English Monasteries: From Saxon Days to Their Dissolution
9781465678065
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
IT is proposed, in the course of a few chapters, to put on record certain facts and statements on the “religious” (using the word in its technical signification) life of England from the seventh century to the sixteenth. Such statements, though based on the original study of a large number of episcopal registers and monastic chartularies, as well as on a variety of old documents at the Public Record Office or in private keeping, will, in many cases, only yield evidence familiar to those well acquainted with a too little studied subject; but some of the points brought forward may be novel to all. It may be well, in the first instance, to disabuse the mind of the low motives that are often supposed to have actuated men and women in seeking admission to the cloistered life. A recent American writer of repute, on Monks and Monasteries (Mr. Wishart, 1900) has said:— “The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt, the devoted or bereaved wife, the pauper and the invalid, the social outcast and the shirker of civic duties, the lazy and the fickle, were all to be found in the ranks of the monastic orders.” Now and again, in a very small minority of cases, such instances as these found their way into the mediæval monasteries, with the result that those whose intentions were so poor became the very ones about whom scandal afterwards arose. But, broadly speaking, such a statement, as applicable to the monastic life generally, is simply an impossible libel, that could not be put forth by any genuine student of monastic life. The notion of a “lazy” man or woman desiring to take vows is an absurdity; that laziness, and other sins, might of course attack cloistered as well as uncloistered lives, no one would deny. The difficulties surrounding the first steps to enter a monastery were by no means inconsiderable, the harshest side of the cloistered life was always set sternly before the applicant, and the novices were severely tested ere they were permitted to take the habit. As we read the extraordinary and heart-rending methods adopted by the English Carthusians to keep all save the most devoted out of their ranks—precautions that were maintained, as can be proved, by the Carthusians of Sheen up to the very moment of their terrible treatment by Henry VIII.—who a short time before had praised them as the very salt of the earth—the marvel is that they could ever find applicants with sufficient courage to enter their ranks.
