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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Coming of the Friars
+
+Author: Augustus Jessopp
+
+Posting Date: March 16, 2014 [EBook #6625]
+Release Date: October, 2004
+First Posted: January 5, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMING OF THE FRIARS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al
+Haines.
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF THE FRIARS AND OTHER HISTORIC ESSAYS
+
+BY THE REV. AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D.
+
+Hon. Canon in Norwich Cathedral, Hon. Fellow of Worcester College,
+Oxford, and Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge
+
+FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME TUTOR,
+
+FRANCIS WHALLEY HARPER,
+
+CANON OF YORK,
+
+I OFFER THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY GRATITUDE
+
+
+
+
+[These Essays have appeared at various times in "The Nineteenth
+Century," and are now printed with some alterations, corrections, and
+additions.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   I. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS
+
+  II. VILLAGE LIFE IN NORFOLK SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO
+
+ III. DAILY LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL MONASTERY
+
+  IV. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA
+
+   V. THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA (_continued_)
+
+  VI. THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY
+
+ VII. THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE COMING OF THE FRIARS.
+
+Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again!--_Lord
+Tennyson._
+
+
+When King Richard of England, whom men call the Lion-hearted, was
+wasting his time at Messina, after his boisterous fashion, in the
+winter of 1190, he heard of the fame of Abbot Joachim, and sent for
+that renowned personage, that he might hear from his own lips the words
+of prophecy and their interpretation.
+
+Around the personality of Joachim there has gathered no small amount of
+_mythus._ He was, it appears, the inventor of that mystical method of
+Hermeneutics which has in our time received the name of "the year-day
+theory," and which, though now abandoned for the most part by sane men,
+has still some devout and superstitious advocates in the school of Dr.
+Cumming and kindred visionaries.
+
+Abbot Joachim proclaimed that a stupendous catastrophe was at hand.
+Opening the Book of the Revelation of St. John he read, pondered, and
+interpreted. A divine illumination opened out to him the dark things
+that were written in the sacred pages. The unenlightened could make
+nothing of "a time, times, and half a time" [Footnote: Dan. xii. 7.];
+to them the terrors of the 1,260 days [Footnote: Rev. xi 3.] were an
+insoluble enigma long since given up as hopeless, whose answer would
+come only at the Day of Judgment. Abbot Joachim declared that the key
+to the mystery had been to him revealed. What could "a time, times, and
+half a time" mean, but three years and a half? What could a year mean
+in the divine economy but the _lunar_ year of 360 days? for was not the
+moon the symbol of the Church of God? What were those 1,260 days but
+the sum of the days of three years and a half? Moreover, as it had been
+with the prophet Ezekiel, to whom it was said, "I have appointed thee a
+day for a year," so it must needs be with other seers who saw the
+visions of God. To them the "day" was not as our brief prosaic day--to
+them too had been "appointed a day for a year." The "time, times, and
+half a time" were the 1,260 days, and these were 1,260 years, and the
+stupendous catastrophe, the battle of Armageddon, the reign of
+Antichrist, the new heavens and the new earth, the slaughter and the
+resurrection of the two heavenly witnesses, were at hand. Eleven
+hundred and ninety years had passed away of those 1,260. "Hear, O
+heavens, and give ear, O earth," said Joachim; "Antichrist is already
+born, yea born in the city of Rome!"
+
+Though King Richard, in the strange interview of which contemporary
+historians have left us a curious narrative, exhibited much more of the
+spirit of the scoffer than of the convert, and evidently had no faith
+in Abbott Joachim's theories and his mission, it was otherwise with the
+world at large. At the close of the twelfth century a very general
+belief, the result of a true instinct, pervaded all classes that
+European society was passing through a tremendous crisis, that the dawn
+of a new era, or, as they phrased it, "the end of all things" was at
+hand.
+
+The Abbot Joachim was only the spokesman of his age who was lucky
+enough to get a hearing. He spoke a language that was a jargon of
+rhapsody, but he spoke vaguely of terrors, and perils, and earthquakes,
+and thunderings, the day of wrath; and because he spoke so darkly men
+listened all the more eagerly, for there was a vague anticipation of
+the breaking up of the great waters, and that things that had been
+heretofore could not continue as they were.
+
+Verily when the thirteenth century opened, the times were evil, and no
+hope seemed anywhere on the horizon. The grasp of the infidel was
+tightened upon the Holy City, and what little force there ever had been
+among the rabble of Crusaders was gone now; the truculent ruffianism
+that pretended to be animated by the crusading spirit showed its real
+character in the hideous atrocities for which Simon de Montfort is
+answerable, and in the unparalleled enormities of the sack of
+Constantinople in 1204. For ten years (1198--1208) through the length
+and breadth of Germany there was ceaseless and sanguinary conflict. In
+the great Italian towns party warfare, never hesitating to resort to
+every kind of crime, had long been chronic. The history of Sicily is
+one long record of cruelty, tyranny, and wrong--committed, suffered, or
+revenged. Over the whole continent of Europe people seem to have had no
+_homes;_ the merchant, the student, the soldier, the ecclesiastic were
+always on the move. Young men made no difficulty in crossing the Alps
+to attend lectures at Bologna, or crossing the Channel to or from
+Oxford and Paris. The soldier or the scholar was equally a free-lance,
+ready to take service whereever it offered, and to settle wherever
+there was dread to win or money to save. No one trusted in the
+stability of anything. [Footnote: M. Jusserand's beautiful book, "La
+Vie Nomade," was not published till 1884, _i.e.,_ a year after this
+essay appeared.]
+
+To a thoughtful man watching the signs of the times, it may well have
+seemed that the hope for the future of civilization--the hope for any
+future, whether of art, science, or religion-lay in the steady growth
+of the towns. It might be that the barrier of the Alps would always
+limit the influence of Italian cities to Italy and the islands of the
+Mediterranean; but for the great towns of what is now Belgium and
+Germany what part might not be left for them to play in the history of
+the world? In England the towns were as yet insignificant communities
+compared with such mighty aggregates of population as were to be found
+in Bruges, Antwerp, or Cologne; but even the English towns _were_
+communities, and they were beginning to assert themselves somewhat
+loudly while clinging to their chartered rights with jealous tenacity.
+Those rights, however, were eminently exclusive and selfish in their
+character. The chartered towns were ruled in all cases by an oligarchy.
+[Footnote: Stubbs, "Constitutional History," vol. i. Section 131.] The
+increase in the population brought wealth to a class, the class of
+privileged traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several
+_mysteries_ to themselves by vigilant measures of protection. Outside
+the well-guarded defences which these trades-unions constructed, there
+were the masses--hewers of wood and drawers of water--standing to the
+skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same
+relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own
+time. The _sediment_ of the town population in the Middle Ages was a
+dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease,
+and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or
+Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the
+townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine,
+horror suggests that we should dismiss as incredible such stories as
+the imagination shrinks from dwelling on. What greatly added to the
+dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the towns was the fact that
+the ever-increasing throngs of beggars, outlaws, and ruffian runaways
+were simply left to shift for themselves. The civil authorities took no
+account of them as long as they quietly rotted and died; and, what was
+still more dreadful, the whole machinery of the Church polity had been
+formed and was adapted to deal with entirely different conditions of
+society from those which had now arisen.
+
+The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and
+ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand
+one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only
+approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle
+Ages the parochial system, except as a _civil_ institution, had broken
+down.
+
+The other idea, of men and women weary of the hard struggle with sin,
+and fleeing from the wrath to come, joining together to give themselves
+up to the higher life, out of the reach of temptation and safe from the
+witcheries of Mammon,--that too was a grand idea, and not unfrequently
+it had been carried out grandly. But the monk was nothing and did
+nothing for the townsman; he fled away to his solitude; the rapture of
+silent adoration was his joy and exceeding great reward; his nights and
+days might be spent in praise and prayer, sometimes in study and
+research, sometimes in battling with the powers of darkness and
+ignorance, sometimes in throwing himself heart and soul into art which
+it was easy to persuade himself he was doing only for the glory of God;
+but all this must go on far away from the busy haunts of men, certainly
+not within earshot of the multitude. Moreover the monk was, by birth,
+education, and sympathy, one with the upper classes. What were the
+rabble to him? [Footnote: The 20th Article of the Assize of Clarendon
+is very significant: "Prohibet dominus rex ne monachi... recipiant
+_aliquem de minuto populo in monachum,_ vel canonicum vel fratrem,"
+&c.--Stubbs, "Benedict Abbas," pref. p. cliv.] In return the townsmen
+hated him cordially, as a supercilious aristocrat and Pharisee, with
+the guile and greed of the Scribe and lawyer superadded.
+
+Upon the townsmen--whatever it may have been among the countrymen--the
+ministers of religion exercised the smallest possible _restraint._ Nay!
+it was only too evident that the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline
+which had so often exercised a salutary check upon the unruly had
+become seriously relaxed of late, both in town and country; they had
+been put to too great a strain and had snapped. By the suicidal methods
+of Excommunication and Interdict all ranks were schooled into doing
+without the rites of religion, the baptism of their children, or the
+blessing upon the marriage union. In the meantime it was notorious that
+even in high places there were instances not a few of Christians who
+had denied the faith and had given themselves up to strange beliefs, of
+which the creed of the Moslem was not the worst. Men must have received
+with a smile the doctrine that Marriage was a Sacrament when everybody
+knew that, among the upper classes at least, the bonds of matrimony
+were soluble almost at pleasure. [Footnote: Eleanor of Aquitaine,
+consort of Henry II., had been divorced by Louis VII. of France.
+Constance of Brittany, mother of Arthur--Shakespeare's idealized
+Constance--left her husband, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, to unite herself
+with Guy of Flanders. Conrad of Montferat divorced the daughter of
+Isaac Angelus, Emperor of Constantinople, to marry Isabella, daughter
+of Amalric, King of Jerusalem, the bride repudiating her husband
+Henfrid of Thouars. Philip II. of France married the sister of the King
+of Denmark one day and divorced her the next; then married a German
+lady, left her, and returned to the repudiated Dane. King John in 1189
+divorced Hawisia, Countess of Gloucester, and took Isabella of
+Angouleme to wife, but how little he cared to be faithful to the one or
+the other the chronicles disdain to ask.] It seems hardly worth while
+to notice that the observance of Sunday was almost universally
+neglected, or that sermons had become so rare that when Eustace, Abbot
+of Flai, preached in various places in England in 1200, miracles were
+said to have ensued as the ordinary effects of his eloquence.
+Earnestness in such an age seemed in itself miraculous. Here and there
+men and women, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, raised
+their sobbing prayer to heaven that the Lord would shortly accomplish
+the number of his elect and hasten his coming, and Abbot Joachim's
+dreams were talked of and his vague mutterings made the sanguine hope
+for better days. Among those mutterings had there not been a speech of
+the two heavenly witnesses who were to do--ah! what were they not to
+do? And these heavenly witnesses, who were they? When and where would
+they appear?
+
+Eight years before King Richard was in Sicily a child had been born in
+the thriving town of Assisi, thirteen miles from Perugia, who was
+destined to be one of the great movers of the world. Giovanni
+Bernardone was the son of a wealthy merchant at Assisi, and from all
+that appears an only child. He was from infancy intended for a
+mercantile career, nor does he seem to have felt any dislike to it. One
+story--and it is as probable as the other--accounts for his name
+Francesco by assuring us that he earned it by his unusual familiarity
+with the French language, acquired during his residence in France while
+managing his father's business. The new name clung to him; the old
+baptismal name was dropped; posterity has almost forgotten that it was
+ever imposed. From the mass of tradition and personal recollections
+that have come down to us from so many different sources it is not
+always easy to decide when we are dealing with pure invention of pious
+fraud, and when with mere exaggeration of actual fact, but it scarcely
+admits of doubt that the young merchant of Assisi was engaged in trade
+and commerce till his twenty-fourth year, living in the main as others
+live, but perhaps early conspicuous for aiming at a loftier ideal than
+that of his everyday associates, and characterized by the devout and
+ardent temperament essential to the religious reformer. It was in the
+year 1206 that he became a changed man. He fell ill--he lay at Death's
+door. From the languor and delirium he recovered but slowly--when he
+did recover old things had passed away; behold! all things had become
+new. From this time Giovanni Bernardone passes out of sight, and from
+the ashes of a dead past, from the seed which has withered that the new
+life might germinate and fructify, Francis--why grudge to call him
+Saint Francis?--of Assisi rises.
+
+Very early the young man had shown a taste for Church restoration. The
+material fabric of the houses of God in the land could not but exhibit
+the decay of living faith; the churches were falling into ruins. The
+little chapel of St. Mary and the Angels at Assisi was in a scandalous
+condition of decay. It troubled the heart of the young pietist
+profoundly to see the Christian church squalid and tottering to its
+fall while within sight of it was the Roman temple in which men had
+worshipped the idols. There it stood, as it had stood for a thousand
+years--as it stands to this day. Oh, shame! that Christian men should
+build so slightly while the heathen built so strongly!
+
+To the little squalid ruin St. Francis came time and again, and poured
+out his heart, perplexed and sad; and there, we are told, God met him
+and a voice said, "Go, and build my church again." It was a "thought
+beyond his thought," and with the straightforward simplicity of his
+nature he accepted the message in its literal sense and at once set
+about obeying it as he understood it.
+
+He began by giving all he could lay his hands on to provide funds for
+the work. His own resources exhausted, he applied for contributions to
+all who came in his way. His father became alarmed at his son's
+excessive liberality and the consequences that might ensue from his
+strange recklessness; it is even said that he turned him out of doors;
+it seems that the commercial partnership was cancelled: it is certain
+that the son was compelled to make some great renunciation of wealth,
+and that his private means were seriously restricted. That a man of
+business should be blind to the preciousness of money was a sufficient
+proof then, as now, that he must be mad.
+
+O ye wary men of the world, bristling with the shrewdest of maxims,
+bursting with the lessons of experience, ye of the cool heads and the
+cold grey eyes, ye whom the statesman loves, and the tradesman trusts,
+cautious, sagacious, prudent; when the rumbling of the earthquake tells
+us that the foundations of the earth are out of course, we must look
+for deliverance to other than you! A grain of enthusiasm is of mightier
+force than a million tons of wisdom such as yours; then when the hour
+of the great upheaval has arrived, and things can no longer be kept
+going!
+
+"Build up my church!" said the voice again to this gushing emaciated
+fanatic in the second-rate Italian town, this dismal bankrupt of
+twenty-four years of age, "of lamentably low extraction," whom no
+University claimed as her own, and whom the learned pundits pitied. At
+last he understood the profounder meaning of the words. It was no
+temple made with hands, but the _living_ Church that needed raising.
+The dust of corruption must be swept away, the dry bones be stirred;
+the breath of the divine Spirit blow and reanimate them. Did not the
+voice mean that? What remained but to obey?
+
+In his journeyings through France it is hardly possible that St.
+Francis should not have heard of _the poor men of Lyons_ whose peculiar
+tenets at this time were arousing very general attention. It is not
+improbable that he may have fallen in with one of those translations of
+the New Testament into the vernacular executed by Stephen de Emsa at
+the expense of Peter Waldo, and through his means widely circulated
+among all classes. [Footnote: See "Facts and Documents Illustrative of
+the History, Doctrine, and Rites, of the Ancient Albigenses and
+Waldenses," by the Rev. S. R, Maitland, London, 8vo., 1832, p. 127 _et
+seq._] Be it as it may, the words addressed by our Lord to the seventy,
+when he sent them forth to preach the kingdom of heaven, seemed to St.
+Francis to be written in letters of flame. They haunted him waking and
+sleeping. "The lust of gain in the spirit of Cain!" what had it done
+for the world or the Church but saturate the one and the other with
+sordid greed? Mere wealth had not added to the sum of human happiness.
+Nay, misery was growing; kings fought, and the people bled at every
+pore. Merchants reared their palaces, and the masses were perishing.
+Where riches increased, there pride and ungodliness were rampant. What
+had corrupted the monks, whose lives should be so pure and exemplary?
+What but their vast possessions, bringing with them luxury and the
+paralysis of devotion and of all lofty endeavour? It was openly
+maintained that the original Benedictine Rule could not be kept now as
+of yore. One attempt after another to bring back the old monastic
+discipline had failed deplorably. The Cluniac revival had been followed
+by the Cluniac laxity, splendour, and ostentation. The Cistercians, who
+for a generation had been the sour puritans of the cloister, had become
+the most potent religious corporation in Europe; but theirs was the
+power of the purse now. Where had the old strictness and the old
+fervour gone? Each man was lusting for all that was not his own; but
+free alms, where were they? and pity for the sad, and reverence for the
+stricken, and tenderness and sympathy? "O gentle Jesus, where art Thou?
+and is there no love of Thee anywhere, nor any love for Thy lost sheep,
+Thou crucified Saviour of men?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Knocking at his heart--not merely buzzing in his brain--the words kept
+smiting him, "Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses,
+neither scrip for your journey, neither two coats, nor yet staves, for
+the workman is worthy of his meat!" Once men had changed the face of
+the world with no other equipment. Faith then had removed mountains.
+Why not again? He threw away his staff and shoes; he went forth with
+literally a single garment; he was girt with a common rope round his
+loins. He no more doubted of his mission, he no more feared for the
+morrow than he feared for the young ravens that he loved and spake to
+in an ecstasy of joy.
+
+Henceforth there was "not a bird upon the tree but half forgave his
+being human;" the flowers of the field looked out at him with special
+greetings, the wolf of the mountains met him with no fierce glare in
+his eye. Great men smiled at the craze of the monomaniac. Old men shook
+their grey heads and remembered that they themselves had been young and
+foolish. Practical men would not waste their words upon the folly of
+the thing. Rich men, serenely confident of their position, affirmed
+that they knew of only one who could overcome the world--to wit, the
+veritable hero, he who holds the purse-strings. St. Francis did not
+speak to these. "Oh, ye miserable, helpless, and despairing; ye who
+find yourselves so unutterably forlorn--so very, very far astray; ye
+lost souls whom Satan has bound through the long weary years; ye of the
+broken hearts, bowed down and crushed; ye with your wasted bodies
+loathsome to every sense, to whom life is torture and whom death will
+not deliver; ye whose very nearness by the wayside makes the traveller
+as he passes shudder with uncontrollable horror lest your breath should
+light upon his garments, look! I am poor as you--I am one of
+yourselves. Christ, the very Christ of God, has sent me with a message
+to you. Listen!"
+
+It is observable that we never hear of St. Francis that he was a
+sermon-maker. He had received no clerical or even academical training.
+Up to 1207 he had not even a license to preach. It was only after this
+that he was--and apparently without desiring it--ordained a deacon. In
+its first beginnings the Franciscan movement was essentially moral, not
+theological, still less intellectual. The absence of anything like
+dogma in the sermons of the early Minorites was their characteristic.
+One is tempted to say it was a mere accident that these men were not
+sectaries, so little in common had they with the ecclesiastics of the
+time, so entirely did they live and labour among the laity of whom they
+were and with whom they so profoundly sympathized.
+
+The secret of the overwhelming, the irresistible attraction which St.
+Francis exercised is to be found in his matchless simplicity, in his
+sublime self-surrender. He removed mountains because he believed
+intensely in the infinite power of _mere goodness_. While from the
+writhing millions all over Europe--the millions ignorant, neglected,
+plague-stricken, despairing--an inarticulate wail was going up to God,
+St. Francis made it articulate. Then he boldly proclaimed: "God has
+heard your cry! It meant this and that. I am sent to you with the good
+God's answer." There was less than a step between accepting him as the
+interpreter of their vague yearnings and embracing him as the
+ambassador of Heaven to themselves.
+
+St. Francis was hardly twenty-eight years old when he set out for Rome,
+to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the Third, and to
+ask from him some formal recognition. The pontiff, so the story goes,
+was walking in the garden of the Lateran when the momentous meeting
+took place. Startled by the sudden apparition of an emaciated young
+man, bareheaded, shoeless, half-clad, but--for all his gentleness--a
+beggar who would take no denial, Innocent hesitated. It was but for a
+brief hour, the next he was won.
+
+Francis returned to Assisi with the Papal sanction for what was,
+probably, a draught of his afterwards famous "Rule." He was met by the
+whole city, who received him with a frenzy of excitement. By this time
+his enthusiasm had kindled that of eleven other young men, all now
+aglow with the same divine fire. A twelfth soon was added--he,
+moreover, a layman of gentle blood and of knightly rank. All these had
+surrendered their claim to everything in the shape of property, and had
+resolved to follow their great leader's example by stripping themselves
+of all worldly possessions, and suffering the loss of all things. They
+were beggars--literally barefooted beggars. The love of money was the
+root of all evil. They would not touch the accursed thing lest they
+should be defiled--no, not with the tips of their fingers. "Ye cannot
+serve God and Mammon."
+
+Beggars they were, but they were brethren--_Fratres (Freres)_. We in
+England have got to call them _Friars_. Francis was never known in his
+lifetime as anything higher than _Brother Francis_, and his community
+he insisted should be called the community of the lesser
+brethren--_Fratres Minores_--for none could be or should be less than
+they. Abbots and Priors, he would have none of them. "He that will be
+chief among you," he said, in Christ's own words, "let him be your
+servant." The highest official among the _Minorites_ was the
+_Minister_, the elect of all, the servant of all, and if not humble
+enough to serve, not fit to rule.
+
+People talk of "Monks and Friars" as if these were convertible terms.
+The truth is that the difference between the Monks and the Friars was
+almost one of kind. The Monk was supposed never to leave his cloister.
+The Friar in St. Francis' first intention had no cloister to leave.
+Even when he had where to lay his head, his life-work was not to save
+his own soul, but first and foremost to save the bodies and souls of
+others. The Monk had nothing to do with ministering to others. At best
+his business was to be the salt of the earth, and it behoved him to be
+much more upon his guard that the salt should not lose his savour, than
+that the earth should be sweetened. The Friar was an itinerant
+evangelist, always on the move. He was a preacher of righteousness. He
+lifted up his voice against sin and wrong. "Save yourselves from this
+untoward generation!" he cried; "save yourselves from the wrath to
+come." The Monk, as has been said, was an aristocrat. The Friar
+belonged to the great unwashed!
+
+Without the loss of a day the new apostles of poverty, of pity, of an
+all-embracing love, went forth by two and two to build up the ruined
+Church of God. Theology they were, from anything that appears,
+sublimely ignorant of. Except that they were masters of every phrase
+and word in the Gospels, their stock in trade was scarcely more than
+that of an average candidate for Anglican orders; but to each and all
+of them Christ was simply _everything_. If ever men have preached
+Christ, these men did; Christ, nothing but Christ, the Alpha and the
+Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. They had no
+system, they had no views, they combated no opinions, they took no
+side. Let the dialecticians dispute about this nice distinction or
+that. There _could_ be no doubt that Christ had died and risen, and was
+alive for evermore. There was no place for controversy or opinions when
+here was a mere simple, indisputable, but most awful fact. Did you want
+to wrangle about the aspect of the fact, the evidence, the what not?
+St. Francis had no mission to argue with you. "The pearl of great
+price--will you have it or not? Whether or not, there are millions
+sighing for it, crying for it, dying for it. To the poor at any rate
+the Gospel shall be preached now as of old."
+
+To the poor by the poor. Those masses, those dreadful masses, crawling,
+sweltering in the foul hovels, in many a southern town with never a
+roof to cover them, huddling in groups under a dry arch, alive with
+vermin; gibbering _cretins_ with the ghastly wens; lepers by the
+hundred, too shocking for mothers to gaze at, and therefore driven
+forth to curse and howl in the lazar-house outside the walls, there
+stretching out their bony hands to clutch the frightened almsgiver's
+dole, or, failing that, to pick up shreds of offal from the heaps of
+garbage--to these St. Francis came.
+
+More wonderful still!--to these outcasts came those other twelve, so
+utterly had their leader's sublime self-surrender communicated itself
+to his converts. "We are come," they said, "to live among you and be
+your servants, and wash your sores, and make your lot less hard than it
+is. We only want to do as Christ bids us do. We are beggars too, and we
+too have not where to lay our heads. Christ sent us to you. Yes. Christ
+the crucified, whose we are, and whose you are. Be not wroth with us,
+we will help you if we can."
+
+As they spoke, so they lived. They _were_ less than the least, as St.
+Francis told them they must strive to be. Incredulous cynicism was put
+to silence. It was wonderful, it was inexplicable, it was disgusting,
+it was anything you please; but where there were outcasts, lepers,
+pariahs, there, there were these penniless Minorites tending the
+miserable sufferers with a cheerful look, and not seldom with a merry
+laugh. As one reads the stories of those earlier Franciscans, one is
+reminded every now and then of the extravagances of the Salvation Army.
+
+The heroic example set by these men at first startled, and then
+fascinated the upper classes. While labouring to save the lowest, they
+took captive the highest. The Brotherhood grew in numbers day by day;
+as it grew, new problems presented themselves. How to dispose of all
+the wealth renounced, how to employ the energies of all the crowds of
+brethren. Hardest of all, what to do with the earnest, highly-trained,
+and sometimes erudite convert who could not divest himself of the
+treasures of learning which he had amassed. "Must I part with my
+books?" said the scholar, with a sinking heart. "Carry nothing with you
+for your journey!" was the inexorable answer. "Not a Breviary? not even
+the Psalms of David?" "Get them into your heart of hearts, and provide
+yourself with a treasure in the heavens. Who ever heard of Christ
+reading books save when He opened the book in the synagogue, and then
+_closed_ it and went forth to teach the world for ever?"
+
+In 1215 the new Order held its first Chapter at the Church of the
+Portiuncula. The numbers of the Brotherhood and the area over which
+their labours extended had increased so vastly that it was already
+found necessary to nominate Provincial Ministers in France, Germany,
+and Spain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While these things were going on in Italy, another notable reformer was
+vexing his righteous soul in Spain. St. Dominic was a very different
+man from the gentle and romantic young Italian. Of high birth, which
+among the haughty Castillians has always counted for a great deal, he
+had passed his boyhood among ecclesiastics and academics. He was twelve
+years older than St. Francis. He studied theology for ten years at the
+University of Palencia, and before the twelfth century closed he was an
+Augustinian Canon. In 1203, while St. Francis was still poring over his
+father's ledgers, Dominic was associated with the Bishop of Osma in
+negotiating a marriage for Alphonso the Eighth, king of Castille. For
+the next ten years he was more or less concerned with the hideous
+atrocities of the Albigensian war. During that dark period of his
+career he was brought every day face to face with heresy and schism.
+From infancy he must have heard those around him talk with a savage
+intolerance of the Moors of the South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo
+nearer home. Now his eyes were open to the perils that beset the Church
+from sectaries who from within were for casting off her divine
+authority. Wretches who questioned the very creeds and rejected the
+Sacraments, yet perversely insisted that they were Christian men and
+women, with a clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and
+Cardinals or the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and
+immortal souls, all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose
+word doth eat as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man,
+and marvelled that there was no intercessor."
+
+It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance, determined
+to war with, but ignorance and error. _These_ were to him the monster
+evils, whose natural fruit was moral corruption. Get rid of them and
+the depraved heart might be dealt with by-and-by. Dominic stood forth
+as the determined champion of orthodoxy. "Preach the word in season,
+out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort"--that was his panacea. His
+success at the first was but small. Preachers with the divine fervour,
+with the gift of utterance, with the power to drive truth home--are
+rare. They are not to be had for the asking; they are not to be trained
+in a day. Years passed, but little was achieved.
+
+Dominic was patient He had, indeed, founded a small religious community
+of sixteen brethren at St. Ronain, near Toulouse--one of these, we are
+told, was an Englishman--whose aim and object were to produce an effect
+through the agency of the pulpit, to confute the heretics and instruct
+the unlearned. The Order, if it deserved the name, was established on
+the old lines. A monastery was founded, a local habitation secured. The
+maintenance of the brotherhood was provided for by a sufficient
+endowment; the petty cares and anxieties of life were in the main
+guarded against; but when Innocent the Third gave his formal sanction
+to the new community, it was given to Dominic and his associates, on
+the 8th of October, 1215, as to a house of _Augustinian Canons_, who
+received permission to enjoy in their corporate capacity the endowments
+which had been bestowed upon them. [Footnote: So "La Cordaire, vie de
+S. Dominique" (1872), p. 120. It was, however, a very curious
+community, as appears from "Ripolli Bullarium Praedicat:" I.i.]
+
+In the following July Innocent died, and was at once succeeded by
+Honorius the Third. Dominic set out for Rome, and on the 22nd of
+December he received from the new Pope a bare confirmation of what his
+predecessor had granted, with little more than a passing allusion to
+the fact that the new canons were to be emphatically _Preachers_ of the
+faith. In the autumn of 1217 Dominic turned his back upon Languedoc for
+ever. He took up his residence at Rome, and at once rose high in the
+favour of the Pope. His eloquence, his earnestness, his absorbing
+enthusiasm, his matchless dialectic skill, his perfect scholastic
+training--all combined to attract precisely those cultured churchmen
+whose fastidious sense of the fitness of things revolted from the
+austerities of St. Francis and the enormous demands which the Minorites
+made upon their converts. While Francis was acting upon the masses from
+Assisi, Dominic was stirring the dry bones to a new vitality among
+scholars and ecclesiastics at Rome.
+
+Thus far we have heard little or nothing of poverty among the more
+highly educated _Friars Preachers_, as they got to be called. That
+seems to have been quite an afterthought. So far as Dominic may be said
+to have accepted the Voluntary Principle and, renouncing all
+endowments, to have thrown himself and his followers for support upon
+the alms of the faithful, so far he was a disciple of St. Francis. The
+Champion of Orthodoxy was a convert to the Apostle of Poverty.
+
+How soon the Dominicans gave in their adhesion to the distinctive tenet
+of the Minorites will never now be known, nor how far St. Francis
+himself adopted it from others; but a conviction that holiness of life
+had deteriorated in the Church and the cloister by reason of the
+excessive wealth of monks and ecclesiastics was prevalent everywhere,
+and a belief was growing that sanctity was attainable only by those who
+were ready to part with all their worldly possessions and give to such
+as needed. Even before St. Francis had applied to Innocent the Third,
+the poor men of Lyons had come to Rome begging for papal sanction to
+their missionary plans; they met with little favour, and vanished from
+the scene. But they too declaimed against endowments--they too were to
+live on alms. The Gospel of Poverty was "_in the air_."
+
+In 1219 the Franciscans held their second general Chapter. It was
+evident that they were taking the world by storm; evident, too, that
+their astonishing success was due less to their preaching than to their
+self-denying lives. It was abundantly plain that this vast army of
+fervent missionaries could live from day to day and work wonders in
+evangelizing the masses without owning a rood of land, or having
+anything to depend upon but the perennial stream of bounty which flowed
+from the gratitude of the converts. If the Preaching Friars were to
+succeed at such a time as this, they could only hope to do so by
+exhibiting as sublime a faith as the Minorites displayed to the world.
+Accordingly, in the very year after the second Chapter of the
+Franciscans was held at Assisi, a general Chapter of the Dominicans was
+held at Bologna, and there the profession of poverty was formally
+adopted, and the renunciation of all means of support, except such as
+might be offered from day to day, was insisted on. Henceforth the two
+orders were to labour side by side in magnificent rivalry--mendicants
+who went forth like Gideon's host with empty pitchers to fight the
+battles of the Lord, and whose desires, as far as the good things of
+this world went, were summed up in the simple petition, "Give us this
+day our daily bread!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus far the friars had scarcely been heard of in England. The
+Dominicans--trained men of education, addressing themselves mainly to
+the educated classes, and sure of being understood wherever Latin, the
+universal medium of communication among scholars, was in daily and
+hourly use--the Dominicans could have little or no difficulty in
+getting an audience such as they were qualified to address. It was
+otherwise with the Franciscans. If the world was to be divided between
+these two great bands, obviously the Minorites' sphere of labour must
+be mainly among the lowest, that of the Preaching Friars among the
+cultured classes.
+
+When the Minorites preached among Italians or Frenchmen they were
+received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the
+people; and in the vulgar speech of the people--rugged, plastic, and
+reckless of grammar--the message came as glad tidings of great joy.
+When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally
+failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate, was
+denied, even to such faith as theirs. They were met with ridicule. The
+rabble of Cologne or Bremen, hoarsely grumbling out their grating
+gutturals, were not to be moved by the most impassioned pleading of
+angels in human form, soft though their voices might be, and musical
+their tones. "Ach Himmel! was sagt er?" growled one. And peradventure
+some well-meaning interpreter replied: "Zu suchen und selig zu machen."
+When the Italian tried to repeat the words his utterance, not his
+faith, collapsed! The German-speaking people must wait till a door
+should be opened. Must England wait too? Yes! For the Franciscan
+missionaries England too must wait a little while.
+
+But England was exactly the land for the Dominican to turn to. Unhappy
+England! Dominic was born in the same year that Thomas a Becket was
+murdered in Canterbury Cathedral; Francis in the year before the
+judgment of the Most High began to fall upon the guilty king and his
+accursed progeny. Since then everything seemed to have gone wrong. The
+last six years of Henry the Second's reign were years of piteous
+misery, shame, and bitterness. His two elder sons died in arms against
+their father, the one childless, the other, Geoffrey, with a baby boy
+never destined to arrive at manhood. The two younger ones were Richard
+and John. History has no story more sad than that of the wretched king,
+hard at death's door, compelled to submit to the ferocious
+vindictiveness of the one son, and turning his face to the wall with a
+broken heart when he discovered the hateful treachery of the other. Ten
+years after this Richard died childless, and King John was crowned--the
+falsest, meanest, worst, and wickedest king that ever sat upon the
+throne of England. And now John himself was dead; and "Woe to thee, O
+land, when thy king is a child!" for Henry the Third was crowned, a boy
+just nine years old.
+
+For eight years England had lain under the terrible interdict; for most
+of the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John had
+small need to tax the people: he lived upon the plunder of bishops and
+abbots. The churches were desolate; the worship of God in large
+districts almost came to an end. Only in the Cistercian monasteries,
+and in them only for a time, and to a very limited extent, were the
+rites of religion continued. It is hardly conceivable that the places
+of those clergy who died during the eight years of the interdict were
+supplied by fresh ordinations; and some excuse may have been found for
+the outrageous demands of the Pope to present to English benefices in
+the fact that many cures must have been vacant, and the supply of
+qualified Englishmen to succeed them had fallen short.
+
+Strange to say, in the midst of all this religious famine, and while
+the Church was being ruthlessly pillaged and her ministers put to
+rebuke, there was more intellectual activity in the country than had
+existed for centuries. The schools at Oxford were attracting students
+from far and near; and when, in consequence of the disgraceful murder
+of three _clerics_ in 1209, apparently at the instance of King John,
+the whole body of masters and scholars dispersed--some to Cambridge,
+others to Reading--it is said their number amounted to 3,000. These
+were for the most part youths hardly as old as the undergraduates in a
+Scotch university in our own time; but there was evidently an ample
+supply of competent teachers, or the reputation of Oxford could not
+have been maintained.
+
+It was during the year after the Chapter of the Dominicans held at
+Bologna in 1220, that the first brethren of the order arrived in
+England. They were under the direction of one Gilbert de Fraxineto, who
+was accompanied by twelve associates. They landed early in August,
+probably at Dover. They were at once received with cordiality by
+Archbishop Langton, who put their powers to the test by commanding one
+of their number to preach before him. The Primate took them into his
+favour, and sent them on their way. On the 10th of August they were
+preaching in London, and on the 15th they appeared in Oxford, and were
+welcomed as the bringers-in of new things. Their success was
+unequivocal. We hardly hear of their arrival before we learn that they
+were well established in their school and surrounded by eager disciples.
+
+Be it remembered that any systematic training of young men to serve as
+evangelists--any attempt to educate them directly as preachers well
+furnished with arguments to confute the erring, and carefully taught to
+practise the graces of oratory--had never been made in England. These
+Dominicans were already the Sophists of their age, masters of dialectic
+methods then in vogue, whereby disputation had been raised to the
+dignity of a science. Then a scholar was looked upon as a mere
+pretender who could not maintain a _thesis_ against all comers before a
+crowded audience of sharp-witted critics and eager partisans, not too
+nice in their expressions of dissent or approval. The exercises still
+kept up for the Doctor's degree in Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge are
+but the shadow of what was a reality in the past. Whether we have not
+lost much in the discontinuance of the old _Acts_ and _Apponencies_,
+which at least assured that a young man should be required to stand up
+before a public audience to defend the reasonableness of his opinions,
+may fairly be doubted. The aim of the Dominican teachers was to turn
+out trained preachers furnished with all tricks of dialectic fence, and
+practised to extempore speaking on the most momentous subjects.
+Unfortunately the historian, when he has told us of the arrival of his
+brethren, leaves us in the dark as to all their early struggles and
+difficulties, and passes on to other matters with which we are less
+concerned. What would we not give to know the history, say during only
+twenty years, of the labours of the Preaching Friars in England? Alas!
+it seems never to have been written. We are only told enough to awaken
+curiousity and disappoint it.
+
+Happily, of the early labours of the Franciscan friars in England much
+fuller details have reached us, though the very existence of the
+records in which they were handed down was known to very few, and the
+wonderful story had been forgotten for centuries when the appearance of
+the "Monumenta Franciscana" in the series of chronicles published under
+direction of the Master of the Rolls in 1858 may be said to have marked
+an event in literature. If the late Mr. Brewer had done no more than
+bring to light the remarkable series of documents which that volume
+contains, he would have won for himself the lasting gratitude of all
+seekers after truth.
+
+The Dominicans had been settled in Oxford just two years when the first
+band of Franciscan brethren landed in England on the 11th of September,
+1224. They landed penniless; their passage over had been paid by the
+monks of Fecamp; they numbered in all nine persons, five were laymen,
+four were clerics. Of the latter three were Englishmen, the fourth was
+an Italian, Agnellus of Pisa by name. Agnellus had been some time
+previously destined by St. Francis as the first _Minister_ for the
+province of England, not improbably because he had some familiarity
+with our language. He was about thirty years of age, and as yet only in
+deacon's orders. Indeed, of the whole company _only one was a priest_,
+a man of middle age who had made his mark and was famous as a preacher
+of rare gifts and deep earnestness. He was a Norfolk man born, Richard
+of Ingworth by name and presumably a priest of the diocese of Norwich.
+Of the five laymen one was a Lombard, who may have had some kinsfolk
+and friends in London, where he was allowed to remain as warden for
+some years, and one, Lawrence of Beauvais, was a personal and intimate
+friend of St. Francis, who on his death-bed gave him the habit which he
+himself had worn.
+
+The whole party were hospitably entertained for two days at the Priory
+of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury. Then brother Richard Ingworth, with
+another Richard--a Devonshire youth conspicuous for his ascetic fervour
+and devotion, but only old enough to be admitted to minor orders--set
+out for London, accompanied by the Lombard and another foreigner,
+leaving behind him Agnellus and the rest, among them William of Esseby,
+the third Englishman, enthusiastic and ardent as the others, but a mere
+youth and as yet a novice. He, too, I conjecture to have been a Norfolk
+or Suffolk man, whose birth-place, _Ashby_, in the East Anglian
+dialect, would be pronounced nearly as it is written in Eccleston's
+manuscript. It was arranged that Richard Ingworth should lose no time
+in trying to secure some place where they might all lay their heads,
+and from whence as a centre they might begin the great work they had in
+hand. The Canterbury party were received into the Priest's House and
+allowed to remain for a while. Soon they received permission to sleep
+in a building used as a school during the day-time, and while the boys
+were being taught the poor friars huddled together in a small room
+adjoining, where they were confined as if they had been prisoners. When
+the scholars went home the friars crept out, lit a fire and sat round
+it, boiled their porridge, and mixed their small beer, sour and thick
+as we are told it was, with water to make it go further, and each
+contributed some word of edification to the general stock, brought
+forward some homely illustration which might serve to brighten the next
+sermon when it should be preached, or told a pleasant tale, thought out
+during the day--a story with a moral. Of the five left behind at
+Canterbury it is to be observed that no one of them was qualified as
+yet to preach in the vernacular. William of Esseby was too young for
+the pulpit, though he became a very effective preacher in a few years.
+He was, however, doing good service as interpreter, and doubtless as
+teacher of English to the rest.
+
+Before long the cheerfulness, self-denial, and devout bearing of the
+little company at Canterbury gained for them the warm support and
+friendship of all classes. They had a very hard time of it. Sometimes a
+kind soul would bring them actually a dish of meat, sometimes even a
+bottle of wine, but as a rule their fare was bread--made up into
+_twists_, we hear, when it was specially excellent--wheat-bread,
+wholesome and palatable; but, alas, sometimes barley-bread, washed down
+with beer too sour to drink undiluted with water. Alexander, the master
+of the Priest's House at Canterbury, soon after gave them a piece of
+ground and built them a temporary chapel, but when he was for
+presenting them with the building, he was told that they might not
+possess houses and lands, and the property was thereupon made over to
+the corporation of Canterbury to hold in honourable trust for their
+use, the friars _borrowing_ it of the town. Simon Langton too,
+Archdeacon of Canterbury, the primate's brother, stood their friend,
+and one or two people of influence among the laity, as Sir Henry de
+Sandwich, a wealthy Kentish gentleman, and a lady whom Eccleston calls
+a "noble countess," one Inclusa de Baginton, warmly supported them and
+liberally supplied their necessities. It is worthy of notice that at
+Canterbury their first friends were among the wealthy, _i.e._, those
+among whom a command of English was not necessary.
+
+While Agnellus and his brethren were waiting patiently at Canterbury,
+Ingworth and young Richard of Devon with the two Italians had made
+their way to London and had been received with enthusiasm. Their first
+entertainers were the Dominican friars who, though they had been only
+two years before them, yet had already got for themselves a house, in
+which they were able to entertain the new-comers for a fortnight. At
+the end of that time they hired a plot of ground in Cornhill of John
+Travers, the Sheriff of London, and there they built for themselves a
+house, such as it was. Their cells were constructed like sheep-cotes,
+mere wattels with mouldy hay or straw between them. Their fare was of
+the meanest, but they gained in estimation every day. In their humble
+quarters at Cornhill they remained preaching, visiting, nursing,
+begging their bread, but always gay and busy, till the summer of 1225,
+when a certain John Iwyn--again a name suspiciously like the phonetic
+representative of the common Norfolk name of _Ewing_--a mercer and
+citizen, offered them a more spacious and comfortable dwelling in the
+parish of St. Nicholas. As their brethren at Canterbury had done, so
+did they; they refused all houses and lands, and the house was made
+over to the corporation of London for their use. Not long after the
+worthy citizen assumed the Franciscan habit and renounced the world, to
+embrace poverty.
+
+In the autumn of 1225 Ingworth and the younger Richard left London,
+Agnellus taking their place. He had not been idle at Canterbury, and
+his success in making converts had been remarkable. At Canterbury and
+London the Minorites had secured for themselves a firm footing. The
+Universities were next invaded. The two Richards reached Oxford about
+October, 1225, and as before were received with great cordiality by the
+Dominicans, and hospitably entertained for eight days. Before a week
+was out they had got the loan of a house or hall in the parish of St.
+Ebbs, and had started lectures and secured a large following. Here
+young Esseby joined them, sent on it seems by Agnellus from London to
+assist in the work; a year or so older than when he first landed, and
+having shown in that time unmistakable signs of great capacity and
+entire devotion to the work. Esseby was quite able to stand alone.
+
+Once more the two Richards moved on to Northampton, where an "opening
+from the Lord" seemed to have presented itself. By this time the whole
+country was on the tip-toe of expectation and crowds of all classes had
+given in their adhesion to the new missionaries. No! it was _not_
+grandeur or riches or honour or learning that were wanted above all
+things--not these, but Goodness, Meekness, Simplicity, and Truth. The
+love of money was the root of all evil. The Minorites were right. When
+men with a divine fervour proclaim a truth, or even half a truth, which
+the world has forgotten, there is never any lack of enthusiasm in its
+acceptance. In five years from their first arrival the Friars had
+established themselves in almost every considerable town in England,
+and where one order settled the other came soon after, the two orders
+in their first beginning co-operating cordially. It was only when their
+faith and zeal began to wax cold that jealousy broke forth into bitter
+antagonism.
