples of dualism history can show: "The
Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is its perfect
symbol. It was at the same time, as I have
said of Cardinal Wolsey (no bad type in himself
of this strange epoch) "beneficent and baleful."
For years the long contest continued, the fight
for final mastery between good and evil, and in
the end in every nation the evil triumphed.
The good reaches back, century beyond century,
a consistent line of development, even to the
promulgation of the Rule of St. Benedict, the
evil intrudes itself only in the fifteenth century,
hatching the cockatrice of neo-paganism from
the egg of Christian civilization. Dante and
Giotto and all that intervenes between them and
Pico della Mirandola and Botticelli, are in Italy,
the manifestation of this good in the Renais
sance, they are the splendid flowering of mediae
valism under the sun of a renewed classicism,
but simultaneously a baleful planet is rising in
the sky to scorch them into extinction; Medici
tyrants and Borgia Popes burst over the world
to blight and ban; the good of the Renaissance
withers and fades away and in its place, supreme
and terrible, lifts the horror of a new paganism,
[283 ]

CONCLUSION
empty of all its ancient virtues, a malefic miasma
dooming civilization to a Gotterdammerung of
three hopeless centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas
has given place to Macchiavelli.
With the martyrdom of Savonarola the victory
of the powers of hell was assured in Italy. The
Concordat of 1516 marked the final end of the
true Renaissance in France. The acceptance
of Luther's leadership rather than that of Eras
mus, fixes the date in Germany, and in England
the execution of Sir Thomas More and the rise
of Cranmer and Crumwell determines a similar
period. For years the battle of Armageddon
had raged. Stealthily but surely the powers of
evil had been intruding into the Church and
society and civil government. The pagan ren
aissance was triumphing over the Christian
renaissance. When its hold on the Church had
become final and complete by the placing of
Alexander VI. in the Papal chair, the doom of
Christian civilization was sealed. Like a cloud
castle the mighty fabric of the Church crumbled
and dissolved. Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests
became, not agencies of righteousness and benefi
cence, but engines of destruction. From the
centre of all, the virus of the pagan renaissance
flowed at last into the veins of the religious life,
the commende sapped its vitality on the continent;
[284]

CONCLUSION
profligate tools of the royal despots, now firmly
fixed on their thrones, spread the pestilence
through every cloister, professions almost ceased,
the faithful died broken-hearted and abandoned,
and the great guardian of true religion, monas
ticism, ceased to exercise its function. Of course
there were scores of houses all over Europe
where righteousness still obtained. England,
spared the horror of commendatory abbots, re
tained a monastic organization singularly and
unexpectedly pure, while its episcopate, though
suffering grievously, had not fallen so low as
was the case across the Channel. Nevertheless
the utter demoralization of the Church conse
quent upon the triumph of the pagan renais
sance, was breeding revolt and revolution, and
we may easily admit that it is little wonder this
revolution took on the form it did in Germany
and the North. The evils of the sixteenth cen
tury bred, and could breed, only violent rebellion
wherever the soul of man was still free of the
mark of the Beast. The Teutonic and Scandi
navian peoples were still unslaved, and they rose
in wrath and indignation, while their roar of
revolt was echoed in France and Italy. Rome,
betrayed to the Renaissance, had sowed the
wind. The whirlwind that was reaped was the
tempest, not of a recrudescent Christian renais-
[285]

CONCLUSION
sance, but of a power owing its nature in equal
measure to the very spirit that, acting in another
channel, had bred the foul corruption it now
burst loose to destroy.
The revolt against Divine law, against author
ity, tradition and implicit faith resulted first
of all in breaking down the moral standards
of society, state and Church and in bringing in
the horrors of the pagan renaissance, but it
engendered also that spirit of revolt, destruction
and revolution, that equal turning against
authority, tradition and implicit faith, which
gave its final and obvious colour to the righteous
uprising against the degraded morals that
stained the Church during the later fifteenth
century. Luther, Calvin, Cranmer and Knox are not
the heirs of the Christian renaissance above
whose tomb rose not as a cenotaph but as the
sign of insolent triumph, St. Peter's Church in
Rome; the nature of the legitimate heirs we can
ascertain from the group in England that went
down to noble defeat. Archbishop Warham, Sir
Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, Dean Colet,
Erasmus. But revolution is wrought not at the
hands of reformers, but at those of destroyers.
The world had no use for the gentle physician,
it howled for the surgeon with his knife.
[286]

CONCLUSION
The common idea of the events we are con
sidering is that mediaevalism proceeded logically
to its necessary fall in the gross evils of Church
and state in the sixteenth century, and that the
Renaissance came as a purging flame to purify
a world defiled by the principles of the Middle
Ages prolonged to their logical conclusion. I
have tried to show above that another solution
is possible, viz., that the Renaissance had de
stroyed what the Renaissance had created, after
it had crushed mediaevalism and established in
its place an horrible thing that had no kinship
whatever with the great triumphs of civilization.
In other words that the Reformation was a case
of internecine warfare, the house of the Renais
sance divided against itself, not the battling of
the Renaissance against mediaevalism.
And in this case also, the case of the Reforma
tion, is there not a chance to discriminate between
the true and the false? No one could possibly
deny that the Church of the pagan renaissance
had fallen into a most terrible condition of im
potence and corruption. English monasticism,
stained though it was by isolated instances of
deep disgrace, as in the case of St. Alban's in the
year 1489, was no fair criterion, for it had been
miraculously preserved from the fate of the con
tinental monasteries. The life had gone out of
[287]

