English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 1: From Celt to Tudor

by Donald Grant Mitchell

Religious Houses.

If you or I had journeyed thither in that day—coming from what land we might—I think we should have been earnest among the first things, to see those great monasteries that lay scattered over the surface of England and of Southern Scotland;—not perched on hills or other defensible positions like the Norman castles of the robber Barons—not buried in cities like London Tower, or the great halls which belonged to guilds of merchants—but planted in the greenest and loveliest of valleys, where rivers full of fish rippled within hearing, and woods full of game clothed every headland that looked upon the valley; where the fields were the richest—where the water was purest—where the sun smote warmest; there these religious houses grew up, stone by stone, cloister by cloister, chapel by chapel, manor by manor, until there was almost a township, with outlying cottages—and some great dominating abbey church—rich in all the choicest architecture of the later Norman days—lifting its spire from among the clustered buildings scarce less lovely than itself.

Not only had learning and book-making been kept alive in these great religious houses, but the art of Agriculture. Within their walled courts were grown all manner of fruits and vegetables known to their climate; these monks knew and followed the best rulings of Cato, and Crescenzius (who just now has written on this subject in Northern Italy, and is heard of by way of Padua). They make sour wine out of grapes grown against sunny walls: they have abundant flocks too—driven out each morning from their sheltering courts, and returned each night; and they have great breadth of ground under carefullest tillage.

Of such character was Tintern Abbey—in the valley of the Wye—now perhaps the most charming of all English ruins. Such another was Netley Abbey, on Southampton water, and Bolton Priory, close by that famous stream, the Wharfe, which you will remember in Wordsworth’s story of the “White Doe of Rylstone.” Fountain’s Abbey, in Yorkshire, was yet another, from whose ruin we can study better perhaps than from any other in England, the extent and disposition of these old religious houses. Melrose was another; and so was Dryburgh, where Scott’s body lies, and Abingdon, close upon Oxford—where was attached that Manor of Cumnor, which Scott assigns for a prison to the sad-fated Amy Robsart, in the tale of “Kenilworth.” Glastonbury was another: this too (once encircled by the arms of the river Brue), was the “Isle of Avalon” in Arthurian romance;

“Where falls not hail, or rain or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.”

Here (at Glastonbury) is still in existence the abbot’s barn of the fourteenth century, and here, too, a magnificent abbot’s kitchen—thirty-three feet square and seventy-two feet high: Think what the cooking and the meats must have been in a kitchen of that style!

Now, these shrewd people who lived in these great monasteries, and built them, and enjoyed the good things kept in store there—made friends of the vassals about them; they were generous with their pot-herbs and fruits; they were the medicine-men of the neighborhood; they doled out flasks of wine to the sick; they gave sanctuary and aid to the Robin Hoods and Little Johns; and Robin Hood’s men kept them in supply of venison; they enlivened their courts with minstrelsy. Warton says that at the feast of the installation of Ralph, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, in 1309, seventy shillings was expended for minstrels in the gallery, and six thousand guests were present in and about the halls. Many abbeys maintained minstrels or harpers of their own; and we may be sure that the monks had jolly as well as religious ditties.

They made friends of all strong and influential people near them; their revenues were enormous. They established themselves by all the arts of conciliation. Finding among their young vassals one keener and sharper witted than his fellows, they beguiled him into the abbey—instructed him—perhaps made a clerk of him, for the transcription of the MSS. we have spoken of (it was thus Cædmon was brought into notice); if very promising, he might come to place of dignity among the monks—possibly grow, as Thomas à Becket did, from such humble beginnings to an archbishopric and to the mastership of the religious heart of England.

These houses were the fat corporations of that day, with their lobby-men and spokesmen in all state assemblages. Their representatives could wear hair shirts, or purple robes and golden mitres, as best suited the needs of the occasion. They could boast that their institutions were established—like our railways—for the good of the people, and in the interests of humanity; but while rendering service, waxing into such lustiness of strength and such habits of corruption and rapacity, that at last, when fully bloated, they were broken open and their riches drifted away under the whirlwind of the wrath of King Henry VIII. Great schemes of greed are very apt to carry an avenging Henry VIII. somewhere in their trail. But let us not forget that there was a time in the early centuries of Christian England when these great religious houses—whose ruins appeal to us from their lovely solitudes—were the guardians of learning, the nurses of all new explorations into the ways of knowledge, the expounders of all healing arts, and the promoters of all charities and all neighborly kindliness.[32] Whatever young fellow of that day did not plant himself under shadow of one of these religious houses for growth, or did not study in the schools of Oxford or Cambridge, must needs have made his way into favor and fame and society with a lance and good horse—just as young fellows do it now with an oar or a racket.