+
+In no part of England were the Franciscans received with more
+enthusiasm than in Norfolk. They appear to have established themselves
+at Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich in 1226. Clergy and laity, rich and
+poor, united in offering to them a ready homage. To this day a certain
+grudging provincialism is observable in the East Anglian character. A
+Norfolk man distrusts the settler from "the Shires," who comes in with
+new-fangled reforms. To this day the home of wisdom is supposed to be
+in the East. When it was understood that the virtual leader of this
+astonishing religious revival was a Norfolk man, the joy and pride of
+Norfolk knew no bounds. Nothing was too much to do for their own hero.
+But when it became known that Ingworth had been welcomed with open arms
+by Robert Grosseteste, the foremost scholar in Oxford--he a Suffolk
+man--and that Grosseteste's friend, Roger de Weseham, was their warm
+supporter, son of a Norfolk yeoman, whose brethren were to be seen any
+day in Lynn market--the ovation that the Franciscans met with was
+unparalleled. There was a general rush by some of the best men of the
+county into the order.
+
+Already St. Francis had found it necessary to include in the fraternity
+a class of recognized associates who may be described as the
+_unattached_. These were the _Tertiaries_--laymen who were not prepared
+to embrace the vows of poverty and to surrender their all--but
+well-wishers pledged to support the Minorites, and to co-operate with
+them when called upon, showing their good-will sometimes in visiting
+the sick and needy, sometimes in engaging in the work of teaching, or
+accompanying the preachers when advisable, and bound by their
+engagement to set an example of sobriety and seriousness in their dress
+and manners.
+
+Up to this time the word _religious_ had been applied only to such as
+were inmates of a cloister. Now the truth dawned upon men that it was
+possible to live the higher life even while pursuing one's ordinary
+vocation in the busy world. The tone of social morality must have
+gained enormously by the dissemination of this new doctrine, and its
+acceptance among high and low. It became the fashion in the upper
+classes to enrol oneself among the Tertiaries, and every new enrolment
+was an important accession to the stability, and, indeed, to the
+material resources of the Minorites; and when, apparently within a few
+days of one another--no less than five gentlemen of knightly rank, of
+whom at least one, Sir Giles de Merc, had only recently been employed
+as an envoy by the king to his brother Richard in Gascony, and another,
+Sir Henry de Walpole, was amongst the most considerable and wealthy men
+in the eastern counties, Henry the Third spoke out his mind and showed
+that he was not too well-pleased. Really these friars were going on too
+fast--turning men's heads! At Lynn the Franciscans were specially
+fortunate in their warden, whose austerity of life, gentle manners, and
+profoundly sympathetic temperament obtained for him unbounded
+influence. Among others Alexander de Bassingbourne [Footnote: The name
+is again changed into _Bissing_burne by Eccleston, who writes it as he
+heard it from Norfolk people.]--seneschal of Lynn for Pandulph, Bishop
+of Norwich, and, as such, a personage of importance, became his convert
+and joined the new order; but the number of Norfolk clergy and scholars
+who actually became friars must have been very large indeed; they were
+quite the picked men among the Franciscans in England. Of the first
+eighteen masters of Franciscan schools at Cambridge, at least ten were
+Norfolk men, while of the first five Divinity readers at Oxford whose
+names have been recorded, after those of Grosseteste and Roger de
+Weseham, four were unmistakably East Anglians. No one familiar with
+Norfolk topography could fail to be struck by this fact, and the queer
+spellings of some places, which puzzled even Mr. Brewer, are themselves
+suggestive. [Footnote: _E.g._, Turnham represents the Norfolk
+pronunciation of _Thornham_. Heddele is _Hadleigh_, in Suffolk spelt
+phonetically; Ravingham is _Raveningham_, Assewelle is _Ashwell_ [cf.
+p. 93, Esseby for Ashby], Sloler is _Sloley_, Leveringfot is
+_Letheringset_.]
+
+St. Francis died at Assisi on October 4, 1226. With his death troubles
+began. Brother Elias, who was chosen to succeed him as Minister General
+of the Order, had little of the great founder's spirit, and none of his
+genius. There was unseemly strife and rivalry, and on the Continent it
+would appear that the Minorites made but little way. Not so was it in
+England; there the supply of brethren animated by genuine enthusiasm
+and burning zeal for the cause they had espoused was unexampled.
+Perhaps there more than anywhere else such labourers were needed,
+perhaps too they had a fairer field. Certainly there they were truer to
+their first principles than elsewhere.
+
+Outside the city walls at Lynn and York and Bristol; in a filthy swamp
+at Norwich, through which the drainage of the city sluggishly trickled
+into the river, never a foot lower than its banks; in a mere barn-like
+structure, with walls of mud, at Shrewsbury, in the "Stinking Alley" in
+London, the Minorites took up their abode, and there they lived on
+charity, doing for the lowest the most menial offices, speaking to the
+poorest the words of hope, preaching to learned and simple such
+sermons--short, homely, fervent, and emotional--as the world had not
+heard for many a day. How could such evangelists fail to win their way?
+Before Henry III.'s reign was half over the predominance of the
+Franciscans over Oxford was almost supreme. At Cambridge their
+influence was less dominant only because at Cambridge there was no
+commanding genius like Robert Grosseteste to favour and support them.
+
+St. Francis's hatred of book-learning was the one sentiment that he
+never was able to inspire among his followers. Almost from the first
+scholars, students, and men of learning were attracted by the
+irresistible charm of his wonderful moral persuasiveness; they gave in
+their adherence to him in a vague hope that by contact with his
+surpassing holiness virtue would go out of him, and that somehow the
+divine goodness which he magnified as the one thing needful would be
+communicated to them and supply that which was lacking in themselves;
+but they could not bring themselves to believe that culture and
+holiness were incompatible or that nearness to God was possible only to
+those who were ignorant and uninstructed. We should have expected
+learning among the Dominicans, but very soon the English Franciscans
+became the most learned body in Europe, and that character they never
+lost till the suppression of the monasteries swept them out of the
+land. Before Edward I. came to the throne, in less than fifty years
+after Richard Ingworth and his little band landed at Dover, Robert
+Kilwarby, a Franciscan friar, had been chosen Archbishop of Canterbury,
+and Bonaventura, the General of the Order, had refused the
+Archbishopric of York. In 1281 Jerome of Ascoli, Bonaventura's
+successor as General, was elected Pope, assuming the name of Nicholas
+IV.
+
+Meanwhile such giants as Alexander Hales and Roger Bacon and Duns
+Scotus among the Minorites--all Englishmen be it remembered--and Thomas
+Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among the Dominicans, had given to
+intellectual life that amazing lift into a higher region of thought,
+speculation, and inquiry which prepared the way for greater things
+by-and-by. It was at Assisi that Cimabue and Giotto received their most
+sublime inspiration and did their very best, breathing the air that St.
+Francis himself had breathed and listening day by day to traditions and
+memories of the saint, told peradventure by one or another who had seen
+him alive or even touched his garments in their childhood. It may even
+be that there Dante watched Giotto at his work while the painter got
+the poet's face by heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To write the history of the Mendicant Orders in England would be a task
+beyond my capacity, but no man can hope to understand the successes or
+the failures of any great party in Church or State until he has arrived
+at some comprehension, not only of the objects which it set itself to
+achieve, but of its _modus operandi_ at the outset of its career.
+
+The Friars were a great party in the Church, organized with a definite
+object, and pledged to carry out that object in simple reliance upon
+what we now call the _Voluntary Principle_. St. Francis saw, and saw
+much more clearly than even we of the nineteenth century see it, that
+the Parochial system is admirable, is a perfect system for the village,
+that it is unsuited for the town, that in the towns the attempt to work
+it had ended in a miserable and scandalous failure. The Friars came as
+helpers of the poor town clergy, just when those clergy had begun to
+give up their task as hopeless. They came as missionaries to those whom
+the town clergy had got to regard as mere _pariahs_. They came to
+strengthen the weak hands, and to labour in a new field. _St. Francis
+was the John Wesley of the thirteenth century, whom the Church did not
+cast out_.
+
+Rome has never been afraid of fanaticism. She has always known how to
+utilise her enthusiasts fired by a new idea. The Church of England has
+never known how to deal with a man of genius. From Wicklif to Frederick
+Robertson, from Bishop Peacock to Dr. Rowland Williams, the clergyman
+who has been in danger of impressing his personality upon Anglicanism,
+where he has not been the object of relentless persecution, has at
+least been regarded with timid suspicion, has been shunned by the
+prudent men of low degree, and by those of high degree has
+been--forgotten. In the Church of England there has never been a time
+when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very _unsafe_ man. Rome
+has found a place for the dreamiest mystic or the noisiest
+ranter--found a place and found a sphere of useful labour. We, with our
+insular prejudices, have been sticklers for the narrowest uniformity,
+and yet we have accepted, as a useful addition to the Creed of
+Christendom, one article which we have only not formulated because,
+perhaps, it came to us from a Roman Bishop, the great sage
+Talleyrand--_Surtout pas trop de zele!_
+
+The Minorites were the Low Churchmen of the thirteenth century, the
+Dominicans the severely orthodox, among whom spiritual things were
+believed to be attainable only through the medium of significant form.
+Rome knew how to yoke the two together, Xanthos and Balios champing at
+the bit yet always held well in hand. At the outset the two orders were
+so deeply impressed by the magnitude of the evils they were to combat
+that they hardly knew there was anything in which they were at
+variance. Gradually--yes, and somewhat rapidly--each borrowed something
+from the other. The Minorites found they could not do without culture;
+the Dominicans renounced endowments; by-and-by they drew apart into
+separate camps, and discord proved that the old singleness of purpose
+and loyalty to a great cause had passed away. Imitators arose.
+Reformers they all professed to be, improvers of the original idea,
+Augustinian Friars, Carmelites, Bethlehemites, Bonhommes, and the rest.
+Friars they all called themselves--all pledged to the Voluntary
+Principle, all renouncing endowments, all professing to live on alms.
+
+I have called St. Francis the John Wesley of the thirteenth century.
+The parallels might be drawn out into curious detail, if we compared
+the later history of the great movements originated by one or the other
+reformer. The new orders of Friars were to the old ones what the
+Separatists among the Wesleyan body are to the Old Connexion. They had
+their grievances, real or imagined, they loudly protested against
+corruption and abuses, they professed themselves anxious only to go
+back to first principles. Rome absorbed them all; they became the
+Church's great army of volunteers, perfectly disciplined, admirably
+handled; their very jealousies and rivalries turned to good account.
+When John Wesley offered to the Church of England precisely their
+successors, we would have no commerce with them; we did our best to
+turn them into a hostile and invading force.
+
+The Friars were the Evangelizers of the towns in England for 300 years.
+When the spoliation of the religious houses was decided upon, the
+Friars were the first upon whom the blow fell--the first and the last.
+[Footnote: The king began with the Franciscan convent of Christ Church,
+London, in 1532; he bestowed the Dominican convent at Norwich upon the
+corporation of that city on the 25th of June, 1540.] But when their
+property came to be looked into, there was nothing to rob but the
+churches in which they worshipped, the libraries in which they studied,
+and the houses in which they passed their lives. Rob the county
+hospitals to-morrow through the length and breadth of the land, or make
+a general scramble for the possessions of the Wesleyan body, and how
+many broad acres would go to the hammer?
+
+Voluntaryism leaves little for the spoiler.
+
+As with the later history of the Friars in England, so with the
+corruptions of the Mendicant orders--though they were as great as
+malice or ignorance may have represented them--I am not concerned. That
+the Minorites of the fourteenth century were very unlike the Minorites
+of the thirteenth I know; that the other Mendicant orders declined, I
+cannot doubt--
+
+     What keeps a spirit wholly true
+     To that ideal which he bears?
+     What record? Not the sinless years
+     That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.
+
+The Rule of St. Francis was a glorious ideal; when it came to be
+carried into practice by creatures of flesh and blood, it proved to be
+something to dream of, not to live. And yet, even as it was, its
+effects upon the Church, nay, upon the whole civilized world, were
+enormous. If, one after another, the Mendicant orders declined, if
+their zeal grew cold, their simplicity of life faded, and their
+discipline relaxed; if they became corrupted by that very world which
+they promised to purify and deliver from the dominion of Mammon--this
+is only what has happened again and again, what must happen as long as
+men are men. In every age the prophet has always asked for the
+unattainable, always pointed to a higher level than human nature could
+breathe in, always insisted on a measure of self-renunciation which
+saints in their prayers send forth the soul's lame hands to clutch-in
+their ecstasy of aspiration hope that they may some day arrive at. But,
+alas! they reach it--never. And yet the saint and the prophet do not
+live in vain. They send a thrill of noble emotion through the heart of
+their generation, and the divine tremor does not soon subside; they
+gather round them the pure and generous--the lofty souls which are not
+all of the earth earthy. In such, at any rate, a fire is kindled by the
+spark that has fallen from the altar. By-and-by it is the fuel that
+fails; then the old fire, after smouldering for a while, goes out, and
+by no stirring of the dead embers can you make them flame again. You
+may cry as loudly as you will, "Pull down the chimney that will not
+draw, and set up another in its place!" That you may do if you please;
+another fire you may have, but the new will not be as the old.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+_VILLAGE LIFE SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO_.
+
+
+     "The rude forefathers of the hamlet..."
+
+
+[In the autumn of 1878, while on a visit at Rougham Hall, Norfolk, the
+seat of Mr. Charles North, my kind host drew my attention to some large
+boxes of manuscripts, which he told me nobody knew anything about, but
+which I was at liberty to ransack to my heart's content. I at once
+dived into one of the boxes, and then spent half the night in examining
+some of its treasures. The chest is one of many, constituting in their
+entirety a complete apparatus for the history of the parish of Rougham
+from the time of Henry the Third to the present day--so complete that
+it would be difficult to find in England a collection of documents to
+compare with it.
+
+The whole parish contains no more than 2,627 acres, of which about
+thirty acres were not included in the estate slowly piled up by the
+Yelvertons, and purchased by Roger North in 1690.
+
+Yet the charters and evidences of various kinds which were handed over
+with this small property, and which date _before_ the sixteenth
+century, count by thousands. The smaller strips of parchment or
+vellum--for the most part conveyances of land, and having seals
+attached--have been roughly bound together in volumes, each containing
+about one hundred documents, and arranged with some regard to
+chronology, the undated ones being collected into a volume by
+themselves. I think it almost certain that the arranging of the early
+charters in their rude covers was carried out before 1500 A.D., and I
+have a suspicion that they were grouped together by Sir William
+Yelverton, "the cursed Norfolk Justice" of the Paston Letters, who
+inherited the estate from his mother in the first half of the fifteenth
+century.
+
+When Roger North purchased the property the ancient evidences were
+handed over to him as a matter of course; and there are many notes in
+his handwriting showing that he found the collection in its present
+condition, and that he had bestowed much attention upon it. Blomefield
+seems to have been aware of the existence of the Rougham muniments, but
+I think he never saw them; and for one hundred and fifty years, at
+least, they had lain forgotten until they came under my notice. Of this
+large mass of documents I had copied or abstracted scarcely more than
+five hundred, and I had not yet got beyond the year 1355. The court
+rolls, bailiffs' accounts, and early leases, I had hardly looked at
+when this lecture was delivered.
+
+The following address gives some of the results of my examination of
+the first series of the Rougham charters. It was delivered in the
+Public Reading-room of the village of Tittleshall, a parish adjoining
+Rougham, and was listened to with apparent interest and great attention
+by an audience of farmers, village tradesmen, mechanics, and labourers.
+I was careful to avoid naming any place which my audience were not
+likely to know well; and there is hardly a parish mentioned which is
+five miles from the lecture-room.
+
+When speaking of "six hundred years," I gave myself roughly a limit of
+thirty years before and after 1282, and I have rarely gone beyond that
+limit on one side or the other.
+
+They who are acquainted with Mr. Rogers' "History of Prices" will
+observe that I have ventured to put forward views, on more points than
+one, very different from those which he advocates.
+
+Of the value of Mr. Rogers' compilation, and of the statistics which he
+has tabulated, there can be but one opinion. It is when we come to draw
+our inferences from such returns as these, and bring to bear upon them
+the sidelights which further evidence affords, that differences of
+opinion arise among inquirers. I really know nothing about the Midlands
+in the Middle Ages; I am disgracefully ignorant of the social condition
+of the South and West; but the early history of East Anglia, and
+especially of Norfolk, has for long possessed a fascination for me; and
+though I am slow to arrive at conclusions, and have a deep distrust of
+those historians who, for every pair of facts, construct a Trinity of
+Theories, I feel sure of my ground on some matters, because I have done
+my best to use all such evidence as has come my way.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Few things have struck me more forcibly since I have cast in my lot
+among country people, than the strange ignorance which they exhibit of
+the _history of themselves_. I do not allude to those unpleasant
+secrets which we should be very sorry indeed for our next-door
+neighbours to be acquainted with, nor to any such matters as our
+experience or memories of actual facts could bring to our minds; I mean
+something very much more than that. Men and women are not only the
+beings they appear to be at any one moment of their lives, they are not
+single separate atoms like grains of sand. Rather they are like
+branches or leaves of some great tree, from which they have sprung and
+on which they have grown, whose life in the past has come at last to
+them in the present, and without whose deep anchorage in the soil, and
+its ages of vigour and vitality, not a bud or a spray that is so fresh
+and healthful now would have had any existence.
+
+Consider for a moment--Who are we, and what do we mean by _Ourselves_?
+When I meet a ragged, shuffling tramp on the road (and I meet a good
+many of them in my lonely walks) I often find myself asking the
+question, "How did that shambling vagabond come to his present
+condition? Did his father turn him out of doors? Did his mother drink?
+Did he learn nothing but lying and swearing and thieving when he was a
+child? Was his grandfather hanged for some crime, or was his
+great-grandfather a ruffian killed in a fight?" And I say to myself,
+"Though I do not know the truth, yet I am sure that man was helped
+towards his vagabondism, helped to become an outcast as he is, by the
+neglect or the wickedness, the crimes or the bad example of his fathers
+and forefathers on one side or the other; for if he had come of decent
+people on both sides, people who had been honestly and soberly brought
+up themselves, as they tried to bring up their children, yonder dirty
+tramp would not and could not have sunk to his present self, for we and
+ourselves are what we come to, partly by our own sins and vices, but
+partly (and much more than some like to believe) by the sins,
+negligences, and ignorances of those whose blood is in our veins.
+
+My friends, it surely must be worth our while to know much more than
+most of us do know about _Ourselves_.
+
+Being convinced of this, and believing, moreover, that to most of us
+nothing on earth is so interesting as that which most concerns
+ourselves at any period of our existence, I resolved, when I was asked
+to address you here this evening, that I would try to give you some
+notion of the kind of life which your fathers led in this parish a
+long, long time ago, and so help you to understand through what strange
+changes we have all passed, and what strange stories the walls of our
+houses, if they could speak, would have to tell, and on what wonderful
+struggles, and hardships, and dangers, and sorrows yonder church tower
+of yours has looked down, since, centuries ago, it first rose up, the
+joy and pride of those whose hands laid stone on stone.
+
+When I came to think over the matter, however, I found that I could not
+tell you very much that I was sure of about your own parish of
+Tittleshall, but that it so happened I could tell you something that is
+new to you about a parish that joins your own; and because what was
+going on among your close neighbours at any one time would be in the
+main pretty much what would be going on among your forefathers, in
+bringing before you the kind of life which people led in the adjoining
+parish of Rougham six hundred years ago, I should be describing
+precisely the life which people were leading here in this parish where
+we are now--people, remember, whose blood is throbbing in the veins of
+some of you present; for from that dust that lies in your churchyard
+yonder I make no doubt that some of you have sprung--you whom I am
+speaking to now.
+
+Six hundred years ago! Yes, it is a long time. Not a man of you can
+throw his thoughts back to so great a lapse of time. I do not expect it
+of you; but nevertheless I am going to try to give you a picture of a
+Norfolk village, and that a village which you all know better than I
+do, such as it was six hundred years ago.
+
+In those days an ancestor of our gracious Queen, who now wears the
+crown of England, was king; and the Prince of Wales, whom many of you
+must have seen in Norfolk, was named _Edward_ after this same king. In
+those days there were the churches standing generally where they stand
+now. In those days, too, the main roads ran pretty much where they now
+run; and there was the same sun overhead, and there were clouds, and
+winds, and floods, and storms, and sunshine; but if you, any of you,
+could be taken up and dropped down in Tittleshall or Rougham such as
+they were at the time I speak of, you would feel almost as strange as
+if you had been suddenly transported to the other end of the world.
+
+The only object that you would at all recognize would be the parish
+church. That stands where it did, and where it has stood, perhaps, for
+a thousand years or more; but, at the time we are now concerned with,
+it looked somewhat different from what it looks now. It had a tower,
+but that tower was plainer and lower than the present one. The windows,
+too, were very different; they were smaller and narrower; I think it
+probable that in some of them there was stained glass, and it is almost
+certain that the walls were covered with paintings representing scenes
+from the Bible, and possibly some stories from the lives of the saints,
+which everybody in those days was familiar with. There was no pulpit
+and no reading desk. When the parson preached, he preached from the
+steps of the altar. The altar itself was much more ornamented than now
+it is. Upon the altar there were always some large wax tapers which
+were lit on great occasions, and over the altar there hung a small lamp
+which was kept alight night and day. It was the parson's first duty to
+look to it in the morning, and his last to trim it at night.
+
+The parish church was too small for the population of Rougham, and the
+consequence was that it had been found necessary to erect what we
+should now call a chapel of ease--served, I suppose, by an assistant
+priest, who would be called a chaplain. I cannot tell you where this
+chapel stood, but it had a burial-ground of its own. [Footnote: Compare
+the remarkable regulations of Bishop Woodloke of Winchester (A.D.
+1308), illustrative of this. Wilkins' "Conc.," vol. ii. p. 296. By
+these constitutions every chapel, two miles from the mother church, was
+bound to have its own burying-ground]
+
+There was, I think, only one road deserving the name, which passed
+through Rougham. It ran almost directly north and south from Coxford
+Abbey to Castle Acre Priory. But do not suppose that a road in those
+days meant what it does now. To begin with, people in the country never
+drove about in carriages. In such a place as Rougham, men and women
+might live all their lives without ever seeing a travelling carriage,
+whether on four wheels or two. [Footnote: It is, however, not
+improbable that when the Queen came into Norfolk, the eyes of the
+awe-struck rustics may have been dazzled by even such an astonishing
+equipage as is figured in Mr. Parker's "Hist. Domestic Architecture,"
+vol. ii. p. 141.] The road was quite unfit for driving on. There were
+no highway rates. Now and then a roadway got so absolutely impassable,
+or a bridge over a stream became so dangerous, that people grumbled;
+and then an order came down from the king to the high sheriff of the
+county, bidding him see to his road, and the sheriff thereupon taxed
+the dwellers in the hundred and forced them to put things straight. The
+village of Rougham in those days was in its general plan not very
+unlike the present village--that is to say, the church standing where
+it does, next to the churchyard was the parsonage with a croft
+attached; and next to that a row of houses inhabited by the principal
+people of the place, whose names I could give you, and the order of
+their dwellings, if it were worth while. Each of these houses had some
+outbuildings--cowsheds, barns, &c., and a small croft fenced round.
+Opposite these houses was another row facing west, as the others faced
+east; but these latter houses were apparently occupied by the poorer
+inhabitants--the smith, the carpenter, and the general shopkeeper, who
+called himself, and was called by others, the _merchant_. There was one
+house which appears to have stood apart from the rest and near Wesenham
+Heath. It probably was encircled by a moat, and approached by a
+drawbridge, the bridge being drawn up at sunset. It was called the Lyng
+House, and had been probably built two or three generations back, and
+now was occupied by a person of some consideration--viz., Thomas
+Middleton, Archdeacon of Suffolk, and brother of William Middleton,
+then Bishop of Norwich. This house was on the east side of the road,
+and the road leading up to it had a name, and was called the Hutgong.
+In front of the house was something like a small park of 5-1/2 acres
+inclosed; and next that again, to the south, 4 acres of ploughed land;
+and behind that again--that is, between it and the village--there was
+the open heath. Altogether, this property consisted of a house and 26
+acres. Archdeacon Middleton bought it on October 6, 1283, and he bought
+it in conjunction with his brother Elias, who was soon after made
+seneschal or steward of Lynn for his other brother, the bishop. The two
+brothers probably used this as their country house, for both of them
+had their chief occupation elsewhere; but when the bishop died, in
+1288, and they became not quite the important people they had been
+before, they sold the Lyng House to another important person, of whom
+we shall hear more by-and-by.
+
+The Lyng House, however, was not the great house of Rougham. I am
+inclined to think _that_ stood not far from the spot where Rougham Hall
+now stands. It was in those days called the Manor House, or the Manor.
+
+And this brings me to a point where I must needs enter into some
+explanations. Six hundred years ago all the land in England was
+supposed to belong to the king in the first instance. The king had in
+former times parcelled it out into tracts of country, some large and
+some small, and made over these tracts to his great lords, or barons,
+as they were called. The barons were supposed to hold these tracts,
+called fiefs, as _tenants_ of the king, and in return they were
+expected to make an acknowledgment to the king in the shape of some
+_service_, which, though it was not originally a money payment, yet
+became so eventually, and was always a substantial charge upon the
+land. These fiefs were often made up of estates in many different
+shires; and, because it was impossible for the barons to cultivate all
+their estates themselves, they let them out to _subtenants_, who in
+their turn were bound to render services to the lord of the fief. These
+sub-tenants were the great men in the several parishes, and became the
+actual lords of the manors, residing upon the manors, and having each,
+on their several manors, very large powers for good or evil over the
+tillers of the soil.
+
+A manor six hundred years ago meant something very different from a
+manor now. The lord was a petty king, having his subjects very much
+under his thumb. But his subjects differed greatly in rank and status.
+In the first place, there were those who were called the free tenants.
+The free tenants were they who lived in houses of their own and
+cultivated land of their own, and who made only an annual money payment
+to the lord of the manor as an acknowledgment of his lordship. The
+payment was trifling, amounting to some few pence an acre at the most,
+and a shilling or so, as the case might be, for the house. This was
+called the _rent_, but it is a very great mistake indeed to represent
+this as the same thing which we mean by rent now-a-days. It really was
+almost identical with what we now call in the case of house property,
+"ground rent," and bore no proportion to the value of the produce that
+might be raised from the soil which the tenant held. The free tenant
+was neither a yearly tenant, nor a leaseholder. His holding was, to all
+intents and purposes, his own--subject, of course, to the payment of
+the ground rent. But if he wanted to sell out of his holding, the lord
+of the manor exacted a payment for the privilege. If he died, his heir
+had to pay for being admitted to his inheritance, and if he died
+without heirs, the property went back to the lord of the manor, who
+then, but only then, could raise the ground rent if he pleased, though
+he rarely did so. So much for the free tenants.
+
+Besides these were the _villeins_ or _villani_, or _natives_, as they
+were called. The villeins were tillers of the soil, who held land under
+the lord, and who, besides paying a small money ground rent, were
+obliged to perform certain arduous services to the lord, such as to
+plough the lord's land for so many days in the year, to carry his corn
+in the harvest, to provide a cart on occasion, &c. Of course these
+burdens pressed very heavily at times, and the services of the villeins
+were vexatious and irritating under a hard and unscrupulous lord. But
+there were other serious inconveniences about the condition of the
+villein or native. Once a villein, always a villein. A man or woman
+born in villeinage could never shake it off. Nay, they might not even
+go away from the manor to which they were born, and they might not
+marry without the lord's license, and for that license they always had
+to pay. Let a villein be ever so shrewd or enterprising or thrifty,
+there was no hope for him to change his state, except by the special
+grace of the lord of the manor. [Footnote: I do not take account of
+those who ran away to the corporate towns. I suspect that there were
+many more cases of this than some writers allow. It was sometimes a
+serious inconvenience to the lords of manors near such towns as Norwich
+or Lynn. A notable example may be found in the "Abbrev, Placit.," p.
+316 (6 deg.. E. ii. Easter term). It seems that no less than eighteen
+villeins of the Manor of Cossey were named in a mandate to the Sheriff
+of Norfolk and Suffolk, who were to be taken and reduced to villeinage,
+and their goods seized. Six of them pleaded that they were citizens of
+Norwich--the city being about four miles from Cossey.] Yes, there was
+one means whereby he could be set free, and that was if he could get a
+bishop to ordain him. The fact of a man being ordained at once made him
+a free man, and a knowledge of this fact must have served as a very
+strong inducement to young people to avail themselves of all the helps
+in their power to obtain something like an education, and so to qualify
+themselves for admission to the clerical order and to the rank of
+free-man.
+
+At Rougham there was a certain Ralph Red, who was one of these villeins
+under the lord of the manor, a certain William le Butler. Ralph Red had
+a son Ralph, who I suppose was an intelligent youth, and made the most
+of his brains. He managed to get ordained about six hundred years ago,
+and he became a chaplain, perhaps to that very chapel of ease I
+mentioned before. His father, however, was still a villein, liable to
+all the villein services, and _belonging_ to the manor and the lord, he
+and all his offspring. Young Ralph did not like it, and at last,
+getting the money together somehow, he bought his father's freedom,
+and, observe, with his freedom the freedom of all his father's children
+too, and the price he paid was twenty marks. [Footnote: N.B.--A man
+could not buy his own freedom, Merewether's "Boroughs," i. 350. Compare
+too Littleton on "Tenures," p 65, 66.] That sounds a ridiculously small
+sum, but I feel pretty sure that six hundred years ago twenty marks
+would be almost as difficult for a penniless young chaplain to get
+together as L500 for a penniless young curate to amass now. Of the
+younger Ralph, who bought his father's freedom, I know little more;
+but, less than one hundred and fifty years after the elder man received
+his liberty, a lineal descendant of his became lord of the manor of
+Rougham, and, though he had no son to carry on his name, he had a
+daughter who married a learned judge, Sir William Yelverton, Knight of
+the Bath, whose monument you may still see at Rougham Church, and from
+whom were descended the Yelvertons, Earls of Sussex, and the present
+Lord Avonmore, who is a scion of the same stock.
+
+When Ralph Red bought his father's freedom of William le Butler,
+William gave him an acknowledgment for the money, and a written
+certificate of the transaction, but he did not sign his name. In those
+days nobody signed their names, not because they could not write, for I
+suspect that just as large a proportion of people in England could
+write well six hundred years ago, as could have done so forty years
+ago, but because it was not the fashion to sign one's name. Instead of
+doing that, everybody who was a free man, and a man of substance, in
+executing any legal instrument, affixed to it his _seal_, and that
+stood for his signature. People always carried their seals about with
+them in a purse or small bag, and it was no uncommon thing for a
+pickpocket to cut off this bag and run away with the seal, and thus put
+the owner to very serious inconvenience. This was what actually did
+happen once to William le Butler's father-in-law. He was a certain Sir
+Richard Bellhouse, and he lived at North Tuddenham, near Dereham. Sir
+Richard was High Sheriff for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in
+1291, and his duties brought him into court on January 25th of that
+year, before one of the Judges at Westminster. I suppose the court was
+crowded, and in the crowd some rogue cut off Sir Richard's purse, and
+made off with his seal. I never heard that he got it back again.
+[Footnote: Abbreviatio Placit. 284, b.]
+
+And now I must return to the point from which I wandered when I began
+to speak of the free tenants and the "villeins." William le Butler, who
+sold old Ralph Red to his own son, the young Ralph, was himself sprung
+from a family who had held the Manor of Rougham for about a century.
+His father was Sir Richard le Butler, who died about 1280, leaving
+behind him one son, our friend William, and three daughters.
+Unfortunately, William le Butler survived his father only a very short
+time, and he left no child to succeed him. The result was that the
+inheritance of the old knight was divided among his daughters, and what
+had been hitherto a single lordship became three lordships, each of the
+parceners looking very jealously after his own interest, and striving
+to make the most of his powers _and rights_.
+
+Though each of the husbands of Sir Richard le Butler's daughters was a
+man of substance and influence--yet, when the manor was divided, no one
+of them was anything like so great a person as the old Sir Richard. In
+those days, as in our own, there were much richer men in the country
+than the country gentlemen, and in Rougham at this time there were two
+very prosperous men who were competing with one another as to which
+should buy up most land in the parish, and be the great man of the
+place. The one of these was a gentleman called Peter the Roman, and the
+other was called Thomas the Lucky. They were both the sons of Rougham
+people, and it will be necessary to pursue the history of each of them
+to make you understand how things went in those "good old times."
+
+First let me deal with Peter the Roman. He was the son of a Rougham
+lady named Isabella, by an Italian gentleman named lacomo de Ferentino,
+or if you like to translate it into English, James of Ferentinum.
+
+How James of Ferentinum got to Rougham and captured one of the Rougham
+heiresses we shall never know for certain. But we do know that in the
+days of King Henry, who was the father of King Edward, there was a very
+large incursion of Italian clergy into England, and that the Pope of
+Rome got preferment of all kinds for them. In fact, in King Henry's
+days the Pope had immense power in England, and it looked for a while
+as if every valuable piece of preferment in the kingdom would be
+bestowed upon Italians who did not know a word of English, and who
+often never came near their livings at all. One of these Italian
+gentlemen, whose name was _John_ de Ferentino, was very near being made
+Bishop of Norwich; [Footnote: At the death of Thomas de Blunville in
+1236. John de Ferentino must have been almost supreme in the diocese.
+The see was practically vacant for three years.] he _was_ Archdeacon of
+Norwich, but though the Pope tried to make him bishop, he happily did
+not succeed in forcing him into the see that time, and John of
+Ferentinum had to content himself with his archdeaconry and one or two
+other preferments.
+
+Our friend at Rougham may have been, and probably was, some kinsman of
+the archdeacon, and it is just possible that Archdeacon Middleton, who,
+you remember, bought the Lyng House, may have had, as his predecessor
+in it, another archdeacon, this John de Ferentino, whose nephew or
+brother, James, married Miss Isabella de Rucham, and settled down among
+his wife's kindred. Be that as it may, John de Ferentino had two sons,
+Peter and Richard, and it appears that their father, not content with
+such education as Oxford or Cambridge could afford--though at this time
+Oxford was one of the most renowned universities in Europe--sent his
+sons to Rome, having an eye to their future advancement; for in King
+Henry's days a young man that had friends at Rome was much more likely
+to get on in the world than he who had only friends in the King's
+Court, and he who wished to push his interests in the Church must look
+to the Pope, and not to the King of England, as his main support.
+
+When young Peter came back to Rougham, I dare say he brought back with
+him some new airs and graces from Italy, and I dare say the new
+fashions made his neighbours open their eyes. They gave the young
+fellow the name he is known by in the charters, and to the day of his
+death people called him Peter Romayn, or Peter the Roman. But Peter
+came back a changed man in more ways than one. He came back a cleric.
+We in England now recognize only three orders of clergy--bishops,
+priests, and deacons. But six hundred years ago it was very different.
+In those days a man might be two or three degrees below a deacon, and
+yet be counted a cleric and belonging to the clergy; and, though Peter
+Romayn was not priest or deacon, he was a privileged person in many
+ways, but a very unprivileged person in one way--he might never marry.
+
+It was a hard case for a young man who had taken to the clerical
+profession without taking to the clerical life, and all the harder
+because there were old men living whose fathers or grandfathers had
+known the days when even a Bishop of Norwich was married, and who could
+tell of many an old country clergyman who had had his wife and children
+in the parsonage. But now--just six hundred years ago--if a young
+fellow had once been admitted a member of the clerical body, he was no
+longer under the protection of the laws of the realm, nor bound by
+them, but he was under the dominion of another law, commonly known as
+the Canon Law, which the Pope of Rome had succeeded in imposing upon
+the clergy; and in accordance with that law, if he took to himself a
+wife, he was, to all intents and purposes, a ruined man.
+
+But when laws are pitted against human nature, they may be forced upon
+people by the strong hand of power, but they are sure to be evaded
+where they are not broken literally; and this law of forbidding
+clergymen to marry _was_ evaded in many ways. Clergymen took to
+themselves wives, and had families. Again and again their consciences
+justified them in their course, whatever the Canon Law might forbid or
+denounce. They married on the sly--if that may be called marriage which
+neither the Church nor the State recognized as a binding contract, and
+which was ratified by no formality or ceremony civil or religious: but
+public opinion was lenient; and where a clergyman was living otherwise
+a blameless life, his people did not think the worse of him for having
+a wife and children, however much the Canon Law and certain bigoted
+people might give the wife a bad name. And so it came to pass that
+Peter Romayn of Rougham, cleric though he were, lost his heart one fine
+day to a young lady at Rougham, and marry he would. The young lady's
+name was Matilda. Her father, though born at Rougham, appears to have
+gone away from there when very young, and made money somehow at
+Leicester. He had married a Norfolk lady, one Agatha of Cringleford;
+and he seems to have died, leaving his widow and daughter fairly
+provided for; and they lived in a house at Rougham, which I dare say
+Richard of Leicester had bought. I have no doubt that young Peter
+Romayn was a young gentleman of means, and it is clear that Matilda was
+a very desirable bride. But then Peter _couldn't_ marry! How was it to
+be managed? I think it almost certain that no religious ceremony was
+performed, but I have no doubt that the two plighted their troth either
+to each, and that somehow they did become man and wife, if not in the
+eyes of Canon Law, yet by the sanction of a higher law to which the
+consciences of honourable men and women appeal against the immoral
+enactments of human legislation.
+
+Among the charters at Rougham I find eighteen or twenty which were
+executed by Peter Romayn and Matilda. In no one of them is she called
+his wife; in all of them it is stipulated that the property shall
+descend to whomsoever they shall leave it, and in only one instance,
+and there I believe by a mistake of the scribe, is there any mention of
+their _lawful_ heirs. They buy land and sell it, sometimes separately,
+more often conjointly, but in all cases the interests of both are kept
+in view; the charters are witnessed by the principal people in the
+place, including Sir Richard Butler himself, more than once; and in one
+of the later charters Peter Romayn, as if to provide against the
+contingency of his own death, makes over all his property in Rougham
+without reserve to Matilda, and constitutes her the mistress of it all.
+[Footnote: By the constitutions of Bishop Woodloke, any _legacies_ left
+by a clergyman to his "concubine" were to be handed over to the
+bishop's official, and distributed to the poor.--Wilkins' "Cone." vol.
+ii. p. 296 b.]
+
+Some year or two after this, Matilda executes her last conveyance, and
+executes it alone. She sells her whole interest in Rougham--the house
+in which she lives and all that it contains--lands and ground rents,
+and everything else, for money down, and we hear of her no more. Did
+she retire from the world, and find refuge in a nunnery? Did she go
+away to some other home? Who knows? And what of Peter the Roman? I know
+little of him, but I suspect the pressure put upon the poor man was too
+strong for him, and I suspect that somehow, and, let us hope, with much
+anguish and bitterness of heart--but yet somehow, he was compelled to
+repudiate the poor woman to whom there is evidence to show he was true
+and staunch as long as it was possible--and when it was no longer
+possible I _think_ he too turned his back upon the Rougham home, and
+was presented by the Prior of Westacre Monastery to the Rectory of
+Bodney at the other end of the county, where, let us hope, he died in
+peace.
+
+It is a curious fact that Peter Romayn was not the only clergyman in
+Rougham whom we know to have been married. As for Peter Romayn, I
+believe he was an honourable man according to his light, and as far as
+any men were honourable in those rough days. But for the other. I do
+not feel so sure about him.
+
+I said that the two prosperous men in Rougham six hundred years ago
+were Peter Romayn and Thomas the Lucky, or, as his name appears in the
+Latin Charters, Thomas Felix. When Archdeacon Middleton gave up living
+at Rougham, Thomas Felix bought his estate, called the Lyng House; and
+shortly after he bought another estate, which, in fact, was a manor of
+its own, and comprehended thirteen free tenants and five villeins; and,
+as though this were not enough, on September 24, 1292, he took a lease
+of another manor in Rougham for six years, of one of the daughters of
+Sir Richard le Butler, whose husband, I suppose, wanted to go
+elsewhere. Before the lease expired he died, leaving behind him a widow
+named Sara and three little daughters, the eldest of whom cannot have
+been more than eight or nine years old. This was in the year 1294.
+Sara, the widow, was for the time a rich woman, and she made up her
+mind never to marry again, and she kept her resolve.
+
+When her eldest daughter Alice came to the mature age of fifteen or
+sixteen, a young man named John of Thrysford wooed and won her.
+Mistress Alice was by no means a portionless damsel, and Mr. John seems
+himself to have been a man of substance. How long they were married I
+know not; but it could not have been more than a year or two, for less
+than five years after Mr. Felix's death a great event happened, which
+produced very momentous effects upon Rougham and its inhabitants in
+more ways than one.
+
+Up to this time there had been a rector at Rougham, and apparently a
+good rectory-house and some acres of glebe land--how many I cannot say.
+But the canons of Westacre Priory cast their eyes upon the rectory of
+Rougham, and they made up their minds they would have it. I dare not
+stop to explain how the job was managed--that would lead me a great
+deal too far--but it _was_ managed, and accordingly, a year or two
+after the marriage of little Alice, they got possession of all the
+tithes and the glebe, and the good rectory-house at Rougham, and they
+left the parson of the parish with a smaller house on the other side of
+the road, and _not_ contiguous to the church, an allowance of two
+quarters of wheat and two quarters of barley a year, and certain small
+dues which might suffice to keep body and soul together but little
+more. [Footnote: This appears from the following charter, which it
+seems worth while to quote: "Pateat universis... quod nos Robertas de
+Feletone, Miles, et Hawigia uxor mea concessimus ... Alicie filie Thome
+de Rucham... Totum ius nostrum... in terris... dicte Alicie... in
+Rucham, que ... habuimus de dono et dimissione Johannis filii Roberti
+de Thyrsforde in Rucham _ante diuorstium_ (sic) _inter eundem Johannem
+et dictam_ Aliciam factum... Omnia munimenta et scripta que de dicto
+tenemento habuimus eidem Alicie quiete reddidimus... Datum apud Lucham
+die Dom: prox: post Annunc: B Mar: Virg: Anno R. R. Edw: fit. Reg.
+Henr: tricessimotertio" (28 March, 1305).--_Rougham Charter_, No. 157.]
+
+John of Thyrsfordhad not been married more than a year or two when he
+had had enough of it. Whether at the time of his marriage he was
+already a _cleric_, I cannot tell, but I know that on October 10, 1301,
+he was a priest, and that on that day he was instituted to the vicarage
+of Rougham, having been already divorced from poor little Alice. As for
+Alice--if I understand the case, she never could marry, however much
+she may have wished it; she had no children to comfort her; she became
+by-and-by the great lady of Rougham, and there she lived on for nearly
+fifty years. Her husband, the vicar, lived on too--on what terms of
+intimacy I am unable to say. The vicar died some ten years before the
+lady. When old age was creeping on her she made over all her houses and
+lands in Rougham to feoffees, and I have a suspicion that she went into
+a nunnery and there died.
+
+In dealing with the two cases of Peter Romayn and John of Thyrsford I
+have used the term _cleric_ more than once. These two men were, at the
+end of their career at any rate, what we now understand by clergyman;
+but there were hosts of men six hundred years ago in Norfolk who were
+_clerics,_ and yet who were by no means what we now understand by
+clergymen. The _clerics_ of six hundred years ago comprehended all
+those whom we now call the professional classes; all, _i.e._, who lived
+by their brains, as distinct from those who lived by trade or the
+labour of their hands.
+
+Six hundred years ago it may be said that there were two kinds of law
+in England, the one was the law of the land, the other was the law of
+the Church. The law of the land was hideously cruel and merciless, and
+the gallows and the pillory, never far from any man's door, were seldom
+allowed to remain long out of use. The ghastly frequency of the
+punishment by death tended to make people savage and bloodthirsty.
+[Footnote: In 1293 a case is recorded of three men, one of them a
+goldsmith, who had their right hands chopped off in the middle of the
+street in London.-"Chron. of Edward I. and Edward II.," vol. i.
+p.--102. Ed. Stubbs. Rolls Series.] It tended, too, to make men
+absolutely reckless of consequences when once their passions were
+roused. "As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" was a saying that had a
+grim truth in it. When a violent ruffian knew that if he robbed his
+host in the night he would be sure to be hung for it, and if he killed
+him he could be no more than hung, he had nothing to gain by letting
+him live, and nothing to lose if he cut his throat. Where another knew
+that by tampering with the coin of the realm he was sure to go to the
+gallows for it, he might as well make a good fight before he was taken,
+and murder any one who stood in the way of his escape. Hanging went on
+at a pace which we cannot conceive, for in those days the criminal law
+of the land was not, as it is now, a strangely devised machinery for
+protecting the wrongdoer, but it was an awful and tremendous power for
+slaying all who were dangerous to the persons or the property of the
+community.