CONCLUSION
the visible Church, and in place thereof was
horror almost unlimited. The Reformation could
be no longer delayed if even the last elements
of Christian society were to be preserved, but
"reformation" could come only from the expo
nents of the Christian renaissance, for only they
were competent to analyze causes, sift the wheat
from the chaff in theological dogma, as it then
stood, destroy the accretions of formalism and
superstition, while preserving intact the essen
tials of the Catholic Faith. The moment power
of action was placed in the hands of the opposite
party, the party of crude mentality, of harsh
literalism, of Hebraism, of defiant rebellion, of
destruction for the mere sake of destruction, —
albeit the party of righteous rebellion against
corruption, — that moment the revolution began,
and when it was finally triumphant the world
was confronted by the terrible fact that the
Renaissance was still in the saddle although
the forms, the principles, the manifestations
were changed, all but one which still endured
unshaken, savage bloodthirstiness and inhuman
cruelty, far-reaching and fundamental, that had
grown to an awful supremacy under the influence
of the Renaissance.
The true reformation lies in the revolt of the
soul of Europe against the degraded morals of a
[288 ]

CONCLUSION
paganized Church; the false reformation in the
assault on the Church as well as on its paganism.
In England there had been, for an hundred
years, a chafing against the progressive eccle
siastical corruption so manifestly taking place.
Yet it was almost wholly a protest against bad
morals. No one took any particular interest in
the dogmatic theorizing of Luther and Calvin.
England was at this time the most faithfully
Catholic of the nations of Europe; what she
wanted was a moral reformation ; she cared little
for a revision of dogmas. As for Henry VIII.,
to do him justice, we must admit he hated theo
logical innovations. Luther was an offence to
him in 1540 precisely as he was in 1521, when he
had earned the title of "Defender of the Faith"
by his controversial pamphlet against the loud
mouthed monk. So far as the Catholic Faith
was concerned, Henry gave it a formal adherence
to the day of his death. He had declared the
English Church independent of Rome, for rea
sons partly domestic and partly political, and
considering the condition of Rome at the time,
the action itself was unassailable. He had ex
terminated monasticism for reasons the most
base and scandalous, but though he was himself
the incarnation of all the moral evil of the
Renaissance and though we can therefore look
[289]

CONCLUSION
on his sturdy defence of the Catholic Faith in its
integrity, as evidence of nothing but an intel
lectual appreciation and a certain lingering good
taste, the fact remains that he hated Protestant
ism and realized that the people hated it also.
When some of them insisted that obedience to
Rome was a prime essential of Catholicity, he
showed them scant mercy, for he knew other
wise. He was as far as possible from being a
fool; he had a particularly clear vision in theo
logical matters, but he inherited in some way
all the moral turpitude of the pagan renaissance,
he surrounded himseff from choice with coun
cillors of the same temper, such as the monstrous
Crumwell, and he was determined to make the
Crown an absolute despotism; therefore he cut
England off from Rome, and he extinguished
without mercy the soundest and most beneficent
institution in the Church, but he left the Faith
itself intact. And here lay one secret of his
success. Had he tried to establish Lutheranism
in England he would have been confronted by a
popular uprising, not alone in Yorkshire and
the North, but in every county in England, and
he would have received short shift indeed.
Practically the whole kingdom, even including
the monasteries, accepted the break with Rome
as a minor matter so long as the Catholic Faith
[290]

CONCLUSION
was held inviolate. The people rose indeed
against the suppression, but not because therein
lay any attack on Catholicity, but because they
looked on the monks and friars as their friends
and benefactors. Bad as Henry was, it can
never be said of him that he aimed in the least
at a substitution of Protestantism for Catholi
cism in England.
The false reformation began in England when
with Henry's death a child came technically to
the throne, while the actual power passed into
the hands of a junta of unprincipled conspirators.
Crumwell found worthy successors in Somerset
and Warwick. Cranmer, now unchecked in his
theological tendencies, gave himself heart and
soul to the substitution of the doctrines of Luther
for those still held by five-sixths of the people.
The monasteries were gone, and with them the
strongest prop of the ancient faith. The wide
spread misery, poverty, and actual pauperism,
their destruction had entailed, resulted in a cur
rent dissatisfaction and a smouldering fury that
continually found vent in irreligion and a rest
less reaching out for something new, no matter
what, so only it was new. Six hundred families
had been raised to affluence and power on the
ruins of the monasteries: to gain this reward
they had become conscienceless sycophants, to
[291 ]

CONCLUSION
retain it it was necessary that they should pre
vent absolutely a return to the Roman obedience
or a restoration of monasticism. The colleges,
chapels, free chantries and hospitals that Henry
had not yet seized were taken over by the gov
ernment, while the great guilds were shorn of
their lands and estates. Change after change
was made in doctrine and liturgy, each towards
a more evident Lutheranism. Mendicancy in
creased with such terrible rapidity that slavery
was restored and held for two years, when the
infamous statute was repealed. Rebellions broke
out in Kent, Cornwall and Norfolk, and were
suppressed by the aid of continental mercenaries.
The king showed signs of coming to a speedy
end ; as matters stood Mary would succeed, and
as she had announced that "Rather than use
any other service than was used at the death of
the late King," her father, she would lay her
head "on a block and suffer death," it became
necessary to eliminate her from the situation.
The regent, who had created himseff Duke of
Northumberland, with the assistance of Cran
mer, therefore prepared an ingenious plot to
substitute for Mary, Jane Gray the wife of his
son, Guilford Dudley, and to seize Mary herself
and relegate her to the Tower. Edward, then
on his death bed, fell in with the plan, debarred
[292]