+
+The law of the Church, on the other hand, was much more lenient. To
+hurry a man to death with his sins and crimes fresh upon him, to
+slaughter men wholesale for acts that could not be regarded as
+enormously wicked, shocked those who had learnt that the Gospel taught
+such virtues as mercy and longsuffering, and gave men hopes of
+forgiveness on repentance. The Church set itself against the atrocious
+mangling, and branding, and hanging that was being dealt out blindly,
+hastily, and indiscriminately, to every kind of transgressor; and
+inasmuch as the Church law and the law of the land six hundred years
+ago were often in conflict, the Church law acted to a great extent as a
+check upon the shocking ferocity of the criminal code. And this is how
+the check was exercised.
+
+A man who was a _cleric_ was only half amenable to the law of the land.
+He was a citizen of the realm, and a subject of the king, but he was
+_more_; he owed allegiance to the Church, and claimed the Church's
+protection also. Accordingly, whenever a _cleric_ got into trouble, and
+there was only too good cause to believe that if he were brought to his
+trial he would have a short shrift and no favour, scant justice and the
+inevitable gallows within twenty-four hours at the longest, he
+proclaimed himself a _cleric_, and demanded the protection of the
+Church, and was forthwith handed over to the custody of the ordinary or
+bishop. The process was a clumsy one, and led, of course, to great
+abuses, but it had a good side. As a natural and inevitable consequence
+of such a privilege accorded to a class, there was a very strong
+inducement to become a member of that class; and as the Church made it
+easy for any fairly educated man to be admitted at any rate to the
+lower orders of the ministry, any one who preferred a professional
+career, or desired to give himself up to a life of study, enrolled
+himself among the _clerics_, and was henceforth reckoned as belonging
+to the clergy.
+
+The country swarmed with these _clerics_. Only a small proportion of
+them ever became ministers of religion; they were lawyers, or even
+lawyers' clerks; they were secretaries; some few were quacks with
+nostrums; and these all were just as much _clerics_ as the chaplains,
+who occupied pretty much the same position as our curates do
+now--clergymen, strictly so called, who were on the look out for
+employment, and who earned a very precarious livelihood--or the rectors
+and vicars who were the beneficed clergy, and who were the parsons of
+parishes occupying almost exactly the same position that they do at
+this moment, and who were almost exactly in the same social position as
+they are now. Six hundred years ago there were at least seven of these
+_clerics_ in Rougham, all living in the place at the same time besides
+John of Thyrsford, the vicar. Five of them were chaplains, two were
+merely _clerics_. If there were seven of these clerical gentlemen whom
+I happen to have met with in my examination of the Rougham Charters,
+there must have been others who were not people of sufficient note to
+witness the execution of important legal instruments, nor with the
+means to buy land or houses in the parish. It can hardly be putting the
+number too high if we allow that there must have been at least ten or a
+dozen _clerics_ of one sort or another in Rougham six hundred years ago.
+
+How did they all get a livelihood? is a question not easy to answer;
+but there were many ways of picking up a livelihood by these gentlemen.
+To begin with, they could take an engagement as tutor in a gentleman's
+family; or they could keep a small school; or earn a trifle by drawing
+up conveyances, or by keeping the accounts of the lord of the manor. In
+some cases they acted as private chaplains, getting their victuals for
+their remuneration, and sometimes they were merely loafing about, and
+living upon their friends, and taking the place of the country parson
+if he were sick or past work. Then, too, the smaller monasteries had
+one or more chaplains, and I suspect that the canons at Castle Acre
+always would keep two or three chaplains in their pay, and it is not
+unlikely that as long as Archdeacon Middleton kept on his big house at
+Rougham he would have a chaplain, who would be attached to the place,
+and bound to perform the service in the great man's chapel.
+
+But besides the clerics and the chaplains and the rector or vicar,
+there was another class, the members of which just at this time were
+playing a very important part indeed in the religious life of the
+people, and not in the religious life alone; these were the Friars. If
+the monks looked down upon the parsons, and stole their endowments from
+them whenever they could, and if in return the parsons hated the monks
+and regarded them with profound suspicion and jealousy, both parsons
+and monks were united in their common dislike of the Friars.
+
+Six hundred years ago the Friars had been established in England about
+sixty years, and they were now by far the most influential Religionists
+in the country. The Friars, though always stationed in the towns, and
+by this time occupying large establishments which were built for them
+in Lynn, Yarmouth, Norwich, and elsewhere, were always acting the part
+of itinerant preachers, and travelled their circuits on foot, supported
+by alms. Sometimes the parson lent them the church, sometimes they held
+a camp meeting in spite of him, and just as often as not they left
+behind them a feeling of great soreness, irritation, and discontent;
+but six hundred years ago the preaching of the Friars was an immense
+and incalculable blessing to the country, and if it had not been for
+the wonderful reformation wrought by their activity and burning
+enthusiasm, it is difficult to see what we should have come to or what
+corruption might have prevailed in Church and State.
+
+When the Friars came into a village, and it was known that they were
+going to preach, you may be sure that the whole population would turn
+out to listen. Sermons in those days in the country were very rarely
+delivered. As I have said, there were no pulpits in the churches then.
+A parson might hold a benefice for fifty years, and never once have
+written or composed a sermon. A preaching parson, one who regularly
+exhorted his people or expounded to them the Scriptures, would have
+been a wonder indeed, and thus the coming of the Friars and the revival
+of pulpit oratory was all the more welcome because the people had not
+become wearied by the too frequent iteration of truths which may be
+repeated so frequently as to lose their vital force. A sermon was an
+event in those days, and a preacher with any real gifts of oratory was
+looked upon as a prophet sent by God. Never was there a time when the
+people needed more to be taught the very rudiments of morality. Never
+had there been a time when people cared less whether their acts and
+words were right or wrong, true or false. It had almost come to this,
+that what a man thought would be to his profit, that was good; what
+would entail upon him a loss, that was evil.
+
+And this brings me to another point, viz., the lawlessness and crime in
+country villages six hundred years ago. But before I can speak on that
+subject it is necessary that I should first try to give you some idea
+of the every-day life of your forefathers. What did they eat and drink?
+what did they wear? what did they do from day to day? Were they happy?
+content? prosperous? or was their lot a hard and bitter one? For
+according to the answer we get to questions such as these, so shall we
+be the better prepared to expect the people to have been peaceable
+citizens, or sullen, miserable, and dangerous ruffians, goaded to
+frequent outbursts of ferocious savagedom by hunger, oppression,
+hatred, and despair.
+
+Six hundred years ago no parish in Norfolk had more than a part of its
+land under tillage. As a rule, the town or village, with its houses,
+great and small, consisted of a long street, the church and parsonage
+being situated about the middle of the parish. Not far off stood the
+manor house, with its hall where the manor courts were held, and its
+farm-buildings, dovecote, and usually its mill for grinding the corn of
+the tenants. No tenant of the manor might take his corn to be ground
+anywhere except at the lord's mill; and it is easy to see what a
+grievance this would be felt to be at times, and how the lord of the
+manor, if he were needy, unscrupulous, or extortionate, might grind the
+faces of the poor while he ground their corn. Behind most of the houses
+in the village might be seen a croft or paddock, an orchard or a small
+garden. But the contents of the gardens were very different from the
+vegetables we see now; there were, perhaps, a few cabbages, onions,
+parsnips, or carrots, and apparently some kind of beet or turnip. The
+potato had never been heard of.
+
+As for the houses themselves, they were squalid enough for the most
+part. The manor house was often built of stone, when stone was to be
+had, or where, as in Norfolk, no stone was to be had, then of flint, as
+in so many of our church towers. Usually, however, the manor house was
+built in great part of timber. The poorer houses were dirty hovels, run
+up "anyhow," sometimes covered with turf, sometimes with thatch. None
+of them had chimneys. Six hundred years ago houses with chimneys were
+at least as rare as houses heated by hot-water pipes are now. Moreover,
+there were no brick houses. It is a curious fact that the art of making
+bricks seems to have been lost in England for some hundreds of years.
+The labourer's dwelling had no windows; the hole in the roof which let
+out the smoke rendered windows unnecessary, and, even in the houses of
+the well-to-do, glass windows were rare. In many cases oiled linen
+cloth served to admit a feeble semblance of light, and to keep out the
+rain. The labourer's fire was in the middle of his house; he and his
+wife and children huddled round it, sometimes grovelling in the ashes;
+and going to bed meant flinging themselves down upon the straw which
+served them as mattress and feather bed, exactly as it does to the
+present day in the gipsy's tent in our byways. The labourer's only
+light by night was the smouldering fire. Why should he burn a rushlight
+when there was nothing to look at? and reading was an accomplishment
+which few labouring men were masters of.
+
+As to the food of the majority, it was of the coarsest. The fathers of
+many a man and woman in every village in Norfolk can remember the time
+when the labourer looked upon wheat-bread as a rare delicacy; and those
+legacies which were left by kindly people a century or two ago,
+providing for the weekly distribution of so many _white_ loaves to the
+poor, tell us of a time when the poor man's loaf was as dark as mud,
+and as tough as his shoe-leather. In the winter-time things went very
+hard indeed with all classes. There was no lack of fuel, for the brakes
+and waste afforded turf which all might cut, and kindling which all had
+a right to carry away; but the poor horses and sheep and cattle were
+half starved for at least four months in the year, and one and all were
+much smaller than they are now. I doubt whether people ever fatted
+their hogs as we do. When the corn was reaped, the swine were turned
+into the stubble and roamed about the underwood; and when they had
+increased their weight by the feast of roots and mast and acorns, they
+were slaughtered and salted for the winter fare, only so many being
+kept alive as might not prove burdensome to the scanty resources of the
+people. Salting down the animals for the winter consumption was a very
+serious expense. All the salt used was produced by evaporation in
+_pans_ near the seaside, and a couple of bushels of salt often cost as
+much as a sheep. This must have compelled the people to spare the salt
+as much as possible, and it must have been only too common to find the
+bacon more than rancid, and the ham alive again with maggots. If the
+salt was dear and scarce, sugar was unknown except to the very rich.
+The poor man had little to sweeten his lot. The bees gave him honey;
+and long after the time I am dealing with people left not only their
+hives to their children by will, but actually bequeathed a summer
+flight of bees to their friends; while the hive was claimed by one, the
+next swarm might become the property of another.
+
+As for the drink, it was almost exclusively water, beer, and cider.
+[Footnote: On a court roll of the manor of Whissonsete, of the date
+July 22, 1355, I find William Wate fined "iiij botell cideri quia fecit
+dampnum in bladis domini."] Any one who pleased might brew beer without
+tax or license, and everybody who was at all before the world did brew
+his own beer according to his own taste. But in those days the beer was
+very different stuff from that which you are familiar with. To begin
+with, people did not use hops. Hops were not put into beer till long
+after the time we are concerned with. I dare say they flavoured their
+beer with horehound and other herbs, but they did not understand those
+tricks which brewers are said to practise now-a-days for making the
+beer "heady" and sticky and poisonous. I am not prepared to say the
+beer was better, or that you would have liked it; but I am pretty sure
+that in those days it was easier to get pure beer in a country village
+than it is now, and if a man chose to drink bad beer he had only
+himself to thank for it. There was no such monopoly as there is now. I
+am inclined to think that there were a very great many more people who
+sold beer in the country parishes than sell it now, and I am sorry to
+say that the beer-sellers in those days had the reputation of being
+rather a bad lot. [Footnote: The presentments of the beer-sellers seem
+to point to the existence of something like a licensing system among
+the lords of manors. I know not how otherwise to explain the frequency
+of the fines laid upon the whole class. Thus in a court-leet of the
+manor of Hockham, held the 20th of October, 1377, no less than fourteen
+women were fined in the aggregate 30s. 8d., who being _brassatores
+vendidere servisiam_ (sic) _contra assisam_, one of these brewsters was
+fined as much as four shillings.
+
+The earliest attempt to introduce uniformity in the measures of ale,
+&c., is the assize of Richard I., bearing date the 20th of November,
+1197. It is to be found in "Walter of Coventry," vol. ii. p. 114 (Rolls
+Series). On the importance of this document see Stubbs' "Const. Hist.,"
+vol. i. pp. 509, 573. On the _tasters_ of bread and ale cf. "Dep.
+Keeper's 43rd Report," p. 207.] It is quite certain that they were very
+often in trouble, and of all the offences punished by fine at the manor
+courts none is more common than that of selling beer in false measures.
+
+The method of cheating their customers by the beer-sellers was, we are
+told, exactly the contrary plan followed by our modern publicans. Now,
+when a man gets into a warm corner at the pot-house, they tell me that
+John Barleycorn is apt to serve out more drink than is good for him;
+but six hundred years ago the beer-seller made his profit, or tried to
+make it, by giving his customer less than he asked for. Tobacco was
+quite unknown; it was first brought into England about three hundred
+years after the days we are dealing with. When a man once sat himself
+down with his pot he had nothing to do but drink. He had no pipe to
+take off his attention from his liquor. If such a portentous sight
+could have been seen in those days as that of a man vomiting forth
+clouds of smoke from his mouth and nostrils, the beholders would have
+undoubtedly taken to their heels and run for their lives, protesting
+that the devil himself had appeared to them, breathing forth fire and
+flames. Tea and coffee, too, were absolutely unknown, unheard of; and
+wine was the rich man's beverage, as it is now. The fire-waters of our
+own time--the gin and the rum, which have wrought us all such
+incalculable mischief--were not discovered then. Some little ardent
+spirits, known under the name of _cordials_, were to be found in the
+better appointed establishments, and were kept by the lady of the house
+among her simples, and on special occasions dealt out in thimblefuls;
+but the vile grog, that maddens people now, our forefathers of six
+hundred years ago had never even tasted.
+
+The absence of vegetable food for the greater part of the year, the
+personal dirt of the people, the sleeping at night in the clothes worn
+in the day, and other causes, made skin diseases frightfully common. At
+the outskirts of every town in England of any size there were crawling
+about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores, living heaven
+knows how. They were called by the common name of lepers, and probably
+the leprosy strictly so called was awfully common. But the children
+must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch, and the scurvy, and the
+ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must have played fearful havoc
+with the weak and sickly.
+
+As for the dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress at all. I
+doubt whether the great mass of the labourers in Norfolk had more than
+a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, with
+a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a man's knife was
+stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread, sometimes for stabbing
+an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton goods, such as are familiar to
+you all, they had never been dreamt of, and I suspect that no more
+people in Norfolk wore linen habitually than now wear silk.
+
+Money was almost inconceivably scarce. The labourer's wages were paid
+partly in rations of food, partly in other allowances, and only partly
+in money; he had to take what he could get. Even the quit-rent, or what
+I have called the ground rent, was frequently compounded for by the
+tenant being required to find a pair of gloves, or a pound of cummin,
+or some other acknowledgment in lieu of a money payment; and one
+instance occurs among the Rougham charters of a man buying as much as
+11-1/2 acres, and paying for them partly in money and partly in barley.
+[Footnote: In the year 1276 halfpence and farthings were coined for the
+first time. This must have been a great boon to the poorer classes, and
+it evidently was felt to be a matter of great importance, insomuch that
+it was said to be the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy by the great
+seer Merlin, who had once foretold in mysterious language, that "there
+shall be half of the round." In the next century it appears that the
+want of small change had again made itself felt: for in the 2nd Richard
+II. we find the Commons setting forth in a petition to the King, that
+"_...les ditz coes n'on petit monoye pur paier pur les petites_ mesures
+a grant damage des dites coes," and they beg "Le plese a dit Sr. le Roi
+et a son sage conseil de faire ordeiner Mayles et farthinges pur paier
+pur les petites mesures... et en eovre de charitee...."--Rolls of
+Parl., vol. iii. p. 65.] Nothing shows more plainly the scarcity of
+money than the enormous interest that was paid for a loan. The only
+bankers were the Jews; [Footnote: I am speaking of Norfolk and Suffolk,
+where the Jews, as far as I have seen, had it all their own way.] and
+when a man was once in their hands he was never likely to get out of
+their clutches again. But six hundred years ago the Jews had almost
+come to the end of their tether; and in the year 1290 they were driven
+out of the country, men, women, and children, with unutterable
+barbarity, only to be replaced by other bloodsuckers who were not a
+whit less mercenary, perhaps, but only less pushing and successful in
+their usury.
+
+It is often said that the monasteries were the great supporters of the
+poor, and fed them in times of scarcity. It may be so, but I should
+like to see the evidence for the statement. At present I doubt the
+fact, at any rate as far as Norfolk goes. [Footnote: The returns of the
+number of poor people supported by the monasteries, which are to be
+found in the "Valor Ecclesiasticus," are somewhat startling. Certainly
+the monasteries did not return _less_ than they expended in alms. Note,
+too, the complaint of the St. Alban's men to Wat Tyler, who are said to
+have slandered the abbey "de retentione stipendiorum pauperum."
+Walsingham, i. 469.] On the contrary, I am strongly impressed with the
+belief that six hundred years ago the poor had no friends. The parsons
+were needy themselves. In too many cases one clergyman held two or
+three livings, took his tithes and spent them in the town, and left a
+chaplain with a bare subsistence to fill his place in the country.
+There was no parson's wife to drop in and speak a kind word--no
+clergyman's daughter to give a friendly nod, or teach the little ones
+at Sunday school--no softening influences, no sympathy, no kindliness.
+What could you expect of people with such dreary surroundings?--what
+but that which we know actually was the condition of affairs? The
+records of crime and outrage in Norfolk six hundred years ago are still
+preserved, and may be read by any one who knows how to decipher them. I
+had intended to examine carefully the entries of crime for this
+neighbourhood for the year 1286, and to give you the result this
+evening, but I have not had an opportunity of doing so. The work has
+been done for the hundred of North Erpingham by my friend Mr. Rye, and
+what is true for one part of Norfolk during any single year is not
+likely to be very different from what was going on in another.
+
+The picture we get of the utter lawlessness of the whole county,
+however, at the beginning of King Edward's reign is quite dreadful
+enough. Nobody seems to have resorted to the law to maintain a right or
+redress a wrong, till every other method had been tried. Starting with
+the squires, if I may use the term, and those well-to-do people who
+ought to have been among the most law-abiding members of the
+community--we find them setting an example of violence and rapacity,
+bad to read of. One of the most common causes of offence was when the
+lord of the manor attempted to invade the rights of the tenants of the
+manor by setting up a fold on the heath, or _Bruary_ as it was called.
+What the lord was inclined to do, that the tenants would try to do
+also, as when in 1272 John de Swanton set up a fold in the common
+fields at Billingford; whereupon the other tenants pulled it down, and
+there was a serious disturbance, and the matter dragged on in the law
+courts for four years and more. Or as when the Prior of Wymondham
+impleads William de Calthorp for interfering with his foldage at
+Burnham; Calthorp replying that the Prior had no right to foldage, and
+that he (Calthorp) had the right to pull the fold down. In these cases,
+of course, there would be a general gathering and a riot, for every
+one's interest was at stake; but it was not only when some general
+grievance was felt that people in those days were ready for a row.
+
+It really looks as if nothing was more easy than to collect a band of
+people who could be let loose anywhere to work any mischief. One man
+had a claim upon another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right
+which was denied--had the claim, or fancied he had--and he seems to
+have had no difficulty in getting together a score or two of roughs to
+back him in taking the law into his own hands. As when John de la Wade
+in 1270 persuaded a band of men to help him in invading the manor of
+Hamon de Clere, in this very parish of Tittleshall, seizing the corn
+and threshing it, and, more wonderful still, cutting down timber, and
+_carrying it off_. There are actually two other cases of a precisely
+similar kind recorded this same year, one where a gang of fellows in
+broad day seems to have looted the manors of Dunton and Mileham; the
+other case was where a mob, under the leadership of three men, who are
+named, entered by force into the manor of Dunham, laid hands on a
+quantity of timber fit for building purposes, and took it away bodily!
+A much more serious case, however, occurred some years after this when
+two gentlemen of position in Norfolk, with twenty-five followers, who
+appear to have been their regular retainers, and a great multitude on
+foot and horse, came to Little Barningham, where in the Hall there
+lived an old lady, Petronilla de Gros; they set fire to the house in
+five places, dragged out the old lady, treated her with the most brutal
+violence, and so worked upon her fears that they compelled her to tell
+them where her money and jewels were, and, having seized them, I
+conclude that they left her to warm herself at the smouldering ruins of
+her mansion.
+
+On another occasion there was a fierce riot at Rainham. There the manor
+had become divided into three portions, as we have seen was the case at
+Rougham. One Thomas de Hauville had one portion, and Thomas de
+Ingoldesthorp and Robert de Scales held the other two portions. Thomas
+de Hauville, peradventure, felt aggrieved because some rogue had not
+been whipped or tortured cruelly enough to suit his notions of salutary
+justice, whereupon he went to the expense of erecting a brand new
+pillory, and apparently a gallows too, to strike terror into the minds
+of the disorderly. The other parceners of the manor were indignant at
+the act, and collecting nearly sixty of the people of Rainham, they
+pulled down the new pillory and utterly destroyed the same. When the
+case came before the judges, the defendants pleaded in effect that if
+Thomas de Hauville had put up his pillory on his own domain they would
+have had no objection, but that he had invaded their rights in setting
+up his gallows without their permission.
+
+If the gentry, and they who ought to have known better, set such an
+example, and gave their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only
+natural that the lower orders should be quick to take their pattern by
+their superiors, and should be only too ready to break and defy the
+law. And so it is clear enough that they were. In a single year, the
+year 1285, in the hundred of North Erpingham, containing thirty-two
+parishes, the catalogue of crime is so ghastly as positively to stagger
+one. Without taking any account of what in those days must have been
+looked upon as quite minor offences--such as simple theft,
+sheep-stealing, fraud, extortion, or harbouring felons--there were
+eleven men and five women put upon their trial for burglary, eight men
+and four women were murdered; there were five fatal fights, three men
+and two women being killed in the frays; and, saddest of all, there
+were five cases of suicide, among them two women, one of whom hanged
+herself, the other cut her throat with a razor. We have in the roll
+recording these horrors very minute particulars of the several cases,
+and we know too that, not many months before the roll was drawn up, at
+least eleven desperate wretches had been hanged for various offences,
+and one had been torn to pieces by horses for the crime of debasing the
+king's coin. It is impossible for us to realize the hideous ferocity of
+such a state of society as this; the women were as bad as the men,
+furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without
+shame, without remorse; and finding life so cheerless, so hopeless, so
+very very dark and miserable, that when there was nothing to be gained
+by killing any one else they killed themselves.
+
+     Anywhere, anywhere out of the world!
+
+Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will do
+well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures butchered
+in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten miles from your
+own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple of lonely women,
+apparently living together in their poverty, gashed and battered in the
+dead of the night, and left in their blood, stripped of their little
+all. The motive, too, for all this horrible housebreaking and
+bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of bacon, and the
+shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a hovel, being too
+paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never dreaming of making
+resistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came to slay rather than to
+steal.
+
+Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on; and,
+before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the
+village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer
+were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was
+not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former
+class, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all had
+some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two that
+he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then there were
+no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one in Rougham
+who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we now
+understand by tenant farmers were a class that had not yet come into
+existence. Where a landlord was non-resident he farmed his estate by a
+bailiff, and if any one wanted to give up an occupation for a time he
+let it with all that it contained. Thus, when Alice the divorced made
+up her mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham--perhaps on a
+pilgrimage--perhaps to Rome--who knows?--she let her house and land,
+and all that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her sister Juliana
+for three years. The inventory included not only the sheep and cattle,
+but the very hoes and pitchforks, and sacks; and everything, to the
+minutest particular, was to be returned without damage at the end of
+the term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this lady, a lady of birth
+and some position, certainly did not have two hundred acres under her
+hands, and would have been a very small personage indeed, side by side
+with a dozen of our West Norfolk farmers today. The difference between
+the labourer and the farmer was, I think, less six hundred years ago
+than it is now. Men climbed up the ladder by steps that were more
+gently graduated; there was no great gulf fixed between the employer
+and the employed.
+
+I can tell you nothing of the amusements of the people in those days. I
+doubt whether they had any more amusement than the swine or the cows
+had. Looking after the fowls or the geese, hunting for the hen's nest
+in the furze brake, and digging out a fox or a badger, gave them an
+hour's excitement or interest now and again. Now and then a wandering
+minstrel came by, playing upon his rude instrument, and now and then
+somebody would come out from Lynn, or Yarmouth, or Norwich, with some
+new batch of songs for the most part scurrilous and coarse, and
+listened to much less for the sake of the music than for the words. Nor
+were books so rare as has been asserted. There were even story-books in
+some houses, as where John Senekworth, bailiff for Merton College, at
+Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire, possessed, when he died in 1314, three
+books of romance; but then he was a thriving yeoman with carpets in his
+house, or hangings for the walls. [Footnote: Rogers' "Hist, of Prices"
+vol. i. p. 124.]
+
+There was a great deal more coming and going in the country villages
+than there is now, a great deal more to talk about, a great deal more
+doing. The courts of the manor were held periodically, and the free
+tenants were bound to attend and carry on a large amount of petty
+business. Then there were the periodical visitations by the Archdeacon
+and the Rural Dean, and now and then more august personages might be
+seen with a host of mounted followers riding along the roads. The
+Bishop of Norwich was always on the move when he was in his diocese;
+his most favourite places of residence were North Elmham and Gaywood;
+at both of these places he had a palace and a park; that meant that
+there were deer there and hunting, and all the good and evil that seems
+to be inseparable from haunches of vension. Nay, at intervals, even the
+Archbishop of Canterbury himself, the second man in the kingdom, came
+down to hold a visitation in Norfolk, and, exactly 602 years ago the
+great Archbishop Peckham spent some time in the county, and though I do
+not think he came near Rougham or Tittleshall, I think it not
+improbable that his coming may have had some influence in bringing
+about the separation between Peter Romayn and Matilda de Cringleford,
+and the divorce of poor Alice from John of Thyrsford.
+
+That year, 1280, or just 602 years ago, when Archbishop Peckham paid
+his visit to Norfolk, was a very disastrous year for the farmers. It
+was the beginning of a succession of bad seasons and floods even worse
+than any that we have known. The rain began on the 1st of August, and
+we are told that it continued to fall for twenty-four hours, and then
+came a mighty wind such as men had never known the like of; the waters
+were out, and there was a great flood, and houses and windmills and
+bridges were swept away. Nay, we hear of a sad loss of life, and many
+poor people were drowned, and many lost their all; flocks, and herds,
+and corn and hay being whelmed in the deluge. In November there was a
+frightful tempest, the lightning doing extensive damage; and just at
+Christmas-time the frost set in with such severity as no man had known
+before. The river Thames was frozen over above London Bridge, so that
+men crossed it with horses and carts, and when the frost broke up on
+the 2nd of February there was such an enormous accumulation of ice and
+snow that five of the arches of London Bridge blew up, and all over the
+country the same destruction of bridges was heard of.
+
+Next year and the year after that, things went very badly with your
+forefathers, and one of the saddest stories that we get from a Norfolk
+chronicler who was alive at the time is one in which he tells us that,
+owing to the continuous rain during these three years, there was an
+utter failure in garden produce, as well as of the people's hope of
+harvest. The bad seasons seem to have gone on for six or seven years;
+but by far the worst calamity which Norfolk ever knew was the awful
+flood of 1287, when by an incursion of the sea a large district was
+laid under water, and hundreds of unfortunate creatures were drowned in
+the dead of the night, without warning. Here, on the higher level,
+people were comparatively out of harm's way, but it is impossible to
+imagine the distress and agony that there must have been in other parts
+of the county not twenty miles from where we are this evening.
+
+After that dreadful year I think there was a change for the better, but
+it must have been a long time before the county recovered from the
+"agricultural distress;" and I strongly suspect that the cruel and
+wicked persecution of the Jews, and the cancelling of all debts due to
+them by the landlords and the farmers, was in some measure owing to the
+general bankruptcy which the succession of bad seasons had brought
+about. Men found themselves hopelessly insolvent, and there was no
+other way of cancelling their obligations than by getting rid of their
+creditors. So when the king announced that all the Jews should be
+transported out of the realm, you may be sure that there were very few
+Christians who were sorry for them. There had been a time when the
+children of Israel had spoiled the Egyptians--was it not fitting that
+another time should have come when the children of Israel should
+themselves be spoiled?
+
+The year of the great flood was the frequent talk, of course, of all
+your forefathers who overlived it, and here in this neighbourhood it
+must have acquired an additional interest from the fact that Bishop
+Middleton died the year after it, and his brothers then parted with
+their Rougham property.
+
+Nor was this all, for Bishop Middleton's successor in the see of
+Norwich came from this immediate neighbourhood also. This was Ralph
+Walpole, son of the lord of the manor of Houghton, in which parish the
+bishop himself had inherited a few acres of land. In less than forty
+years no less than three bishops had been born within five miles of
+where we are this evening: Roger de Wesenham, [Footnote: The names of
+several members of the bishop's family occur in the Rougham Charters as
+attesting witnesses, and a Roger de Wesenham is found among them more
+than once.] who became Bishop of Lichfield in 1245; William Middleton,
+who had just died; and Ralph Walpole, who succeeded him. There must
+have been much stir in these parts when the news was known. The old
+people would tell how they had seen "young master Ralph" many a time
+when he was a boy scampering over Massingham Heath, or coming to pay
+his respects to the Archdeacon at the Lyng House, or talking of foreign
+parts with old James de Ferentino or Peter Romayn. Now he had grown to
+be a very big man indeed, and there were many eyes watching him on both
+sides of the water. He had a very difficult game to play during the
+eleven years he was Bishop of Norwich, for the king was dreadfully in
+need of money, and, being desperate, he resorted to outrageous methods
+of squeezing it from those whom he could frighten and force, and the
+time came at last when the bishops and the clergy had to put a bold
+face on and to resist the tyranny and lawless rapacity of the sovereign.
+
+And this reminds me that though archdeacons, and bishops, and even an
+archbishop, in those days might be and were very important and very
+powerful personages, they were all very small and insignificant in
+comparison with the great King Edward, the king who at this time was
+looked upon as one of the most mighty and magnificent kings in all the
+world. He, too, paid many a visit to Norfolk six hundred years ago. He
+kept his Christmas at Burgh in 1280, and in 1284 he came down with the
+good Queen Eleanor and spent the whole of Lent in the county; and next
+year, again, they were in your immediate neighbourhood, making a
+pilgrimage to Walsingham. A few years after this he seems to have spent
+a week or two within five miles of where we are; he came to Castle
+Acre, and there he stayed at the great priory whose ruins you all know
+well. There a very stirring interview took place between the king and
+Bishop Walpole, and a number of other bishops, and great persons who
+had come down as a deputation to expostulate with the king, and
+respectfully to protest against the way in which he was robbing his
+subjects, and especially the clergy, whom he had been for years
+plundering in the most outrageous manner. The king gave the deputation
+no smooth words to carry away, but he sent them off with threatening
+frowns and insults and in hot anger. Some days after this he was at
+Massingham, and one of his letters has been preserved, dated from
+Massingham, 30th of January, 1296, so that it is almost certain the
+great king passed one night there at least. It is a little difficult to
+understand what the king was doing at Massingham, for there was no
+great man living there, and no great mansion. Sometimes I have thought
+that the king rode out from Castle Acre to see what state the Walpoles
+of those times were keeping up at Houghton. Had not that audacious
+Bishop Walpole dared to speak plainly to his Grace the week before? But
+the more probable explanation is that the king went to Massingham to
+visit a small religious house or monastery which had been recently
+founded there. I suspect it had already got into debt and was in
+difficulties, and it is possible that the king's visit was made in the
+interest of the foundation. At any rate, there the king stayed; but
+though he was in Norfolk more than once after this, he never was so
+near you again, and that visit was one which your forefathers were sure
+to talk about to the end of their lives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And these were the days of old. But now that we have looked back upon
+them as they appear through the mists of centuries, the distance
+distorting some things, obscuring others, but leaving upon us, on the
+whole, an impression that, after all, these men and women of the past,
+whose circumstances were so different from our own, were perhaps not so
+very unlike what we should be if our surroundings were as theirs. Now
+that we have come to that conclusion, if indeed we have come to it, let
+me ask you all a question or two. Should we like to change with those
+forefathers of ours, whose lives were passed in this parish in the way
+I have attempted to describe, six hundred years ago? Were the former
+times better than these? Has the world grown worse as it has grown
+older? Has there been no progress, but only decline?
+
+My friends, the people who lived in this village six hundred years ago
+were living a life hugely below the level of yours. They were more
+wretched in their poverty, they were incomparably less prosperous in
+their prosperity, they were worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse
+taught, worse tended, worse governed; they were sufferers from
+loathsome diseases which you knew nothing of; the very beasts of the
+field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth, and I do not believe
+there were any giants in the earth in those days. The death-rate among
+the children must have been tremendous. The disregard of human life was
+so callous that we can hardly conceive it. There was everything to
+harden, nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and
+fierceness. Judged by our modern standards, the people of our county
+village were beyond all doubt coarser, more brutal, and more wicked,
+than they are. Progress is slow, but there has been progress. The days
+that are, are not what they should be; we still want reforms, we need
+much reforming ourselves; but the former days were not better than
+these, whatever these may be; and if the next six hundred years exhibit
+as decided an advance as the last six centuries have brought about, and
+if your children's children of the coming time rise as much above your
+level in sentiment, material comfort, knowledge, intelligence, and
+refinement, as you have risen above the level which your ancestors
+attained to, though even then they will not cease to desire better
+things, they will nevertheless have cause for thankfulness such as you
+may well feel to-night as you look back upon what you have escaped
+from, and reflect upon what you are.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+DAILY LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL MONASTERY.
+
+
+          "Now I think on't,
+     They should be good men; their affairs as righteous:
+     But all hoods make not monks."
+
+
+[The commemoration of the birth of Martin Luther, which people would
+have called his quater-centenary if they had not been deterred by the
+terrific appearance of so huge a word, was the occasion of many
+preachments and much lecturing, besides a great deal of heroic talk in
+public and private. With so much to encourage cynicism and persiflage
+among us it was comforting to find that the instinct of hero-worship is
+not quite dead, and that the story of a great man's life still stirs
+the heart. It was inevitable that, among the many utterances with which
+we were treated in the year 1883, many should be very foolish, and not
+a few mischievous and erroneous. Itinerant Windbags are rarely
+scrupulous about their facts, and the allusive style flavoured with
+stinging invective is far more telling than any historical narrative,
+however picturesque and eloquent it may be. Luther the Monk will always
+be a more attractive subject in the lecture hall than Luther the
+Theologian, and an audience prepared to be harrowed and shocked will
+greedily listen to broad hints about _abominations_-the word is a very
+favourite one--which the author could disclose, but mercifully
+withholds in pity for the shuddering hearts of a too sensitive
+assembly. The consequence was that an altogether disproportionate
+amount of declamation was wasted up and down the country by gentlemen
+on the stump, in girding at monks and nuns, their vices and crimes,
+till some men's minds were not a little exercised, and some, horrified
+by what they were told, asked in their perplexity, "Can these things
+be?" The present writer knows nothing of the condition of the German
+Religious Houses in the fifteenth or the sixteenth century, and not as
+much as he would wish to learn of the condition of the English houses
+during the same period, but he has been painfully convinced that the
+peripatetic orators are about as qualified to lecture upon the subject
+as he is to lecture on astronomy.
+
+It was while musing in my solitude upon the harm done by ignorant
+pretenders in sowing error broadcast in the waste places of the world
+that I received a call from one of the class, who came to beg my
+countenance for a lecture upon Luther the Monk and Monkery. He was a
+vociferous personage and prodigal of his words. He added to all his
+sins this one, that he did not know when to go. He had no tact, only
+talk. Irritated at last beyond endurance, my normal suavity forsook me,
+and I spoke with brutal plainness. Of course he was wroth, and pressed
+for an explanation. In a weak moment I yielded. "To begin with," said
+I, "Luther, strictly speaking, was not a monk at all!" [Footnote: He
+belonged to the order of Friars Eremite under the Augustinian Rule.] It
+was a foolish speech: first, because it made my friend an offender for
+a word; and, secondly, because there was more truth in it than the man
+was capable of understanding or was prepared to receive; but it had the
+effect of ridding me of a bore. As he took his leave he shot at me this
+Parthian shaft--"If you are above learning, sir," he said, "perhaps
+teaching might not be beneath you. Could you not, for instance, let the
+world know something about monks and monasteries some day? Even I,
+ignorant as you pronounce me, have heard of your lecturing on a
+thirteenth-century village. Why not try a thirteenth-century monastery
+next?" I politely thanked him for his valuable suggestion, and promised
+to give it my respectful attention. The following sketch is the outcome
+of our interview. "Facit indignatio versus."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be assumed as a fact which scarcely requires to be more than
+stated that there are few subjects which the great mass of Englishmen
+are so curiously ignorant of as the History of Monasticism, of the
+constitution of the various Orders, of the fortunes of any single
+religious house, or the discipline to which its members were, in theory
+at least, compelled to submit. The assumption being granted, it may
+naturally be asked, How is such ignorance to be accounted for? It is
+due to more causes than one, but chiefly and primarily to the vastness
+of the subject itself.
+
+When the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII. there was an utter
+obliteration of an order of things which had existed in our island for
+certainly more than a thousand years, and how much longer it is
+impossible to say. The names of religious houses which are known to
+have existed before the Norman Conquest count by hundreds; the names of
+men and women who presided over such houses during the centuries
+preceding that event count by thousands. Some of these religious houses
+had passed through the strangest vicissitudes; they had been pillaged
+again and again; they had been burnt by Danish marauders; their inmates
+driven out into the wilderness or ruthlessly put to the sword; their
+lands given over to the spoiler or gone out of cultivation; their very
+existence in some cases almost forgotten; yet they had revived again
+and again from their ashes. When William the Conqueror came among us,
+and that stern rule of his began, there was scarcely a county in
+England and Wales in which one or more religious houses were not to be
+found, and during his reign of twenty-one years about thirty new
+monasteries of one sort or another were added to those already existing.
+
+To begin with, the very word monastery is a misnomer: the word is a
+Greek word, and means the dwelling-place of a solitary person, living
+in seclusion. But, misnomer though it be, the employment of the word in
+a sense so widely different from that which it first bore, until it got
+to designate the dwelling-place of a corporate body, among whom no
+solitude was allowed and privacy was almost impossible, is of itself
+very significant as indicating the stages through which the original
+idea of monasticism passed.
+
+It was natural enough, when society was in a condition of profound
+disorganization, and sensuality and violence were in the ascendant,
+that men and women of gentle nature should become convinced that the
+higher life could only be lived in lonely retirement, far from the
+sound of human voices and the contact of human creatures, whose very
+nearness almost implies sin. But what a vast step from this to that
+other conviction which the developed form of monasticism expresses,
+when experience has convinced the devout searcher after God that no
+great work can be done in improving the world, or raising the tone of
+society, or in battling with our own weaknesses and vices, except by
+earnest, resolute, and disciplined co-operation. It is when we draw
+together that we are strong, and strongest when we are labouring
+shoulder to shoulder for some common object, and that no mean and
+sordid one; it is then that we best find deliverance from our
+self-deception and most inveterate delusions, whilst living in the
+light of other's eyes, and subjected to the influence and control of a
+healthy and well-instructed public opinion.
+
+In the thirteenth century (and I shall as much as possible confine
+myself to the limits of that period), a monastery meant what we now
+understand it to mean--viz., the abode of a society of men or women who
+lived together in common--who were supposed to partake of common meals;
+to sleep together in one common dormitory; to attend certain services
+together in their common church; to transact certain business or pursue
+certain employments in the sight and hearing of each other in the
+common cloister; and, when the end came, to be laid side by side in the
+common graveyard, where in theory none but members of the order could
+find a resting-place for their bones. When I say "societies of men and
+women" I am again reminded that the other term, "convent," has somehow
+got to be used commonly in a mistaken sense. People use the word as if
+it signified a religious house tenanted exclusively by women. The truth
+is that a convent is nothing more than a Latin name for an association
+of _persons_ who have _come together_ with a view to live for a common
+object and to submit to certain rules in the ordering of their daily
+lives. The monastery was the common dwelling-place: the convent was the
+society of persons inhabiting it; and the ordinary formula used when a
+body of monks or nuns execute any corporate act--such as buying or
+selling land--by any legal instrument is, "The Prior and Convent of the
+Monastery of the Holy Trinity at Norwich;" "the Abbot and Convent of
+the Monastery of St. Peter's, Westminster;" "the Abbess and Convent of
+the Monastery of St. Mary and St. Bernard at Lacock," and so on.
+
+Bearing in mind, then, that the term convent has to do with a
+corporation of men or women united into an organized society, and that
+the term monastery can strictly be applied only to the buildings--the
+_domus_, in which that society has its home--it will be well at
+starting that we should endeavour to gain some notion of the general
+plan of these buildings first, and when we have done that that we
+should proceed to deal next with the constitution of the society itself
+and the daily routine of conventual life.
+
+A monastery in theory then was, as it was called, a Religious House. It
+was supposed to be the home of people whose lives were passed in the
+worship of God, and in taking care of their own souls, and making
+themselves fit for a better world than this hereafter. As for this
+world, it was lying in wickedness; if men remained in this wicked world
+they would most certainly become contaminated by all its pollutions;
+the only chance of ever attaining to holiness lay in a man or woman's
+turning his back upon the world and running away from it. It was no
+part of a monk's duty to reform the world; all he had to do was to look
+after himself, and to save himself from the wrath to come. It is hardly
+overstating the case if I say that a monastery was not intended to be a
+benevolent institution; and if a great religious house became, as it
+almost inevitably did become, the centre of civilization and
+refinement, from which radiated light and warmth and incalculable
+blessings far and wide, these results flowed naturally from that growth
+and development which the original founders had never looked forward to
+or could have foreseen, but it was never contemplated as an end to be
+aimed at in the beginning. Being a home for religious men, whose main
+business was to spend their days and nights in worshipping God, the
+first requisite, the first and foremost, the _sine qua non_ was, that
+there should be a church.
+
+On the church of a monastery, as a rule, no amount of money spent, no
+amount of lavish ornament or splendour of decoration, was grudged.
+Sculpture and painting, jewels and gold, gorgeous hangings, and
+stained-glass that the moderns vainly attempt to imitate, the purple
+and fine linen of the priestly vestments, embroidery that to this hour
+remains unapproachable in its delicacy of finish and in the perfect
+harmony of colours--all these were to be found in almost incredible
+profusion in our monastic churches. You hear some people work
+themselves into a frenzy against the idolatrous worship of our
+forefathers; but to a monk of a great monastery his church was his one
+idol--to possess a church that should surpass all others in
+magnificence, and which could boast of some special unique glory--that
+seemed to a monk something worth living for. The holy rood at Bromholm,
+the holy thorn at Glastonbury, were possessions that brought world-wide
+renown to the monasteries in which they were found, and gave a lustre
+to the churches in which they were deposited; and the intense _esprit
+de corps_, the passionate loyalty, of a monk to his monastery is a
+sentiment which we in our time find it so extremely difficult to
+understand that we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that it could
+exist without some subtle intermixture of crafty selfishness as its
+ruling force and motive.
+
+The church of a monastery was the heart of the place. It was not that
+the church was built for the monastery, but the monastery existed for
+the church; there were hundreds and thousands of churches without
+monasteries, but there could be no monastery without a church. The
+monks were always at work on the church, always spending money upon it,
+always adding to it, always "restoring" it; it was always needing
+repair. We are in the habit of saying, "Those old monks knew how to
+build; look at their work--see how it stands!" But we are very much
+mistaken if we suppose that in the twelfth or the thirteenth or the
+fourteenth century there was no bad building. On the contrary, nothing
+is more common in the monastic annals than the notices of how this and
+that tower fell down, and how this and that choir was falling into
+ruins, and how this or that abbot got into debt by his mania for
+building. There was an everlasting tinkering going on at the church;
+and the surest token that a monastery was in a bad way was that its
+church was in a shabby condition.
+
+The church was, almost invariably, built in the form of a cross, facing
+east and west, the long limb of the cross being called the nave, the
+cross limbs being called the transepts, and the shorter limb, or head
+of the cross, being called the choir. The choir, as a rule, was
+occupied exclusively by the monks or nuns of the monastery. The
+servants, workpeople, and casual visitors who came to worship were not
+admitted into the choir; _they_ were supposed to be present only on
+sufferance. The church was built for the use of the monks; it was
+_their_ private place of worship.