CONCLUSION
both Mary and Elizabeth on the ground of ille
gitimacy, and forthwith died — not without some
slight assistance from Northumberland, as many
have believed.
The plot failed; Jane Gray was proclaimed
Queen, but England rose as one man behind
Mary, and she entered London in triumph whilst
Northumberland's party dissolved into thin air.
The Renaissance had bred a savage disregard
of human life and Mary, zealously Catholic,
backed by a vast majority of the nation, but
meshed in plots and treasons against her faith,
her crown and her very life, plots emanating
from the group of reformers she had inherited
from her father and brother, — Mary, gloomy,
bigoted and merciless, resumed the practices
taught her by her ruthless progenitor, and while
restoring the old faith, to the joy of her people,
protected it against heresy and treason by
methods that only intensified the rage of the
Protestant party, whilst winning to it great num
bers of those who revolted from blood and
persecution. When after Mary's short and un
happy reign, Elizabeth succeeded, she found
herself bound by every policy to the party of the
reformers, though she hated their theology as
bitterly as had Henry and Mary. The King of
Navarre thought France well worth a mass, and
[293]

CONCLUSION
similarly and with the same degree of conviction,
Elizabeth thought a mass hardly worth England.
The stars in their courses fought against Mary,
even though she voiced the wish of her whole
people. Everything played into the hands of
Elizabeth, even though at first she headed a
faction only. A thorough statesman, a master
of perfect diplomacy, a marvellous judge of
human nature, wise, far-seeing, troubled by no
deep religious scruples, Elizabeth played her
cards with amazing wisdom, and by subtlety and
exquisite cunning transformed England from a
Catholic to a Protestant nation, using the stake,
the block and the dungeon without the slightest
remorse, and with considerable prodigality, but
veiling her executions with plausible pretexts
that robbed them of the incentive power that
obtained in the case of her grim sister's more
frank and savage employment of the same
expedients. The suppression of the monasteries, chapels
and chantries had done its work; religion,
mercy and education had been entirely removed
from the lives of tens of thousands once depend
ent upon them for spiritual leadership, mental
stimulus and material benefit. Henry had never
intended to substitute for the old faith the new
he hated so cordially, but for reasons in no way
[294]

CONCLUSION
connected with religion he had destroyed the
one force that could have held England to
Catholicity. Here then we see the bearing of this rehearsal,
of history on the question as to whether monas
ticism was a passing episode or is an essential
and indestructible portion of organized Chris
tianity. We find that in no case has the prim
itive Catholic doctrine been superseded by
Protestant dogma and the Apostolic polity given
place to the reformed system of voluntary asso
ciation, except where monasticism has either
been prostituted by absolutism and vitiated by
the commende, or, as in England, wholly eradi
cated; and in this last case we find that England
even while in the clutch of a tyrant of the Ren
aissance, proved a bulwark against the invasion
of German heresies until, the monasteries sup
pressed, the last defence was gone.
But surely we may see more than this, more
that bears on the question before us, in the story
of the fall of monasticism. To do so, to gain a
just idea of the real causes that led to the down
fall of the religious Ufe, and to weigh the signifi
cance of this cataclysm it is necessary that we
should discriminate as I have said, between the
true and the false mediaevaUsm, the true and the
false renaissance, the true and the false refor-
[295]

CONCLUSION
mation. If we do this, it wiU become evident,
I think, that the condition of continental monas
ticism in the sixteenth century and the fact of
the English suppression have no bearing what
ever on the ultimate question of the nature of
the monastic idea and its permanence or im-
permanence. We shall come to see that in the
real mediaevalism, lies the root of all such ele
ments of true civilization we now possess in
common with the great ages of the Christian
past: that the true renaissance was but a vivid
intensifying of mediaeval ideals, while the break
down of moral and religious standards in the
sixteenth century with all it meant of ruin and
disgrace to the Church and righteous civil
society, was the result of the false and pagan
theories and practices of the victorious element
of the Renaissance. And finally we shall realize
that monasticism had been reduced to impotence
by the same Renaissance (save only in England)
which later was to extend its malignant control
even over the popular revolt its own enormities
had brought into being.
There is nothing in the history of monasticism
from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries that
gives any excuse for condemning it as false in
ideal or even temporary in its usefulness, while
its subsequent condition proves only that it had
[296]

CONCLUSION
gone down in defeat at last before the only
power that had ever mastered it, the irresistible
force of the human mind out of bondage at last
to the controUing spirit of Christ through His
Church. If we put this, which is I think the true, con
struction, on the history of the decline and faU
of monasticism, we shall be better able to study
its real nature, unclouded by the confusing
issues raised by those who are driven to discredit
monasticism that they may so defend the events
that accompanied and followed its fall. It is
far from being the ideal state of man, as was
held by its earliest apologists; it undoubtedly
obtained too enormous a hold on the human
mind, and so withdrew from secular life and
domestic relations, many of the best type of
men, whom civil society could ill spare. In its
earliest state it fostered an unwholesome intro
spection and a selfish consideration for the wel
fare of the individual soul, but it is wrong to
postulate these evils of the fully developed system
when altruism had taken the place of egotism to
a most unusual degree. It was never exempt
from deterioration, which happened constantly,
but a retrograde order instantly gave place to
another that carried on the work without loss
of momentum. Of human organization, and
[297]

CONCLUSION
human in its personnel, its failures went hand in
hand with its triumphs, but unfaithfulness in
part could never destroy the beneficence of the
whole. It is unnecessary to catalogue the list of its
benefactions, for the debt the world owes to the
monks is admitted now by every one. It might
have been the greatest benefactor of the human
race, and yet remain a thing of temporary value,
but it seems to me that the nature of the work
it did in upholding the liberty of the individual
and the superiority of mind and soul to class
distinctions; in converting innumerable tribes of
barbarians and transforming them into great
civilized states; in defeating every tendency
towards tyranny and absolutism for a thousand
years; in organizing and protecting and insti
gating industry and agriculture; in founding
schools and universities and peopling them with
students; in cherishing and preserving classical
literature, fostering scientific investigation, de
veloping the study of theology, grammar and
literature; in actually creating the greatest archi
tecture, painting, sculpture, music and indus
trial arts yet produced under Christianity, and
in establishing a system of mercy and charity
hitherto undreamed of in Europe, it seems to
me, I say, that the nature of this vast and far-
[298]

CONCLUSION
reaching industry argues that the power that
brought it into being was one the world may
still find useful.
Monasticism possesses two aspects, the passive
and the active. In its first state, as it was con
ceived to be by the anchorites and hermits from
the Thebaid down to St. Benedict, it was a
means of escape from a social condition that
made spiritual advancement impossible. The
essential idea was the saving of the individual
soul through renunciation and through with
drawal beyond the influences of death-dealing
conditions. This was, I think, St. Benedict's
original and perhaps sole idea, the establishing
of havens of refuge in the midst of social anarchy
where those who desired might find and follow
the teachings of Christ. If this was indeed his
single aim he "builded better than he knew," for
his will was overridden by the Will of God, and
it became immediately evident that by Divine
guidance he had been led to develop an institu
tion exquisitely calculated to do the very work
throughout the world the times then demanded.
Monasticism forever remained a sanctuary, but
its glory was to lie in its active function, its action
as a great and perfectly organized society for the
counteracting of pagan tendencies, the resistance
to private selfishness, tyranny and crime, the
[299]

CONCLUSION
dissemination of religion, learning and mercy,
and the building upon earth of the Kingdom of
God. At the same time it exerted two influences of
very diverse nature: it fostered self-respect, de
fended the sanctity of the soul and taught the
higher equality that lies beyond caste and social
distinction, but it was as well truly socialistic,
teaching the deep necessity of perfect co-opera
tion, and the supreme truth that the whole is
immeasurably greater than the part, exemply-
fying this in its life and works and standing as a
mighty proof of the power that lies in organized
co-operation when ruled by rigid, fixed and
immutable law.
In both these respects it has an equal work
to do to-day. If we look below the show of
things we come to realize that existing condi
tions have much in common with those that
confronted St. Benedict. Beneath the splendid
phantasmagoria of the twentieth century pageant
of material glory lies a festering horror of eco
nomic evil, of social corruption, of political
baseness, of artistic impotence and of spiritual
death, and below this again as its primal and
continuing cause a monstrous individualism ex
aggerated beyond all reason, that has resulted
in an ominous downfall of religious and ethical
[300]

CONCLUSION
standards. " St. Benedict," says Cardinal New
man, "found the world, physical and social, in
ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the
way — not of science, but of nature; not as if
setting about to do it, not professing to do it by
any set time, or by any series of strokes, but so
quietly, patiently, gradually that often till the
work was done it was not known to be doing.
It was a restoration, rather than a visitation,
correction or conversion."
If we substitute for the words "physical and
social," the words "spiritual, ethical and social,"
we shall have a good description of the world in
its ruin to-day, and one may be justified in
believing that the corrective brought into being
by St. Benedict, under God, and that restored
and recreated civilization, may still retain power
to operate successfully again. Renunciation,
consecration, co-operation, and all in the Name
of Christ and under law Divinely ordained, these
are the foundation stones of world regeneration.
Marriage, individuality and personal initiative
are sacred things, but there are others equally
holy, and that the work of God may be done on
earth it is necessary that these should yield to
them so far as some men and women are con
cerned. In the Providence of God there are
always those who can make a sacrifice of certain
[301]

CONCLUSION
joys and privileges for the welfare of mankind,
and it is at least as glorious and honourable
when these give their lives to the cloister for
faithful labour amongst men, as it is when they
forget wife and children and the exercise of their
individual wills to lay down their lives on the
field of battle.
And also there are those who by their native
temper are unable to cope with the world in
solitary conflict: who after such unequal war
fare, weary and disheartened, feel the gnawing
need of peace and rest: who are ready to recog
nize the honour and virtue and discipline of
obedience as of personal and independent action.
And there are women, who, lonely and un
guarded, look in vain for a field of congenial
action, and find nothing for them but the un
equal and unwholesome contention with men in
the field the latter have made their own. For all
these society and civilization have provided no
refuge other than that of the consecrated life.
And there is yet another and even more prac
tical field of activity in which a revived monas
ticism would offer most opportune assistance.
Exaggerated denominationalism has bred an im
possible parochialism. In England and in Amer
ica we are confronted by thousands of parish
churches and mission chapels where religious
[302]

CONCLUSION
services must be maintained, since they are set
in regions which cannot be deprived of the offices
of a Catholic priesthood, yet cannot in spite of
every effort, support in simple decency a married
priest and his family. Agricultural depression
in England has so reduced the stipends payable
in hundreds of livings that these no longer
deserve the name, and can only be accepted by
priests of independent fortunes. Ordinations
are falling off, religious ministrations are becom
ing more and more infrequent in many sections,
and the people are drifting away to the "tent
meetings" of itinerant evangelists supported by
nonconformist bodies. Here in America there
are vast numbers of parishes that pay, and can
pay, only a very few hundred dollars a year;
many a married priest with a wife and children
being compelled to starve along as best he can
on half the income of a sober brick-mason.
No one will deny that this condition of things
is profoundly shameful if not actually immoral.
It could be corrected by an order of religious in
each diocese, living under the threefold rule,
but vowed for short periods only, perhaps for
three years, the vows being renewable until such
time as the oblate found himself convinced of
his vocation, and ready to take life-vows. Some
approach to the Augustinian type would be the
[303]