+
+Almost as essential to the idea of a monastery as the church was the
+cloister or great quadrangle, inclosed on all sides by the high walls
+of the monastic buildings. Its usual position was on the south of the
+church, to gain as much of the sun's rays as possible, and to insure
+protection from the northerly and easterly winds in the bitter season.
+All round this quadrangle ran a covered arcade, whose roof, leaning
+against the high walls, was supported on the inner side by an open
+trellis work in stone--often exhibiting great beauty of design and
+workmanship--through which light and air was admitted into the arcade.
+[Footnote: In other words the thirteenth-century monk passed far the
+greater portion of his time in the open air, except that there was a
+roof over his head. As time went on, and monks became more
+self-indulgent, they did not by any means like the draughts and
+exposure in the cloister, and the old-fashioned open arcades were
+glazed, and the old open walks were turned into splendid lounges,
+comfortable and luxurious, such as the cloisters of Gloucester could be
+made into at a small outlay at the present day.] The open space not
+roofed in was called the _garth_, and was sometimes a plain grass plat
+and sometimes was planted with shrubs, a fountain of running water
+being often found in the centre, which afforded a pleasant object for
+the eye to rest on. The cloister was really the living-place of the
+monks. Here they pursued their daily avocations, here they taught their
+school, they transacted their business, they spent their time and
+pursued their studies, always in society, co-operating and consulting,
+and, as a rule, knowing no privacy.
+
+"But surely a monk always lived in a cell, didn't he?"
+
+The sooner we get rid of that delusion the better.
+
+Be it understood that until Henry II. founded the Carthusian Abbey of
+Witham, in 1178, there was no such thing known in England as a monk's
+_cell_, as we understand the term. It was a peculiarity of the
+Carthusian order, and when it was first introduced it was regarded as a
+startling novelty for any privacy or anything approaching solitude to
+be tolerated in a monastery. The Carthusian system never found much
+favour in England. The Carthusians never had more than nine houses, all
+told; the discipline was too rigid, the rule too severe, the loneliness
+too dreadful for our tastes and for our climate. In the thirteenth
+century, if I mistake not, there were only two monasteries in England
+in which monks or nuns could boast of having any privacy, any little
+corner of their own to turn into, any place where they could enjoy the
+luxury of retirement, any private study such as every boy nowadays, in
+a school of any pretension, expects to have provided for himself, and
+without which we assume that nobody can read and write for an hour.
+
+The cloister arcade was said to have four _walks_. The south walk ran
+along the south wall of the nave, the north walk was bounded by the
+refectory or great dining hall, the east walk extended along the south
+transept, and where the transept ended there usually came a narrow
+passage called _slype_, passing between the end of the transept and the
+chapter-house, which may be described as the council-chamber of the
+convent. Beyond the chapter-house, and abutting partly upon the east
+wall of the cloister, but extending far beyond it till, in some cases,
+it made with the refectory a block of buildings in the form of a T, ran
+the dormitory or common sleeping-place for the fraternity. The
+dormitory was always approached by steps, for it was invariably
+constructed over a range of vaulted chambers, which served for various
+purposes; one of these chambers was set apart for the reception of
+those monks who had been subjected to the monthly bleedings which all
+were supposed to require, and which all were compelled to submit to,
+that so by a mechanical process, if in no other way, the flesh might be
+subdued. The beds of the monks were arranged along the walls of the
+dormitory, at regular intervals; and in some monasteries a wainscot
+partition separated the sleepers from each other, thus making for each
+a little cubicle, with a low door leading into it. The broad passage,
+running from end to end, between the sleeping-places in the dormitory
+was strewn with rushes; and at the end opposite to the flight of stairs
+were the latrines or washing-places, which were open to the air, and
+under which was always a sewer that could be flushed by a water-course
+hard by.
+
+In the dormitory and the latrines lights were kept burning through the
+night; a provision necessary, if for no other reason, because the
+services in the church at night-time had to be kept up and attended by
+the whole house. They who went from the dormitory to the church always
+passed under cover--sometimes by going through the cloister, sometimes
+by passing straight into the transept.
+
+We have been round three sides of the cloister: on the north the
+church; on the east the chapterhouse and dormitory; on the south the
+refectory. There remain the buildings abutting on the west wall. In the
+arrangement of these no strict rule was observed. But generally the
+western buildings were dedicated to the cellarer's hall with cellars
+under it, the pitanciar's and kitchener's offices or _chequers_ as they
+were called, and a guest-chamber for the reception of distinguished
+strangers and for the duties of hospitality, to which great importance
+was attached.
+
+These were the main buildings, the essential buildings of a monastery
+great or small. Where a monastery was rich enough to indulge in
+luxuries of "modern improvements and all the best appliances," there
+was hardly any limit to the architectural freaks that might be indulged
+in. There were the infirmary and the hospital; the calefactory or
+warming apparatus, the recreation hall and the winter hall, the
+locutorium and the common hall, and I know not what besides. You
+observe I have as yet said nothing about the library. I must remind you
+that in the thirteenth century the number of books in the world was, to
+say the least, small. A library of five hundred volumes would, in those
+days, have been considered an important collection, and, after making
+all due allowances for ridiculous exaggeration which have been made by
+ill-informed writers on the subject, it may safely be said that nobody
+in the thirteenth century--at any rate in England--would have erected a
+large and lofty building as a receptacle for books, simply because
+nobody could have contemplated the possibility of filling it. Here and
+there amongst the larger and more important monasteries there were
+undoubtedly collections of books, the custody of which was intrusted to
+an accredited officer; but the time had not yet come for making
+libraries well stored with such priceless treasures as Leland, the
+antiquary, saw at Glastonbury, just before that magnificent foundation
+was given as a prey to the spoilers. A library, in any such sense as we
+now understand the term, was not only no essential part of a monastery
+in those days, but it may be said to have been a rarity.
+
+But if the thirteenth century monastery possessed necessarily no great
+Reading-Room, the Scriptorium, or Writing-Room, was almost an essential
+adjunct. In the absence of the printing-press, the demand for skilled
+writers and copyists throughout the country was enormous. In the
+Scriptorium all the business, now transacted by half a dozen agents and
+their clerks, was carried on. The land of the country in those days was
+subdivided to an extent that it is now almost impossible for us to
+realize, and the tenure under which the small patches of arable or
+meadow-land were held was sometimes very complex and intricate. The
+small patches were perpetually changing hands, being bought or sold,
+settled upon trustees, or let out for a term of years, and every
+transaction would be registered in the books of the monastery
+interested, while the number of conveyances, leases, and enfeofments
+made out in the course of the year was incalculable. In such an abbey
+as that of Bury St. Edmunds a small army of writers must have been
+constantly employed in the business department of the Scriptorium
+alone. Obviously it became a great writing-school, where the copyists
+consciously or unconsciously wrote according to the prevailing fashion
+of the place; and there have been, and there are, experts who could
+tell you whether this or that document was or was not written in this
+or that monastic Scriptorium. Paper was very little used, and the
+vellum and parchment required constituted a heavy item of expense. Add
+to this the production of school-books and all materials used for
+carrying on the education work, the constant replacement of _church_
+service books which the perpetual thumbing and fingering would subject
+to immense wear and tear, the great demand for music which, however
+simple, required to be written out large and conspicuous in order to be
+read with ease, and you get a rather serious list of the charges upon
+the stationery department of a great abbey.
+
+But though by far the greater portion of work done in the Scriptorium
+was mere office work, the educational department, if I may so term it,
+being subsidiary, it must not be forgotten that the literary and the
+historical department also was represented in the Scriptorium of every
+great monastery. In the thirteenth century men never kept diaries or
+journals of their own daily lives, but monasteries did. In theory,
+every religious house recorded its own annals, or kept a chronicle of
+great events that were happening in Church and State. Where a monastery
+had kept its chronicle going for a long time, it got to be regarded
+almost as a sacred book, and was treated with great veneration: it lay
+in a conspicuous place in the Scriptorium, and was under the care of an
+officer who alone was permitted to make entries in it. When any great
+piece of news was brought to the monastery that seemed worth putting on
+record, the person giving the information wrote out his version of the
+story on a loose piece of parchment, and slipped his communication into
+the book of annals for the authorized compiler to make use of in any
+way that seemed best to him, after due examination of evidence. This
+was the rule in all monastic houses. Unfortunately, however, as it is
+with the journals or diaries of men and women of the nineteenth
+century, so it was with the journals and diaries of monks of the
+thirteenth, they evidently were kept by fits and starts; and before the
+fourteenth century was half out, the practice of keeping up these
+diaries in all but the larger monasteries had come to an end.
+
+Before passing on from the Library and Scriptorium, on which a great
+deal more might easily be said, it is necessary that one caution should
+be given; I know not how that notion originated or how it has taken
+such hold of the minds of ninety-nine men out of a hundred, that the
+monks as a class were students or scholars or men of learning; as far
+as the English monasteries of the thirteenth century are concerned, I
+am sure that the notion is altogether erroneous. If we except some few
+of the larger and nobler monasteries, which from first to last seem
+always to have been centres of culture, enlightenment, and progress,
+the monks were no more learned than the nuns. As a class, students,
+scholars, and teachers they were not. When King John died, in 1216, a
+little learning went a long way, and whatever the Norman Conquest did
+for England (and it did a great deal), it certainly was not an event
+calculated to increase the love of study, or likely to make men bookish
+pundits.
+
+I should only confuse my readers if I dwelt more at length upon the
+buildings of a monastery. It is enough for the present that we should
+understand clearly that the essential buildings were (1) the church,
+(2) the cloister, (3) the dormitory, (4) the refectory, (5) the
+chapter-house. In these five buildings the life of the convent was
+carried on. Having said thus much we will pass on to the corporation
+itself--that which strictly was called the convent; and for convenience
+and distinctness it will be as well if we use that word _convent_ in
+the more accurate sense and employ it only as signifying the corporate
+body of persons occupying those buildings of which I have been
+speaking, and which in their aggregate were called a _monastery_.
+
+Once more I think it necessary to start with a caution. Not only do I
+propose to take no account here of that large class of conventuals
+which comprehended the mendicant order or friars as they are called,
+but I must needs pass by with little or no notice the various orders of
+regular canons-_i.e._, canons living under a rule. The friars came into
+England first in 1220. During the thirteenth century they were, so to
+speak, upon their trial; and from the first the monks and the friars
+were essentially opposed in the ideal of their daily lives. So with the
+very numerous houses of canons regular up and down the land. They and
+the monks did not love one another, and when I speak of monks and their
+houses it will be advisable to exclude from our consideration the
+friars on the one hand and the canons on the other, and, in fact, to
+limit ourselves to that view of conventual life which the great English
+monasteries under the rule of St. Benedict afford.
+
+At the time of the Norman Conquest it may be said that all English
+monks were professedly under one and the same Rule--the famous
+Benedictine Rule. The Rule of a monastery was the constitution or code
+of laws, which regulated the discipline of the house, and the Rule of
+St. Benedict dates back as far as the sixth century, though it was not
+introduced into England for more than a hundred years after it had been
+adopted elsewhere. Four hundred years is a very long time for any
+constitution or code of law to last unchanged, and though the English
+monasteries professedly were living according to the Benedictine Rule
+during all the Saxon and the Danish times, yet there is too much reason
+to believe that if St. Benedict could have risen from the dead in the
+days of Edward the Confessor and made a visitation of many an English
+house, he would have been rather astonished to be told that the monks
+were living according to his Rule.
+
+About one hundred and fifty years before the Conquest, a great
+reformation had been attempted of the French monasteries, which it was
+said had fallen into a state of great decay as far as discipline and
+fervour were concerned, and a revision of the old rule had been found
+necessary, the reformers breaking away from the old Benedictines and
+subjecting themselves to a new and improved Rule. These first reformers
+were called _Cluniac_ monks, from the great Abbey of Clugni, in
+Burgundy, in which the new order of things had begun. The first English
+house of reformed or Cluniac monks was founded at Lewes, in Sussex,
+eleven years after the Conquest, by Gundrada, a step-daughter of
+William the Conqueror, and her husband, William, Earl of Warrene and
+Surrey. The Cluniacs were at first famous for the simplicity of their
+lives and the strictness of their discipline, but as time went on they
+became too rich and so too luxurious, and at last they too needed
+reforming, and a new reformer arose. In this case the real moving
+spirit of reformation was an Englishman, one Stephen Harding, probably
+a Dorsetshire man, who was brought up at the Benedictine monastery of
+Sherborne, and in the course of events chosen Abbot of the monastery of
+Citeaux, where St. Bernard became his ardent disciple, and where the
+two enthusiasts, working cordially together, brought about that second
+reform of the Benedictines which resulted in the founding of the great
+Cistercian order.
+
+Thus, without looking too minutely into the matter, we find that when
+the thirteenth century opens, or if you will, when Henry III. came to
+the throne in 1216, there were three great orders of monks in
+England--the old Benedictines, who had held houses and lands for
+centuries; the Cluniacs, who were the reformed Benedictines; and the
+Cistercians, who may be styled the reformed Cluniacs. But inasmuch as
+the architectural and other reforms among the Cistercians were many and
+peculiar, it will again be advisable to pass by these peculiarities
+without remark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The constitution of every convent, great or small, was monarchical. The
+head of the house was almost an absolute sovereign, and was called the
+Abbot. His dominions often extended, even in England, over a very wide
+tract of country, and sometimes over several minor monasteries which
+were called Cells. Thus the Abbot of St. Alban's had under himself the
+cell of Tynemouth in Northumberland and two others in Norfolk-_viz._,
+Binham and Wymondham, the latter of which eventually became an
+independent abbey--and the heads of these cells or subject houses were
+called Priors. An _abbey_ was a monastery which was independent. A
+priory was a monastery which in theory or in fact was subject to an
+abbey. All the Cluniac monasteries in England were thus said to be
+alien priories, because they were mere cells of the great Abbey of
+Clugni in France, to which each priory paid heavy tribute; while the
+priors were almost always foreigners, and always appointed by the Abbot
+of Clugni, and responsible to him much in the same way as a Pacha is to
+his suzerain the Sultan. On the other hand, the Cistercian houses were
+all abbeys, and their abbots sovereigns in alliance or confederation
+with one another, and exercising over their several convents supreme
+jurisdiction, though recognizing the Abbot of Citeaux as their
+over-lord. The abbot not only had a separate residence within the
+monastery and lived apart from his monks, but he had his separate
+estate for the maintenance of his dignity, and to bear the very heavy
+expenses which that dignity necessitated, and he had the patronage of
+every office in the convent. These officers were numerous. The first of
+them was the prior, who was the abbot's prime minister and head of the
+executive and the abbot's representative in his absence. Under him was
+the sub-prior, sometimes a third prior, and then a number of
+functionaries, to whom, as in the case of the abbot, separate estates
+were assigned out of which they were bound to provide for certain
+charges which they were called upon to meet as best they could, while a
+complicated system of finance provided for the surplus of one office
+being applied when necessary for the deficiency of another.
+
+In the great Abbey of Evesham a very elaborate constitution was drawn
+up and agreed to in the year 1214, after a long dispute between the
+abbot and convent which had lasted for several years, and this scheme
+has come down to us.
+
+From it we find that certain officers (obedientiaries was their
+technical name) were charged with providing certain articles out of the
+revenue of the office. The prior, to whom no mean share of the revenues
+was assigned, had to provide the parchment that might be required for
+business purposes or for legal instruments and all other materials for
+the scriptorium, except ink. The manciple was to pro-vide all wine and
+mead, the keeping up the stock of earthenware cups, jugs, basins, and
+other vessels, together with the lamps and oil. The precentor had to
+find all the ink used, and all colour required for illumination, the
+materials for book-binding, and the keeping the organ in repair. To the
+chamberlain were assigned certain revenues for providing all the
+clothing of the monks, it being stipulated that the abbot's dress was
+not to be paid for out of the fund. In the same way certain small
+tithes are apportioned for buying basins, jugs, and towels for the
+guests' chamber; while all rents levied from the various tenants paid
+not in money, but in kind--as, _e.g_., capons, eggs, salmon, eels,
+herrings, &c.--were to be passed to the account of the kitchener. Every
+monk bearing office was bound to present his accounts for audit at
+regular intervals, and the rolls on which these accounts were inscribed
+exist in very large numbers, and may still be consulted by those who
+are able to read them.
+
+It looks as if it were the policy of the Benedictines to give as many
+monks as possible some special duty and responsibility--to give each,
+in fact, a personal interest in the prosperity of the house to which he
+belonged--and the vacancies occurring from time to time in the various
+offices gave everybody something to look forward to. There was room for
+ambition, and, I am bound to add, room for a good deal of petty
+scheming, on the one hand, and truckling to the abbot, on the other;
+but it all went towards relieving the monotony of the life in the
+cloister--a monotony which has been very much over-stated by those who
+have never studied the subject. To begin with, it does not follow that
+what would be very dull to us would be dull and insipid to the men of
+the thirteenth century. Before a man offered himself for admission to a
+monastery, he must have had a taste for a quiet life, and in many
+instances he had grown tired of the bustle, the struggle, and all the
+anxious wear of the work-day world. He wanted to be rid of _bothers_,
+in fact; he was pretty sure to have had a fair education, and he was
+presumably a religious man, with a taste for religious exercises;
+sometimes, and not unfrequently, he was a disappointed man, who had
+been left wifeless and childless; sometimes, too, he was one whose
+career had been cut short suddenly by some accident which incapacitated
+him for active exertion and made him long only for repose and
+obscurity. Moreover, in those distant times the instinct of devotion
+was incomparably stronger than it is now, and people found a real and
+intense delight in the services of the sanctuary, to say nothing of
+their entire belief in the spiritual advantages to be derived from
+taking part in those services. Add to this that a monk had to pass
+through rather a long training before he was regularly admitted to full
+membership. He had to submit to a term of probation, during which he
+was subject to a somewhat rigorous ordeal.
+
+A novice had the pride taken out of him in a very effectual way during
+his novitiate--he was pretty much in the position of a _fag_ at a great
+school nowadays, and by the time that he had passed through his
+novitiate he was usually very well broken in, and in harmony with the
+spirit of the place in which he found himself. It was something to have
+a higher place assigned him at last in the church and the dormitory, to
+have some petty office given him, and to have a chance of being
+promoted by and by. There was Brother So-and-so, who was getting
+infirm, and he could not do the pitanciar's work much longer; the
+precentor was getting as hoarse as a raven, and the sacrist was gouty,
+or the cellarer was showing signs of breaking up. Nay, the prior's
+cough gave unmistakable signs of his lungs being wrong, and if he
+_were_ to drop off, which we should of course all of us deplore--there
+would be a general move up, it might be; unless, indeed, Father Abbot
+should promote his chaplain over the heads of all of us--for such
+things have been!
+
+But, when we come to look a little closer, we find that the monotony of
+monastic life was almost confined to the frequent services in the
+church. There were six services every day, of one kind or another, at
+which the whole convent was supposed to be present, and one service at
+midnight. [Footnote: Peckham's Register, ii, Preface, p. lxviii, et
+seq.] The lay brethren among the Cistercians, and the servants engaged
+in field labour, were excused attendance at the nocturnal service, and
+those officials of the convent whose business required them to be
+absent from the precincts were also excused. Indeed, it would have been
+simply impossible for the whole brotherhood to assemble at all these
+services; there would have been a dead-lock in twenty-four hours if the
+attempt had ever been made in any of the large monasteries, where the
+inmates sometimes counted by hundreds, who all expected their meals
+punctually, and for whom even the simplest cookery necessitated that
+fires should be kept up, the porridge boiled, the beer drawn, and the
+bread baked. Hence, they whose hands were full and their engagements
+many really had no time to put in an appearance at church seven times
+in twenty-four hours. While, on the other hand, the monk out of office,
+with nothing particular to do, was all the better for having his time
+broken up; going to church kept him out of mischief, and singing of
+psalms saved him from idle talk, and if it did him no good certainly
+did him very little harm.
+
+The ordinary life of the monastery began at six o'clock in the morning,
+and when the small bell, called the skilla, rang, all rose, washed
+themselves at the latrines, put on their day habit, and then presented
+themselves at the matin Mass. _Mixtum_ or breakfast, followed, and that
+over the convent assembled in chapter for consultation. After chapter
+the officials dispersed; the kitchener to arrange for the meals, and
+not unfrequently to provide hospitality for distinguished guests and
+their retinue; the precentor to drill his choir boys, to tune the
+organ, to look after the music, or to arrange for some procession in
+the church, or some extraordinary function; the infirmarer to take his
+rounds in the hospital; the cellarer to inspect the brewhouse and
+bakeries; and each or all of these officers might find it necessary to
+go far a-field in looking after some bailiff or tenant who could not
+safely be left alone. At Evesham the sacristan, the chamberlain, and
+the infirmarer were allowed forage and the keep of one horse. Meanwhile
+in the cloister all was stir and movement without noise. In the west
+alley the schoolmaster was teaching his little pupils the rudiments of
+Latin, or it might be the elements of singing; in the south alley,
+where the light was best, a monk with a taste for art was trying his
+hand at illuminating a MS. or rubricating the initial letters; while on
+the other side, in the north alley, some were painfully getting by
+heart the psalms, or practising meditation--alone in a crowd.
+
+Within the retirement of that cloister, fenced all round, as I have
+said, with the high walls and the great buildings, there the monks were
+working, there the real conventual life was going on; but outside the
+cloister, though yet within the precincts, it is difficult for us now
+to realize what a vast hive of industry a great monastery in some of
+the lonely and thinly-populated parts of England was. Everything that
+was eaten or drunk or worn, almost everything that was made or used in
+a monastery, was produced upon the spot. The grain grew on their own
+land; the corn was ground in their own mill; their clothes were made
+from the wool of their own sheep; they had their own tailors and
+shoemakers, and carpenters and blacksmiths, almost within call; they
+kept their own bees; they grew their own garden-stuff and their own
+fruit; I suspect they knew more of fish-culture than, until very
+lately, we moderns could boast of knowing. Nay, they had their own
+vineyards and made their own wine.
+
+The commissariat of a large abbey must have required administrative
+ability of a very high order, and the cost of hospitality was enormous.
+No traveller, whatever his degree, was refused food and shelter, and
+every monastery was a vast hotel, where nobody need pay more than he
+chose for his board and lodging. The mere keeping the accounts must
+have employed no small number of clerks, for the minuteness with which
+every transaction was recorded, almost passes belief. Those rolls I
+spoke of--the sacrist's, cellarer's, and so on--were, it must be
+remembered, periodical balance-sheets handed in at audit day. They
+deal, not only with pence and half-pence, but with farthings and
+half-farthings, and were compiled from the tablets or small
+account-books posted up from day to day and hour to hour. They give the
+price of every nail hammered into a wall, and rarely omit the cost of
+the parchment on which the roll itself is written. The men must have
+been very busy, or, if you prefer it, very fussy--certainly they could
+not have been idle to have kept their accounts in this painfully minute
+manner, even to the fraction of a farthing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the natural course of events, as a monastery grew in wealth and
+importance, there was one element of interest which added great zest to
+the conventual life, in the _quarrels_ that were sure to arise.
+
+First and foremost, the most desirable person to quarrel with was a
+Bishop. In its original idea, a monastery was not necessarily an
+ecclesiastical institution. It was not necessary that an abbot should
+be an ecclesiastic, and not essentially necessary that any one of his
+monks should be in holy orders. Long before the thirteenth century,
+however, a monk was almost invariably ordained, and being an ordained
+person, and having his local habitation in a bishop's diocese, it was
+only natural that the bishop should claim jurisdiction over him and
+over the church in which he and the fraternity ministered; but to allow
+a power of visitation to any one outside the close corporation of the
+convent was fraught with infinite peril to the community. Confessing
+their faults one to another, and asking pardon of the Lord Abbot or his
+representative, the prior, was one thing; but to have a querulous or
+inquisitive or even hostile bishop coming and intruding into their
+secrets, blurting them out to the world and actually pronouncing
+sentence upon them--that seemed to the monks an absolutely intolerable
+and shocking condition of affairs. Hence it seemed supremely desirable
+to a convent to get for itself, by fair means or foul--and I am afraid
+the means were not always fair means, as we should consider them--the
+exemption of their house from episcopal visitation or control. I
+believe that the earliest instance of such an exemption being granted
+in England was that of the Conqueror's Abbey of Battle. The precedent
+was a bad one, and led to all sorts of attempts by other houses to
+procure for themselves the like privilege. Such attempts were stoutly
+resisted by the bishops, who foresaw the evils that would inevitably
+follow, and which in fact did follow; and, of course, bishop and abbey
+went to law. Going to law in this case meant usually, first, a certain
+amount of preliminary litigation before the Archbishop of Canterbury;
+but sooner or later it was sure to end in an appeal to the Pope's
+court, or, as the phrase was, an appeal to Rome.
+
+Without wishing for a moment to defend or excuse a state of things
+which was always vexatious, and at last became intolerable, it is
+impossible to deny that a great deal of nonsense has been talked and
+written about these appeals. Almost exactly the same state of things
+exists in the present day both in civil and ecclesiastical matters.
+Parsee merchants fall to loggerheads in Bombay or Calcutta, and bring
+their disputes before the courts in India; one side feels aggrieved by
+the sentence, and straightway he removes the case to a court of appeal
+in London. Or some heretical person in Asia or Africa or somewhere else
+gets into hot water with an orthodox society for the promotion of
+religious persecution, and sooner or later the archbishop is appealed
+to, and the ecclesiastical lawyers have a most delightful time of it.
+It all costs a great deal of money nowadays, and leading advocates on
+this side or that are actually so extortionate and exorbitant that they
+will not do anything for nothing, and insist on receiving the most
+exorbitant fees. So it was in the old days. The final court of appeal
+in all matters ecclesiastical was before the Pope at Rome or Avignon,
+and the proctors and doctors, and all the canonists and officials,
+actually required to be paid for their work.
+
+When a monastery was in for a great fight with a bishop, it was a
+serious matter for both parties. But it was much more serious for the
+bishop than for the convent. The bishop had always his state to keep up
+and his many houses to maintain, and his establishment was enormously
+costly. His margin for law expenses was small; and I suspect that a
+bishop in England during the thirteenth century who had no private
+fortune outside his mere episcopal revenues would have been likely
+sooner or later to find himself in serious difficulties. On the other
+hand, in a great monastery all sorts of expedients could be resorted to
+in order to effect a salutary retrenchment--as when the monks of St.
+Alban's agreed to give up the use of wine for fifteen years, and
+actually did so, that they might be able to rebuild their refectory and
+dormitory in the days of John the twenty-first abbot. Moreover,
+inasmuch as a corporation never dies, the convent could raise very
+heavy sums on the security of its estates, and take its own time to
+repay the loans. A bishop could not pledge his episcopal estates beyond
+his own lifetime, and the result was that, in the days when life
+assurance was unknown, a bishop who had to raise money for a costly
+lawsuit would have to pay a rate of interest which would make our blood
+run cold if we had to pay it, or our hearts leap for joy if we could
+get it in these days of two and three per cent. The bishop was always
+at a disadvantage in these appeal cases; he stood to lose everything,
+and he stood to win nothing at all except the satisfaction of his
+conscience that he was struggling for principle and right. And thus it
+came to pass that the monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely
+shrank from engaging in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a
+deputation from the convent to watch the case as it was going on, and
+there was all the delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a
+trip, in fact, to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.
+
+But when there was no appeal case going on--and an appeal was too
+expensive an amusement to be indulged in often--there was always a good
+deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the convent, and
+to give them something to think about and gossip about nearer home. We
+have the best authority--the authority of the great Pope Innocent
+III.--for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth century were
+extremely fond of beer; but there was something else that they were
+even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history is almost made up of
+the stories of this everlasting litigation; nothing was too trifling to
+be made into an occasion for a lawsuit. Some neighbouring landowner had
+committed a trespass or withheld a tithe pig. Some audacious townsman
+had claimed the right of catching eels in a pond. Some brawling knight
+pretended he was in some sense _patron_ of a cell, and demanded a
+trumpery allowance of bread and ale, or an equivalent. As we read about
+these things we exclaim, "Why in the world did they make such a fuss
+about a trifle?" Not so thought the monks. They knew well enough what
+the thin end of the wedge meant, and, being in a far better position
+than we are to judge of the significance and importance of many a
+_casus belli_ which now seems but trivial, they never dreamed of giving
+an inch for the other side to take an ell. So they went to law, and
+enjoyed it amazingly! Sometimes however, there were disputes which were
+not to be settled peaceably; and then came what University men in the
+old days used to know as a "Town and Gown row."
+
+Let it be remembered that a Benedictine monastery, in the early times,
+was invariably set down in a lonely wilderness. As time went on, and
+the monks brought the swamp into cultivation, and wealth flowed in, and
+the monastery became a centre of culture, there would be sure to gather
+round the walls a number of hangers-on, who gradually grew into a
+community, the tendency of which was to assert itself, and to become
+less and less dependent upon the abbey for support. These _towns_ (for
+they became such) were, as a rule, built on the abbey land, and paid
+dues to the monastery. Of course, on the one side, there was an
+inclination to raise the dues; on the other, a desire to repudiate them
+altogether. Hence bad blood was sure to arise between the monks and the
+townsmen, and sooner or later serious conflicts between the servants of
+the monasteries and the people outside. Thus, in 1223, there was a
+serious collision between the Londoners and the Westminster monks; the
+mob rushed into the monastery, and the abbot escaped their violence
+with difficulty by slipping out at a back door and getting into a boat
+on the Thames. On another occasion there was a very serious fray
+between the citizens of Norwich and the priory there, in 1272, when the
+prior slew one man with his own hands, and many lives were lost. At a
+later time there was a similar disturbance at Bury St. Edmunds, and in
+the year 1314 the great abbey of St. Alban's was kept in a state of
+siege for more than ten days by the townsmen, who were driven to frenzy
+by not being allowed to grind their own corn in their own handmills,
+but compelled to get it ground by the abbey millers, and, of course,
+pay the fee.
+
+Thirty years later, again, that man of sin, Sir Philip de Lymbury,
+lifted up his heel against the Abbey of St. Alban's, and actually laid
+hands upon Brother John Moot, the cellarer; and on Monday, being market
+day at Luton in Beds, did actually clap the said cellarer in the
+pillory and kept him there, exposed to the jeers and contempt of the
+rude populace, who, we may be sure, were in ecstasies at this precursor
+of Mr. Pickwick in the pound. But the holy martyr St. Alban was not
+likely to let such an outrage pass; and when the rollicking knight came
+to the abbey to make it up, and was for presenting a peace-offering at
+the shrine, lo, the knightly nose began to bleed profusely, and, to the
+consternation of the beholders, the offering could not be made, and Sir
+Philip had to retire, holding his nose, and shortly after he died--and,
+adds the chronicler, was speedily forgotten, he and his.
+
+Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is
+reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there
+was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the
+canvassing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a
+convent might be turned for years into a house divided against itself,
+the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog. Nor did it
+at all follow that because the convent had elected their abbot or prior
+unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by the king, to
+whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable instance in
+Carlyle's "Past and Present."] King John kept monasteries without any
+abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the meantime, and leaving
+the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an abbot was forced upon a
+monastery in spite of the convent, as in the case of Abbot Roger
+Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks not only detested
+because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they denounced as actually
+immoral. Sometimes, too, the misconduct of a prior was so abominable
+that it could not be borne, and then came the very difficult and very
+delicate business of getting him deposed: a process which was by no
+means easily managed, as appeared in the instance of Simon Pumice,
+Prior of Worcester, in 1219, and in many another case.
+
+Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to
+relieve the monotony which it has been too readily assumed was the
+characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own
+within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their
+relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that
+confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly
+relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent,
+was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get
+the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was
+holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity
+upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the
+practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look
+after them, it was assumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to
+undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?
+
+Nor, again, must we suppose that the monks were debarred all
+amusements. On August 29, 1283, there was a great wrestling match at
+Hockliffe, in Beds, and a huge concourse of people of all sorts were
+there to see the fun. The roughs and the "fancy" were present in great
+force, and somehow it came to pass that a free fight ensued. I am sorry
+to say that the canons of Dunstable were largely represented upon the
+occasion. We are left to infer that the representatives were chiefly
+the servants of the canons, but I am afraid that some at least of their
+masters were there too. In the fight one Simon Mustard, who appears to
+have been something like a professional prize-fighter, "a bully
+exceeding fierce," says the annalist, got killed; but thereon ensued
+much inquiry and much litigation, and Dunstable and its "religious" had
+to suffer vexations not a few. In fairness it should be remembered that
+these Dunstable people were not monks but canons--regular or
+irregular--and those canons, we all know, would do anything. We protest
+against being confounded with canons!
+
+The amusements of monks were more innocent. The garden was always a
+great place of resort, and gardening a favourite pastime. We may be
+sure there was much lamentation and grumbling at St. Alban's when Abbot
+John de Maryns forbade any monk, who from infirmity could only be
+carried on a litter, from entering the garden at all. Poor old fellows!
+had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the flower-beds?
+Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion among them; but in
+the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by his letters, there
+were other diversions of a far more reprehensible character. Actually
+at the small Priory of Coxford, in Norfolk, the prior and his canons
+were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was dreadful! In other
+monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only the abbots, but the
+common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to be found as monks
+keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister, Peckham denounces these
+breaches of decorum as grave offences, which were not to be passed over
+and not to be allowed. What! a black monk stalking along with a
+bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse than the Jackdaw of Rheims,
+using bad words in the garth, and showing an evil example to the
+chorister boys, with his head on one side!
+
+But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all delights
+to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking. "Sir, I like
+my dinner!" said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one thought the
+worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in a great abbey
+was clearly a very important event in the day--I will not say it was
+_the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important one. It must
+strike any one who knows much of the literature of this age that the
+weak point in the monastic life of the thirteenth century was the
+gormandizing. It was exactly as, I am told, it is on board ship on a
+long voyage, where people have little or nothing to do, they are always
+looking forward to the next meal, and the sound of the dinner-bell is
+the most exciting sound that greets the ear in the twenty-four hours.
+And so with the monks in a great monastery which had grown rich, and in
+point of fact had more money than it knew what to do with: the dinner
+was the event of the day. It is not that we hear much of drunkenness,
+for we really hear very little of it, and where it is spoken of it is
+always with reprobation. Nor is it that we hear of anything like the
+loathsome and disgusting gluttony of the Romans of the empire, but
+eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one
+is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is
+significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief
+reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the
+curtailing the luxury of the refectory.
+
+But the monks were not the only people in those times who had a high
+appreciation of good cheer. When a man of high degree took up his
+quarters in a monastery he by no means wished to be put off with
+salt-fish-and-toast-and-water cheer. Richard de Marisco, one of King
+John's profligate councillors, who was eventually foisted into the see
+of Durham, gave the Abbey of St. Alban's the tithes of Eglingham, in
+Northumberland, to help them to make their ale better--"taking
+compassion upon the weakness of the convent's drink," as the chronicler
+tells us. The small beer of St. Alban's, it seems, was not so much
+improved as was to be desired, notwithstanding this appropriation of
+Church property, for twice after this the abbey had the same delicate
+hint given to it that its brewing was not up to the mark, when the
+rectory of Norton, in Hertfordshire, and two-thirds of the tithes of
+Hartburn, in Northumberland, were given to the monastery that no excuse
+might remain for the bad quality of the malt liquor.
+
+And here let me remark in passing that another wide-spread delusion
+needs to be removed from the popular mind with regard to the relations
+between the monks and the clergy. We have again and again heard people
+say, "Wonderfully devoted men, those monks! Look at the churches all
+over the land! If it had not been for the monks how could all the
+village churches have been built? The monks built them all!" Monks
+build parish churches! Why, the monks were always robbing the country
+parsons, and the town parsons, too, for that matter. Every vicarage in
+England represents a spoliation of the church, whose rectorial tithes
+had been appropriated by a religious house, the parson being left with
+the vicarial tithes, and often not even with them, but thrown for his
+daily bread upon the voluntary offerings of his parishioners. The monks
+build churches! I could not from my own knowledge bring forward a
+single instance in all the history of England of a monastery
+contributing a shilling of money or a load of stone for the repair, let
+alone the erection, of any parish church in the land. So far from it,
+they pulled down the churches when they had a chance, and they were
+always on the look-out to steal the rectory houses and substitute for
+them any cheap-and-nasty vicarage unless the bishop kept a sharp
+look-out upon them and came to the help of his clergy. Of all the sins
+that the monks had to answer for, this greedy grasping at Church
+property, this shameless robbery of the seculars, was beyond compare
+the most inexcusable and the most mischievous. To the credit of the
+Cistercians it must be told that they _at first_ set themselves against
+the wholesale pillage of the parochial clergy. I am not prepared to say
+they were true to their first principles--no corporate society ever
+was, and least of all a religious corporation--but at starting the
+Cistercians were decidedly opposed to the alienating of tithes and
+appropriating them to the endowment of their abbeys, and this was
+probably one among other causes why the Cistercians prospered so
+wonderfully as they did during the first hundred years or so after
+their first coming here; people believed that the new order was not
+going to live by robbing parsons, as the older orders had done without
+remorse. The swindler always thinks his victim a fool, and the victim
+never forgives the smarter man who has taken him in. Accordingly the
+monks always pretended to think scorn of the clergy, and when the
+monasteries fell the clergy were the very last people to lament their
+fall.
+
+And this brings us to the question of the moral condition of the
+monasteries. Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century "the
+golden age of English Churchmanship." Subject to correction from the
+greatest of England's great historians--and subject to correction, too,
+from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable eminence,
+are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this subject--I
+venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century was also the
+golden age of English Monachism. Certainly we know much more about the
+monasteries and their inner life during this period than at any other
+time. The materials ready to our hand are very voluminous, and the
+evidence accessible to the inquirer is very various. I do not believe
+that any man of common fairness and candour who should give some years
+to the careful study of those materials and that evidence could rise
+from his examination with any other impression than that, as a body,
+the monks of the thirteenth century were better than their age. Vicious
+and profligate, drunken and unchaste, as a class, they certainly were
+not. Of course there were scandalous brethren. Here and there--but
+rarely, very rarely--there was a wicked abbot or prior. Of course there
+were instances of abominations on which one cannot dwell; of course
+there are stories which are bad to read; stories which find their way
+into the chronicles because they were strange or startling; but these
+stories are always told with horror, and commented upon with severity
+and scorn. Excuse for wickedness or any palliation of it, you simply
+never find.
+
+On the other hand, the intense _esprit de corps_ of a convent of monks
+went beyond anything that we can now realize, and led to grave sins
+against truth and honesty. The forgeries of charters, bulls, and legal
+instruments of all kinds for the glorification of a monastery by its
+members was at least condoned only too frequently. It can hardly be
+doubted that the scriptorium of many a religious house must have been
+turned to very discreditable uses by unscrupulous and clever scribes,
+with the connivance if not with the actual knowledge of the convent,
+for such things were not done in a corner. If the forgeries
+succeeded--and that they often did succeed we know--the monastery got
+all the advantage of the rascality; no inquiry was made, and it was
+tacitly assumed that where so much was gained, and the pride of "our
+house" was gratified, the end justified the means.
+
+There remains one question which may suggest itself to our minds as it
+has often suggested itself to others. From what class or classes in
+society were the monks for the most part taken? This is one of the most
+difficult questions to answer. The late Dr. Maitland, who perhaps knew
+more, and had read more, about monks and monasteries than any
+Englishman of his time, professed himself unable to answer it; and my
+friend Dr. Luard--whose labours in this field of research have gained
+for him a European reputation, and whose wonderful industry,
+carefulness, and profound knowledge, qualify him to speak with
+authority on such a point, if any one might pronounce upon
+it--hesitates to give a decided opinion. The impression that is left
+upon my own mind is, that the thirteenth-century monk, as a rule, was
+drawn from the gentry class, as distinguished from the aristocracy on
+the one hand, or the artisans on the other. In fact, _mutatis
+mutandis_, that the representatives of the monks of the thirteenth
+century were the Fellows of Colleges of the nineteenth before the
+recent alteration of University and College statutes came into force.
+An ignorant monk was certainly a rarity, an absolutely unlettered or
+uneducated one was an impossibility, and an abbot or prior who could
+not talk and write Latin with facility, who could not preach with
+tolerable fluency on occasion, and hold his own as a debater and man of
+business, would have found himself sooner or later in a very ridiculous
+and very uncomfortable position, from which he might be glad to escape
+by resignation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three centuries after the time we have been considering, the religious
+houses were suppressed--to use that euphonious term which has become
+universally accepted--only after they had existed in these islands in
+one form or another for at least a thousand years. Century after
+century monasteries continued to spring up, and there never was much
+difficulty in finding devout people who were ready to befriend a new
+order, to endow it with lands, and to give it a fair start. In other
+words, there was always a _demand_ for new monasteries, and the first
+sure sign that that demand had been met, and more than met, was when
+the supply of monks began to fall short, and when, as was the case
+before the end of the fifteenth century, the religious houses could not
+fill up their full complement of brethren. Is it conceivable that this
+constant demand could have gone on, unless the common sense of the
+nation had been profoundly convinced, and continuously convinced, that
+the religious orders gave back some great equivalent for all the
+immense surrenders of wealth which generation after generation of
+Englishmen had made--some equivalent for all the vast stream of
+benefactions which flowed on from age to age so strongly that kings and
+statesmen had to interfere and check, if it might be, the dangerous
+prodigality of lavish benefactors? What that equivalent was, what the
+real work of the monasteries was, what great functions they discharged
+in the body politic, what the nation at large gained by their
+continuance and lost by their fall--these are questions which on this
+occasion I am not concerned with, and with which I scrupulously forbear
+from dealing. But there are moments when a great horror comes upon some
+men's minds, and a vision of a lonely and childless old age rises
+before them in the gloom of a dreary twilight, or when the mists of
+autumn hide the sunbeams, and they think, "If desolation were to come
+upon our homes, where could we hide the stricken head and broken
+heart?" To that question--a morbid question if you will--I have never
+found an answer. The answer was possible once, but it was in an age
+which has passed away.
+
+Yes, that age has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is
+true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes the
+echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single sound
+is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the several
+parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter that "flash along
+the chords and go," the wail of the minor, as if crying for the theme
+that has vanished and yet will reappear--"like armies whispering where
+great echoes be"--these things are not mere repetition; they are
+messages from the Eternal Father to the sons of men, reminding them
+that the world moves on. Merely to ape the past, and to attempt to
+reproduce in the nineteenth century the tree that had taken a
+millennium to grow into its maturity in the thirteenth and was rudely
+cut down root and branch in the sixteenth, is about as wise as it would
+be to try and make us sing the Hallelujah Chorus in unison! Let the
+dead bury their dead.
+
+Meanwhile the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are
+rising up around us each after his kind; Pall Mall swarms with them,
+hardly less splendid than their progenitors, certainly not less
+luxurious. Our modern monks look out at the windows of the Carlton and
+the Athenaeum with no suspicion that they are at all like the monks of
+old. Nor are they. They lack the old faith, the old loyalty to their
+order, and with the old picturesqueness something else that we can less
+afford to miss--the old enthusiasm. We look back upon the men of the
+thirteenth century with much complacency. A supercilious glance at the
+past seems to give the moderns an excellent opinion of themselves. But
+suppose the men of the thirteenth century could turn the tables upon
+us, and, from their point of view, pass their judgment upon the daily
+life of the conventuals of St. James's, who are, after all, only
+survivals, but just conceivably not quite survivals of the fittest;
+would the monks of old find all things quite up to the highest ideal,
+or would they hide their heads in shame and confusion of face compelled
+to acknowledge that the new is in all things so much better than the
+old?
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA.
+
+
+     "So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,
+       And a famine of strivers silenced strife:
+         There were none to love and none to wed,
+         And pity and joy and hope had fled,
+     And grief had spent her passion in sighing;
+       And where was the Spirit of Life?"
+
+From across the Channel during the last few months [Footnote: February,
+1884.] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of pestilence
+which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to some heavy with
+menace. From Italy, the land beyond the Alps; from Spain, the land
+beyond the Pyrenees; from seaports in France and cities of the plain,
+we hear that the cholera has been striking down its victims. The
+Phantom with the deadly breath has shown strange caprice in his coming
+and going; but when he has been suspected to be nigh at hand, wild-eyed
+Panic has shown herself as of old. It is sad and discouraging to find
+that, spite of all our boasted progress--all that science has taught
+us, and all that we are supposed to have learnt--the attitude of the
+multitude when certain dangers threaten, appears to be as it was, and
+that we still hear of shuddering wretches trying to fight a dreaded
+enemy by letting off old muskets and drenching portmanteaus with
+Condy's fluid.