CONCLUSION
best, the monks or canons being subject to the
call of the bishop of the diocese at any time and
for any work he might specify. With such an
order at hand no parish that could not pay a
living stipend to a married priest should be per
mitted a resident rector. It should be served on
Sundays and Holydays by the members of the
order acting, so soon as they left the precincts
of the monastery, under the direction of the
diocesan, at other times clergy could be obtained
from the monastery for all works of council,
admonition and mercy, but it would be no longer
necessary for a priest to impose on himself and
a numerous family the hardships consequent on
a cure of souls that counted perhaps a score of
communicants and paid seven hundred dollars or
less for his ministrations.
The missionary efficiency of such "diocesan
monasteries" would be enormous. What could
not a bishop do with, say, twenty men, all with
out family ties, each ready to go forth at his
call transmitted through the abbot or prior, to
do such work as was laid down for him, yield
ing obedience outside the cloister to the bishop
instead of the superior. The possibiUties are
startling in their magnitude.
With a system of three-year vows (at least for
all under middle age) the houses of such an
[304]

CONCLUSION
order would be recruited largely from amongst
the younger men; those who desired a deeper
experience than could be obtained through cura
cies or poverty stricken missions; who feeling a
call to the religious life, could not answer in
stantly and finally because of possible filial
duties that might later become operative; who
because of youth could not say whether or no
they could renounce for themselves the joys of
domestic life. Associated with them would be
the elders, those who, left alone perhaps by the
marriage of their children and the death of a
wife, found themselves hopeless and astray, with
no call coming to them from parishes that de
manded rather, men from the other side the
"age limit." From amongst these there would
always be a good number convinced of their
vocation and finally bound for life- vows; a nu
cleus of permanence around whom would gather
and dissolve from year to year, the body of
temporary workers, new blood coming constantly
into the organism, stability and mutation work
ing together towards the best and most vigor
ous life.
"Such an order would be widely different in
its nature and its activities to the traditional
Benedictine, Cistercian or Franciscan of his
tory"? Very true, but different in accidents
[305]

CONCLUSION
only, not in the underlying principle, and the
greatness of the monastic idea lies in its infinite
adaptability to incessantly changing conditions.
There is a place for the Benedictine to-day, for
the Cistercian, the Dominican, perhaps even the
Carthusian and the Trappist, but the demand
for these comes from the individual soul. The
great cry of the world that goes up to-day
"How long, O Lord, how long?" is rather for
a great order of mission priests who will inci
dentally work out their own salvation through
their consecrated labour in wide vineyards
already ripe for the harvest.
Monasticism then, was neither a mediaeval
superstition nor a passing expedient. The his
tory of its achievements both in individual char
acters and in the development of civilization,
leaves no alternative but the conviction that it
grew under the fostering Hand of God. A just
estimate of mediaevalism, of the Renaissance and
of the Reformation shows us what monasticism
achieved for the world, how it perished, not of
internal disease but at the hands of the crescent
power of evil, what was lost when it fell and how
humanity has suffered during the period of its
eclipse and extinction.
We have studied something of the history of
monasticism as it comes before us in the vine-
[306]

CONCLUSION
clad vestiges that rise like the shards of glory in
the dim valleys and on the windy hills of Great
Britain. May these sorrowful ruins remain to
us not only as memorials of a great and won
derful epoch of Christian civilization, but as
beacons of an imminent goal, as stars of evening
that sank long ago in the west only to rise again
as dawn stars, heralding the coming day.

Ean0 2Dto.

[307]

INDEX

A

Abbeys, Benedictine, that are now
cathedrals, 38, 39.
Abbeys, total destruction of cer
tain, 39, 73.
Abbey estates, fate of lay-holders
of, 248.
Absolutism the child of the
Renaissance, S80.
Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, 133.
St. Aidan, Bishop of Northum
bria, 31, 48, 49, 51, 54.
St. Alban's Abbey, 17.
St. Aldhehn, 229, 234, 241.
Alexander I., King of Scots, 132,
172, 184.
Alexander II., Pope, 115.
Alexander III., King of Scots, 139.
Alexander VI., Pope, 8, 284.
Alexander, Abbot of Kirkstall,
192, 203.
Amalarius, Canon of Metz, 115.
Ancrum Moor, battle of, 190.
Anne of Warwick, 82.
Architecture, Norman, in Eng
land, 53, in Scotland, 144, 148;
Norman transition in England,
45, 46, 167, 242; thirteenth cen
tury in England, 57, 58, 90,
109, 159, 216, 226, 257, in Scot
land, 145, 187; thirteenth cen
tury transition in England, 97;
fourteenth century in England,
121, 172, 175, 260; Cistercian
type of, 78, 98, 197; destruction
of mediseval, 123; French in
fluence in English, 167; in Scot-
[309]

tish, 146, 177; perfection of
Gothic, 121.
Art, mediseval, at York, 214, 215;
Puritan hatred of, 102; works of,
destroyed at the Suppression, 38.
Arthur, King, 29, 30.
Arthur and Guinevere, finding of
bodies of, 33.
Aske, Robert, 10, 264; betrayal of,
266; murder of, 268.
Athelney Abbey, 17.
Athelstan, King, 234, 241.
St. Augustine, Archbishop of Can
terbury, 48.
Augustinian Order, 114, 116.
Avalon, Island of, 28, 34.
Avignon, papal edle at, 7.

B
Bannockbum, battle of, 175.
Bath Abbey, 17.
Beaton, Cardinal, 139.
Beaufort, Duke of, 96.
Beaulieu Abbey, founding of, 80,
84; destruction of, 79.
Beaulieu, Lord Montague of, 79.
a'Becket, St. Thomas, Archbishop
of Canterbury, 112.
Bede, the Venerable, 31.
St. Benedict, 64, et seq. 301; Rule
of, 67.
Benedictine Order, 63, 113.
Bere, Richard, Abbot of Glaston
bury, 42.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 76, 251.
de Bienfaite, Richard, 110.

INDEX

Bigod, Roger, 110; Sir Francis,
267.
"Bishops of the New Learning,''
popular hatred of the, 263.
"Black Book," legend of the, 14.
Black Canons, see Augustinian
Order.
"Black Death," the, 121.
Boleyn, Anne, 13.
Bolton Abbey, founding of, 127.
Borgia Popes, the, 283.
Bowes, Sir George, 189.
"Boy of Egremond, the, 127.
Bradley, Marmaduke, pseudo-
Abbot of Fountains, 261.
Brithwald IL, Abbot of Malmes
bury, 241.
Bruce, King Robert the, 172.
de Brus, Robert, 118.
Buccleuch, Duke of, 182.
Byland Abbey, founding of, 165;
destruction of, 166.

Caedmon, 66, 61.
Calvin, John, 286, 289.
Cardinal's College, founding of, 13.
Carthusian Priors, fate of the, 10.
St. Catherine of Siena, 7.
Celtic Church, 49, 50.
Charles V., King of France, 8.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 188.
Cheshire Rising, the, 263.
Chinnock, John, Abbot of Glas
tonbury, 42.
Chrodegang, Abp. of Metz, 115.
Church, State of, in fifteenth cen
tury, V, 280; First Christian, in
Britain, 31; influence of Renais
sance on, 287.
Cisterican Order, 74; austerity of,
in art, 74, 77, 78, 98; the
fosterer of Enghsh nationality,
111 ; Abbey, plan of, 100, 104; its
influence on civilization, 114;
Abbeys of, in Yorkshire, 153;
lapse of, 168, 171; architecture

of, 197; revival of religion by,
251.
de Claire, Gilbert, Eari of Glou
cester, 110; Walter, 110.
Clement VH., Pope, 12.
Coel, King, 31.
Colet, Dean, 286.
Colman, Abbot of Lindisfarne,
57, 61.
St. Columba, 50.
"Commende," the, 135, 284, 295.
" Comperta, " nature of the, 15.
Concordat of 1516, 284.
Cranmer, Thomas, 9, 284, 286,
290.
Crumwell, Thomas, 8, 9, 11, 12,
24, 44, 262, 284, 290.
Crosland, Col., 156.
St. Cuthbert, 51.

D
Danes, invasion of, 62.
St. David, King of Scots, 133, 172.
St. David, King of Wales, 31, 40.
Dent, William, last Abbot of York,
228.
Dissolution by attainder, 18.
Doncaster, Treaty of, 265; viola
tion of, 267.
Dorchester Abbey, rehabihtation
of, 231.
Domton, John, Abbot of Foun
tains, 259.
Dorset, Marquis of, 82.
Douglass, the Flower of Chivalry,
184; the Good Sir James, 184;
Sir James, 184; Sir William, of
Lothian, 184; William, first
Eari of, 184; Archibald, Eari of
Angus, 189.
de Dreux, Yolande, 134.
Dryburgh, founding of, 187; de
struction of, 189.
Dudley, Lord Guilford, 292.
Durandus, master-mason of Rouen,
80.
St. Dunstan, 29, 31.

[310]

INDEX

E
Eadwine, King, 48.
Ealdwine, Prior of Winchcumbe,
62.
Ecgred, Bishop, 132.
Edgar, King, 31.
Edmund the Magnificent, King,
31.
Edmund Ironsides, King, 31.
St. Edmundsbury Abbey, 17, 73.
Edward III., King, 37.
Edward VL, moral degradation
during reign of, 279, 291; pau
perism under, 291 ; doctrinal rev
olution under, 292; rebellions
against Protestantism under,
292.
Elfleda, Princess, and Abbess of
Whitby, 60, 61.
Elizabeth, Queen, character of,
294; doctrinal revolution under,
294.
Erasmus, 284, 286.
Eure, Sir Ralph, 189, 190.
Evesham Abbey, 53, 73.

Fitzherbert, Archbishop of York,
256.
FitzJohn, Eustace, 255.
Fisher, Cardinal Bishop and Mar
tyr, 8, 10, 286.
Forman, Andrew, Commendator
of Dryburgh, 189.
Frampton, Robert, last Abbot of
Malmesbury, 245.
Franciscan Observants, suppres
sion of, 13.

Geoffrey, Abbot of York, 252.
Gilbert Strongbow, 110.
St. Gildas, 31.
Giraldus Cambrensis, chronicle
of, 33.