+
+Such things have been before. Must they recur again? Philosophers
+comfort us with the assurance that our brains are larger than those of
+our forefathers. Nay, that the convolutions of the said brains are more
+complex. How about the _moral fibre?_ Are we never to have stouter
+hearts or more "bowels and mercies?" In the face of the same
+circumstances, will men for ever show themselves the same? Or is it
+that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy breaking
+loose here and there--anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate and
+senselessly cruel--are true only of exceptional communities, as yet
+unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe in,
+and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?
+
+The cholera has abated, we are told; as we were told it would. Thus far
+we in England have escaped its ravages. Experts--and experts are the
+people whose vocation it is to speak without doubt or hesitation
+whenever they speak--experts assure us that London was never more free
+from cholera than during this present summer. Other experts--they too
+speaking with authority--confidently affirm that our time is coming,
+that a severe visitation is impending; that all we have heard of
+hitherto of the ravages of the epidemic elsewhere, will prove but
+child's play in comparison with that which we shall hear of by and by.
+"And then, sir, you'll see!" That is a comforting assurance--at any
+rate, _some_ of us will survive.
+
+But what do we know of the march of any mysterious form of death that
+has ever appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding
+over the earth--"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind
+him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful
+visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to
+mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and
+substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any
+trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any
+great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section
+of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to? How long would
+it take to write; or rather, when it was written, how long would it
+take to read?
+
+This island of Great Britain has more than once been visited by
+pestilence. De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls
+"The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little
+of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so
+marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That there
+is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can doubt.
+The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of two
+years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665 did
+not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively trifling.
+The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a scale to
+demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has the
+destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire unvisited by
+his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not one dead. It
+is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of historians; but it
+is at least significant that among all contemporary writers who have
+made mention of the Black Death--as it has been agreed to call it--the
+Black Death in the reign of Edward III.--there is little mention of any
+panic, few ugly tales of desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances
+of miserable creatures crying that the wells were poisoned. On the
+contrary, we have proof that as a rule men died at their posts during
+all that trying time, that those in authority never lost their heads,
+and that though there must, of course, have been isolated cases of
+abject fear, expressing itself in the maddest extravagances of despair,
+yet we have to look long and look far and wide to find such cases--and
+after all our search may be fruitless.
+
+As yet the history of the Black Death can hardly be said to have been
+investigated at all; and until specialists can be prevailed upon to
+examine the evidence ready at hand, we shall continue to be put off
+with mere generalities when we ask for more light upon a calamity which
+was the most stupendous that ever befell this island.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have all heard of Boccaccio's _Decameron_--only naughty people have
+_read it_--and how it was written when the plague was raging at
+Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those
+other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing
+now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over
+Europe--desolating, devastating--the spectre with the swinging scythe
+mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture
+to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace
+that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered for him by the
+fragrant smoke of aromatic logs burning in huge pyres round about him
+night and day. Some have heard of Giovanne Villani, the historian of
+Florence, who wrote feebly about that same pestilence in his native
+city, and who doubtless would have written more, and more plainly and
+more strongly, but that in the midst of his writing Azrael touched him
+too, and his pen fell from his hand. [Footnote: Muratori, "Rerum
+Italicarum Scriptores," vol. xiii. pp, 1-771.] Some few, again, have a
+faint recollection of that Emperor of the West, John Cantacuzene, who
+ruled at Constantinople when the plague was, and who wrote about it.
+[Footnote: His four books of Histories are to be found in the "Corpus
+Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae."] Didn't he? Nay! Hadn't he a son,
+Andronicus, who died of it? How did it come to pass that Gibbon did not
+so much as allude to it? Some, peradventure, think of Rome and of
+Rienzi, and how it was about that time that he was potent, or was he in
+hiding there among the Fraticelli? And isn't there something too about
+the plague visiting Greenland, and putting back the clock that was
+moving on steadily, but which suddenly stopped? How vague we are!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was this plague? How did it strike men down?
+
+"It showed itself," says Boccaccio, "in a sad and wonderful manner; and
+_different from what it had been in the East_, where bleeding from the
+nose is the fatal prognostic, here [at Florence] there appeared certain
+tumours in the groin or under the armpits, some as big as an apple,
+others as big as an egg; and afterwards purple spots in most parts of
+the body: in some cases large and but few in number, in others less and
+more numerous, both kinds the usual messengers of death... They
+generally died," he adds, "the third day from the first appearance of
+the symptoms, without a fever or other bad circumstance attending."
+
+"It took men generally in the head and stomach, appearing first in the
+groin," says Villani, "or under the armpits, by little knobs or
+swellings called kernels, boils, blains, blisters, pimples, or
+plague-sores; being generally attended with devouring fever, with
+occasional spitting and vomiting of blood, whence, for the most part,
+they died presently or in half a day, or within a day or two at the
+most."
+
+Less precise and minute is the description of the great surgeon, Guido
+de Chauliac, who nobly stayed at Avignon for the six months during
+which the visitation was at its worst; but he too mentions the
+carbuncular swellings in the axillae and the groin, the purple spots,
+and the violent inflammation of the lungs, attended by fatal
+expectoration of blood.
+
+As for the Emperor John Cantacuzene, his description is so flagrantly a
+mere adaptation of the history of the plague at Athens by Thucydides
+that it must be received with caution. It is only in what it omits and
+in what it adds to the older narrative that it possesses any great
+historic value. It agrees with the accounts quoted above in making
+mention of the swellings, the blood-spitting, and the awful rapidity
+with which the disease ran its course. It omits all mention of the
+eruption on the surface of the skin, the flushed eyes, and, above all,
+the swollen and inflamed condition of the larynx, the cough, the
+sneezing, and the hiccough, which Dr. Collier found so significant.
+
+Comparing, then, the several accounts which have come down to us,
+meagre though they are, it ought to be possible to arrive at some
+conclusions regarding the nature of the plague of the fourteenth
+century which, for the pathologist, would amount to certainties. The
+wonder is that such men as Dr. Hecker and his learned translator should
+have shown so much reserve--not to say timidity--in pronouncing
+judgment upon the question.
+
+A layman runs a risk of incurring withering scorn at his presumption,
+and ridicule at his ignorance who ventures to express an opinion--or to
+have one--on any subject which the medical profession claims as within
+its own domain; and I should not dare to speak otherwise than as a very
+humble inquirer when the learned are silent. There are, however, some
+conclusions which may be accepted without hesitation and which will be
+admitted by all.
+
+I. The Black Death was _not_ scarlatina maligna, as the plague at
+Athens undoubtedly was. [Footnote: "The History of the Plague of
+Athens," translated from Thucydides by C. Collier, M.D., London, 1857.]
+
+II. It was _not_ small-pox.
+
+III. It was _not_ cholera.
+
+IV. It probably _was_ a variety of the Oriental plague, which has
+reappeared in Europe in more modern times, and regarding which they who
+wish to know more must seek their information where it is to be found.
+
+The next question usually asked is, Where did the new plague come from?
+And here the answer is even more uncertain than that to the other
+question--What the great plague was.
+
+In fact, a careful comparison of such testimony as comes to hand leaves
+the inquirer in a very perplexed condition, and inclines him rather to
+accept than reject the old-fashioned theory of a "general corruption of
+the atmosphere" as the only working hypothesis whereby to account for
+the startling spontaneity of the outbreak and its appearance at so many
+and such distant points at the same time.
+
+The Imperial author, who appears to have done his best to gather
+information, evidently found himself quite baffled in his attempt to
+follow the march of the plague. It had originated among the Hyperborean
+Scythians; it had passed through Pontus, and Libya, and Syria, and the
+furthest East, and "in a manner all the world round about." Other
+writers are just as much in the dark as Cantacuzene, and it seems mere
+waste of time to endeavour to arrive at any conclusion from data so
+defective and statements so void of historical basis as have come down
+to us. This only seems established, that during the year 1347 there was
+great atmospheric disturbance extending over a large area of Southern
+Europe, and resulting in extensive failure of the harvest, and
+consequent distress and famine; and that in January, 1348, one of the
+most violent earthquakes in history wrought immense havoc in Italy, the
+shocks being felt in the islands of the Mediterranean, and even north
+of the Alps.
+
+It is at least curious that the date of the earthquake coincides very
+closely with the date which has been given by Guido de Chauliac for the
+first appearance of the plague at Avignon. He tells us expressly that
+it broke out in that city in January, 1348, and I think it would be
+difficult to produce trustworthy evidence of any earlier outbreak than
+this, at any rate, in Europe. [Footnote: One of our monastic
+chroniclers states expressly that it began about St. James's Day in
+1347. I _feel_ certain that the date is wrong, and that it could be
+proved to be wrong without much difficulty by reference to documentary
+evidence which might be consulted.] "It appeared at Florence," says
+Villani, "at the beginning of April, and at Cesena, on the other side
+of the Apennines, on the 1st of June." It is asserted that it reached
+England at the beginning of August, is said to have lingered for some
+months in the west, and to have devastated Bristol with awful severity.
+
+There can be no doubt that in the towns of Italy and France there was a
+dreadful mortality; but when we are told that 100,000 died in Venice,
+and 60,000 in Florence, and 70,000 in Siena, it is impossible to accept
+such round numbers as anything better than ignorant guesses. Whether
+the great cities of the Low Countries were visited by the pestilence
+with any severity, or how far the towns of Germany were affected, I am
+unable to say, nor am I much concerned at present with such an inquiry;
+that I leave to others to throw light upon. But as to the progress, the
+incidence, and the effect of the Black Death in England--when it came
+and where it showed itself, how long it lasted, and what effects
+followed--on these questions the time has come for pointing out that we
+have a body of evidence such as perhaps exists in no other
+country--evidence, too, which hitherto has hardly received any
+attention, its very existence entirely overlooked, forgotten, nay! not
+even suspected.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us understand where we are, and look about us for a little while.
+
+When King Edward III. entered London in triumph on the 14th of October,
+1347, he was the foremost man in Europe, and England had reached a
+height of power and glory such as she had never attained before. At the
+battle of Creci France had received a crushing blow, and by the loss of
+Calais, after an eleven months' siege, she had been reduced well-nigh
+to the lowest point of humiliation. David II., King of Scotland, was
+now lying a prisoner in the Tower of London. Louis of Bavaria had just
+been killed by a fall from his horse, the Imperial throne was vacant,
+and the electors in eager haste proclaimed that they had chosen the
+King of England to succeed. To their discomfiture the King of England
+declined the proffered crown. He "had other views." Intoxicated by the
+splendour of their sovereign and his martial renown, and the Success
+which seemed to attend him wherever he showed himself, the English
+people had gone mad with exultation--all except the merchant princes,
+the monied men, who are not often given to lose their heads. They took
+a much more sober view of the outlook than the populace did--they had
+an eye to their own interests and the interests of the trade and
+commerce in which they were engaged. They were very much in earnest in
+asserting their rights and protesting against their wrongs, and they
+presented their petitions to the King after the fashion of the
+time--petitions which must have seemed rather startling protests in the
+fourteenth century, betraying, as they did, some advanced opinions for
+which the world at large was hardly then prepared.
+
+Students of the manual, compendium, and popular handbook style of
+literature may possibly be hardly aware that the war of protection
+_versus_ free trade, and the other war concerned with the incidence of
+taxation upon property, real and personal, had already begun. Even my
+distinguished friend, Mr. Cadaverous, who never made a mistake in his
+life, and whose memory for facts is portentous--even Mr. Cadaverous
+assures me that he has never met with any mention of the above fact in
+all his study of history.
+
+History! What is history but the science which teaches us to see the
+throbbing life of the present in the throbbing life of the past?
+
+Note that these "gentlemen of the House of Commons," who made
+themselves somewhat disagreeable in the Parliament of 1348, were not
+the warriors who had gone out to fight the King's battles, but the
+burghers who stayed at home, heaped up money, and grumbled. It was
+otherwise with the roistering swash-bucklers who came back in that
+glorious autumn. They are said to have returned laden with the spoils
+of France, the plunder of Calais, and so on and so on. Calais must have
+been rather a queer little place to afford much _plunder_ after all
+that it had gone through. The swash-bucklers doubtless brought
+prize-money home, but it did not all come from France--that is pretty
+certain. Villani, our Florentine friend, tells us of an unexampled
+commercial crisis at Florence about this time--brought about, observe,
+by the English conqueror of France not paying his debts. So the Bardi
+and the Peruzzi actually stopped payment; for the King owed them a
+million and a half of gold florins, and there was lamentation and
+distress of mind, and the level of the Arno rose by reason of the flood
+of tears that fell "from tired eyelids upon tired eyes." All that made
+no difference to the swash-bucklers, and up and down England there was
+wild extravagance, and money seemed to burn in people's pockets.
+Feasting and merriment, and all that appertains thereto, were the order
+of the day, and all went merry as a marriage bell.
+
+The King got all he could get out of the Parliament, but he did not
+get, he could not get, all he wished. What was to be done next? The
+Pope said, "Make peace!" and his Holiness did his little best to bring
+about the desired end. The summer of 1348 had come, and it seems that
+at Avignon the plague had by this time spent itself, people were no
+longer afraid to go there now, and the Pope would peradventure come out
+of his seclusion and receive an embassy. So on the 28th of July Edward
+III. wrote a letter to Pope Clement, and announced his intention of
+sending his ambassadors to Avignon to treat about terms. The
+negotiations fell through, and on the 8th of October the King announced
+by proclamation that he was once more going to make an inroad upon
+France with an armed force. He did not keep his word. In November a
+truce was patched up somehow; and on the first of the next month we
+find the King once more at Westminster, and there he seems to have
+remained over Christmas. If the dates are correctly given, the news
+from the west of England about this time was not likely to have
+provoked much merriment.
+
+Are the dates correct? Gentlemen of an antiquarian turn of mind, out in
+the west there, might do worse than spend some weeks in looking into
+this matter.
+
+Meanwhile, it is at this point that we get our first direct,
+unquestionable proof, that the plague had reached our shores. On the
+1st of January, 1349, the King wrote to the Bishop of Winchester,
+informing him that although the Parliament had been summoned to meet on
+the 19th of the month, yet because a _sudden visitation of deadly
+pestilence had broken out at Westminster and the neighbourhood,_ which
+was increasing daily, and occasioning much apprehension for the safety
+of any great concourse of people, should it assemble in that place at
+the time appointed; therefore it had been determined to prorogue the
+Parliament to Monday, the 27th of April.
+
+I gather from the wording of this document that the Government did not
+look upon the outbreak with any very grave apprehension, that they did
+not regard it as anything more than an epidemic which would be confined
+to narrow limits, and one likely to pass off after a little time as the
+spring advanced; and that they can hardly as yet have received any very
+disturbing intelligence of its ravages, such as must have soon come in
+from all points of the compass. Two months passed, and the situation
+had seriously changed. On the 10th of March the King issued another
+letter, in which, after referring to the previous proclamation, he
+further prorogued the meeting of Parliament _sine die._ The reason for
+this step is explained to be "because the deadly pestilence in
+Westminster, _and in the City of London,_ and in other places
+thereabouts, was increasing with extraordinary severity" _(gravius
+solito invalescit)._
+
+It is to be observed that, in the first notice of prorogation, no
+mention is made of the City of London, only of Westminster and its
+neighbourhood. In the second, we hear that the plague had already
+extended over a wider area, and was showing no signs of abating. Nay,
+by this time the King and his advisers had taken alarm--there was no
+knowing where the mortality would stop.
+
+Two days after this (12th of March, 1349) William Bateman, Bishop of
+Norwich, received his letters of protection as ambassador for the King
+in France. His safe conduct--for himself and his suite--was to extend
+till Whitsuntide next ensuing (31st of May, 1349). The suite consisted
+of eight persons, all Norfolk men; two were wealthy laymen, two were
+distinguished ecclesiastics, three were country parsons, of one I know
+nothing. I believe they all got back safely, but the three country
+parsons returned to their several cures only to be smitten by the
+plague. The Bishop had not shown himself again in his diocese many
+weeks before they were all three dead. In making this last statement, I
+am a little anticipating the course of events, but only a little. The
+Angel of Death moves at no laggard pace when once he begins his march
+with his sword drawn in his hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus far I have been quoting from, or referring to, authorities which
+are accessible to any one with an adequate command of books at his
+elbow--the chroniclers and the historians named, the Foedera, the Rolls
+of Parliament, and such authorities as whoever chooses may consult for
+himself. These printed authorities, which have all been consulted and
+looked into again and again, have told us very little, but they have
+given us certain notes of time--furnished us, in fact, with a _terminus
+a quo_. We have learnt this, at any rate, that about Christmas, 1348,
+the plague appeared at Westminster and its vicinity, and that it had
+increased alarmingly in London and elsewhere by the beginning of March,
+1349.
+
+We have next to deal with that other evidence to which I have
+alluded--the unprinted documentary evidence ready to our hands--I mean
+the Institution Books in the various Diocesan Registries and the Rolls
+of the Manor Courts, which still exist in very great abundance, though
+they are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. It is
+necessary that I should trespass upon my reader's attention while I
+endeavour to explain the nature and the value of these two classes of
+documents before proceeding to deal with their testimony.
+
+I. Students of English history know that few aggressions of the Pope of
+Rome during the thirteenth century caused more deep discontent among
+the laity than those which threatened interference with their right of
+patronage to ecclesiastical benefices, and actually did interfere with
+those rights. The disgraceful recklessness with which Italians,
+ignorant of our language, were forced into English livings, and the
+best preferment was claimed for Papal nominees, produced an amount of
+irritation and revolt against Roman interference which had never been
+known before. The feeling of the laity became more and more outspoken,
+and at last Innocent IV. gave way, and the rights of private patronage
+were assured to the great lords--assured, at any rate, in word--though
+the Papal rescript "paltered with them in a double sense" and the
+quibbles and reservations, which could always be resorted to under
+colour of the _non obstante_ clause, constantly afforded excuse for
+fresh encroachments and evasions when the opportunity occurred. The
+jealousy of Roman interference continued to increase, and the
+legislation of the first half of the fourteenth century was largely
+taken up with enactments to guard the rights of English patrons, from
+the King downwards. But there was always a feeling of insecurity on the
+part of those who had any benefices in their gift, and a corresponding
+feeling on the part of those who were candidates for preferment. This
+led to a vicious system, whereby appointments were made with almost
+indecent haste to every vacant cure; institution was granted to an
+applicant for a benefice with the least possible delay after a vacancy
+had once been made known; the patron was willing to exercise his right
+in favour of any one, rather than not exercise it at all; the candidate
+for the living knew that it was a case of now or never; the Bishop had
+nothing to gain, and something to fear, from asking too many questions;
+and there is some reason to think that the parishioners had more voice
+in the matter than they have now. That followed which was likely to
+follow, namely, that the institutions to vacant benefices were made as
+a rule within a very few weeks, or even days, after the death of an
+incumbent. A man who had got his nomination lost no time in presenting
+himself to the Bishop. There was no widow or family of his predecessor
+to consider; and for every reason, the sooner the new man got into the
+parsonage the better for all parties concerned. Moreover, to guard
+against all chances of a disputed claim, the Bishops' Registers of
+Institution were kept with the most scrupulous care, and while enormous
+masses of ecclesiastical records in every diocese in England have
+perished, the Institution Books have been preserved with extraordinary
+fidelity, have survived all the troubles and wars and spoliation that
+have gone on, and, speaking within certain limits, have been preserved
+for five hundred years from one end of England to the other. It is no
+exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of parishes in England of
+whose incumbents for centuries not only a complete list may be made
+out, but the very day and place be set down where those incumbents
+received institution into the benefice either at the hands of the
+Diocesan or his official. This is certainly the case in the great East
+Anglian diocese of Norwich, which comprehended, in the fourteenth
+century, the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and a portion of
+Cambridgeshire. We may safely say that we are able to tell
+approximately--within a few weeks or days--when any living fell vacant
+during the period under review, who succeeded, and who the patron was
+who presented to the cure. Nor is this true only of the secular or
+parochial clergy. Jealous as the religious houses were of their rights
+and privileges, the heads of monasteries, as a rule, were compelled to
+receive institution too at the hands of the Bishops of the see in which
+they were situated. They too presented themselves to their Diocesan
+that their elections might be formally recognized; and thus the
+Institution Books contain not only the records of the various changes
+in the incumbency of the secular clergy, but also of such as were
+occasioned by the death of all abbots, or priors or abbesses as
+presided over that large number of religious houses as were not exempt
+from Episcopal jurisdiction. It is obvious that these Records
+constitute an invaluable body of evidence, from which important
+information may be drawn regarding our parochial and ecclesiastical
+history. The Institution Books, as might be expected, contain a great
+deal of curious matter besides the mere records of admission to
+benefices, but with this I am at present not concerned.
+
+II. I come now to the Court Rolls, which throw much more light upon our
+parochial history than any other documents that have come down to us;
+their information is concerned exclusively with the civil, domestic,
+sometimes with the political life of our forefathers; about their
+religious life, or their contentions with ecclesiastics, they have
+rarely a word to say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All who have at any time owned or purchased what is known as copyhold
+land might be supposed to know something of the nature of the title on
+which such land is held. If they do not it is not for want of being
+reminded from time to time, in a very vexatious way, that they are in
+theory and in fact not so much owners of their several holdings as
+_tenants_ of the Lord of the Manor to which such holdings appertain.
+But inasmuch as a great deal of ignorance prevails as to the nature of
+this tenure, and as it is impossible to estimate the value and
+importance of the evidence which the Rolls of the Manor Courts supply
+in the inquiry on which we are engaged, I feel it necessary to
+introduce at this point a few paragraphs introductory to and
+explanatory of what follows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the thirteenth century it may be said that _in theory_ the land of
+England belonged to the sovereign. The sovereign had indeed assigned
+large tracts of territory to A or B or C; but under certain
+circumstances, of no very unfrequent occurrence, these tracts of
+territory came back into the hands of the sovereign, and were
+re-granted by him at his will to whom he chose. In return for such
+grants, A or B or C were bound to perform certain _services_ in
+recognition of the fact that they were _tenants_ of the king; and by
+virtue of such _services_-the equivalents of what we now understand by
+_rent_-they were called _tenants in chief_, or tenants _in capite_.
+
+The tracts of territory held by A or B or C were in almost every case
+made up of lands scattered about over all parts of the kingdom. The
+tenant in chief had his castle or capital mansion, [Footnote: Experts
+will object to the use of this term and other terms as strictly
+inaccurate. I am not writing for experts.]which was supposed to be his
+abode; but as far as the larger portion--immensely the larger
+portion--of his possessions, he was necessarily a non-resident
+landlord, getting what he could out of them either by farming them
+through the agency of a bailiff, or letting out his estates to be held
+under himself in precisely the same way as he held his _fief_, or
+original grant, from the King.
+
+_In theory_, the tenant in chief could not sell his land; he could
+sublet it to a _mesne tenant_, who stood to himself precisely in the
+same relation as he--the tenant _in capite_--stood to the sovereign,
+the mesne tenant in his turn being bound to render certain _services_
+to his over lord, and liable to forfeit his _lease_--for in theory it
+was that--if certain contingencies happened. It was inevitable that, as
+time went by, the mesne tenant should regard his estate as his own, and
+that the same necessities which compelled the tenant _in capite_ to
+relax his hold over an outlying landed estate would compel the mesne
+tenant to follow his example. The process went on till it was becoming
+a serious difficulty to discover how the King was to get his _services_
+from the tenant _in capite_, who had practically got rid of two-thirds
+of his _fief_, and how he again was to get _his services_ from the
+mesne tenant, who had parted with two-thirds of _his_ estate to half a
+dozen under tenants. Obviously, when the King's _scutage_ had to be
+levied, there was no telling who was liable for it, or how it should be
+apportioned.
+
+It was to meet this difficulty, and to check the prevailing
+sub-division of land--_sub-infeudation_ men called it then--that the
+statute of _Quia Emptores_ was passed in the eighteenth year of King
+Edward I. [A.D. 1290]. The result of all the sub-division that been
+going on had been that the number of what we now call _landed estates_
+had largely increased, each of them administered on the model of the
+larger _fiefs_ originally granted to the tenants _in capite_. There was
+a capital mansion in which the _lord_ resided, or was supposed to
+reside, and sub-tenants holding their land under the lord, and paying
+to him periodically certain small money rents and rendering him certain
+_services_. The _estate_ comprehended the capital mansion with its
+appurtenances and the domain lands in the lord's occupation, the common
+lands over which the tenants had certain common rights, and the lands
+in the occupation of the tenants, which they farmed with more or less
+freedom for their own behoof,--the whole constituting a manor whose
+owner was the lord. At certain intervals the tenants were bound to
+appear before their lord and give account of themselves; bound, that
+is, to show cause why they had not performed their _services_; bound to
+pay their quit rents, whether in money or kind; bound to go through a
+great deal of queer business; but above all, as far as our present
+purpose is concerned, _to do fealty_ to the lord of the manor in every
+case where the small patches of land had changed hands, and pay a fine
+for entering upon land acquired by the various forms of alienation or
+by inheritance. In some manors, if a tenant died the lord laid claim to
+some of his live stock as a _heriot_, which was forthwith seized by the
+bailiff of the manor; and in all manors, if a man died without heirs,
+his land _escheated_ to the lord of the manor; that is, it came back to
+the lord who _in theory_ was the owner of the soil.
+
+These periodical meetings at which all this business and a great deal
+else was transacted were called the _Courts_ of the Manor, and the
+Records of these Courts were kept with exceeding and most jealous
+scrupulousness; they were invariably drawn up in Latin, according to a
+strictly legal form, and were inscribed on long _rolls_ of parchment,
+and are known as Manor Court Rolls. This is not the time to say much
+more about the Court Rolls. They are not very easy reading--they
+require a somewhat long apprenticeship before they can be readily
+deciphered; but when one has once become familiar with them, they
+afford the student some very curious and unexpected information from
+time to time, though it must be allowed that you have to do a good deal
+of digging for every nugget that you find.
+
+Observe, however, this--that it is not far from the truth to say that
+in East Anglia--for I will not travel out of my own province--every
+tiller of the soil who occupied a plot of land, however small, was sure
+to be a tenant under some lord of the manor; when he died _a record of
+his death was entered upon the_ _Court Rolls of the Manor_; the name of
+his successor was inscribed; the amount of fine set down which his heir
+paid for entering upon his inheritance; and if he died _without heirs_
+the fact was noticed, the lands which he had held being forfeited, or
+_escheating_, as it was called, to the lord.
+
+Thus the Court Rolls of a manor of the fourteenth century--for before
+the statute _Quia Emptores_ I suspect that they were kept with much
+less regularity and much less care than they were afterwards--are
+practically the _registers of the deaths_ of all occupiers of land
+within the manor; and, as every householder was an occupier of land,
+the death of every householder may be said to be inscribed upon the
+Rolls.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Taken together, then, we have in the Diocesan Institution Books, on the
+one hand, and in the Court Rolls, on the other, two sources of
+information which--as far as they go--furnish us with a mass of
+evidence absolutely irrefragable with regard to the mortality of clergy
+and laity at any period during the fourteenth century. I say "as far as
+they go," for it might happen that a country benefice--and still more
+frequently that a town benefice--had been so cruelly pillaged by a
+religious house, that little or nothing remained to support the
+wretched parson, and that no one could be found who would accept the
+cure. Then the cure would remain vacant for years. Where this happened
+the death of the previous incumbent would not appear on the Records for
+years after it had occurred, nor would any notice be taken of the long
+vacancy when the next parson was instituted. In a period of dreadful
+mortality, if the parsons died off in large numbers, it would be
+inevitable that the impoverished livings would "go a begging." It might
+be difficult to get the most valuable pieces of preferment filled--it
+would be impossible to fill such as could not offer a bare maintenance.
+Hence the Institution Books can only be accepted as giving a part of
+the evidence with regard to the clerical mortality. However startling
+the number of deaths of clergy within a certain area during a given
+period may appear to be, they certainly will not represent the whole
+number--only the number of such incumbents as were forthwith replaced
+by their successors; and, taking one year with another, it is fair to
+say that within any diocese the _larger the number of institutions_
+recorded in a given time, the _more incomplete_ will be the record of
+the deaths among the clergy during that time. When there are more men
+than places the places are soon filled. When there are more places than
+men there must needs be vacancies--square holes and round ones.
+
+So much for the Institution Books. With regard to the Court Rolls,
+there the evidence is even much less exhaustive; for here we have the
+registers of the deaths of the landholders within the manor, great and
+small--_i.e._, of the heads of families; but, except in rare instances,
+we have no notice of any other member of the household, or of what
+happened to them. A man's whole household may have been swept
+off--young and old, babe and suckling, sister and brother, and aged
+mother, and wife, and children, and servant, and friend--every soul of
+them involved in one hideous, horrible calamity. The steward of the
+manor was not concerned with any but the head of the house--the tenant
+of the manor. Was he missing? Then, who was his heir? Any sons? Dead of
+the plague! Brothers? Dead of the plague! Wife? Dead of the plague!
+Children? Kinsfolk? All gone! Their blackening carcases huddled in
+sweltering masses of putrefaction in the wretched hovels, while the
+pitiless July sun blazed overhead, "Calmer than clock-work, and not
+caring!"
+
+The steward made his entry of one fact only. Thus:--
+
+"The Jurors do present that Simon Must died seized of a Messuage and 4
+acres of land in Stradset, and that he has no heir. Therefore it is
+fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the lord."
+
+Also that Matilda Stile... was she married or single, widow or mother
+or maid? What cared the precise man of business on that 24th of July,
+1349, as his pen moved over the parchment?...--"Matilda Stile died
+seized of one acre and one rood of land held in Villenage. Therefore it
+is fitting that the aforesaid land be taken into the hands of the lord
+until such time as the heir may appear in court."
+
+He never did appear! Next year her little estate was handed over to
+another. She was the last of her line.
+
+Such entries as these swarm in the Court Rolls of this year 1349. They
+tell their own tale. But it is obvious that their tale is incomplete,
+and that we must form our own conclusions from the number of the deaths
+recorded as to the probable number of those whose names have been quite
+passed over, sometimes, too, these Rolls are eloquent in their silence.
+When country parsons were dying by scores and hundreds, and the tillers
+of the soil by thousands and tens of thousands, it could not but be
+that the lords of manors and their stewards died also. Yes! they, too,
+were struck down. In one instance that I have met with the first half
+of the entries of the business carried on at one of these courts in the
+summer of this year is written in the ordinary court hand of the time,
+and the rest is rudely scrawled by some one whose hand is _not yet
+formed;_ it looks like the writing of a lad apprenticed to the
+scrivener's business. Was the steward of the manor actually smitten by
+the plague as he was holding the court--a subordinate taking his place
+and awkwardly finishing the work which his master's glazed eye perhaps
+never rested on? Again and again I have found that a series of Court
+Rolls of an important Norfolk manor is perfect for the first twenty-two
+years of Edward III. and no record remains for the next year or two.
+Then they begin once more, and have been preserved with unbroken
+regularity. At Raynham, in a parish of 1,400 acres, there were three
+small manors. The courts of one of them were held three times in the
+year 1348. _Upon the same parchment,_ and immediately following the
+records of the previous year, come some scarcely legible notes of a
+court held in 1349, the precise day of the month omitted, the entries
+scrawled informally by a scribe who not only did not know the forms of
+the court, but who was evidently not a professional writer. He bungled
+so that he seems actually to have given up his task. The next court of
+the manor was not held till three years had gone by. At Hellhoughton, a
+manor now belonging to the Marquis of Townshend, where two courts were
+held annually, the series of rolls for the first twenty-two years of
+Edward III. is complete. Then comes one which scarcely deserves to be
+called a Court Roll, so entirely informal is it, and so evidently drawn
+up by some one who did not know his business, and who did not pretend
+to know it. It is little more than a collection of rough memoranda of
+deaths. Twelve of the _suitors_ of the court had died without heirs;
+seven others had come to do fealty to the lord as successors to those
+whose heirs they presumably were. Nothing else is recorded. At another
+manor of Lord Townshend's, Raynham Parva, between the years 1347 and
+1350 no court seems to have been held, though the lord of the manor,
+Thomas de Ingaldesthorp, had died in the interval. The scourge of the
+plague had been so awful in its incidence that when the next court was
+held on the 24th July, 1350, fourteen men and four women (holders of
+land, be it remembered) are named as having died off, not one of whom
+had left a living representative behind them. In all cases their little
+holdings had escheated to the lord. Amongst them was one "John Taleour,
+clericus." Was he the clerk who, up to this time, had kept the Rolls so
+neatly, and who could not be easily replaced after he fell a victim to
+the plague?
+
+Indeed, the inquirer who is desirous of pursuing researches in this
+field must be prepared for frequent disappointment just at the moment
+when he thinks he has made a "find." The Court Rolls for this
+particular year are comparatively scarce, and this is true not only for
+East Anglia, but for the whole of England, as any one may see who will
+only cast his eye down those pages of the Deputy-Keeper's Forty-third
+Annual Report, which are concerned with the Records of the Duchy of
+Lancaster. These _registers of deaths_ are, as I have before said, only
+_complete as far as they go._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now return to the point at which the King's letter of
+prorogation left us on the 10th March, 1349. At that time it is certain
+that the pestilence was raging fiercely in London and Westminster, and
+almost as certain that it had abated in Avignon and other towns in
+France. Two or three days after this date the Bishop of Norwich crossed
+the Channel, leaving his diocese in the hands of his officials. Had the
+plague broken out with any severity in East Anglia? I think it almost
+demonstrable that it had not. A day or two before the Bishop left
+London he instituted his friend Stephen de Cressingham to the Deanery
+of Cranwich--in the west of Norfolk--which had fallen vacant, but there
+is nothing to show that the vacancy was due to anything out of the
+common. During the year ending 25th of March, 1349, there were 80
+institutions in the diocese of Norwich, as against 92 in the year 1347
+and 59 in the year 1346. The average number of institutions for the
+five years ending 25th of March, 1349, was 77. Between this date and
+the end of the month there were four institutions only--that is, there
+was nothing abnormal in the condition of the diocese.
+
+East Anglia had not long to wait. In the valley of the Stour, a mile or
+two from Sudbury, where the stream serves as the boundary between
+Suffolk and Essex, the ancestors of Lord Walsingham had two manors in
+the township of Little Cornard--the one was called Caxtons, the other
+was the Manor of Cornard Parva. At this latter manor a court was held
+on the 31st of March--the number of tenants of the manor can at no time
+have exceeded fifty--yet at this court six women and three men are
+registered as having died since the last court was held, two months
+before.
+
+This is the earliest instance I have yet met with of the appearance of
+the plague among us, and as it is the earliest, so does it appear to
+have been one of the most frightful visitations from which any town or
+village in Suffolk or Norfolk suffered during the time the pestilence
+lasted. On the 1st of May another court was held, fifteen more deaths
+are recorded--thirteen men and two women. _Seven of them without
+heirs._ On the 3rd of November, apparently when the panic abated, again
+the court met. In the six months that had passed thirty-six more deaths
+had occurred, and _thirteen more households_ had been left without a
+living soul to represent them. In this little community, in six months'
+time, twenty-one families had been absolutely obliterated--men, women
+and children--and of the rest it is difficult to see how there can have
+been a single house in which there was not one dead. Meanwhile, some
+time in September, the parson of the parish had fallen a victim to the
+scourge, and on the 2nd of October another was instituted in his room.
+Who reaped the harvest? The tithe sheaf too--how was it garnered in the
+barn? And the poor kine at milking time? Hush! Let us pass on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Little Cornard lies almost at the extreme south of the county of
+Suffolk. At the extreme north of Norfolk, occupying the elbow of the
+coast, having the Wash on the west and the German Ocean on the north,
+lies the deanery of Heacham, a district in which the Le Stranges have
+for at least seven centuries exercised their beneficent influence.
+Heacham itself is a large township extending over some 4,900 acres. The
+manorial rights appear to have extended over the whole parish. The
+series of Court Rolls is almost unbroken for the reign of Edward III.
+During the years 1346, 1347, and 1348, ten, six, and nine deaths are
+registered respectively. The courts were held every two months. In
+December, 1348, there is no death recorded; in February, 1349, again
+there is none. On the 28th of April a dispute was set down for hearing
+to be adjudicated upon by the steward and a jury of the homage. It was
+a dispute between a husband and wife on a question of dower. The man's
+name was Reginald Goscelin, his wife's name was Emma. The dispute was
+never settled. Before the day of hearing came on, _every one_ of Emma
+Goscelin's witnesses was dead, and her husband was dead too. Four other
+landowners had died. One of these latter had a son and heir to succeed,
+but two months later the boy had gone, and the sole representative of
+the family was a little girl, who became straightway the ward of the
+lord of the manor.
+
+Contiguous to the township of Heacham lies Hunstanton--not the pleasant
+little watering-place which the million will persist in calling by that
+name, though scarcely forty years ago the maker and builder of the
+modern town, the man who marked out its streets and planned its roads,
+and foresaw its future before a brick of the place was laid, gave it
+the name of St. Edmunds--Hunstanton, I say, in the fourteenth century
+was a parish less than half the size of Heacham, and probably much
+further from the sea than it is now. When, on the 20th of March, 1349,
+the steward of the manor of Hunstanton held his court there he entered
+the name of only one old woman who had died within the last month--that
+is, up to the 20th of March the plague had not yet appeared. Five weeks
+after this, on the 23rd of April, the next court was held. Five petty
+disputes had been entered for hearing. Sixteen men were engaged in them
+as principals or witnesses. When the day came eleven of the sixteen
+were dead. On the 22nd of May again there was a court, and again three
+suits for debt were set down. The defendant in one case, the plaintiff
+in a second, both plaintiff and defendant in the third, died before the
+court day arrived. In June no court was held--was there a panic? Except
+in this month and in September the meetings were carried on as
+regularly as if it had all been done by machinery. In September things
+got to their worst, and in this month the parson died, and was speedily
+succeeded by another. When the court of the 16th of October sat, it was
+found that in two months sixty-three men and fifteen women had been
+carried off. In thirty-one instances there were only women or children
+to succeed; in nine cases there were no heirs, and the little estates
+had escheated to the lord. Incredible though it may sound the fact is
+demonstrable, that in this one parish of Hunstanton, which a man may
+walk round in two or three hours, and the whole population of which
+might have assembled in the church then recently built, one hundred and
+seventy-two persons, tenants of the manor, died off in eight months;
+seventy-four of them left no heirs male, and nineteen others had no
+blood relation in the world to claim the inheritance of the dead.
+
+I have no intention of laying before my readers a detailed statement of
+the documentary evidence which has passed under my notice. The time has
+not come yet for an elaborate report on the case, nor can I pretend to
+have done more than break ground upon what must be regarded still as
+virgin soil; but this I may safely say, that I have not found one
+single roll of any Norfolk manor during this dreadful 23rd year of
+Edward, dating after April or May, which did not contain only too
+abundant proof of the ravages of the pestilence--evidence which forces
+upon me the conviction that hardly a town or village in East Anglia
+escaped the scourge; and which in its cumulative force makes it
+impossible to doubt that the mortality in Norfolk and Suffolk must have
+exceeded the largest estimate which has yet been given by conjecture.
+
+When I find in a stray roll of an insignificant little manor at
+Croxton, near Thetford, held on the 24th of July, that seventeen
+tenants had died since the last court, eight of them without heirs;
+that at another court held the _same day_ at Raynham, at the other end
+of the county, eighteen tenements had fallen into the lord's hands,
+eight of them certainly escheated, and the rest retained until the
+appearance of the heir; that in the manor of Hadeston, a hamlet of
+Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could not possibly have had
+four hundred inhabitants, fifty-four men and fourteen women were
+carried off by the pestilence in six months, twenty-four of them
+without a living soul to inherit their property; that in manor after
+manor the lord was carried off as well as the tenants and the steward;
+that in a single year _upwards of eight hundred parishes lost their
+parsons,_ eighty-three of them twice, and ten of them three times in a
+few months; and that it is quite certain these large numbers represent
+only a portion of the mortality among the clergy and the religious
+orders--when, I say, I consider all this and a great deal more that
+might be dwelt on, I see no other conclusion to arrive at but one,
+namely, that during the year ending March, 1350, more than half the
+population of East Anglia was swept away by the Black Death. If any one
+should suggest that _many more_ than half died, I should not be
+disposed to quarrel with him.
+
+It must be remembered that nothing has been here said of the mortality
+in the towns. I believe we have no means of getting at any evidence on
+this part of the subject which can be trusted. In no part of England
+did the towns occupy a more important position relatively to the rest
+of the population. In no part of England did three such important towns
+as Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich, lie within so short a distance of one
+another, not to mention others which were then rising in the number and
+consideration of their inhabitants. But the statements made of the
+mortality in the towns will not bear examination--they represent mere
+guesses, nothing more. This, however, may be assumed as certain--that
+the death-rate in the towns at such a time as this cannot have been
+less than the death-rate in the villages, and that the scourge which so
+cruelly devastated the huts and cabins of the countrymen was not likely
+to fall less heavily upon the filthy dens and hovels of the men of the
+streets. Town life in the fourteenth century was a very dreadful life
+for the masses.
+
+How did the great bulk of the people comport themselves under the
+pressure of this unparalleled calamity? How did their faith stand the
+strain that was put upon it? How did their moral instincts support
+them? Was there any confusion and despair? What effects--social,
+political, economical--followed from a catastrophe so terrible? How did
+the clergy behave during the tremendous ordeal through which they had
+to pass? What glimpses do we get of the horrors or the sorrows of that
+time--of the romantic, of the pathetic side of life?
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+_THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA._ (CONTINUED.)
+
+
+When Bishop Bateman started on his journey upon the King's business, in
+March 1349, he can scarcely have turned his back upon his diocese
+without some misgivings as to what might happen during his absence. In
+some parts of Norfolk a very grievous murrain had prevailed during the
+previous year among the live stock in the farms, and though this had
+almost disappeared, there was ample room for anxiety in the outlook. If
+the plague had not yet been felt to any extent in East Anglia, it might
+burst forth any day. London had been stricken already, and there was no
+saying where it would next appear in its most malignant form. It was
+hoped that the Bishop's mission would be accomplished in a couple of
+months, and during his absence the charge of the diocese was committed
+as usual to his officials, to one of whom the palace at Norwich was
+assigned as a temporary residence.
+
+The good ship, with the Bishop and his suite, had hardly got out of the
+channel, when a storm other than that which sailors care for burst upon
+town and village in East Anglia. The Bishop's official found his hands
+full of work. In April he was called upon to institute twenty-three
+parsons to livings that had fallen vacant. This was bad enough as a
+beginning, but it was child's play to what followed. By the end of May
+_seventy-four_ more cures had lost their incumbents and been supplied
+with successors. That is, in a single month, the number of institutions
+throughout the diocese had almost equalled the _annual_ average of the
+last five years. All these stricken parishes were country villages, and
+the larger number of them lay to the north and east of the county of
+Norfolk. We take note of this that we call a fact, and straightway the
+temptation presents itself to construct a theory upon it. Who knows not
+that in the trying spring-time, the "colic of puff'd Aquilon" makes
+life hard for man and beast in Norfolk, and that across our fields the
+cruel gusts burst upon us with a bitter petulance, unsparing, pitiless,
+hateful, till our vitality seems to be steadily waning? It was in the
+month of March that the great plague smote us first:--did it not come
+to us on the wings of the wind that swept across the sea the germs of
+pestilence, say from Norway, or some neighbour land in which,
+peradventure, the Black Death had already spent itself in hideous
+havoc? A tempting theory! If I confess that such a view once presented
+itself to my own mind I am compelled to acknowledge that I abandoned it
+with reluctance. It was hard, but it had to be done. How we all do
+hanker after a theory! What! live all your life without a theory? It's
+as dreary a prospect as living all your life without a baby, and yet
+some few great men have managed to pass through life placidly without
+the one or the other, and have not died forgotten or lived forlorn.
+
+The plague had apparently fallen with the greatest virulence upon the
+coast and along the watercourses, but already in the spring had reached
+the neighbourhood of Norwich, and was showing an unsparing impartiality
+in its visitation. At Earlham and Wytton and Horsford, at Taverham and
+Bramerton, all of them villages within five miles of the cathedral, the
+parsons had already died. Round the great city, then the second city in
+England, village was being linked to village closer and closer every
+day in one ghastly chain of death. What a ring-fence of horror and
+contagion for all comers and goers to overpass!