Gisburgh, founding of, 118; de
struction of, 118; prosperi^ of,
124.
Glastonbury Tor, 28.
Glastonbury, founding of, 30
desecration of ruins of, 32
revenues of, 35; library of, 35
destruction of, 47.
Godfrey of Jumieges, Abbot of
Malmesbury, 242.
Gothic architecture, perfection of,
121.
Gray, Lady Jane, 292.
Great Schism, the, 7.
Grimstone, Hugh, Abbot of Kirk
stall, 204.
Guinevere, Queen, 29, 30.
Gundreda, the Lady, 164.

H
Hageth, Ralph, Abbot of Kirk
stall, 203.
"Heart of Bruce," the, 184.
Helmsley Castle, 155.
Henry of Blois, Abbot of Glaston
bury, 40.
Henry I., King, 153.
Henry IIL, King, 80, 85, 110.
Henry VIII., 7, 9, 14, 17, 24, and
the Northern risings, 10; his
new nobility, 11; and the Com
mons, 15; his profits from the
suppression, 21, 245; his motives
for the suppression, 25; and
Dryburgh Abbey, 189 ; his prom
ised new sees, 244; rebellions
against, 263; his treachery in the
North, 268; his hatred of Protes
tantism, 289; his character, 290.
Hertford, Eari of, 87, 139, 147,
150; Hertford, Marquis of, 87.
St. Hilda, 60, 61.
Holy Grail at Glastonbury, the, 30.
Holy Island, see Lindisfarne.
"Holy Matin Club," 152.
"Holy Thorn" of Glastonbury,
the, 30.

[311]

INDEX

Holland, Lady, and Netley Abbey,
89.
Home, Andrew, Commendator of
Jedburgh, 137; John, Com
mendator of Jedburgh, 137, 139.
Huby, Marmaduke, Abbot of
Fountains, 259; his tower, 260.
Hunter, Abbot of Melrose, 180.
Huntingdon, Earl of, 88.
Hurst Castle, 49.

Ine, King, 40.
Zona, Monks of, 51.

James IH. and VIU., 152.
James V., King ot Scots, 156.
Jedburgh, founding of, 133; de
struction of, 141 ; redemption of,
143.
John, King, 84.
John I., Abbot of Jedburgh, 134.
John IL, Abbot of Jedburgh, 134.
John of Kent, Abbot of Fountains,
256, 257.
John Pherd, Abbot of Fountains,
266.
John of York, Abbot of Fountains,
256.
St. Joseph of Arimathea, 29, 30,
34.
Juhus XL, Pope, 8.
K
Katharine, divorce of Queen, 13.
Kelso, founding of, 149; siege of,
150; destmction of, 147, 150;
proclamation ot King James HI.
and VIII. at, 152.
Kirkstall, founding of, 194 ; a vision
of restoration, 198; nineteenth-
century project for restoration,
200; destruction of, 202.
Knox, John, 286.

De Lacy, Henry, 193.
Lambert, Abbot of Kirkstall, 203.
Langton, Archbishop, 110, 112.
Layton, Richard, 12, 14, 44.
Layton, Sir Bryan, 189, 190.
Leeds, John, last Abbot of By-
land, 169.
I^gh, Thomas, 12, 117.
Leo X., Pope, 8.
Libraries, destruction of monastic,
36 120 235.
Lincolnshire Rising, the, 262, 263.
Lindisfarne, founding of, 49; de
struction of, 51, 52.
London, John, 12, 14.
Lothian, Marquess of, 143.
Louis the Pious, Emperor, 116.
Lucy, Sir Berkeley, 88.
Luther, Martin, 284, 286, 289.
M
Macchiavelli, 284.
Maeldulph, 233.
Malcom Canmore, King, 132.
Margaret of Anjou, 82.
Malmesbury, contemporary degra
dation of, 229; founding of, 234;
destruction of, 238; misguided
attempts at restoration, 239;
grandeur of, 243.
Malmesbury, William of, 30, 37,
234, 241.
Malvem Abbey, 17.
Mary I., Queen, 292, 293.
St. Mary's Church, Whitby, 66.
Meaux Abbey, 265.
Mediaevalism, true and false, 279;
liberty under, 281; the basis of
true civilization, 296.
Medici tyrants, the, 283.
Melrose, architecture of, 173;
under Robert the Bruce, 179;
destruction of, 175.
de Meschines, William, 127.
Monasteries, multitude of Eng
hsh, 6; suppression of the

[312]

INDEX

smaller, 13, 16; financial returns
from suppression of smaller,
16, 17; suppression of the
greater, 19; financial returns
from suppression of the greater,
21; papuerism resulting from
suppression of, 22; guiding
motives behind suppression o^
25; nineteenth-century suppres
sion of, 272.
Monastic libraries, destruction of,
36, 120, 235.
Monasticism, its influence on
civilization, 1, 247; power of
English, 3; dual function of, 4;
the question of morals in Eng
lish, 23; fostering of trade by,
83; debauching of, in Scotland,
138; restoration of, in English
Church, 273; historical assail
ants of, 275; destruction of, by
civil power, 285; condition of,
in England, 287; the bulwark
against heresy, 296; benefits
conferred by, 298; dual aspect
of, 299; demand for, to-day,
300, 301; a corrective for de
nominationalism, 302; a new
,mode of, 303; as a missionary
agency, 304; adaptability of,
305; a necessary and permanent
agency, 306.
Monington, Walter, Abbot of
Glastonbury, 42.
Monks, as landlords, 83, and san
itation, 84; their hterary indus
try, 120, 236.
de Montfort, Simon, 110.
Montague, Baron, of BeauUeu, 79.
Monte Cassino, 66.
Moon, last Prior of Bolton, 128.
More, Sir Thomas, Martyr, 8, 10,
284, 286.
de MorviUe, Hugo, Lord Lauder
dale, 187.
Morvo, John, 176, 177.
de Mowbray, Roger, 162, 164, 166.
Murdac, Henry, Abbot of Foun
tains, 256.