+
+For two months Thomas de Methwold, the official, stayed where he had
+been bidden to stay, in the thick of it all, at the palace. On the 29th
+of May he could bear it no longer. Do you ask was he afraid? Not so! We
+shall see that he was no craven; but the bravest men are not reckless,
+and least of all are they the men who are careless about the lives or
+the feelings of others. The great cemetery of the city of Norwich was
+at this time actually within the cathedral Close. The whole of the
+large space enclosed between the nave of the cathedral on the south and
+the bishop's palace on the east, and stretching as far as the Erpingham
+gate on the west, was one huge graveyard. When the country parsons came
+to present themselves for institution at the palace, they had to pass
+straight across this cemetery. The tiny churchyards of the city,
+demonstrably very little if at all larger than they are now, were soon
+choked, the soil rising higher and higher above the level of the
+street, which even to this day is in some cases five or six feet below
+the soppy sod piled up within the old enclosures. To the great cemetery
+within the Close the people brought their dead, the tumbrels
+discharging their load of corpses all day long, tilting them into the
+huge pits made ready to receive them; the stench of putrefaction
+palpitating through the air, and borne by the gusts of the western
+breeze through the windows of the palace, where the Bishop's official
+sat, as the candidates knelt before him and received institution with
+the usual formalities. It was hard upon him, it was doubly so upon
+those who had travelled a long day's journey through the pestilential
+villages; and on the 30th of May the official removed from Norwich to
+Terlyng, in Essex, where the Bishop had a residence; there he remained
+for the next ten days, during which time he instituted thirty-nine more
+parsons to their several benefices. By this time other towns in the
+diocese had felt the force of the visitation. Ipswich had been smitten,
+and Stowmarket, and East Dereham--how many more we cannot tell. Then
+the news came that the Bishop had returned; Thomas de Methwold was at
+once ordered back to Norwich--come what might, that was his post; there
+he should stay, whether to live or die.
+
+The Bishop seems to have landed at Yarmouth about the both of June; he
+did not at once push on to report himself to the King; urgent private
+affairs detained him in his native county. Seventeen or eighteen miles
+to the south-west of Yarmouth lies the village of Gillingham, where the
+Bishop's brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman, a man of great wealth and
+consideration, had been the lord of the manor. The parish contains
+about 2,000 acres, and at this time had at least three churches, only
+one of which now remains. Besides these Sir Bartholomew had a private
+chapel in his house. Here he kept up much state, as befitted a
+personage who had more than once represented Norfolk and Suffolk in
+Parliament. The plague came, and the worthy knight was struck down; the
+parson too fell a victim; and the Lady Petronilla, Sir Bartholomew's
+widow, presented to the living a certain Hugh Atte Mill, who was
+instituted on the 7th of June. The first news that the Bishop heard
+when he landed was that his brother was dead. He started off at once to
+Gillingham. Death had been busy all around, and the plague had broken
+out in the Benedictine Nunnery of Bungay and carried off the prioress
+among others. Straightway the few nuns that were left chose another
+prioress; on the morning of the 13th she came for institution, and
+received it at the Bishop's hands. Hurrying on to Norwich, the Bishop
+stayed but a single day, leaving his official at the palace. He himself
+had to present himself before the King to give account of his mission;
+on the 19th he was in London; on the 4th of July he was back again in
+his diocese. During the twenty days that had passed since he had left
+Gillingham, exactly _one hundred_ clergymen had been admitted to vacant
+cures, all of them crossing the horrible cemetery where the callous
+gravediggers were at work night and day, the sultry air charged with
+suffocating stench, poisoning the breath of heaven. Yet there the
+Bishop's vicar-general had to stay, eat, drink, and sleep--if he
+could--and there he did stay till the Bishop came back and relieved him
+of the dreadful work.
+
+Meanwhile the gentry too had been dying. It is clear that in the upper
+ranks the men died more frequently than the women, explain it how you
+will. During June and July no fewer than fifteen patrons of livings
+were widows, while in thirteen other benefices the patronage was in the
+hands of the executors or trustees of gentlemen who had died. During
+the month of July in scarcely a village within five miles of Norwich
+had the parson escaped the mortality, yet in Norwich the intrepid
+Bishop remained in the very thick of it all, as if he would defy the
+angel of death, or at least show an example of the loftiest courage.
+Only towards the end of July did he yield, perhaps, to the persuasion
+or entreaty of others, and moved away to the southern part of his
+diocese, taking up his residence at Hoxne, in Suffolk, where he stayed
+till October, when he once more returned to his house at Thorpe by
+Norwich. The palace had become at last absolutely uninhabitable.
+
+To Hoxne accordingly the newly-appointed clergy came in troops, and
+during the first seven weeks after the Bishop's arrival he admitted no
+less than eighty-two parsons, a larger number than had been the average
+of a whole year heretofore. Did they all betake themselves to their
+several parishes and brave the peril and set themselves to the grim
+work before them? They could not help themselves. Where the benefice
+was a vicarage an oath to reside upon his cure was in every case
+rigorously imposed upon the newly-appointed; and though the law did not
+sanction this in the case of rectors, yet not a single instance of a
+licence of non-residence occurs; the difficulty of finding substitutes
+was becoming daily more and more insuperable, and the penalty of
+deserting a parish without licence was a great deal too serious to be
+disregarded. In the months of June, July, and August things were at
+their worst, as might have been expected. In July alone there were two
+hundred and nine institutions. During the year ending March, 1350,
+considerably more than two-thirds of the benefices of the diocese had
+become vacant.
+
+In the religious houses the plague wrought, if possible, worse havoc
+still. There were seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk. Five of them
+lost their prioresses. How many poor nuns were taken who can guess? In
+the College of St. Mary-in-the-fields, at Norwich, five of the seven
+prebendaries died. In September the abbot of St. Benet's Hulm was
+carried off. Again we ask and receive no answer--what must have been
+the mortality among the monks and the servants of the convent? And yet
+sometimes we do get an answer to that question. In the house of
+Augustinian Canons at Heveringland prior and canons died to a man. At
+Hickling, which a century before had been a flourishing house and been
+doing good work, only one canon survived. Neither of these houses ever
+recovered from the effects of the visitation; they were eventually
+absorbed in other monastic establishments.
+
+It is one of the consequences of the peculiar privileges granted to the
+Friars that no notice of them occurs in the episcopal records. They
+were free lances with whom the bishops had little to do. It is only by
+the accident of every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a house in
+Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their house was left
+tenantless, that we know anything of their fate. Wadding, the great
+annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the notorious decadence in
+the _morale_ of the mendicant orders during the fourteenth century--a
+decadence which he does not attempt to deny--attributes it wholly to
+the action of the Black Death, and is glad to find in that calamity a
+sufficient cause for accounting for the loss of the old prestige which
+in little more than a century after St. Francis's death had set in so
+decidedly. "It was from this cause," he writes, "that the monastic
+bodies, and especially the mendicant orders, which up to this time had
+been flourishing in virtue and learning, began to decline, and
+discipline to become slack; as well from the loss of eminent men as
+from the relaxation of the rules, in consequence of the pitiable
+calamities of the time; and it was vain to look for reform among the
+young men and the promiscuous multitude who were received without the
+necessary discrimination, for they thought more of filling the empty
+houses than of restoring the old strictness that had passed away." How
+could it be otherwise? In the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, at
+least _nineteen_ religious houses were left without prior or abbot. We
+may be quite sure that where the chief ruler dropped oft the brethren
+of the house and the army of servants and hangers-on did not escape.
+What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and
+until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands
+in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly
+help trying--trying, but failing--to imagine what the place must have
+looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it must
+have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's throw of
+one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer than the
+cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and miracles of
+splendour within--and outside ghastly heaps of corruption, and piles of
+corpses waiting their turn to be covered up with an inch or two of
+earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors of that awful summer? In
+the desolate swamps through which the sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly
+to mingle its waters with the Yare; by the banks of the Waveney where
+the little Bungay nunnery had been a refuge for the widow, the
+forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in the valley of the Nar--the
+Norfolk Holy Land--where seven monasteries of one sort or another
+clustered, each distant from the other but a few short miles--among the
+ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the Broads, where the tall reeds
+wave and whisper, and all else is silent--the glorious buildings with
+their sumptuous churches were little better than centres of contagion.
+From the stricken towns people fled to the monasteries, lying away
+there in their seclusion, safely, favoured of God. If there was hope
+anywhere it must be there. As frightened widows and orphans flocked to
+these havens of refuge, they carried the Black Death with them, and
+when they dropped death-stricken at the doors, they left the contagion
+behind them as their only legacy. Guilty wretches with a load of crime
+upon their consciences--desperate as far as this world was concerned,
+and ready for any act of wickedness should the occasion
+arrive--shuddered lest they should go down to burning flame for ever
+now that there was none to shrive them or to give the _viaticum_ to any
+late penitent in his agony. In the tall towers by the wayside the bells
+hung mute; no hands to ring them or none to answer to their call
+Meanwhile, across the lonely fields, toiling dismally, and ofttimes
+missing the track--for who should guide them or show the path?--parson
+and monk and trembling nun made the best of their way to Norwich; their
+errand to seek admission to the vacant preferment. Think of them, after
+miles of dreary travelling, reaching the city gates at last, and
+shudderingly threading the filthy alleys which then served as streets,
+stepping back into doorways to give the dead carts passage, and jostled
+by lepers and outcasts, the touch of whose garments was itself a
+horror. Think of them staggering across the great cemetery and
+stumbling over the rotting carcases not yet committed to the earth,
+breathing all the while the tainted breath of corruption--sickening,
+loathsome! Think of them returning as they came, going over the same
+ground as before, and compelled to gaze again at
+
+  Sights that haunt the soul for ever,
+  Poisoning life till life is done.
+
+Think of them foot-sore, half-famished, hardly daring to buy bread and
+meat for their hunger, or to beg a cup of cold water for Christ's sake,
+or entreat shelter for the night in their faintness and weariness, lest
+men should cry out at them--"Look! the Black Death has clutched another
+of the doomed!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have said that upwards of 800 of the beneficed clergy perished in
+East Anglia during this memorable year. Besides these we must make
+allowance for the non-beneficed among the regulars; the _chaplains,_
+who were in the position of curates among ourselves; the vicars of
+parishes whose endowments were insufficient to maintain a resident
+parson under ordinary circumstances, and the members of the monastic
+and mendicant orders. Putting all these together, it seems to me that
+we cannot estimate the number of deaths among regular and secular
+clergy in East Anglia during the year 1349 at less than _two_
+_thousand._ [Footnote: In the diocese of Ely, where the mortality was
+less severe than in Norfolk and Suffolk, 57 parsons died in the three
+months ending the 1st of October, 1349. When an ordination was held by
+the Bishop of Ely's suffragan at the priory of Barnwell on the 19th of
+September, the newly-ordained were fewer by 35 than those who had died
+at their posts since the last ordination.] This may appear an enormous
+number at first hearing, but it is no incredible number. Unfortunately
+the earliest record of any ordinations in the diocese of Norwich dates
+nearly seventy years after the plague year, but there is every reason
+for believing that there were at least _as many,_ and probably many
+more, candidates at ordinations in the fourteenth century as presented
+themselves in the fifteenth. During the year ending January, 1415,
+Bishop Courtenay's suffragan ordained 382 persons, and assuming that in
+Bishop Bateman's days an equal number were admitted to the clerical
+profession, the losses by death in the plague year would have absorbed
+all the clergy who had been ordained during the six previous years, but
+no more. Even so this constituted a tremendous strain upon the reserve
+force of clergy unbeneficed and more or less unemployed, and it was
+inevitable that with such a strain, there would be a deterioration in
+the character and fitness of the newly-appointed incumbents. Yet
+nothing has surprised me more than the exceeding rareness of evidence
+damaging to the reputation of the new men. That these men were less
+educated than their predecessors we know; but that they were mere
+worthless hypocrites there is nothing to show, and much to disprove.
+Nay! the strong impression which has been left upon my mind, and which
+gathers strength as I study the subject, is that the parochial clergy
+of the fourteenth century, before _and after_ the plague, were
+decidedly a better set than the clergy of the thirteenth. The friars
+had done some of their best work in "provoking to jealousy" the country
+clergy and stimulating them to increased faithfulness; they had, in
+fact, made them more _respectable_; just as the Wesleyan revival acted
+upon the country parsons and others four centuries later. Until the
+episcopal _visitations_ of the monasteries during the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries are made public--they exist in far larger numbers
+than is usually supposed--it will be impossible to estimate the effect
+of the plague upon the religious houses; but I am inclined to think
+that the monasteries suffered very greatly indeed from the terrible
+visitation, and that the violent disturbance of the old traditions and
+the utter breakdown in the old observances acted as disastrously upon
+these institutions as the first stroke of paralysis does upon men who
+have passed their prime--they never were again what they had been.
+
+It must be remembered that in the great majority of the smaller
+monasteries, and indeed in any religious house where there were
+chaplains to do the routine work in the church, there was nothing to
+prevent an absolutely illiterate man or woman from becoming monk or
+nun. It was, however, impossible for a man to discharge the duties of
+his calling as a parish priest without some education and without at
+least a knowledge of Latin. I will not stop to argue that point; they
+who dispute the assumption have much to learn. Moreover it is only what
+we should expect, that while some were hardened and brutalized by the
+scenes through which they had passed, some were softened and humbled.
+The prodigious activity in church building--church _restoration_ is
+perhaps the truer term-during the latter part of the fourteenth century
+in East Anglia is one of many indications that the religious life of
+the people at large had received a mighty stimulus. Here, again, the
+evidence near at hand requires to be carefully looked into. In
+historical no less than in physical researches, the microscope requires
+to be used. As yet it has scarcely been used at all. History is in the
+empirical stage. Meanwhile, such hints as that of Knighton's are
+significant when he tells us that, as the parsons died, a vast
+multitude of laymen whose wives had perished in the pestilence
+presented themselves for holy orders. _Many,_ he says--not all--were
+illiterate, save that they knew how to read their missals and go
+through the services though unintelligently, they hardly understood
+what they read. Were they, therefore, the worst of the new parsons? Men
+bowed down by a great sorrow, bewildered by a bereavement for which
+there is none but a make-shift remedy, men whose "life is read all
+backwards and the charm of life undone," are not they whose sorrow
+usually makes them void of sympathy for the distressed. Nay! their own
+sadness makes them responsive to the cry of the needy, the lonely, and
+the fallen. Experience proves to us every day that among such men you
+may find, not the worst parish priests, but the best.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder whether John Bonington, steward of the manor of Waltham, was
+one of those whom Knighton alludes to.
+
+Sometime during the year 1343 there had been a disastrous fire in the
+house of one Roger Andrew; the dwelling, with all that it contained,
+was burnt to the ground. Poor Roger lost all his household stuff and
+furniture and much else besides; worse than all, he lost all his title
+deeds, the evidences and charters whereby he held his little estate. As
+for Roger himself, he either perished in the flames or his heart broke
+and he died very shortly afterwards. He left a son behind him, young
+Richard Andrew, who must have found himself in sorry plight when he
+came to take up his patrimony and enter upon his inheritance. Those
+were not the days when the weak man and the beaten man excited much
+pity in England. No! they were _not,_ whatever sentimental people may
+say who maunder about the ages of faith and refresh themselves with
+other such lackadaisical phrases. So, poor Richard being down in his
+luck, John Bonington, acting for Henry, Earl of Lancaster, [Footnote:
+His son and heir, Henry, Earl of Derby, was created _Duke_ of Lancaster
+in 1351.] the lord of the manor, put the screw on, and boldly claimed a
+heriot from the young man as the right of the lord. Richard disputed
+the right, and protested that his land was not _heriotable._ Bonington
+pleaded his _might_ in a very effectual way, and took his heriot--to
+wit, the best horse which Richard had in his stable, the best and
+probably the only one. Then Richard appealed to the homage. The
+homagers were afraid to give a verdict against the steward, and timidly
+objected that all Richard's evidences had been burnt in the fire.
+Bonington trotted off triumphant, leaving Richard to his bitter wrath.
+Six years went by, and the plague came. It fell upon the district round
+with terrific fury, and the people died in that dreadful April, 1349,
+as the locusts die when the hurricane drives them seaward, and they rot
+in piles upon the shore. The Roll of the Manor Court is a horrible
+record of the suddenness and the force with which the Black Death smote
+the wretched Essex people. When the steward's day's work was done, and
+the long, long list of the dead had been written down, he added a note
+wherein he gives us the facts which have come down to us; and then he
+adds that, inasmuch as he, John Bonington, had come to see that the
+aforesaid horse had been unrighteously taken from Richard Andrew six
+years before, and that the conviction of his own iniquity had been
+brought home to his contrite heart, _as well by the dreadful mortality
+and horrible pestilence at that time raging as by the stirring of
+religious emotion within his soul,_ therefore the full value of the
+horse was to be restored to the injured Richard, and never again was
+heriot to be levied on his land. After six years' hard riding and scant
+feeding, peradventure Richard Andrew would rather have had the hard
+cash than the poor brute, which by this time, probably, had died and
+gone to the dogs! A shudder of penitence and remorse had thrilled
+through John Bonington when the plague was stalking grimly up and down
+the land; and this is what we learn about him--this and no more.
+
+Had John Bonington lost _his_ wife; and was he meditating a life of
+usefulness and penitence and prayer?
+
+  Infert se saeptus nebula (mirabile dictu)
+  Per medics miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli,
+
+A shadowy form looming out from the mists that have gathered over the
+ages past, we see him for a moment, and he is gone.
+
+Fill up the gaps and tell all the tale, poet with the dreamy eyes, eyes
+that can pierce the gloom--poet with the mobile lips, lips that can
+speak with rhythmic utterance the revelations of the future or the past.
+
+All the lonely ones, and all the childless ones, did not turn parsons
+we may be sure; yet it is good for us to believe that John Bonington's
+was not a solitary instance of a man coming out of the furnace of
+affliction softened, not hardened; purified, not merely blistered, by
+the fire.
+
+Was Thomas Porter at Little Cornard somewhat past his prime when the
+plague came? It spared him and his old wife, it seems; but for his sons
+and daughters, the hope of his eld and the pride of his manhood, where
+were they? He and the good wife, cowering over the turf fire, did they
+dare to talk with quivering lips and clouded eyes about the days when
+the little ones had clambered up to the strong father's knee, or tiny
+arms were held out to the rough yeoman as he reached his home? "Oh! the
+desolation and the loneliness. No fault of thine dear wife--nor mine.
+It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!"
+
+Thomas Porter had a neighbour, one John Stone, a man of small
+substance: he owned a couple of acres under the lord; poor land it was,
+hardly paying for the tillage, and I suppose the cottage upon it was
+his own, so far as any man's copyhold dwelling was his own in those
+days. The Black Death came to that cottage among the rest, and John
+Stone and wife and children, all were swept away. Nay! not all: little
+Margery Stone was spared; but she had not a kinsman upon earth. Poor
+little maid, she was barely nine years old and absolutely alone! Who
+cared? Thomas Porter and his weeping wife cared, and they took little
+Margery to their home, and they comforted themselves for all that they
+had lost, and the little maid became unto them as a daughter.
+Henceforth life was less dreary for the old couple. But five years
+passed, and Margery had grown up to be a sturdy damsel and very near
+the marriageable age.
+
+Oh, ho! friend Porter, what is it we have heard men tell? That when the
+Black Death came upon us, your house was left unto you desolate and
+there remained neither chick nor child. Who is this? Then some one told
+the steward, or told the lord, and thereupon ensued inquiry. What right
+had Thomas Porter to adopt the child? She belonged to the lord, and he
+had the right of guardianship. Aye! and the right of disposing of her
+in marriage too. Thomas Porter, with a heavy heart, was summoned before
+the homage. He pleaded that the marriage of the girl did not belong to
+the lord by right, and that on some ground or other, which is not set
+down, she was not his property at all. That might have been very true
+or it might not, but one thing was certain, Thomas Porter had no right
+to her, and so the invariable result followed--he had to pay a fine.
+What else ensued we shall never know.
+
+The glimpses we get of the ways and doings of the old stewards of
+manors are not pleasing; I am afraid that as a class they were hard as
+nails. Perhaps they could not help themselves, but they certainly very
+rarely erred on the side of mercy and forbearance. Is not that phrase
+"making allowances for," a comparatively modern phrase? At any rate the
+_thing_ is not often to be met with in the fourteenth century. Yet in
+the plague year every now and then one is pleased to find instances
+actually of consideration for the distress and penury of the homagers
+at this place and that. Thus at Lessingham, when the worst was over and
+a court was held on the 15th of January, 1350, the steward writes down
+that only thirty shillings was to be levied from the customary tenants
+by way of tallage, "Because the greater part of those tenants who were
+wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the
+deadly pestilence."
+
+Here and there, too, we come upon heriots remitted because the heir was
+so very poor, and here and there fines and fees are cancelled _causa
+miseriae propter pestilentiam._ Surely it is better to assume that this
+kind of thing was done, as our friend Bonington puts it, _mero motu
+pietatis suae_ than because there was no money to be had. Better give a
+man the benefit of the doubt, even though he has been dead five hundred
+years, than kick him because he will never tell any more tales.
+
+If it happened sometimes that the plague brought out the good in a man,
+sometimes changed his life from one of covetous indifference or
+grasping selfishness into a life of earnestness and devout
+philanthropy, it happened at other times--and I fear it must be
+confessed more frequently--that coarse natures, hard and cruel ones,
+were made more brutal and callous by the demoralizing influences of
+that frightful summer.
+
+I am sure it will be very gratifying to some enlightened and chivalrous
+people to learn that I have at least one bad story against a parson.
+
+Here it is!
+
+The rolls of the manor of Waltham show that the plague lingered about
+there till late in the spring of 1350. As elsewhere, there must needs
+have been much change in the benefices of the neighbourhood. Of course
+some of the new parsons were scamps, the laity who survived being,
+equally of course, models of all that was lovely and estimable. One of
+these clerical impostors had got a cure somewhere in the
+neighbourhood--where is not stated, but, inasmuch as his clerical
+income had not come up to his expectations or his necessities, or his
+own estimate of his deserts, he found it necessary to supplement that
+income by somewhat unprofessional conduct. In fact, the Rev.
+William--that was his name--seems actually to have thrown up his
+clerical avocations and by his flagrant irregularities had got to
+himself the notorious sobriquet of William the One-day priest. I should
+not be surprised to find out that this worthy was captain of a band of
+robbers who infested Epping Forest. In the end of January, 1351.
+Matilda, wife of John Clement de Godychester, was quietly riding
+homewards when, as she passed by the sheepfold of Plesset, out came the
+Rev. William and bade the lady stand and deliver. Her attendants, it is
+to be presumed, took to their heels, and the lady, being unable to help
+herself, delivered up her purse--the account says the Rev. William cut
+it off--and moreover surrendered a ring of some value, after which she
+continued her journey. She raised the hue and cry to some purpose, and
+the clerical king of the road was taken and... there is no more. No! It
+is a story without an end.
+
+But there were then, as there are now, other ways of preying upon our
+fellow-creatures and levying blackmail from them, without going to the
+length of highway robbery--cold work, and a little risky at times.
+
+Henry Anneys, at Lessingham, could work upon the fears of Alice Bakeman
+and extort a douceur from her without resorting to violence. Mrs.
+Bakeman had succeeded to the property of some dead kinsman, and Mr.
+Anneys heard of it. He called on the lady and informed her that for a
+consideration he would save her from paying any heriot to the lord; he
+had certain information which he could use either way. Finally, it was
+agreed that Alice should give the rogue a cow as hush-money, and with
+the cow Mr. Anneys departed. His triumph was brief. When the time for
+holding the next court arrived, others came round the poor woman, and
+made it quite evident that the lands she had succeeded to were not
+heriotable at all, and that Henry Anneys was a swindler. So the case
+was brought before the homage as usual, the cow was ordered to be
+returned, and a substantial fine imposed upon Anneys.
+
+Almost the first thing that strikes a novice who looks into the village
+history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the astounding
+frequency of bloody quarrels among the rustics. In the records of the
+Courts Leet for Norfolk it is very seldom indeed, that you can find a
+court held at which one or more persons, male and female, are not
+amerced for "drawing blood" from somebody. Whether it was by punching
+their opponents on the nose, or whether they used their knives, I
+hesitate to decide; but I suspect, from the frequent mention of knives
+and daggers, that sticking one's enemy with cold steel was not so very
+un-English a practice as popular prejudice is wont to assume it to be.
+One thing is very certain, and that is--that all over East Anglia, five
+hundred years ago, there was such an amount of bloodletting in village
+frays as would hardly have disgraced the University of Heidelberg. In
+Norfolk these sanguinary fights must have been a passion; but one would
+have thought that, while the plague was raging and after it had begun
+to subside, then, if ever, men and women would have become less savage
+and ferocious. So far from it, such records of the years 1349 and 1350
+as I have examined are fuller than ever of fights and quarrels At
+Lessingham, about Christmas time, 1349, there was a free fight of a
+most sanguinary character, men and women joining in it freely. It seems
+to have arisen from some one finding a horse wandering about the
+deserted fields. As a stray it belonged to the lord--the finder took a
+different view, somebody cried "Halves!" and somebody else said, "Til
+give information," and somebody else replied, "So will I," whereupon
+arose a bloody battle as has been told. About the same time at
+Hunstanton, Catherine Busgey, evil-disposed old hag that she was, had
+stript a dead man of his leather jerkin. Did she proceed to wear the
+manly attire that she might be dagger-proof for the next encounter?
+Rash woman! The dead man's friends recognized the well-known coat, it
+was forfeited and delivered over to the lord.
+
+It might well be supposed that, while the whole executive machinery of
+the country was being subject to a tremendous strain, there would be in
+some districts a condition of affairs which differed very little from
+downright anarchy. Yet here, again, the existing records are
+surprisingly free from any evidence tending to support such an
+assumption, England was not governed by the Home Secretary in those
+days. Every parish was a living political unit with its own police and
+its own local government. However desirable it may appear to some to
+bring back such a state of things, the question nevertheless remains
+how far it is ever possible to revivify an organization which has long
+since died a natural death. That, in the fourteenth century, the
+country districts governed themselves there can be no doubt at all;
+with what results, as far as the greatest happiness of the greatest
+number is concerned, this is not the time or the place to inquire or to
+decide. Yet I cannot withhold my conviction that, if any such gigantic
+calamity were to fall upon our people now as fell upon them when the
+Black Death swept over the face of the land five centuries ago--a
+calamity so sweeping, so overwhelming--its consequences upon the whole
+social fabric would be incomparably more disastrous than it was in
+times when centralization was almost unknown and practically
+impossible. Be it as it may, since the days when the Roman Senate
+passed a vote of confidence in a beaten general because he had not
+despaired of the republic, I know nothing in history that impresses a
+student more profoundly with a sense of the magnificent
+self-possession, self-control, and self-respect of a suffering nation,
+under circumstances of unexampled agony and horror, than the simple
+prosaic annals which remain to us of the great plague year in England.
+
+In only one district in Norfolk have I found evidence of any widespread
+lawlessness. Even there one hears of it only to hear of vigorous
+grappling with the ruffians, who were not allowed to have it all their
+own way.
+
+The hundred of Depwade, lying to the south of Norwich, contains
+twenty-three parishes; and at the time we are concerned with had very
+few resident gentry of any consideration. Then, as now, the country
+parsons were the most important people in the district, and the
+benefices were above the average in value. In the summer and autumn, at
+least fifteen of these clergymen fell victims to the plague; among them
+the rector of Bunwell and the vicar of Tibenham, adjoining parishes.
+The vicarage was a poor one; it was worth no one's holding; the rectory
+had been held by William Banyard, a near relative of Sir Robert
+Banyard, lord of the manor; the plague carried him off in July, and his
+successor was instituted on the 25th of the month, but does not seem to
+have come into residence immediately. There had been a clean sweep of
+the old incumbents from all the parishes for miles round; the poor
+people, left to themselves, became demoralized; there seems to have
+been a general scramble, and for a while no redress anywhere. It is
+recorded that the cattle roamed at will over the standing corn with
+none to tend them, and that there had been none to make the lord's hay;
+that among others who had died there were five substantial men among
+the homagers on whose lands heriots of more or less value were due; but
+no heriot was recoverable, inasmuch as since the last court certain
+persons unknown had plundered all that could be carried off--cattle and
+sheep and horses and goods, and there was nothing to distrain upon but
+the bare lands and the bare walls.
+
+It may be presumed that where a scoundrel escaped the contagion
+altogether, while others were dying all round him, or where another
+recovered after being brought to death's door, in such cases the man
+would, as a rule, be a person of exceptional strength and vigorous
+constitution. Such fellows, when the evil spirit was upon them, would
+be ugly customers to deal with. Gilbert Henry, of Tibenham, was a
+somewhat audacious thief when he walked into John Smith's house, where
+there was none alive to bar the door, and carried off certain bushels
+of malt and barley, with other goods not specified; and, not content
+therewith, stripped the dead man of his coat and waistcoat. The value
+of these articles of apparel was not assessed very highly--only
+sixpence each--and Master Gilbert, after paying the price of the
+garments, seems to have gone away with them. It is hardly to be
+wondered at that neither steward nor lord greatly coveted that coat and
+waistcoat. At the same court, too, William Hessland was amerced for
+appropriating the few trumpery chattels of Walter Cokstone, a _villein_
+belonging to the lord. Another wretched pair--a man and his wife--had
+deliberately cleared a crop of oats off an acre and a half of land, and
+stacked it in their own barn. Their view was that it belonged to no
+one; the steward took a different view, and reminded them that what
+grew on no man's land was the property of some one other than the smart
+man who ventured to lift it.
+
+It was at Bunwell, too, that William Sigge was by way of becoming a
+terror to his neighbours. It was laid to his charge, generally, that he
+had from time to time during the pestilence carried off and
+appropriated various articles of property _(diversa catalla)_ too
+numerous to specify. They must have been a very miscellaneous lot, for
+they included several hurdles and the lead stripped off a dead man's
+roof, not to mention such trifles as garments and pots and pans. Sigge
+was a very successful plunderer, and, his success rather turned his
+head. When the autumn of 1350 came, he refused to do his autumn
+service, protested that there was none to do, and was fined
+accordingly; not only so, but he was found to have stubbed up a hedge
+which had been the boundary of the land of Robert Attebrigge, who had
+died with no one to represent him. The women were as bad as the men;
+they had their rights in those days. One of these beldames was caught
+walking away with a couple of handmills from a plague-struck dwelling,
+and another had looted a tenement where John Rucock's corpse lay; she
+too had stripped the dead!
+
+It is not a little curious to notice how that love of going to law
+which old Fuller two hundred years ago remarked upon as a
+characteristic of Norfolk men comes out again when the confusion had
+begun to subside. The plague is no sooner at an end than the local
+courts are resorted to for the hearing of every kind of odd question
+which the complications arising from the abnormal mortality had
+occasioned.
+
+When Edward Burt died at Lessingham, he left his widow Egidia all he
+had; but he owed Margery Brown the sum of thirty shillings. Egidia at
+once provided herself with a second husband, and surrendered herself
+and her belongings to Edward Bunting. Mrs. Brown applied for her little
+bill. Egidia, now no longer a widow, but lawful wife of Mr. Bunting,
+repudiated the debt; she was widow no longer, she had become the
+property of another man; the debt, she pleaded, was buried in her first
+husband's grave. That little quibble was soon overruled. But there were
+often cases which were by no means so easily disposed of. Robert
+Bokenham was lord of the manor of Tibenham, and Robert Tate was one of
+his tenants. Tate died; then Bokenham died. Bokenham's son was only
+nine years old, and no guardian had been appointed when Tate's son
+died. Then followed a dispute as to who was guardian of young Bokenham,
+and of whom Tate's land was held, and who was the true heir. A pleasant
+little brief there for a rising barrister to hold.
+
+A complication of much the same kind arose at Croxton. William Galion,
+a man of some consideration, died in July, leaving his wife Beatrix
+with two sons; but he died intestate..Beatrix had just time to pay a
+heavy fine to the lord for the privilege of being her eldest son's
+guardian when the plague took her. Before she died she left the
+guardianship of her first-born son John to her husband's brother Adam;
+a few days afterwards the boy John died, and his brother Robert alone
+remained; the guardianship of the boy John is of course at an end, and
+uncle Adam applies for the guardianship of the surviving nephew; but by
+this time he is unable to find the money; whereupon the child's estate
+is taken into the hands of the lord till such time as the uncle can pay
+the fees demanded.
+
+Walter Wyninge had a wise woman for his wife, and her name was Matilda.
+The Black Death left her & widow, but she speedily married without any
+license from the lord to William Oberward. The second husband had a
+very brief enjoyment of his married life; in a few days he too died,
+and Matilda married a third husband, one Peter the carpenter. At this
+point Matilda's turn came and she died. All this had happened in the
+interval of two months since the last manor court was held. The steward
+of the manor claimed a heriot from Wyninge's land and another from
+Oberward's. But the astute Peter was equal to the occasion: he pleaded
+that, according to the custom of the manor, no heriot could be levied
+from a widow till she had survived her husband a year and a day, and he
+demanded that the court rolls should be searched to confirm or correct
+his assertion. I suspect he knew his business, and no heriot came to
+that grasping steward. Who pities him?
+
+Ladies and gentlemen of the romantic order of mind will be shocked at
+the indelicacy of Mistress Matilda--she of the many names. I suspect
+that they would be shocked by a great many things in the domestic life
+of England five centuries ago. Marrying for love has a sweet sound
+about it, but the thing did not exist in the old days. When did it
+exist? History is very hard upon romance; History, disdaining courtesy,
+lifts one veil after another, opens closed doors, reveals long-buried
+secrets, turns her bull's-eye upon the dark corners, and breaks the old
+seals. She is very cynical, and will by no means side with this
+appellant or with that. Beautiful theories crumble into dust when they
+stand before her judgment-seat, and old dreams, offspring of brains
+that were wrestling with slumber in the darkness, pass away as the dawn
+comes, bringing with it, too often, such revelations as are not
+altogether lovely to dwell on. In the fourteenth century an unmarried
+woman was a chattel, and belonged to somebody who had the right to sell
+her or to give her away. That is the naked truth. You may make a man an
+offender for a word if you will, and object that "sell" is an incorrect
+term; but the fact remains, however much some may--
+
+     leave the sense their learning to display,
+  And some explain the meaning quite away.
+
+Hence, when a wretched woman was mourning alone over the husband who
+had just been hustled into his grave, the men were after her like
+wolves, every one of her neighbours knowing exactly what she was worth
+even to the fraction of a rood of land, or the last lamb that had been
+dropped, or the litter of pigs that were rootling up the beech-nuts in
+the woods. They gave her short time to make up her mind. Sentiment? We
+in the East--the land of the wise men since time was young--we know
+nothing of sentiment. We can hate with a sullen tenacity of resentment
+which knows no forgiveness; but love--nay we leave that for the
+"intense" of other climes. And women in the good old times--positively
+women--love one man more than another? What _they?_
+
+  "Whose love knows no distinction but of gender,
+   And ridicules the very name of choice!"
+
+Why, where were you born?
+
+The records of the marriages on the court rolls of the plague year are
+hardly more startling than the deaths. Whether men and women paid less
+to the lord for a license than they were compelled to pay if they
+married without license I cannot tell; but that hundreds of widows must
+have married only a few weeks or a few days after their husbands'
+deaths is clear. Matilda's case was not a rare one. Alice Foghal, at
+Lessingham, was another of those ladies who in a couple of months had
+been the property successively of three husbands--the last was actually
+a stranger. Where he came from is not stated, but he sate himself down
+by the widow's hearth, claimed it as his own, and paid a double fee for
+his successful gallantry. How he managed the matter remains
+unexplained, but young brides were plentiful in the parish just about
+that time; and at the same court where Alice's matrimonial alliances
+were compounded for, no less than fifteen other young women paid their
+fees for marrying without license from the lord. I have only noticed
+one instance of anything like remission of _marriage fees_, though I
+hope it was less uncommon than appears on the rolls. The lady in this
+case was a butcher's widow, and it was too much to expect that she
+could wait till the next court, wherefore the steward graciously
+knocked off seventy-five per cent. of his due; and, in lieu of two
+shillings, charged her only sixpence--_ratione temporis et in
+misericordia_, as he sententiously observes. Magnanimous steward!
+
+I have met with no evidence leading to the belief that anywhere in the
+country villages there was anything approaching to a panic. Only a
+novice would be led astray by what he might read occurred at
+Coltishall. Five brothers named Gritlof and two other brothers named
+Primrose, being _nativi_, i.e., _villeins born_, and so the property of
+the lord, had decamped whither none could tell; the court solemnly
+adjudicated upon the case, and decreed that the seven runaways should
+be attached _per corpora_, whatever that may mean. But Coltishall is
+barely five miles from Norwich, and from the villages round the great
+city the _villeins_ were always running away in the hopes of getting
+their freedom if they could keep in hiding within the city walls for a
+year and a day. Oh, ye seven, had the yellow primrose less charm for
+you, and the barley loaves that were sure for you in breezy
+Coltishall--gritty though they might be--less charm than the garbage
+that might be picked up in Norwich, in its noisome alleys reeking with
+corruption, and all that flesh and blood revolts from? Ah! but to be
+free--to be free! How that thought made their poor hearts throb!
+
+That there was panic--mad, unreasoning, insensate panic--elsewhere than
+in the country villages there is abundant evidence to prove, but it was
+among the well-to-do classes--the traders and the moneyed men,
+_bourgeoisie_ of the towns--that a stampede prevailed. Any one who
+chooses may satisfy himself of this by looking into Rymer's _Faedera,_
+to go no further.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Enough has been told in the foregoing pages to illustrate the
+overwhelming violence with which the Great Plague ran its career in
+East Anglia. Only a small part of the evidence still ready to our hands
+has been examined; but if no more were scrutinized, the impression left
+upon us of the severity of the visitation would be quite sufficiently
+appalling. It is, however, when an attempt to estimate the immediate
+effects and the remoter consequencs that followed that our difficulties
+begin.
+
+Before a man is qualified to dogmatize upon those effects, he must have
+gone some way towards making himself familiar with the social and
+economic conditions of the country during at least the century before
+the plague. Unfortunately the history of economics in England has never
+been attempted by any one at all duly qualified for dealing with so
+complex and difficult a subject, and the crudest theories have been
+substituted for sound conclusions, then only to be accepted when based
+upon the solid ground of ascertained fact. In the childhood of every
+science dogmatism precedes induction, and in the absence of clear
+knowledge, foolish and wild-eyed visionaries have posed as discoverers
+again and again. Yet bluster and audacity have their use, if only to
+stimulate the timid and the dilatory to quicken their pace and move
+forwards. For my part, however, if it be necessary to choose between
+the two, I should prefer to err with the slow and cautious rather than
+with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag
+upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us
+out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be
+very hard to get back into the right track.
+
+The great teacher who, with his transcendent genius, has done more to
+create a school of English history than all who have gone before him,
+who, in fact, has made English history, not what it is, but what it
+will be, when his influence shall have permeated our literature, has
+spoken on this subject of the Black Death with his usual profound
+suggestiveness. The Bishop of Chester looks with grave distrust upon
+any theory which ascribes to the Great Plague as a cause "nearly all
+the social changes which take place in England down to the Reformation:
+the depopulation of towns, the relaxation of the bonds of moral and
+social law, the solution of the continuity of national development
+caused by a sort of disintegration in society generally." [Footnote:
+"Constitutional History," vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 399, Section 259,
+edit. 1875.] And yet this appalling visitation must have constituted a
+very important factor in the working out of those social and political
+problems with which the life of every great nation is concerned. Such
+problems, however, are not simple ones; rather they are infinitely
+complex; and he who would set himself to analyse the processes by which
+the ultimate results are arrived at will blunder hopelessly if he takes
+account of only a single unknown quantity.
+
+I. It is obvious that the sudden exhaustion of the large reserve force
+of clergy must have made itself felt at once in every parish in
+England. In the diocese of Norwich a considerable number of the parsons
+who died belonged to the gentry class. Then, as now, there were family
+livings to which younger sons might hope to be presented, and were
+presented, as vacancies occurred; but, in the face of the sudden and
+widely extended mortality, it was inevitable that appointments should
+be made with very little reference to a man's social grade or
+intellectual proficiency. Patrons had to take whom they could get. This
+of itself would tend to a deterioration in the character of the clergy;
+but this was not all. The clergy died; but other holders of offices,
+civil and ecclesiastical, were not spared. There was a sudden opening
+out of careers in every direction for the ambitious and the unemployed:
+young men who ten years before would never have dreamt of anything but
+"resorting to holy orders," turned their eyes to other walks and
+adopted other views; and it is plain that a large number of those who
+presented themselves for admission to the clerical profession as we now
+understand it, in many instances belonged to a lower class than their
+predecessors. Some were devout and earnest, such country parsons as
+Chaucer described--he does not turn aside to caricature _them_--but
+others were mere adventurers, hirelings whose heart was not in their
+work. These clerical scamps gave Archbishop Simon Islip a great deal of
+trouble. The smaller livings were forsaken, the curate market rose, the
+chaplains would neither take the country vicarages nor engage
+themselves as regular helpers to the parish priests. London swarmed
+with itinerants who preferred picking up a livelihood by occasional
+duty, when they could make their own terms, to binding themselves to a
+cure of souls. [Footnote: Compare Chaucer's words--"He sette not his
+benefice to hire, And lette his sheep accombred in the mire, _And ran
+unto London, into Seint Paules To seken him a chanterie for
+Soules_"---with Wilkins' "Concilia," vol. iii. I.] The primate
+denounced these greedy ones again and again, but it was all in vain;
+the bishops found it impossible to draw the reins of discipline as
+tightly as they wished, and found it equally impossible to prevent the
+extortionate demands of such curates as could be got. The evil grew to
+such a height that the faithful Commons took the matter up and
+petitioned the King to interfere, inasmuch as "les chappeleins sont
+devenuz si chers" that they actually demanded ten or even twelve marks
+a year as their stipend--"a grant grevance & oppression du poeple." The
+usual methods were resorted to, and if people could be made good by Act
+of Parliament the evils complained of would have disappeared. They did
+not disappear, and the evil grew. Unhappily the increased stipends did
+not serve to produce a better article, and it is only too plain that
+the religious convictions and the religious life of the people suffered
+seriously. Ten years after the Black Death the Archbishop expresses his
+deep sorrow at the neglect of Sunday, the desertion of the churches and
+the decline in religious observances. Yet we must be cautious how we
+attribute this break-up in the old habits of the people to the plague
+exclusively, or even mainly. Some of the evils complained of had
+already begun to be felt before the plague came, and may fairly be
+attributed, not to the falling short of the numbers of the clergy, but
+exactly the reverse.
+
+Already a strong reaction had set in against the friars, their
+influence and their teaching had begun to be regarded as menacing to
+the stability of existing creeds and existing institutions. Langland
+hated them. Chaucer held them up to scorn. Wickliffe denounced them
+with a righteous wrath. Fitz-Ralph, Archbishop of Armagh, carried on
+open war against them. All these leaders of the chosen bands that fight
+the battles of God had arrived at man's estate when the Black Death
+came, and all survived it. They certainly were not the product of the
+great visitation; they were the spokesmen and representatives of a
+generation that had begun to look at the world with larger, other eyes
+than their fathers. That which was coming would have come if there had
+been no plague at all, and so far from its being certain that that
+calamity was in any great degree the cause of the upheaval that ensued,
+it is at least as probable that the sudden decrease in the population
+served to retard the action of forces already working mightily in the
+direction of revolution--revolution it might be for the better, or it
+might be for the worse.
+
+2. Whoever else may have been losers or sufferers by the plague, there
+was one class which emerged from that dreadful year very much richer
+than before. The lords of the manors, the representatives of what we
+now call the country gentry, were great gainers. Not only did the
+extraordinary amount paid in heriots and fees make up an aggregate
+which in itself constituted a very large percentage upon the capital
+embarked in agriculture, but the extent of land which _escheated_ to
+the lords was very considerable. Moreover, the manors themselves, or as
+we should say, the landed property of the country, came into fewer
+hands; the gentry became richer and their estates larger. Knighton
+draws attention to the fact that in the towns a large number of houses
+became ruinous for want of occupants, but he adds that in the hamlets
+and villages the same effects followed, and that everywhere. Here
+again, the rolls of Parliament corroborate the assertion and inform us
+that not only the dwellings of the homagers but the capital mansions
+themselves, were deserted and falling to decay. When, in the next
+reign, the manor of Hockham came into the possession of Richard, Earl
+of Arundel, in right of his wife, he took the precaution of having a
+careful survey made of the condition of the estate as it came into his
+hands. The manor-house had not been tenanted for thirty years. It had
+been a mansion of considerable pretension and two stories high; on the
+ground-floor the doors were all gone; on the upper floor the windows
+were open to the air; the chamber "vocata ladyes chambre" was roofless,
+the offices were too dilapidated to be worth repair. The enclosing
+walls and the moat had been utterly neglected. The offices had formerly
+been adapted for a large establishment; there had been extensive farm
+buildings, and at least six substantial houses for the bailiff and
+other farm servants. Among other buildings there were two _fishouses_
+built of timber and _daubur_, in which apparently the keeper of the
+fishponds lived, and some elaborate arrangements had existed for
+keeping up the supply of fish in the ponds by methods of pisciculture
+to us unknown. The windmill had long ceased to be used, its very
+grinding stones had disappeared. Worse than all, there was no more any
+gallows or pillory, or even stocks, _pro_ _libertate servanda_, as the
+jurors quaintly remark. Yet the records show that at Hockham things had
+gone on pretty much as before since the big house was deserted. The
+courts were held with exemplary regularity, the fees had been exacted
+with unwavering rigour, the homagers settled their own affairs in their
+own way; but there was this difference, that for a generation the
+tenants had been living under an absentee landlord, who so far from
+being the poorer because the big house had been tumbling down, was the
+richer, inasmuch as he had one mansion the less to keep up out of his
+income. What happened at Hockham must have happened in hundreds of
+other parishes; there must have been large tracts of country during the
+latter half of the reign of Edward the Third where a resident landlord
+was the exception to that which aforetime had been the rule.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+3. In the present condition of our knowledge, any estimate of the
+actual numbers who perished in the plague must be the merest guesswork.
+It may be that two millions were carried off; it may be there were
+three. It is undeniable that a very large proportion of the inhabitants
+of this island died in a few months--employers and employed. We must,
+however, remember that England in the fourteenth century was
+incomparably more self-supporting than it is in the nineteenth century;
+that there were no great centres of industry then; that the rural
+population was largely in excess of the urban population; that we
+exported the wool which the Flemings manufactured into cloth; and that
+if there were fewer hands to till the soil, there were fewer mouths to
+feed. No one can doubt that the labour market must have been seriously
+disturbed, but it is very easy to exaggerate this disturbance; and
+whether it were less or more than has been asserted, we shall certainly
+err by attributing the rise in wages, which undoubtedly took place
+after the Black Death, to it, and to it alone--_post hoc ergo propter
+hoc_ is not a safe conclusion. Granted, as we must grant, that the
+plague accelerated the rise in wages, it is certain the upward movement
+had already begun before the population had been seriously lessened.
+The number of clergy, to be sure, was largely in excess of the needs of
+the country; the clerical profession had become "choked" by the influx
+of young men presumably with _some_ private means to fall back upon;
+among them there must have been, and there was, serious competition for
+every vacant post. When the reserve of supernumeraries became absorbed,
+the competition turned the other way, and the surviving clergy could
+make their own terms. It was otherwise with the masses, especially with
+the peasantry. If there were an insufficient number of labourers to
+till the land heretofore in cultivation, the worst land fell out of
+cultivation, and no one was much the worse. It was all very well for
+some landlords to complain that their rents had fallen off. Yes!
+Then--as now, as always--the small proprietors suffered severely, and
+needy men are wont to be clamorous. Then--as now, as always--the
+sufferers looked about them for a cause of their distress, and found it
+in any event that was nearest at hand. But we know that the style of
+living after the plague was incomparably more luxurious and extravagant
+than it was before. The country was producing less, it may be; but the
+people, man for man, were much richer than before.
+
+When we find ourselves confronted with the rhetorical stuff which the
+literature of preambles and parliamentary petitions in the fourteenth
+century flaunts so liberally before our eyes, we must learn to accept
+the statements of draughtsmen _cum grano_, and to read between the
+lines. The Commons were quite equal to making the most of any calamity
+that occurred. When the Parliament, which had not met since mid Lent,
+1348, assembled once more in February, 1350, the plague was not
+forgotten. In the petitions presented to the King, the havoc wrought is
+dwelt upon and deplored, _not_ with a view to remedy any of the
+distress that had ensued, but in the hope that the arrears of taxation
+due from the dead might be excused to the survivors who had succeeded
+to the others' property. If they complain of the scarcity and dearness
+of corn, this is to give point to their protest against the King's
+servants taking it for the victualling of his army and the town of
+Calais. If, again, they sound a note of alarm at the outrageous
+insolence of the labourers who presumed to demand a large increase of
+wage, and would not work at the old scale of pay, there is no pretence
+that the employers could not afford to accede to the increased demand;
+the "grand meschief du poeple" consisted in this, that the tillers of
+the soil should have dreamt of asserting themselves in any way
+whatever. Moreover, when it came to legislating against the mutinous
+labourers, King and Parliament, while sternly setting their faces
+against the rise in wages, _do not take the twenty-third year of the
+King as the standard year_ by which to settle what the normal rate of
+wages should be. They go back to the twentieth year, _ou cynk ou sis
+ans devans_. That is to say, the wages had been steadily rising for ten
+years before the plague; the labourers had been getting their share of
+the increased prosperity of the country; and the Statute of Labourers
+was only one of the clumsy attempts to interfere with the action of a
+great economical law which had been working silently for the advantage
+of the operatives long before the Black Death had come to perplex and
+confuse men's minds and disturb their calculations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some of us remember when the science of geology was young--and we were
+young too--we remember how there was a certain romance and fascination
+about those fearless and richly imaginative theories which explained
+all the great changes in the crust of the earth by magnificent
+cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack of doom meant
+something after all! What had been should be again. Old times had
+stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of systems, and the
+swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in the yawning
+abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself inside out.
+Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we had to
+comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting with
+infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered ages, the
+great laws working themselves out without haste or any tendency to
+those picturesque paroxysms which have a certain charm for us in our
+nonage. When Sociology shall have risen to the dignity of a
+science--and that day may come--I think she too will be chary of
+resorting to the cataclysm theory; she and her handmaid History will
+hardly smile approval upon pretenders who are anxious to discover a
+single efficient cause for results which a million influences have
+combined to bring about, or who assume that every new phenomenon must
+disturb the equilibrium of the world. To take up with theories first in
+the hope, and sometimes with the determination, that facts shall be
+found to support them at last, is the vice--I had almost said the
+crime--of too many of those who now are styled historians.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If at this point I leave to others the further pursuit of a subject
+which deserves a more comprehensive treatment than it has yet received,
+it is not because I have not much more that I could tell. If it be true
+that the proper study of mankind is man, it is at least as true that
+the proper study of Englishmen is the history of England; that,
+however, means a great deal more than is usually understood by the
+words. It means the history of English institutions, of the social, the
+intellectual, and the religious life of our forefathers--it means a
+great deal more than the life of our sovereigns, their wars, their
+virtues or their follies. Unhappily historic studies in England,
+notwithstanding the splendid impetus that has been given to them of
+late by the brilliant achievements of some philosophic enquirers,
+receive but scant encouragement, and for the most part a man's labour
+must be his own reward. In our elementary schools History is almost
+utterly ignored. A whole people is rapidly breaking with the past from
+sheer ignorance that there is any past that is worth knowing. Who shall
+estimate the immeasurable harm that must be wrought to a nation that
+has lost touch with the past? Let men but believe, to their shame, that
+
+     The glories of our birth and state
+     Are shadows, not substantial things,
+
+and what becomes of patriotism? Granted, if you will, that English
+history has been made too often a dry and repulsive study by those who
+have undertaken to teach it and write it; need it remain so? It must
+remain so as long as we keep to the old lines and content ourselves
+with the old methods. What is wanted to make any science _interesting_
+is that it should push its inquiries into new fields of research. The
+means and appliances, and opportunities for pursuing historical
+researches open to those whose youth is not all behind them, are such
+as we, their seniors, never dreamt of when we were in our early
+manhood. There are whole worlds as yet unexplored and waiting to be
+won. Do men whimperingly complain that there is no longer a career for
+genius? Tush! It is enthusiasm that is wanted. Give us that, and the
+career will follow. But the enthusiasm must be of the real sort--not
+self-asserting, self-conscious, self-seeking; but earnest, patient,
+resolute, and reticent: for science, too, needs heroism no less than
+war.
+
+In the domain of Physical Science there has been in our own time no
+lack of intelligent co-operation, and volunteers have been many and
+earnest, nor have they spared themselves or shrunk from sacrifices. In
+the domain of Historical Science the labourers are few and far between;
+there research proceeds with lagging steps. No one sneers at a
+philosopher who travels to Iceland to investigate the habits of a gnat,
+or who counts it the pride of his life to have discovered a new fungus,
+but simpletons are pleased to make themselves merry with caricaturing
+any student of his country's institutions who is "always poring over
+musty old parchments." And yet these minute researches will have to be
+made sooner of later, and till we can bring ourselves to study the
+structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions,
+and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools
+deride, the light of truth will be dim for us all; our Ethical, equally
+with our political Philosophy must remain in a condition of hopeless
+sterility. Nevertheless History too has her mission, though her time
+has not yet come. It will not always be that the past will be to us "as
+the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is
+learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith I cannot, for it
+is sealed; and the book is delivered to him that is not learned,
+saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned."
+
+No! It will not be always so.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.
+
+     . . . . "so famous,
+     So excellent in art, and still so rising."
+
+Some years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed
+myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and pride
+it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the
+important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic showman,
+and I am bound to say he showed us a great deal; but the most memorable
+moment of that instructive day was when he stopped before, what seemed
+to us, a respectable mansion in a respectable street, and announced to
+us that "you" was "the Free Kirk _Univairsity_." It was the first time
+in my life that I had heard four stone walls with a roof over them
+called a University. It was not long, however, before I discovered that
+I myself had been living with my head in a sack and, in more senses
+than one, had been of those
+
+     Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry,
+       And all the world go by them.
+
+Only so could it have come to pass that this new meaning for an old
+word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.
+
+          Licuit semperque licebit
+     Signatum praesente nota producere nomen.
+
+_Allowable?_ Yes! and much more than merely allowable; it is inevitable
+that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to old words. And
+if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it that, when we
+desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we should be
+compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name by which the
+thing is designated.
+
+A word at starting upon the remarkable book [Footnote: "The
+Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, and of the
+Colleges of Cambridge and Eton." By the late Robert Willis, M.A.,
+F.R.S. Edited, with large additions, and brought up to the present
+time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow of Trin. Coll., Camb. 4
+vols. super-royal 8vo Cambridge: The University Press.] which has
+suggested the following article. To say of it that it is quite the most
+sumptuous work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press, is to
+say little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the most
+important contributions to the social and intellectual history of
+England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The title of the
+work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the
+encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays,
+and, least of all, of the abundance of _human interest_ which
+characterizes it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human
+interest that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon
+those who have a craving to get some insight into the life of their
+forefathers; and it is because I believe the number of such students of
+history is in our times rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious to
+draw attention to some few of the many matters treated of so ably in
+these magnificent volumes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The term _University_, in its original acceptation, was used to
+designate any aggregate of _persons_ associated in a political,
+religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common
+privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the members
+of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons of a
+religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were addressed
+as a _University_. Nay! when the whole body of the faithful is appealed
+to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made use of by lay or
+ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or intentions, is
+"Noverit _Universitas_ vestra." A University in this sense, regarded as
+an aggregate of persons, might be localized or it might not; its
+members might be scattered over the whole Christian world, or they
+might constitute an inner circle of some larger community, of which
+they--though a _Universitas_--formed but a part. A University in its
+original signification meant no more than our modern term an
+Association. When men associated together for purposes of trade, they
+were a trading _Universitas_; when they associated for religious
+objects, they were a religious _Universitas_; when they associated for
+the promotion of learning, they were a learned _Universitas_. But the
+men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The
+architectural history, in its merely technical and professional
+details, could only start at a point where the University, as an
+association of scholars and students, had already acquired power and
+influence, had been at work for long, and had got to make itself felt
+as a living force in the body politic and in the national life. It was
+because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that
+they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the
+assumption that stonewalls make an institution, they professed to tell
+when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest
+founders. The authors of this modern _Magnum Opus_ have set themselves
+to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to
+trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down
+from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us
+how "the glorious fellowship of living men," which constituted the
+_personal_ University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed
+by slow degrees into the brick-and-mortar Universities of the
+nineteenth--such Universities as are springing up all over the world;
+their teachers advertised for in _The Times_, and their students
+tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money rewards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first made
+their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to themselves
+from the four winds classes of eager youths hungry for intellectual
+food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be content to leave
+undetermined. They who like the flavour of the old antiquarianism may
+enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose to hunt up among certain
+forgotten volumes now grown scarce. They may read what John Caius
+(pronounced Keys) wrote as the champion of Cambridge, and Thomas Caius
+wrote as champion of Oxford; they may rejoice their hearts over the
+Battle of the Keys, and come to what conclusion they prefer to arrive
+at. For most of us, however, this sort of old-world lore has lost its
+charm. A man lives through his taste for some questions. The student of
+history nowadays is inclined to say with St. Paul, "So fight I not as
+one that beateth the air," and to reject with some impatience the
+frivolous questions which help not a jot towards bringing us into
+closer relation with the life and personality of our ancestors.
+
+     "I am halt sick of shadows," said
+                     The Lady of Shalott;
+
+and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs to the
+light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask for firm ground
+on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move onwards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of Queen
+Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a Cambridge
+before there was an Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is so. Hide your
+diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have us believe that a
+thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the wicked king whom the
+wolves ate--as was right and fitting they should--built a noble city,
+which as time went on "was called _Oxonia_, or by the Saxons
+_Oxenfordia_." Alack! it turns out that we must make an enormous step
+along the course of time before we can find trace of any such city or
+anything like it. It turns out that "the year 912 saw Oxford made a
+fortified town, with a definite duty to perform and a definite district
+assigned to it." What! Seven years after the great Alfred had closed
+his eyes in death, and left to others the work which he had showed them
+how to do? Yes! Even so. It may be very hard to have to confess the
+odious crime of youth; but it seems almost capable of demonstration
+that Cambridge, as a fortress and a a town existed a thousand years
+before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery
+village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and
+laboriously manufactured earthenware pots. What have we to do with
+thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside while thine elder
+sister--ay, old enough to be thy mother--takes her place of honour. She
+has waited long for her historian; he has come at last, and he was
+worth waiting for.
+
+In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in
+Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It
+contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty
+earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer brute
+force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The Romans
+drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place. Two of the
+great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the conquerors called
+it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some portion of the old
+one. In their language it was known as _Caniboritum_. The primeval
+fortress stood on the left bank of the river, which some called the
+Granta and some called the Cam; and for reasons best known to
+themselves, the Romans did not think fit to span that river by a
+bridge, but they made their great Via Devana pass sheer through the
+river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist has pretended that the
+children of Israel did when they found the Jordan barring their
+progress--that is, those Roman creatures constructed a solid pavement
+in the bed of the sluggish stream, over which less audacious engineers
+would have thrown an arch. Through the water they carried a kind of
+causeway, and the name of the place for centuries indicated that it was
+situated on the _ford_ of the Cam. But what the Roman did not choose to
+do, that the people that came after him found it needful to do. In the
+Saxon Chronicle we find that the old fortress which the Romans had held
+and strengthened, and then perforce abandoned, had got to be called
+Granta-brygge; and this name, or something very like it, it retained
+when the great survey was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was
+drawing to its close. By this time the town had moved across to the
+right bank of the river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch
+and defended by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four
+hundred houses, and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a
+new castle, and in doing that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.
+
+The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the
+obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at
+Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in
+almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the
+older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much more the case. There
+were no _monks_ at Cambridge at any time; there never were any nearer
+than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old times a long day's journey off,
+and accessible in the winter, if accessible at all, only by water. King
+Knut, we are told, greatly favoured the Abbey of Ely, visited it, was
+entertained there, in fact restored it. But at Cambridge there were no
+monks. No _real_ monks; a fact which ought to be a significant hint to
+"all educated men," but which, unhappily, is likely to be significant
+only to the few who have taken the trouble to learn what a real monk
+professed to be. If there were no monks at Cambridge, there was
+something else. Outside the walls of the town there rose up, in the
+twelfth century, the priory of Barnwell-a priory of Augustinian
+_canons_; and, moreover, a nunnery-the Benedictine nunnery of St.
+Rhadegunda. Within the walls there was another house of Augustinians,
+which was known as St. John's Hospital; that is, a house where the
+canons made it part of their duty to provide a spurious kind of
+_hospitality_ to travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of
+St. Bernard offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such
+food and shelter something more--to wit, the opportunity of worshipping
+the Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At St. John's
+Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who had found a
+refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in recognition of the
+kindly treatment he had met with, and it might happen that these free
+gifts constituted no small portion of the income on which the
+canons--for the most part a humble and unpretentious set of men-kept up
+their houses.
+
+With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great revivalists--the
+friars. Wherever the friars established themselves they began not only
+to preach, but to teach. They were the awakeners of a new intellectual
+life; not only the stimulators of an emotional pietism always prone to
+run into religious intoxication and extravagance. With the coming of
+the friars what may be called the modern history of Cambridge begins.
+Not that it can be allowed that there were no schools of repute on the
+banks of the Cam till the coming of the friars; it is certain that
+learning had her home at Cambridge long before this time.
+
+As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his
+_Expugnatio Hiberniae_ in public lectures, and entertained the doctors
+of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars.
+[Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History,"
+p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned,
+but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at
+Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was a suitable
+home for them there--an opening as we say--which the flourishing
+condition of the University afforded. There were scholars to teach,
+there were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to criticize,
+oppose, or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already strained
+relations between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge as at
+Oxford. The first great "town and gown row" which we hear of took place
+at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the other
+University mentioned by the historian in close connection with the
+event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had seized three
+of the gownsmen _in hospitio suo_ and threw them into the gaol. King
+John came down to make inquiry, and he hung those three, guiltless
+though they were, as Matthew Paris assures us. Hereupon there was
+intense indignation, and the University dispersed. Three thousand of
+the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some to Cambridge we learn. Oxford for
+a while was deserted. This was fifteen years before the Franciscans
+settled among us. It was the year in which King John was
+excommunicated. There were only three bishops left in England; the king
+had worried all the rest away. There was misery and anarchy everywhere.
+Yet, strange to say, in the midst of all the bitterness men _would_
+have their sons educated, and the Universities did not despair of the
+republic. Shadowy and fragmentary as all the evidence is on which we
+have to rely for the history of the Universities during the twelfth
+century, it is enough to make us certain that the friars settled at
+Cambridge because there they found scope for their labours. There was
+undoubtedly a University there long before they arrived. Nevertheless,
+it is not till the middle of the reign of Henry the Third (A.D.
+1216-1272) that we come upon any direct mention of a corporation which
+could be regarded as a chartered society of scholars at Cambridge, and
+it is difficult to resist the conviction that, whatever may have been
+its previous history, and however far back its infancy may date, the
+friars were to some extent nursing fathers of the University of
+Cambridge.
+
+And this brings us again to the point from which we started a page or
+two back, and gives me the opportunity of quoting a passage from
+Professor Willis's introduction, which will serve at once as a
+continuation of and comment upon what has been said, while leading us
+on to what still lies before us.
+
+The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned men,
+associated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the privilege
+that no one should be allowed to teach within their dominion unless he
+had received their sanction, which could only be granted after trial of
+his ability. The test applied consisted of examinations and public
+disputations; the sanction assumed the form of a public ceremony, and
+the name of _a degree_; and the teachers or doctors so elected or
+created carried out their office of instruction by lecturing in the
+public schools to the students who, desirous of hearing them, took up
+their residence in the place wherein the University was located. The
+degree was in fact merely a license to teach; the teacher so licensed
+became a member of the ruling body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have arrived at this point--we find ourselves at the beginning of
+the thirteenth century face to face with a _University_ at Cambridge, a
+University which, existing originally in its inchoate condition of an
+association vaguely aiming at the improvement of the methods of
+education and the encouragement of scholars, had gradually grown into a
+recognized and powerful body, with direct influence and control over
+its members; a body, too, which had become so identified with the
+interests of culture and research that a change had already begun in
+the generally received acceptation of its name, and already the word
+"university" had begun to be restricted to such a _Universitas_ as was
+identified with the life and pursuits of learning and learned men. This
+means that, _pari passu_ with its increase in power, the University had
+grown too, in the number of its members--the teachers and the taught.
+The time had arrived when the demands of professors and students for
+adequate accommodation would become pressing. Lecturers with popular
+gifts would expect a hall capable of holding their audiences. Public
+disputations could not be held in a corner. Receptions of eminent
+scholars from a distance, and all those ceremonials which were so dear
+to gentle and simple in the middle ages, required space, and were the
+more effective the grander the buildings in which they were displayed,
+Yet how little the Cantabs of the thirteenth century could have dreamt
+of what was coming! What a day of small things it was! Six hundred
+years ago the giant was in his cradle.
+
+Meanwhile, another need than that of mere schools and lecture-halls had
+begun to be felt. The scholars who came for what they could get from
+the teachers--the regents and the doctors--flocked from various
+quarters; they were young, they were not all fired with the student's
+love of learning; they were sometimes noisy, sometimes frolicsome,
+sometimes vicious. As now is the case at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, so
+it was then at Cambridge, the bonds of discipline were very slight; the
+scholars had to take their chance; they lodged where they could, they
+lived anyhow, each according to his means; they were homeless. It was
+inevitable that all sorts of grave evils should arise.
+
+The lads--they were mere boys--got into mischief, they got into debt
+with the Jews; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few; they were
+preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand and on the
+left; many of them learned more harm than good. The elder men, and they
+who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked what could
+be done? For a long time the principle of _laissez faire_ prevailed:
+the young fellows were left to the tender mercies of the townsfolk.
+There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days. Gradually a kind
+of joint-stock arrangement came into vogue. Worthy people seemed to
+have hired a house which they called a _hostel_ or hall, and sub-let
+the rooms to the young fellows; the arrangement appears to have been
+clumsily managed, and led to dissensions between town and gown; the
+townsmen soon discovered that the gownsmen were gainers by the new
+plan, and they themselves were losers. They grumbled, protested,
+quarrelled. But it was a move in the right direction, and a beginning
+of some moral discipline was made, and that could not but be well.
+These _hostels_ were set up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of
+the thirteenth century, and how long before we cannot tell; but it was
+at Oxford that the first _college_, as we understand the term, rose
+into being. It was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the
+father of the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon
+a new experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of
+his life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous _Rule
+of Merton_, of which it is not at all too much to say that its
+publication constituted an era in the history of education and learning
+in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who
+survived him nine years, appears to have been moved with a desire to do
+for Cambridge what Merton had done for Oxford. Balsham is spoken of as
+the founder of St. Peter's College, and in one sense he was so. The
+bishops of Ely were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop Balsham asked
+himself what could be done, and set himself to deal with the problems
+which presented themselves for solution in the condition of his own
+University. He was not a great man, that seems clear enough: his
+schemes were crude; he bungled. The truth seems to me to be that the
+feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and there are indications
+that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fashion were opposed to anything
+like _secular education_. We hear of money being left to support
+_priests_ studying theology, and of an experiment for introducing
+scholars as residents in the Hospital of St. John. The canons were to
+take in the young scholars as _boarders_ into their house, and look
+after their conduct and morals. The plan did not answer. It was an
+attempt to put new wine into old bottles. There came an explosion.
+Cambridge in the thirteenth century had not the _men_ that Oxford had,
+so Oxford kept the lead. Perhaps there was some soreness. Did
+ecclesiastics shake their heads as they saw the walls of Balliol
+College rise, and learnt that there was just a little too much
+importance given to mere scholarship, and no prominence given to
+theology in those early statutes of 1282? Did they, without knowing
+why, anticipate with anxiety the awakening of a spirit of free thought
+and free inquiry among those scholars of the Merton, Rule? Did the
+orthodox party resort to prophecy, which is seldom very complimentary
+or cheerful in its utterances?
+
+This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there was a
+stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to assert themselves
+and take their place among the learned. John Giffard started his great
+college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It became, and
+for centuries continued to be, the resort of the Benedictine order, and
+was supported by levies from a large number of the old monasteries. The
+inference is forced upon us that the English monasteries no longer
+stood in the front rank as seats of learning. Students and scholars
+would no longer go to the monks; the monks must go to the scholars. But
+the establishment of a seminary for the reception of young monks at
+Oxford tended to the strengthening of the ecclesiastical influence in
+that University. Cambridge lost in the same proportion that Oxford
+gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich sent its promising young monks
+to Qxford, passing by the nearer and more conveniently situated
+University. As early as 1288 we find entries in the Norwich Priory
+Rolls of payments for the support of the schools and scholars at
+Oxford. It was long after this that Cambridge offered any similar
+attraction to the "religious."
+
+Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we
+now understand by a _college_. It was a novelty in English
+institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies that
+were essentially religious in their character. Some of those societies,
+and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes of learning as
+well as of devotion; but the main business-the _raison d'etre_ of monks
+and nuns and canons-was the practice of asceticism, the keeping up of
+unceasing worship in the church of the monastery--the endeavour to be
+holier than men of the world need be, or the endeavour to make the men
+of the world holier than they cared to be. The religious orders were
+religious or they were nothing. Each new rule for the reformation of
+those orders aimed at restoring the primitive idea of self-immolation
+at the altar--a severer ritual, harder living, longer praying. Nay! the
+new rules, in not a few instances, were actually aimed against learning
+and culture. The Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton
+would not call his society of scholars a _convent_, as the old monkish
+corporations had been designated. That sounded too much as though the
+mere promotion of pietism was his aim; he revived the old classical
+word _collegium_. There had been _collegia_ at Rome before the imperial
+times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were
+decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued
+certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane
+objects. Why should not there be a _collegium_ of scholars? Why should
+students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other
+people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by
+his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old
+conventual type, but to enter upon a new departure.
+
+The scholars of the new college were to take no vows; they were not to
+be worried with everlasting ritual observances. Special chaplains, who
+were presumably not expected to be scholars and students, were
+appointed for the ministration of the ceremonial in the church. Luxury
+was guarded against; poverty was not enjoined. As long as a scholar was
+pursuing his studies _bona fide_, he might remain a member of the
+college; if he was tired of books and bookish people, he might go.
+
+When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it to
+himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up; sometimes it gets
+improved upon; sometimes very much the reverse. For a wise man acts
+upon a hint, and it germinates; a fool only half apprehends the meaning
+of a hint, and he displays his folly in producing a caricature. Hugh de
+Balsham seems to have aimed at improving upon Merton's original idea.
+He meant well, doubtless; but his college of Peterhouse, the first
+college in Cambridge, was a very poor copy of the Oxford foundation.
+Merton was a man of genius, a man of ideas; Balsham was a man of the
+cloister. Moreover, he was by no means so rich as his predecessor, and
+he did not live to carry out his scheme. The funds were insufficient.
+The first college at Cambridge was long in building. Cambridge, in
+fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there was none of the dash and
+enthusiasm, none of the passion for progress, which characterized
+Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress his
+strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred, no
+commanding intellect like that of Roger Bacon to attract and dazzle and
+lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and eager spirits who
+felt that a new era had begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine;
+no John Wielif to kindle a new flame--say, rather, to take up the torch
+which had dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which
+the others had run so well. What a grand succession of men it was!
+
+Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose at
+Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the reign
+of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no fewer than seven
+colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them have survived to
+our own days, and two were eventually absorbed by the larger foundation
+which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of raising, and which now stands
+forth in its grandeur, the most magnificent educational corporation in
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the original
+buildings in which the _University_, as a teaching body, pursued its
+work, but which also provided the _houses_ in which the _colleges_ of
+scholars lived and laboured?
+
+Unhappily, we know very little of the University buildings during this
+early period. All the industry of Mr. Clark has not availed to
+penetrate the thick obscurity; but this at least is pretty certain,
+namely, that the earliest University buildings at Cambridge were very
+humble structures clustering round about the area now covered by the
+University schools and library, that it was not till the middle of the
+fourteenth century that any attempt was made to erect a building of any
+pretension, and that the "Schools Quadrangle was not completed till 130
+years after the first stone was laid." The University of Cambridge was
+for ages a very poor corporation; it had no funds out of which to build
+halls or schools or library. The ceremonies at _commencement_ and on
+other great occasions took place in the churches, sometimes of the
+Augustinian, sometimes of the Franciscan friars. In these early times
+the gownsmen dared not contemplate the erection of a senate-house
+wherein to hold their meetings. When the fourteenth-century schools
+were planned their erection was doubtless regarded as a very bold and
+ambitious experiment. The money came in very slowly, the work stopped
+more than once, and when it proceeded it was only by public
+subscription that the funds were gathered. In 1466, William Wilflete,
+Master of Clare Hall and Chancellor of the University, actually made a
+journey to London to gather funds from whatever quarters he could, and
+he dunned his friends, and those on whom the University had any claim,
+so successfully that on June 25 of that year a contract for proceeding
+with the work was drawn up and signed, but it was nearly nine years
+after this before the schools were finally completed, together with a
+new library over them, by the special munificence of Archbishop
+Rotherham, who had further enriched the library with numerous volumes
+of great value.
+
+The tie which bound the members of the _University_ together was much
+weaker than that which united the members of the same _college_. The
+colleges were, in almost every case, founded by private munificence,
+and in most cases were commenced during the lifetime of the several
+founders; but when we come to look into the sources of the college
+revenues we find that the actual gifts of money, or indeed of lands,
+was less than at first sight appears. A very large proportion of the
+endowments of these early colleges came from the _spoliation of the
+parochial clergy_. Popular writers in our own time declaim against the
+horrible sin of buying and selling church preferment, as if it were a
+modern abomination. Let a man only spend half an hour in examining the
+_fines_ or records of transfers of property in England during the
+fourteenth century and he will be somewhat surprised to discover what a
+part the buying and selling of advowsons played in the business
+transactions of our forefathers five centuries ago. Advowsons were
+always in the market, and always good investments in those days, But
+not only so. A pious founder could do a great deal in the way of making
+perpetual provision for the mention of his name by posterity at a small
+cost if he took care to manipulate ecclesiastical property with
+prudence. There was a crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson
+could _appropriate_ the tithes of a benefice to the support of any
+corporation which might be considered a _religious_ foundation. The old
+monasteries had benefited to some extent from this disendowment of the
+secular clergy, the Augustinian canons, during the twelfth century,
+being the chief gainers by the pillage. When the rage for founding
+colleges came in, and the awful ravages of the Black Death had
+depopulated whole districts, the fashion of alienating the revenues of
+the country parsons and diverting them into the new channel grew to be
+quite a rage. The colleges of secular priests living together in
+common, or what it is now the fashion to call a clergy house, might be
+and were strictly _religious_ foundations; and could the colleges of
+scholars, of teachers and learners who presumably were all priests, or
+intended for the priesthood, be regarded as less _religious_ than the
+others? So it came to pass that the tithes of parish after parish were
+diverted into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which
+were professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the
+seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy. In
+order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was
+arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge alone!
+Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford had attracted
+the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the fast ones. How
+else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's stringent order in 1342
+for the repression of the dandyism that prevailed among the young
+scholars? These young Cantabs of the fourteenth century were exquisites
+of the first water. Their fur-trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their
+shoes of all the colours of the rainbow; their dainty girdles,
+bejewelled and gilt, were a sight to see. And then their hair!
+positively curled and powdered, and growing over their shoulders, too;
+and when they passed their fingers through the curls, look you, there
+were rings on their fingers! Call you these scholars? Chaucer's "Clerk
+of Oxenforde" was of a very different type:--
+
+  For all that he might of his frendes hentc
+  On books and in learning he it spente.
+
+Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so many
+colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new
+collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of
+readers no part of Mr. dark's great work will prove so attractive as
+the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on "The
+Component Parts of a College." Here we have traced out for us in the
+most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate idea,
+from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had no
+particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one
+another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of
+their arrangements.
+
+At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their
+favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming
+that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is
+almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was adopted
+very gradually.
+
+Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older
+universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are
+themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be
+propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of
+the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an
+attempt to supersede them.
+
+More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first
+necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this
+being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in
+Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was consecrated
+in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess of Pembroke in
+1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the precincts of her new
+college; and, so far from these convenient adjuncts to a collegiate
+establishment having been considered an essential in early times, no
+less than eight of the college chapels at Cambridge and four at Oxford
+date from a time after the Reformation. In the fourteenth century and
+later the young scholars, as a rule, attended their parish church.
+Sometimes the college added on an aisle for the accommodation of its
+members; sometimes it obtained a _licence_ to use a room in which
+Divine Service might be conducted for a time; once the founder of a
+college erected a collegiate quire in the middle of the parish church,
+a kind of gigantic _pew,_ for the accommodation of his scholars.
+Downing College has never had a chapel to the present hour.
+
+Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has been
+more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the fourteenth
+century the master of a college was but _primits inter pares,_ and the
+distance between him and his _fellows_ or _scholars_ was less than that
+which exists now between the Commanding officer of a regiment in
+barracks and his brother officers. The master had no sinecure; the
+discipline of the place depended upon him almost entirely, for in those
+days the monarchial idea was in the ascendant; the king was a real
+king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real master. Everything
+was referred to him, everything originated with him, everything was
+controlled by him. But as for the accommodation assigned to him in the
+early colleges, it was very inferior indeed to that which every
+graduate at Trinity or St. John's expects to find in our time. The
+Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted by the statutes to dine apart if
+he pleased, and to reside outside the precincts of the college if he
+chose to provide for himself another residence; but this was clearly an
+exceptional case, for the master was at this time the actual founder of
+the college, and Adam de Brune might be presumed to know what was good
+for his successors in the office for which he himself had made
+provision. But for generations the master enjoyed no more than a couple
+of _chambers_ at the most, and it was not till the sixteenth century
+that an official residence was provided, and then such residence
+consisted only of _lodgings_ a little more spacious and convenient than
+those of any of the fellows, and in no case separated from the main
+buildings of the college. Even when masters of colleges began to marry
+(and the earliest instance of this seems to have been Dr. Heynes,
+Master of Queens' College, in 1529), it was long before the master's
+wife was so far recognized as to be received within the precincts; and
+as late as 1576, when the fellows of King's complained of their
+provost's wife being seen within the college, Dr. Goad replied that she
+had not been twice in the college "Quad" in her life, as far as he
+knew. When the great break-up came in the next century, then the
+establishment of the master demanded increased accommodation for his
+family, and the master's lodge began to grow slowly, until university
+architects of the nineteenth century displayed their exalted sense of
+what was due to the dignity of a "head of a house" by erecting two such
+palaces as the lodges of Pembroke and St. John's Colleges; for the
+glorification of the artist, it may be, but whether for the advantage
+of the college, the university, or the occupants of the aforesaid
+lodges may be reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge _is
+at this moment let,_ presumably for the benefit of the head of the
+house, whose official residence it is; and, if things go on as they are
+tending, the day may come--who knows how soon?--when Cambridge shall at
+last be able to boast of a really good hotel, "in a central and very
+desirable situation, commanding a delightful view of"--what shall we
+say?--"fitted up with every convenience, and formerly known as the
+Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College."
+
+I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture run
+to seed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a
+single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of
+investigation which he has pursued, or to summarize at all
+satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so
+masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning
+over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations
+alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and
+ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence of
+their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark of
+imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished guide
+can lead them. Do you think that such a work as this tells us no more
+than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed their present
+form, and court was added to court, and libraries and museums and
+lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed by the
+professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by the masons
+and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.
+
+  Horizons rich with trembling spires
+  On violet twilights, lose their fires
+
+if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The
+authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else
+that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great
+national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and
+crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the marks
+of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the
+questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of
+a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful
+searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these
+homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years.
+Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life;
+and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the
+indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark
+could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and
+collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the
+student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.
+
+How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what
+whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have
+rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their
+sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man
+is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen
+has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our
+dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they
+were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical
+discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon
+to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a figure which to us
+would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social,
+and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our
+forefathers that they could not conceive of such a _terminus ad quern_
+as serves us as a _terminus a quo._ In other words, we _begin_ at a
+point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the
+more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in
+all essentials is for ever repeating herself--impossible though it may
+be to put the clock back for ourselves.
+
+How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of
+building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of
+Cambridge--that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the
+realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery--never seemed to have thought
+that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old monasteries
+there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who passed into the
+cloister came there once for all--to live _and die_ within the walls of
+his monastery. The scholar who came to get all the learning he could,
+and who settled in some humble hostel or some unpretentious college of
+the old type, came to spend some few years there, but no more. He came
+to live his life, and when there was no more life in him--no more
+youthful force, activity, and enthusiasm-there was no place for him at
+Cambridge, There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their
+work. Die? No! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he
+should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should go. No
+college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead!
+
+Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly--the lad of
+feeble frame and delicate organization-to stand that rugged old
+Cambridge life. "College rooms" in our time suggest something like the
+_ne plus ultra_ of aesthetic elegance and luxury. We find it hard to
+realize the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was expected
+to have two or three _chamber fellows_ who shared his bedroom with him;
+and that his _study_ was no bigger than a study at the schoolhouse at
+Rugby, and very much smaller than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a
+more modern public school. At the hostels, which were of course much
+more crowded than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege
+of the few. What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed
+receptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as
+late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than seventy
+members of the college "accommodated" (!) in twenty-eight chambers.
+This was before the second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet
+these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their
+predecessors of two hundred years before.
+
+"In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and
+closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or tiled;
+and their halls and ceilings were unplastered." We have express
+testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the master's lodge
+had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of the sixteenth
+century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed, dated July 3,
+1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's College, "the
+wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only one chair; that
+the tables were supported on trestles; and that those who used them sat
+on forms or stools." As for the chambers and studies, not only were
+they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but
+their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there
+were not even lath and plaster between the tiles and the beams of the
+roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible how vitality could have been
+kept up in the winter under such conditions. The cold must have been
+dreadful.
+
+At four only of five earlier and smaller colleges was there any
+fire-place in the hall, and the barbaric braziers in which first
+charcoal and afterwards coke was burned, were actually the only heating
+apparatus known in the immense halls of Trinity and St. John's till
+within the last twenty years! The magnificent hall of Trinity actually
+retained till 1866 the brazier _which had been in use for upwards of
+160 years!_ The clumsy attempt to fight the bitter cold which was usual
+in our mediaeval churches and manor-houses, by strewing the stone floor
+with rushes, was carried out too in the college halls, and latterly,
+instead of rushes, sawdust was used, at least in Trinity. "It was laid
+on the floor at the beginning of winter, and turned over with a rake as
+often as the upper surface became dirty. Finally, when warm weather set
+in, it was removed, the colour of charcoal!" Well might the late
+Professor Sedgwick, in commenting upon this practice, exclaim; "The
+dirt was sublime in former years!"
+
+Yet in the earliest times a lavatory was provided in the college halls,
+and a towel of eight or nine yards long, which at Trinity, as late as
+1612, was hung on a hook--the refinement of hanging a towel on a
+_roller_ does not appear to have been thought of. These towels were for
+use _before_ dinner; _at_ dinner the fellows of Christ's in 1575 were
+provided with table-napkins. If they wiped their fingers on the
+table-cloth they were fined a penny. The temptation must have been
+strong at times, for _no forks were in use_--not even the iron-pronged
+forks which some of us remember in hall in our young days. The oldest
+piece of furniture in the college halls were the stocks, set up for the
+correction of refractory undergraduates who should have been guilty of
+the enormity of bathing in the Cam or other grave offence and scandal.
+
+Of the amusements indulged in by the undergraduates at Cambridge in the
+early times we hear but little. The probability seems to be that they
+had to manage for themselves as best they could. Gradually the
+bowling-green, the butts for archery, and the tennis-courts were
+provided by several colleges. Tennis seems to have been the rage at
+Cambridge during the sixteenth century, and the tennis-courts became
+sources of revenue in the Elizabethan time, It is clear that by this
+time the old severity and rigour had become relaxed, the colleges had
+become richer, and in another hundred years the combination-rooms had
+become comfortable and almost luxurious before the seventeenth century
+closed. In Queens' College in 1693 there were actually _flowers_ in the
+combination-room, and at Christ's College in 1716 a card-table was
+provided "in the fellows' parlour."
+
+It may be said that the immense expansion of the University, as
+distinct from a mere aggregate of colleges, dates from the beginning of
+the eighteenth century. Up to that time the colleges had for four
+hundred years been steadily growing into privileged corporations, whose
+wealth and power had been too great for the Commonwealth, of which they
+were in idea only members. With the Georgian era the new movement
+began. When Bishop Moore's vast library was presented by George II. to
+the _University,_ when the first stone of the Senate House was laid in
+1722, when the _University_ arranged for the reception of Dr.
+Woodward's fossils in 1735--these events marked the beginning of a new
+order of things. Whatever confusion may have existed in the minds of
+our grandfathers, who had a vague conviction that the University meant
+no more than the aggregate of the colleges, and a suspicion that what
+the University was the colleges made it--we, in our generation, have
+been assured that the colleges owed their existence to the sufferance
+of universities; or, if that be putting the case too strongly, that the
+colleges exist for the sake of the University. The new view has at any
+rate gained the approval of the Legislature; the University is in no
+danger of being predominated over by the colleges in the immediate
+future; the danger rather is lest the colleges should be starved or at
+least impoverished for the glorification of the University, the
+college-fellowships being shorn of their dignity and emoluments in
+order to ensure that the University officials shall become the
+exclusive holders of the richest prizes.
+
+For good or evil we have entered upon a new career. The old Cambridge,
+which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn ecclesiasticism,
+its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomalies, its fascinating
+picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible odds and ends
+that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall--that old
+Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The new Cambridge,
+with its bustling syndics for ever on the move--its bewildering
+complexity of examinations--its "sweet girl-graduates with their golden
+hair," its delightful "notion of grand and capacious and massive
+amusement," its glorious wealth of collections and appliances and
+facilities for every kind of study and research, is alive with an
+exuberant vitality.
+
+What form will the new life assume in the time that is coming? Will the
+Cambridge of six centuries hence be able to produce such a record of
+her past as that which she can boast of now? Among her alumni of the
+future will there arise again any such loyal and enlightened historians
+as these who have raised to themselves and their University so noble a
+monument?
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+_THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD._
+
+
+     "Did you ever hear tell of Lodowick Muggleton?"
+
+     "Not I."
+
+     "That is strange. Know then that he was the founder
+     of our poor society, and after him we are frequently,
+     though oppro-briously, termed Muggletonians, for we
+     are Christians. Here is his book; I will sell it cheap."
+                                --LAVENGRO.
+
+
+Scrupulous veracity was hardly a characteristic of the late George
+Borrow. A man of great memory, he was also a man of fertile
+imagination, and where the two are found in excess, side by side in the
+same intellect, they are apt to twine round one another, so to speak,
+and the product is something which the matter-of-fact man abhors. I do
+not doubt that Borrow did meet a Muggletonian at Bristol--I think it
+was there--some sixty years ago; but I am pretty sure that he knew very
+little indeed about the Muggletonians, and that he could have hardly
+opened the book which he implies that he purchased, and which I am
+almost certain he never read. I have a strong suspicion that he very
+much antedated the incident which he narrates, for I myself knew an old
+secondhand bookseller in a back street at Bristol, who was a
+Muggletonian, with whom I made acquaintance when a lad. He was a
+slow-speaking, wary, suspicious, and dirty old man, and as I had not
+sufficient funds to be a good customer, I daresay he did not think it
+worth his while to be communicative, but he told me one day that he had
+been one of the original subscribers to the _Spiritual Epistles_ which
+were reprinted in quarto years before I was born; though, as he
+confessed, his name does not appear on the list of names printed at the
+end of the preface, which list, he assured me, was very incomplete, as
+he from his own knowledge could certify. This old man would have been
+very old indeed if he had been old when Borrow was a youth; and yet, as
+I say, I suspect he was the very man of whom mention is made in the
+extract I have given above. He was the only Muggletonian I ever knew,
+but he certainly was not the last of his sect, and I should not be at
+all surprised to hear that it is a flourishing sect still, and that it
+still has its assemblies, its votaries, its literature, and its
+propaganda. It is true that the name _Muggletonians_ does not appear in
+that astonishing list of religious denominations which the
+Registrar-General was enabled to compile for the year 1883; but that
+proves little, inasmuch as the closer a religious corporation is, the
+more exclusive, the less does it care to register the name of the
+building in which it may choose to assemble for worship; and I observe
+that the Southcotians are no longer to be found upon that list, though
+I happen to know that they are not extinct yet, nor has their faith in
+their prophetess and her mission quite died out from the face of the
+earth.