N
Navarre, Heniy, King of, 293.
Netley, founding of, 85; destruc
tion of, 88.
Newminster Abbey, 265.
Nicholas V., Pope, 8.
Nicholas, Abbot of Jedburgh, 134.
St. Norbert, 188.
Norbertines, see Prsemonstraten-
sians.
Norfolk, cmelty of Duke of, 267.
O
Oliver, Abbot of Dryburgh, 188.
Osbert, first Abbot of Jedburgh,
134.
Osney Abbey, 53, 73, 117.
Oswald, King of Northumbria, 48,
49,60.
Oswin, Monk of Jarrow, 62.f
Oswiu, King, 60.
Otho, Duke of Burgundy, 74.

St. Patrick, 29, 30.
Patrick, Canon of Dryburgh, 189.
St. Paulinus, 48.
Pembroke, Eari of, 106.
Penda, King of Mercia, 60.
de Percy, William, 63; Eari, 225.
St. Philip the Apostle, and Glas
tonbury, 30.
Phihp the Fair, King of France, 7.
Pilgrunage of Grace, 264, 268.
Pius IL, Pope, 8.
Praemonstratensian Order, 116,
187.
Presbyterianism in Scotland, a
side Ught on, 141, 183.
R
Ralph of Glastonbury, 41, 46, 123.
Ralph of Strode, 188.

[313]

INDEX

Ralph, Abbot of Fountains, 266.
Reformation, true and false, 287,
288.
"Reign of Terror," the English, 9.
Reinfred, re-founder of Whitby, 62.
Renaissance, evil influence of,
280, 283; dual nature of, 283;
triumph of pagan over Christian,
R. 284; the breeder of Ucense
and revolt, 286.
Revolution vs. Reformation, 288.
Richard, Prior of York, 252.
Rievaulx, destruction of, 157, 161 ;
possible redemption of, 158.
Ripley, John, last Abbot of Kirk
stall, 205.
Ripon, Marquis of, 163, 249.
St. Robert of Molesme, 74, 251.
Robert IH., Abbot of Jedburgh,
134.
Robert IV., Abbot of Jedburgh,
134.
Robert the Bmce, King, 177, 179.
Romsey Abbey, sale of , 17 ; rehabil
itation of, 233.

Sahsbury Cathedral, 57.
Sanctuary, privilege of, at Beau
lieu, 82.
"Sapphire Shrine," the, 29, 40.
Savonarola, martyrdom of, 284.
Scott, Michael, 184; Sir Walter,
185; Sir W. of Buccleuch, 190.
Scotus. Duns, 234.
Sculpture, thirteenth century, in
England, 217.
Sedburgh, Adam, last Abbot of
Jervaubc, and martyr, 268.
Serlo of Kirkstall, chronicle of, 256.
Seymour, Edward, 87.
Siegfried, Abbot of Glastonbury,
40.
Sodbury, Adam, Abbot of Glaston
bury, 37.
Sparke, Thomas, last Abbot of
Lindisfarne, 52.

Stained glass, first mention of, in
England, 101.
Stephen, King, 111.
St. Stephen Harding, 76, 251.
Streonshalh, Synod of, 57, 61.
Stuart, James, Commendator of
Dryburgh, 189.
Stuart, Lady Arabella, 87.
Stumpe, WiUiam, 237.
Surrey, Eari of, 138.

Taunton, Walter, Abbot of Glas
tonbury, 37.
Taylor, Master Walter, 88.
Tewkesbury Abbey, 81.
Theobald, Archbishop, 112.
St. Thomas Aquinas, 284.
Thomas U., Abbot of Jedburgh,
134.
Thirsk, William, last Abbot of
Fountains, and martyr, 248, 261,
268.
Tintern, founding of, 110; de
struction of, 96.
Tironensian Order, 149.
Turgsius, Abbot of KirkstaU, 203.
Turold of Fecamp, Abbot of
Malmesbury, 242.
Turstan, Archbishop of York, 118,
154, 163, 262, 253.
Turstan, first Norman Abbot of
Glastonbury, 40.

de Vai, Henry, last Abbot of
Whitby, 54, 70.
Vestments, mediaeval ecclesiasti
cal, 37, 42.
"Vestusta Ecclesia," Glastonbury,
40.
"Visitors," character of Crum-
weU's, 14, 16.

[314]

INDEX

W
Walpole, Sir Horace, 86.
Warbeck, Perkin, 82.
Warham, Archbishop of Canter
bury, 286.
Warwick, Simon of, Abbot of
York, 226.
Warwick, Eari of, 138; John, Eari
ot, 70.
WearyaU HiU, 30.
Westminster Abbey, 81.
Whitby, destruction of, 54, 59;
founding of, 60; revenues of, 70.
White Canons, see Praemonstra
tensians.

Whiting, Richard, last Abbot of
Glastonbury, and martyr, 43, 46.
Wilfrid, Archbishop, of York, 61.
Winchester, Marquis of, 86.
Wiuwoedfield, battle of, 60.
Wolsey, Cardinal, 10, 12.
Worcester, Earl of, 96; Marquis
of, 109.
Wych, last Abbot of Tintern, 96.

York Abbey, destruction of, 211;
thehme-kilns of, 212; mediaeval
art at, 216; mediaeval sculpture
at, 217 ; a vision of , 219 et. seq.

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