+
+This is certain, that as late as 1820 an edition of the _Spiritual
+Epistles,_ which must have cost at that time two or three hundred
+pounds to print, was subscribed for, and that nine years afterwards
+appeared _Divine Songs of the Muggletonians_--they were not ashamed of
+the name--printed also by subscription, filling 621 pages, and showing
+pretty clearly that there had of late been a strange revival of the
+sect: an outburst of new fervour having somehow been awakened, and an
+irrepressible passion for writing "Songs" having displayed itself,
+which had not been without its effect in resuscitating dormant
+enthusiasm. The vagaries of the human mind in what, for want of any
+better designation, we call "religious belief" have always had for me a
+peculiar fascination, as they have for others. Epiphanius, whose name
+is and used to be a terror to her Royal Highness in days gone by, when
+I insisted upon reading to her about the peculiar people who made it a
+matter of faith to eat bread and cheese at the Eucharist--Epiphanius is
+to me positively entertaining, and Pagitt's _Heresiography_ is none the
+less instructive because it is a vulgar catch-penny little book, made
+up, like Peter Pindar's razors, to sell. To me it seems that to dismiss
+even the wildest and foolishest opinion _which makes way,_ as if it
+were a mere absurdity that does not deserve notice, is to show a
+certain flippancy and shallowness. Do not all thoughtful men pass
+through certain stages of intellectual growth, and are not the
+convictions of our youth held very differently from those which we find
+ourselves swayed by in our later years? The beliefs which the multitude
+take up with are such as the untrained and the half-trained are always
+captivated by, whether individually or in the mass. There are limits to
+our powers of assimilation according as our development has been
+arrested or is still going on, and he who hopes to understand the
+course of human affairs or to make any intelligent forecast of what is
+coming can never afford to neglect the study of morbid appetites or
+morbid anatomy in the domain of mind.
+
+There is a strong family likeness among all fanatics; and this is
+characteristic of them all, that they are profusely communicative and
+absolutely honest. Prophets have no secrets, no reserve, no doubts,
+they are always true men. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton are no
+exception to the general rule. We can follow their movements pretty
+closely for some years. The book of _The Acts of the Witnesses of the
+Spirit_ furnishes us with quite as much as we want to know about the
+sayings and doings of the grotesque pair and their early extravagances;
+and Muggleton's letters cover a period of forty years, during all which
+time he was going in and out among the artisans and small traders of
+the city, obstinately asserting himself in season and out of season,
+and leaving behind him in his eccentric chronicle such a minute and
+faithful picture of London life among the middle--the lower
+middle--class during the last half of the seventeenth century as is to
+be found nowhere else. The reader must be prepared for the most
+startling freaks of language, for very vulgar profanity, the more
+amazing because so manifestly unintended. When people break away from
+all the traditions of the past and surrender themselves to absolute
+anarchy in morals and religion the old terminology ceases to be
+employed in the old way, ceases indeed to have any meaning. The prophet
+or the philosopher who sets himself to invent a new theory of the
+universe or a new creed for his followers to embrace, can hardly avoid
+shocking and horrifying those who are content to use words as their
+forefathers did and attach to these words the same sort of sacredness
+that the Hebrews did to the Divine name. There is no need to do more
+than allude to this side of the Muggletonian writing. What we are
+concerned with is the story of the prophet's life, which has been told
+with the utmost frankness and simplicity; a more unvarnished tale it
+would be difficult to find, or one which bears more the stamp of truth
+upon its every line.
+
+_The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit_ is a posthumous work written
+by Muggleton when he was very old, and left behind him in manuscript
+with directions that it should be published after his death. It is a
+quarto volume of 180 pages and is a book of some rarity. It was
+published in 1699, with an epistle dedicatory to all true Christian
+people, apparently written by Thomas Tomkinson, one of the chosen seed.
+After preparing us for what is coming by dwelling upon the wonderful
+stories in the Old Testament and the New, Muggleton plunges into his
+subject by giving us a brief account of his own and his brother
+prophet's parentage and early biography. Let the reader understand that
+here beginneth the third chapter of _The Acts of the Witnesses_ at the
+third verse:--
+
+"3. As for John Reeve, he was born in Wiltshire; his father was clerk
+to a deputy of Ireland, a gentleman as we call them by his place, but
+fell to decay.
+
+"4. So he put John Reeve apprentice here at London to a tailor by
+trade. He was out of his apprenticeship before I came acquainted with
+him; he was of an honest, just nature, and harmless.
+
+"5. But a man of no great natural wit or wisdom; no subtlety or policy
+was in him, nor no great store of religion; he had lost what was
+traditional; only of an innocent life.
+
+"7. And I, Lodowick Muggleton, was born in Bishop-gate Street, near the
+Earl of Devonshire's house, at the corner house called Walnut-tree Yard.
+
+"8. My father's name was John Muggleton; he was a smith by trade--that
+is, a farrier or horse doctor; he was in great respect with the
+postmaster in King James's time; he had three children by my mother,
+two sons and one daughter, I was the youngest and my mother loved me."
+
+His mother died, his father married again, whereupon the boy was sent
+into the country--_boarded out_ as we say--and kept there till his
+sixteenth year, when he was brought back to London and apprenticed to-a
+tailor--one John Quick--"a quiet, peaceable man, not cruel to servants,
+which liked me very well." Muggleton took to his trade and pleased his
+master. The journeymen were a loose lot, "bad husbands and given to
+drunkenness, but my nature was inclined to be sober." Hitherto the
+young man had received no religious training; when he had served his
+time, however, "hearing in those days great talk among the vulgar
+people and especially amongst youth, boys, and young maids, of a people
+called Puritans.... I liked their discourse upon the Scriptures and
+pleaded for a holy keeping of the Sabbath day, which my master did not
+do, nor I his servant."
+
+This must have been about the year 1630--for Muggleton was born in June
+1610--when the Sabbatarian controversy was at its height, and the
+feeling of the country was approaching fever heat, and when Charles the
+First had resolved to try and govern without a Parliament, and when
+Archbishop Abbot was in disgrace, and Laud had begun to exercise his
+predominant influence. Muggleton was but little impressed by "the
+people called Puritans," and he went on his old way. When he had nearly
+served his time, he began to look about him. The tailor's trade did not
+seem likely to lead to much, unless it were combined with something
+else, and a brilliant opening offered itself, as he was at work for a
+pawnbroker in Hounsditch. "The broker's wife had one daughter alive.
+The mother, being well persuaded of my good natural temper, and of my
+good husbandry, and that I had no poor kindred come after me to be any
+charge or burthen to her daughter, ... proposed to me that she would
+give me a hundred pounds with her to set up.... So the maid and I were
+made sure by promise, and I was resolved to have the maid to wife, and
+to keep a broker's shop, and lend money on pawns, and grow rich as
+others did." Muggleton had not yet been admitted to the freedom of the
+city, and the marriage was arranged to take place after he should have
+done so. In the meantime he found himself working side by side with
+William Reeve, Prophet John Reeve's brother, at this time a "very
+zealous Puritan," with whom he talked of his prospects. "I loved the
+maid, and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people
+were horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a
+usurer, and they "threatened great judgments, and danger of damnation
+hereafter."
+
+It is clear that the frightful eschatology of the time was exercising a
+far greater power upon the imagination of the masses than anything
+else. People were dwelling upon all that was terrible and gloomy in the
+picture of a future life; the one thought with the visionaries was
+this--Save yourselves from the wrath to come. "I was extremely fearful
+of eternal damnation," says Muggleton, "thinking my soul might go into
+hell fire without a body, as all people did at that time."
+
+There was evidently a struggle between conviction and inclination, and
+it ended as we should have expected--the marriage was broken off. Then
+followed some years of vehement religious conflict; "Neither did I hear
+any preach in these days but the Puritan ministers, whose hair was cut
+short. _For if a man with long hair had gone_ into the pulpit to
+preach, I would have gone out of the Church again, though he might
+preach better than the other." All through this time visions of hell
+and torment, and devils and damnation troubled him; now and then there
+were "elevations in my mind, but these were few and far between; a
+while after all was lost again." He soon consoled himself for his
+matrimonial disappointment; he married and had three daughters, then
+his first wife died. He throve in his calling, "only the spirit of fear
+of hell was still upon me, but not so extreme as it was before." He
+took a second wife, and the civil war began.
+
+"And generally the Puritans were all for the Parliament, and most of my
+society and acquaintance did fall away and declined in love one towards
+another. Some of them turned to Presbytery, and some turned
+Independents; others fell to be Ranters, and some fell to be mere
+Atheists. So that our Puritan people were so divided and scattered in
+our religion, that I was altogether at a loss; for all the zeal we
+formerly had was quite worn out. For I had seen the utmost perfection
+and satisfaction that could be found in that way, except I would do it
+for loaves, _but loaves was never my aim."_
+
+The civil war ran its course, but Muggleton cared nothing for the
+general course of events. What were kings and bishops and Lords and
+Commons to him? he was living in quite another world. As for Laud and
+Strafford, and Pym and Hampden, he does not even once name them. He
+makes not the slightest allusion to the death of Charles the First,
+though he was living within half a mile of Whitehall when the king's
+head fell on the block. Prophets of the Muggleton type are so busied
+about their own souls and their own spiritual condition, that the
+battles, murders, and sudden deaths of other men, great or small, give
+them no concern whatever.
+
+A couple of years or so after the execution of the king, "it came to
+pass I heard of several prophets and prophetesses that were about the
+streets.... Also I heard of two other men that were counted greater
+than prophets--to wit, John Tannye and John Robins. John Tannye, he
+declared himself to be the Lord's High Priest, therefore he circumcised
+himself according to the law. Also he declared that he was to gather
+the Jews out of all nations,... with many other strange and wonderful
+things. And as for John Robins, he declared himself to be God Almighty.
+Also he said that he had raised from the dead several of the prophets,
+as Jeremiah and others. Also I saw several others of the prophets that
+was said to be raised by him, _for I have had nine or ten of them at my
+house at a time, of those that were said to be raised from the dead."_
+
+Is madness contagious? Or is it that, while the sane can exercise but a
+very limited power over the insane, there is no limit to the influence
+which the insane can gain over one another? Living in a world of their
+own, where delusions pass for palpable facts, where the logical faculty
+accepts the wildest visions as of equal significance with actual
+realities, these dreamers have a calculus of their own which includes
+the symbols in use among the sane, but comprehends besides a notation
+which these latter attach no meaning to, reject, and deride.
+
+"Would you be so kind as tell me, sir, what's a ohm?" said the worthy
+Mr. Stiggins to me the other day. "It's a modern term used in
+electricity, which I am too ignorant to explain to you." He looked full
+at me for more than five seconds without a word then he said, "I'm
+thinking that this man was a fool to talk about ohms when not even you
+knew what a ohm means. And he came from Cambridge College too, and he's
+got a vote! I reckon when a man can't talk the same as other folks he'd
+ought to be shut up." Indignant Stiggins! But are we not all intolerant?
+
+John Robins had acquired an almost unlimited ascendency over his crazy
+prophets, and speedily acquired the like ascendency over Muggleton.
+What specially fascinated him was that all John Robins's prophets "had
+power from him to damn any that did oppose or speak evil of him. So his
+prophets gave sentence of damnation upon many, to my knowledge, for
+speaking evil of him, they not knowing him whether he was true or
+false." Muggleton was profoundly impressed, but according to his own
+account he was a silent observer, and waited. One of the prophets often
+came to his house and was welcome; he "spake as an angel of God, and I
+never let him go without eating and drinking," for Muggleton was a man
+of large appetite and demanded large supplies of food, nor did he stint
+himself of meat and drink or withhold creature comforts from those he
+loved.
+
+Just at this time Muggleton "fell into a melancholy." He had arrived at
+the prophetic age--he had completed his fortieth year. "Then did two
+motives arise in me and speak in me as two lively voices, as if two
+spirits had been speaking in me, one answering the other as if they
+were not my own spirit." So that our noble laureate was anticipated by
+two centuries, unless indeed the "two lively voices" make themselves
+heard at times to most men who have ears to hear them. Muggleton's
+voices were not very high-toned voices; they were voices that spake of
+heaven and hell, nothing more. Love and duty never seem to have formed
+the subject of his meditations. "For I did not so much mind to be
+saved, as I did to escape being damn'd. For I thought, if I could but
+lie still in the earth for ever, it would be as well with me as it
+would be if I were in eternal happiness... for I did not care whether I
+was happy so I might not be miserable. I cared not for heaven so I
+might not go to hell. These things pressed hard upon my soul, even to
+the wounding of it."
+
+The battle within him went on fiercely for some time, and it ended as
+we should have expected. "I was so well satisfied in my mind as to my
+eternal happiness, that I was resolved now to be quiet and to get as
+good a living as I could in this world and live as comfortably as I
+could here, thinking that this revelation should have been beneficial
+to nobody but myself." The "motional voices," and visions, and
+questionings, continued from April 1651 to January 1652; and it was
+during this time that the intimacy between Muggleton and Reeve became
+more closely cemented, for "John Reeve was so taken with my language
+that his desires were _extreme earnest_ that he might have the same
+revelation as I had. His desires were so great that he was troublesome
+unto me, for if I went into one room, into another, he would follow me
+to talk to me." His persistence was rewarded, and just when Muggleton's
+visions ceased "in the month of January 1652, about the middle of the
+month, John Reeve came to me very joyful and said, Cousin Lodowick, now
+said he, I know what revelation of Scripture is as well as thee."
+Reeve's revelations increased, and never ceased for two weeks. "First
+visions, then by voice of words to the hearing of the ear three
+mornings together the third, fourth, and fifth days of February, 1652,
+and the year of John Reeve's life forty-two, and the year of my life
+forty-one."
+
+Two men in this curious ecstatic condition obviously could not stop at
+this point. It was a critical moment--would they enter into rivalry or
+spiritual partnership? If the latter, then who was to be the leader,
+who would make the first move? It was soon settled.
+
+"The first evening God _spake_ to John Reeve he came to my house and
+said, Cousin Lodowick, God hath given thee unto me for ever, and the
+tears ran down both sides his cheeks amain. So I asked him what was the
+matter, for he looked like one that had been risen out of the grave, he
+being a fresh-coloured man the day before, but the tears ran down his
+cheeks apace." John Reeve was not yet prepared to deliver his
+commission with authority; it was coming, but not yet. Meanwhile he
+turned to Muggleton's children and pronounced them blessed, "but
+especially thy daughter Sarah, she shall be the teacher of all the
+women in London." Sarah was hiding on the stairs and was not a little
+afraid; she was a girl of fourteen, but she accepted her mission there
+and then.
+
+She proved to be a valuable helper, "and several persons came
+afterwards to my house more to discourse with her than us, and they
+marvelled that one so young should have such knowledge and wisdom."
+Next day John Reeve came again, and Muggleton was pronounced to be the
+_mouth_ of the new revelation, "as Aaron was given to be Moses' mouth."
+
+The first thing to be done was to depose the other two prophets, Robins
+and Tannye, and to hoise them on their own petard. It had to be seen
+who could damn hardest. For one moment even Muggleton's stout heart
+failed, he would take another with him to be present at the great trial
+of strength. He called upon a certain Thomas Turner to accompany him,
+"else you must be cursed to all eternity. But his wife was exceeding
+wroth and fearful, and she said, if John Reeve came again to her
+husband that she would run a spit in his guts, so John Reeve cursed her
+to eternity." Whereupon Turner, appalled by the sentence, complied with
+the order and went. The three presented themselves before the other
+madman, and John Reeve uttered his testimony, denouncing him as a false
+prophet and gave him a month to repent of his misdeeds. When the month
+had elapsed Reeve wrote the sentence of eternal damnation upon him "and
+left it at his lodging, and after a while he and his great matters
+perished in the sea. For he made a little boat to carry him to
+Jerusalem, and going to Holland to call the Jews there, he and one
+Captain James was cast away and drowned, so all his powers came to
+nothing."
+
+The day after the interview with Tannye, the prophets proceeded to deal
+with John Robins. He had been thrown into Bridewell by Cromwell, and
+there he lay, his worshippers still resorting to him for any one with
+money could visit a prisoner in gaol as often as he pleased. When the
+prophets appeared at the gate empty handed, the keeper as a matter of
+course refused them admittance. Then said John Reeve to the keeper,
+"Thou shall never be at peace." By and by they were shown where
+Robins's cell was; they summoned him to the window, and a strange
+interview took place, which is minutely described. It ended by Reeve
+delivering his charge and pronouncing his sentence. Many had been the
+crimes of John Robins. He had ruined and deceived men in a multitude of
+ways; among others "thou givest them leave to abstain by degrees from
+all kinds of food, thou didst feed them with windy things, as apples
+and other fruit that was windy, and they drank nothing but water;
+therefore look what measure thou hast measured to others we will
+measure again to thee."
+
+John Robins was utterly mastered; "he pulled his hands off the grates
+and laid them together and said, It is finished; the Lord's will be
+done." In two months he had written a letter of recantation, was
+released from durance, and is heard of no more.
+
+"Thus the reader may see that these two powers were brought down in
+these two days' messages from the Lord."
+
+The world was all before them now. It remained that the new prophets
+should have some distinctive dogma, and that the printing press should
+be called in as an accessory to spread their fame. Again John Reeve
+took the lead, and in 1652 he wrote an account of his divine commission
+and published his first work, _A Transcendant Spiritual Treatise_,
+which told of his last revelation of the message to Tannye and Robins.
+
+While the book was passing through the press the prophets lived by
+their trade, and made no attempt to preach before any assembly. They
+_talked_ incessantly, and they cursed liberally. At last the children
+in the streets began to follow Reeve and pelt him, crying after him,
+"There goes the prophet that damns people!" Muggleton, meanwhile, was
+always ready to meet an inquirer, and to eat and drink with him. "On
+one occasion an old acquaintance would needs have me drink with him,
+that he might have some talk with me, and there followed a neighbour of
+his, a gentleman, as we call them; his name was Penson, and he sat down
+in our company." Soon Penson began to deride and abuse the prophet;
+whereupon Muggleton calmly "did pronounce this Penson cursed to
+eternity." Penson did not like being damned under the circumstances.
+"Then he rose up, and with both his fists smote upon my head... But it
+came to pass that this Penson was sick immediately after, and in a week
+or ten days after he died, much troubled in his mind, and tormented
+insomuch that his friends and relations sought to apprehend me for a
+witch, he being a rich man, but they couldn't tell how to state the
+matter, so they let it fall."
+
+It is pretty clear that John Reeve was from the first disposed to go
+beyond his brother prophet; and shortly after the incident of Penson's
+death Reeve made a grand _coup_, which produced a profound impression.
+Muggleton had damned a _gentleman_. Reeve tried his power upon the same
+class, and succeeded in actually converting two of them, who were
+influential men among the Ranters. The Ranters were startled and
+puzzled. "And it came to pass that one of these Ranters kept a
+victualling house and sold drink in the Minories, and they would spend
+their money there. So John Reeve and myself came there, and many of
+them despised our declaration. So John Reeve gave sentence of eternal
+damnation upon many of them, and one of them, being more offended than
+all the rest, was moved with such wrath and fury that five or six men
+could hardly keep him off, his fury was so hot. Then John Reeve said
+unto the people standing by, 'Friends,' said he, 'I pray you stand
+still on both sides of the room, and let there be a space in the
+middle, and I will lay down my head upon the ground and let this
+furious man tread upon my head and do what he will unto me....' So John
+Reeve pulled off his hat and laid his face flat to the ground, and the
+people stood still. So the man came running with great fury, and when
+he came near him, lifting up his foot to tread on his neck, the man
+started back again and said, 'No, I scorn to tread upon a man that
+lieth down to me.' And the people all marvelled at this thing."
+
+Though Muggleton does not make much of this incident, it appears to
+have been a very important one in the early history of the sect, for
+from this moment the numbers of Muggletonians began to increase, and
+they began to absorb a small army of wandering monomaniacs who were
+roaming about London and talking about _religion_, and visions, and
+revelations, and attaching themselves first to one body and then to
+another, according as they could get admission to the meeting-houses
+and be allowed to preach and harangue. Astrologers too, came and
+conferred with the prophets, and drunken scoffers laid bets that they
+would get the prophet's blessing; and on one occasion a company of
+"Atheistical Ranters" made a plot to turn the tables upon Muggleton,
+and damn him and Reeve. Three of "the most desperatest" agreed to do
+it. "So the time appointed came, and there was prepared a good dinner
+of pork, and the three came ready prepared to curse us." Part of the
+agreement was that the dinner should follow upon the cursing. But
+whether it was that the rogues could do nothing until they were
+fortified with drink, or that a sudden spasm of conscientiousness came
+upon them, or that they were like superstitious people who with
+blanched lips loudly protest that they do not believe in ghosts, but
+decline on principle to walk through a churchyard after dark, these
+three fellows all ran away from their engagements at the eleventh hour.
+"So they departed without their dinner of pork."
+
+The prophets were becoming notorious. The Ranters and John Robins had
+been vanquished; their first book was published and was selling; they
+were advertising themselves widely, and being advertised by friends and
+foes; but as yet they had not been persecuted, and as yet they had not
+put very prominently forward any distinctive or special theology. They
+claimed to be prophets, but their mission, What was it? What were they
+charged to proclaim?
+
+It was just about this time that the works of Jacob Boehm had begun to
+exercise a very great influence upon the visionaries in England. The
+_Mercurius Teutonicus_ was first published in an English translation in
+1649, and the _Signatura_ _Rerum_ had appeared in 1651. Muggleton had
+certainly read these books, and as certainly turned them to account.
+The jargon of the German mystic was exactly what he wanted in his
+present state of mind, and there was that in the new philosophy which
+commended itself vastly to him. Not that he, as an inspired prophet,
+could for one moment admit that he had received any light from man or
+was under any obligation to anything but the divine illumination
+enlightening him directly and immediately; but the obligation was there
+all the same, and to Jacob Boehm's influence we must attribute the
+evolution of the distinctive doctrine of the Muggletonians, which just
+about this time comes into obtrusive prominence.
+
+It was at the beginning of the year 1653 that the prophets made their
+first important convert. Up to this time they had been heard of only in
+the back streets of London. But now a New England merchant named
+Leader, who had made a fortune in America, and had come back in disgust
+at the intolerance and persecution that prevailed among the colonists,
+made advances to Muggleton. Leader was in a despondent state of mind,
+and on the lookout for a religion with some novelty in it. He too had,
+it seems, been a student of Jacob Boehm, and the _Signatura Rerum_ had
+opened out a new line of speculation to him. "His first question was
+concerning God--whether God, that created all things, could admit of
+being any form of Himself?"
+
+Prophets are never at a nonplus, and never surprised by a question; the
+more transcendental the problem, the more need for the prophetic gift
+to solve it. In fact, the prophet comes in to help when all human
+cunning is at fault.
+
+Accordingly Mr. Leader's question led to a discussion which is all set
+down at full for those who choose to read it, and as the result of that
+discussion comes out into clearness the astounding declaration which
+henceforth appears as the main article of the Muggletonian theology.
+
+"God hath a body of His own, as man hath a body of his own; only God's
+body is spiritual and heavenly, clear as _christial_, brighter than the
+sun, swifter than thought, yet a body."
+
+Hitherto the prophets had been groping after a formula which might be
+their strength, but they had not been able to put it into shape. Jacob
+Boehm's mysticism, passing through the alembic of such a mind as
+Leader's, and subjected to that occult atmosphere which Muggleton lived
+in, came forth in the shape of a new theology, transcendental,
+unintelligible, but therefore celestial and sublime. The prophets from
+this moment made a new departure.
+
+Meanwhile, the unhesitating and authoritative damning of opponents
+exercised a strange fascination over the multitude. Reeve and Muggleton
+lived among the blackguards at their first start, and they damned the
+blackguards pretty freely. In numberless instances the blackguards were
+to all intents and purposes damned before Muggleton's sentence was
+pronounced. They were fellows given over to drink and debauchery, sots
+who had not much life in them, scoundrels who were in hiding, skulking
+in the vilest holes of the city, whom the plague or famine would be
+likely to rid the world of any day. They died frequently enough after
+the sentence was pronounced, and it is quite conceivable that the
+sentence may have hastened the end of many a poor wretch who had
+nothing to live for. Nay, in more cases than one a timid man, when the
+sentence was passed, was so terrified that he took to his bed there and
+then, and never rose from it, or became insane, neglected his business,
+and so was ruined; and as the number of the damned was always
+increasing, the chances of strange accidents and misfortunes would go
+on increasing also. People heard of these, and of these only.
+
+What the prophets themselves did, it was only natural that their
+followers would try to do also; indeed, it is wonderful that the
+damning prerogative was not invaded much oftener than it was. It was
+very rarely intruded upon, however. Once, indeed, a misguided and too
+venturous believer named Cooper took upon him to usurp authority, and
+pronounced the sentence of damnation upon a small batch of fifteen
+scoffers who had jeered at him and the prophet's mission. The precedent
+was a dangerous one, there was no telling what it would lead to if such
+random and promiscuous damning was to go on. Next day Cooper fell
+grievously sick, and conscience smote him; he could not be at peace
+till he had confessed his fault and been forgiven. He was forgiven
+accordingly, but he was admonished to lay to heart the warning, and to
+presume no more. "Not but that I do believe," says Muggleton, "they
+will all be damned," all the whole fifteen!
+
+The movement was becoming a nuisance by this time, and Reeve got a
+hint, and no obscure one, that a warrant would be issued against him,
+"either from General Cromwell, or the Council of State, or from the
+Parliament." So far from being deterred by the prospect--was there ever
+a prophet who was frightened into silence?--he declared that if
+Cromwell or the Parliament should despise him and his mission, "I would
+pronounce them damned as I do you!" Though no warrant came from the
+Council or Cromwell--a matter much to be regretted--yet a warrant was
+taken out by five of the opponents, and the prophets were brought
+before the Lord Mayor. As usual, a detailed account is given of the
+proceedings, which are valuable as illustrating the method pursued in
+those days in the examination of an accused person, and the procedure
+of the court--so very different from our modern practice. The prophets
+were committed for trial; they refused to give bail, and were thrown
+into Newgate. It was the 15th of September, 1653, one of the great
+festivals among the believers. The hideous picture of prison life in
+Newgate deserves to be read even by those who have some acquaintance
+with the horrors of our prisons at this time. The prophets were well
+supplied with money, and so were spared some of the worst sufferings of
+the place; but it was bad enough, in all conscience, and one night the
+two narrowly escaped being hanged in their own room, and were only
+saved by five condemned men, who came to the rescue. Muggleton says the
+highwaymen and _the boys_ were most set against him; one of the
+highwaymen, whenever he saw him in the Hall, "would come and deride at
+me, and say, 'You rogue, you damn'd folks.' And so it was with the boys
+that were prisoners; they would snatch off my hat, and pawn it for
+half-a-dozen of drink. So the boys did, and I gave them sixpence every
+time they did it, to please them." Highly gratifying to the boys!
+
+While the two were in Newgate John Reeve wrote a letter to the Lord
+Mayor and another to the Recorder, mildly damning them both. If we are
+to believe Muggleton, the Recorder was somewhat disturbed and alarmed
+by the sentence. When the day of trial came, Reeve bade the Lord Mayor
+hold his peace and be silent, as became a damned man in the presence of
+the prophets, and we are told the Mayor obeyed and said nothing more.
+The two were condemned, nevertheless, and thrown into Bridewell for
+seven months. Under the horrors of that dreadful imprisonment Reeve's
+constitution broke down. He was never the same man again. He languished
+on, indeed, for four years more, but he was a dying man, and he spent
+his time in writing books, his followers kindly ministering to him in
+his broken health and feebleness. The end came to him while visiting
+some convents at Maidstone--good women, of course. "The one was Mrs.
+Frances, the eldest; the second, Mrs. Roberts; the third, Mrs. Boner.
+This Mrs. Frances closed up his eyes, for he said unto her, 'Frances,
+close up mine eyes, lest my enemies say I died a staring prophet.'"
+
+While Reeve and Muggleton were lying in Newgate, another mystic--are we
+to call him a prophet too?--was lying in Carlisle gaol. George Fox, the
+Quaker, had fallen into the hands of Wilfrid Lawson, then High Sheriff
+for the county, who had not spared him. Just about the time that the
+London prophets were discharged, Fox arrived in London under the
+custody of Captain Drury, and had that memorable interview with
+Cromwell which readers of Fox's Journal are not likely to forget,
+though Carlyle has gone far to spoil the story by slurring it over.
+
+It was a great event to the Quakers to have their leader in London. He
+had only once before been in the Metropolis--that was nine years
+ago--and then he had been "fearful," had done nothing, was tongue-tied,
+and had gladly escaped to itinerate among the _steeple houses_ in the
+north. This time he had gained acceptance with the Protector. No man
+would meddle with him from henceforth or let them look to it! The
+Quakers were, of course, elated; they were going to carry all before
+them; they met to organize a grand campaign for proselytizing all
+England. The two _commissionated prophets_ were by no means dismayed,
+by no means inclined to be outdone by the Quakers; they invited them to
+a disputation--a trial of the spirits, in fact. It came off,
+accordingly, in Eastcheap, and George Fox was there, and with him two
+or three of his "ministers whom the Lord raised up." It is not a little
+significant that Fox makes no mention of this meeting in his
+Journal-significant because he never omits to speak of his successes,
+and never tells us anything of his failures. Nay, he studiously omits
+all mention of Muggleton's name throughout the Journal, and in his
+books against him indulges in really violent language. Muggleton, on
+the other hand, speaks of this discussion at Eastcheap as if it had
+been a serious check to the Quakers, and from this time to his death he
+never ceased to assail them with a resolute aggressiveness which
+indicates no sort of misgiving in his power to deal with his
+antagonists. The discussion, however, ended in Fox and his
+supporters-five in all-receiving the sentence of damnation from the two
+prophets, and from this moment there was internecine war between the
+Quakers and the Muggletonians; each denouncing the other fiercely, and
+issuing books against the other by the score-works which have happily
+been long ago forgotten, to the great advantage of mankind. If,
+however, any one, curious in such lore, is desirous of finding out what
+cursing and swearing, regarded as one of the Fine Arts, may achieve
+when skilfully managed by adepts, let him by all means turn to the
+pamphlets of Pennington, Richard Farnsworth, and others of the Quaker
+body, while delivering their souls against Muggleton, and the
+counterblasts of Muggleton, Claxton, and their friends in reply. One of
+the choicest diatribes of these _esprits forts_, as we may well call
+them, was hurled at the prophet by William Penn.
+
+Muggleton had some very zealous converts at Cork--for there were
+believers everywhere by this time--and as they were people of substance
+and much in favour, they were making some way. Of course they came into
+collision with the Quakers, and not without success. Penn had early
+fallen under the influence of Richard Farnsworth, whom Muggleton had
+damned in 1654, and Penn's father had sent him over to manage his Irish
+estates, in the hope of getting the new notions out of the young man's
+head. The experiment failed, and young Penn, now only twenty-four years
+old, had returned to England in 1668 as staunch a Quaker as ever. There
+was a leading man among the Quakers, Josiah Cole by name, whom
+Muggleton had solemnly damned; he was in failing health, and he died a
+few days after the sentence was pronounced. The Muggletonians were
+jubilant, and some of the Quakers were disturbed and alarmed. Penn's
+heart was moved within him, and with all the fervid indignation of
+youth he stepped forward to draw the sword of the Lord. He printed a
+letter to Muggleton which should reassure the waverers. It thundered
+out defiance. "Boast not," he says, "thou enemy of God, thou son of
+perdition and confederate with the unclean croaking spirits reserved
+under chains to eternal darkness.... I boldly challenge thee with thy
+six-foot God and all the host of Luciferian spirits, with all your
+commissions, curses, and sentences, to touch and hurt me. And this
+know, O Muggleton: on you I trample, and to the bottomless pit are you
+sentenced, from whence you came, and where the endless worm shall gnaw
+and torture your imaginary soul."
+
+Muggleton replied with his usual coolness, and pronounced his sentence
+upon the young enthusiast. Neither was a man easily to be put down; but
+whereas the prophet's followers were wholly unmoved by all the attacks
+upon them, the Quakers found the Muggletonians extremely troublesome,
+and it is impossible to resist the conviction that large numbers of the
+Quakers were won over to join the opposite camp. Nay, it looks as if
+Muggleton had really some strange power over the weaker vessels among
+the Quakers, and had actually _frightened_ some of them. Writing in
+1670, he says: "You are not like the people you were sixteen years ago;
+there were few Quakers then, but they had witchcraft fits, but now of
+late I do not hear of any Quaker that hath any fits, no, not so much as
+to buz and hum before the fit comes. But if you, Fox, doth know of any
+of you Quakers that have any of those witchcraft fits as formerly,
+bring them to me, and I shall cast out that devil which causeth those
+fits." The Quakers could hardly have been as angry as they were, nor
+their books have been so many and their writers so voluble during
+twenty years and longer, if Muggleton had not been a disputant to be
+dreaded, and a prophet with the faculty of drawing others after him.
+
+In the whole course of his career, which extended over nearly half a
+century, Muggleton never found any difficulty in maintaining his
+authority over his followers. There were indeed two attempts at mutiny,
+but they were promptly suppressed, and they collapsed before they had
+made any head. The first was in 1660, shortly after the death of John
+Reeve. Lawrence Claxton, a "great writer" among the Muggletonians, had
+during Reeve's long illness come very much to the fore as an opponent
+of the Quakers, and his success had a little turned his head. In one
+passage of his writings he had taken rank as Reeve's equal and
+representative, and had put himself on a level with "the
+Commissionated." It was an awful act of impiety. "For," says Muggleton,
+"as John Reeve was like unto Elijah, so am I as Elisha, and his place
+was but as Gehazi, and could stand no longer than my will and pleasure
+was." Claxton had been formally blessed, therefore he could never be
+damned, but excommunicated he could be and was. He at once dropt out
+and we hear of him no more.
+
+The second revolt was much more serious. "There were four conspirators
+in the rebellion... for which I damned two of them, and the other two I
+did excommunicate." This time the fomenter of discord was a busy
+Scotchman. Muggleton calls him Walter Bohenan, which appears to be only
+a _bhonetic_ representation of Walter _Buchanan_. That so sagacious a
+seer as Muggleton should have been betrayed into associating himself
+intimately with a canny Scot is truly wonderful, and illustrates the
+eternal verity that "we are all of us weak at times," even the
+prophets. _Bohenan's_ self-assertion led him on to dizzy heights of
+towering presumption, until at last "he acted the highest act of
+rebellion that ever was acted." It was all in vain; he was cut off for
+ever--perished from the congregation; utterly damned, and thereupon
+disappears, swallowed up of darkness and silence.
+
+Muggleton lived twenty-six years after this last revolt, exercising
+unquestioned authority; an autocratic prophet to whom something like
+worship was offered even to the last. He was far advanced in his
+eighty-ninth year when he died. He was far on towards seventy when he
+was brought before Jeffreys, then Common Serjeant, and other justices,
+on a charge of blasphemy. Jeffreys was as yet a novice in those arts of
+which he became the acknowledged master a few years after, but already
+he quite equalled his future self in his savage brutality to the poor
+monomaniac. "He was a man," says Muggleton, "whose voice was very loud;
+but he is one of the worst devils in nature." The jury hesitated to
+bring in their verdict, knowing well enough what would follow, but
+Jeffrey's look and manner cowed them. The prophet was condemned to pay
+a fine of L 500, to stand in the pillory three times for two hours
+_without the usual protection to his head_, which those condemned to
+such a barbarous punishment were allowed. He was to have his books
+burned by the common hangman, and to remain in Newgate till his fine
+was paid. Only a man of an iron constitution could have come out of the
+ordeal with his life. Muggleton bore it all; remained in Newgate for a
+year, compounded for his fine in the sum of L 100, which his friends
+advanced, and was a free man on the 19th of July, 1677, a day which the
+Muggletonians observed as the prophet's Hegira.
+
+As early as 1666 he had many followers on the Continent, and in that
+year the _Transcendant Spiritual Treatise_ was translated into German
+by a convert who came over to London to confer with the sage. Except on
+very rare occasions he never left London, nor indeed the parish in
+which he was born. He pursued the trade of a tailor till late in life,
+but his books had sold largely, and he managed to get together a
+competence, and was at one time worried by his neighbours and fined for
+refusing to serve in some parish offices. There was a fund of sagacity
+about the man which appears frequently in his later letters, but an
+utter absence of all sentiment and all sympathy. He had no _nerves_.
+Staid, stern, and curiously insensible to physical pain, he was
+absolutely fearless, with a constitution that could defy any hardships
+and bear any strain upon it.
+
+When we come to the _teaching_ of Muggleton, we find ourselves in a
+tangled maze of nonsense far too inconsequential to allow of any
+intelligible account being given of it. Jacob Boehm's mistiest dreams
+are clearness itself compared with the English prophet's utterances.
+Others might talk of the divine cause or the divine power or the divine
+person, "fumbling exceedingly" and falling back in an intellectual
+swoon upon the stony bosom of the Unknowable. Muggleton grimly told you
+that there was a personal Trinity in the universe--God, man, and
+devil--and each had his body. If you pressed him for further
+particulars he poured forth words that might mean anything, a metallic
+jargon which you were ordered to receive and ponder. Such as it was,
+however, you had to accept or reject it at your peril. Why should an
+inspired prophet argue?
+
+Something must be set down to the circumstances in which he found
+himself, and to the dreadfully chaotic condition which the moral
+sentiments and religious beliefs of the multitude had been reduced to
+during the wild anarchy of the seventeenth century. There were two men
+in England who were _quite certain_--George Fox was one, Muggleton was
+the other. Everybody else was doubting, hesitating, groping for the
+light, moaning at the darkness. These two men _knew_, other people were
+seeking to know. George Fox went forth to win the world over from
+darkness to light. Muggleton stayed at home, he _was_ the light. They
+that wanted it must come to him to find it. All through England there
+was clamour and hubbub of many voices, men going to and fro, always on
+the move, trying experiments of all kinds. Here was one man, "a still
+strong man in a blatant land," who was calm, steadfast, unmovable, and
+always at home. He did not want you, whoever you were; he was perfectly
+indifferent to you and your concerns. Preach? No! he never preached, he
+never cared to speak till he was spoken to. If you went to him as an
+oracle, then he spake as a god.
+
+Moreover, when the Restoration came and the high pressure that had been
+kept up in some states of society was suddenly taken off, there was a
+frantic rage for pleasure, which included the wildest debauchery and
+the most idiotic attempts at amusement. Then, too, the haste to be rich
+agitated the minds of all classes; Westward ho! was the cry not only of
+Pilgrim Fathers but of reckless adventurers of all kinds. From across
+the sea came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver, and
+ivory, and apes, and peacocks, and a thousand tales of El Dorado.
+Muggleton the prophet, with that lank brown hair of his and the dreamy
+eye and the resolute lips, waited unmoved. Pleasure? If he wondered at
+anything it was to know what meaning there could be in the word.
+Riches? What purpose could they serve? To him it seemed that the
+Decalogue contained one wholly superfluous enactment; why should men
+covet? There would have been some reason in limiting the number of the
+commandments to nine; nine is the product of three times three. Think
+of that! This man in that wicked age must have appeared to many a
+standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in
+London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as
+little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which
+the sand storms can beat against but never stir.
+
+So far from Muggleton's influence and authority growing less as he grew
+older, it went on steadily increasing; there was a mystery and an awe
+that gathered round him, and latterly he was regarded rather as an
+inspired oracle than as a seer. The voice of prophecy ceased; he had
+left his words on record for all future ages, but from day to day his
+advice was asked, and people soon found it was worth listening to. In
+the latter years of his life his letters dealt with the ordinary
+affairs of men. People wrote to inquire about their matrimonial
+affairs, their quarrels, their business difficulties, whether they must
+conform to this or that enactment of the State, how they might outwit
+the persecutors and skulk behind the law. Muggleton replies with
+surprising shrewdness and good sense, and now and then exhibits a
+familiarity with the quips and quirks of the law that he can only have
+acquired by the necessity which suffering had laid upon him. His
+language is always rugged, for he had received little or no education;
+he is very unsafe in his grammar, but he has a plain, homely
+vocabulary, forcible and copious, which, like most mystics, he was
+compelled to enrich on occasion, and which he does not scruple to
+enrich in his own way. His style certainly improves as he gets older,
+and in these letters one meets now and then with passages that are
+almost melodious, the sentences following one another in a kind of
+plaintive rhythm, and sounding as you read them aloud, like a Gregorian
+chant. He died of natural decay, the machine worn out. His last words
+were, "Now hath God sent death unto me." They laid him on his bed, and
+he slept and woke not. Nearly 250 of the faithful followed him to his
+grave. It is clear that the sect had not lost ground as time moved on.
+
+Not the least feature in this curious chapter of religious history is
+that the Muggletonians should have survived as a sect to our own days.
+As late as 1846 an elaborate index to the Muggletonian writings was
+issued, and the _Divine Songs of the Muggletonians_, written
+exclusively by believers, show that there has been a strange continuity
+of composition among them, and that, too, such composition as ordinary
+mortals have never known the like of. Yet Muggleton never broke forth
+into verse. Joanna Southcott could not keep down her impulse to pour
+forth her soul in metre; Muggleton is never excited, the emotional had
+no charm for him. So, too, he never cared for music, he makes no
+allusion to it. Nay, he speaks slightingly of worship, of prayer and
+praise, especially of congregational worship. It was allowable to the
+little men, a concession to the weak which the strong in the faith
+might be expected to dispense with sooner or later. For himself,
+isolated and self-contained, he could do without the aids to faith
+which the multitude ask for and find support in. He held himself aloof;
+he had no sympathy to offer, he asked for none; nay, he did not even
+need his followers, he could do without them. The question for them
+was, Could they do without him? For more than two centuries they have
+kept on vehemently answering No!
+
+Of late years a class of specialists has risen up among us who have
+treated us to quite a new philosophy--to wit, the philosophy of
+religion. To these thinkers I leave the construction of theories on
+Muggleton's place in the history of religion or philosophy; to them,
+too, I leave the question of what was the secret of his success and
+power. Much more interesting to me is the problem how the sect has gone
+on retaining its vitality. Perhaps the great secret of that permanence
+has been that Muggleton did not give his followers too much to believe
+or too much to do. He disdained details, he was never precise and
+meddlesome. If the Muggletonians wished to pray, let them; to sing,
+there was no objection; to meet together in their conventicles, it was
+a harmless diversion. But they must manage these things themselves, and
+provide for difficulties as they arose. It was no part of the prophet's
+office to make bye-laws which might require to be altered any day. Thus
+it came about that the sect was left at Muggleton's death absolutely
+unfettered by any petty restraints upon its freedom of development. The
+believers must manage their own affairs. There is one God and Muggleton
+is His prophet--that was really the sum and substance of their creed.
+That followed on a small scale which is observable on a large scale
+among the Moslems, the prophet's followers found themselves more and
+more thrown back upon their prophet till he became almost an object of
+adoration. The creed of Islam without Mahomet would be to millions
+almost inconceivable; the Muggletonian God without Muggleton would not
+be known.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Says her Royal Highness, looking over my shoulder, "You have written
+quite enough about those crazy, vulgar people. It's all old world talk.
+There are no prophets now; there never will be any more."
+
+No more prophets! The _prophetical succession_ never stops, never will
+stop. When Muggleton died Emanuel Swedenborg was a boy of ten; twenty
+years afterwards the new prophet was walking about London just as the
+old one had done, living the same lonely life, conversing with the
+angels and writing of heaven and hell and conjugal love, and--well, a
+great deal else besides; and, odd coincidence, it was in that same
+Eastcheap where Muggleton had damned the Quakers in 1653 that the
+Swedenborgians held their first assembly in 1788, just about the same
+time that Joanna Southcott came to London, and before Joseph Smith and
+Brigham Young were born or thought of. No, no. The prophets are not
+improved off the face of the earth. They never will be. They will turn
+up again and again. You can no more hope to exterminate them by culture
+than you can hope to produce them by machinery. _Propheta nascitur non
+fit_. For once her Royal Highness was wrong.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp
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