A NOVICE FROM ESSEX
In Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Richard II., there is an Abbot of Westminster who flits craftily across the scene, generally shadowing a Bishop of Carlisle, whom we shall meet again. When Bolingbroke announces that he is about to be crowned King in Richard's stead, this Abbot bids his friends—
"Come home with me to supper; and I'll lay
A plot shall show us all a merry day."[ 2]
In the next act[ 3] it is stated that he is dead—
"The grand conspirator, Abbot of Westminster,
With clog of conscience and sour melancholy
Hath yielded up his body to the grave."
As to which it must be sufficient to say that the poet who could not give the Abbot's name was equally unconscious of the fact that he outlived his alleged conspiracy by twenty years.
But his name was William Colchester, and we may begin by assuming that, as his name implies, he was a Colchester man. In and before his time, and for a considerable space afterwards, the customary designation of a Brother was his Christian name and a place name, with or without the copula de; in earlier years he called himself William de Colchester, but the documents which concern him as Abbot mostly speak of William Colchester, or William Abbot of Westminster. Nor are we left to guess-work as to the place of his origin. In later life, according to the habit of his time, he busied himself with the endowment of obits, or anniversaries, for the good of his soul. Here is a document,[ 4] dated May 20, 1406, in which he bargained with the Prior of St. Botolph, Colchester, having paid 40s. to Henry IV.'s Clerk of the Hanaper to seal the bargain, that one of the canon-chaplains of that Priory should say Mass every week, at sixpence a week, for his soul and for the souls of his parents; that the Prior and his Brethren should observe his anniversary, again with a memorial of his parents, in the parish church of St. Nicholas, Colchester; that a set sum should be distributed yearly to the vicar of St. Nicholas, to the poor of the parish, and to the prisoners in Colchester Castle; and that the tomb of his parents in the parish churchyard should be kept in proper repair.
We may conclude, then, that this was his native parish, and that in his great position as Abbot of Westminster he wished the connexion to be had in remembrance. But he knew to a mile the distance between his Abbey and Colchester, and how easy it might be for the Prior of St. Botolph to accept his bequest and to neglect to fulfil its conditions. So in 1407 (December 3), when he was completing the arrangements[ 5] for maintaining an anniversary at the Abbey out of the revenues of the church of Aldenham,[ 6] in Hertfordshire, he inserted an instruction that the Monk-Bailiff of Westminster, at the time of his annual visit to the Essex manors, should either proceed or send to Colchester and make careful inquiry as to the due observance of the covenants, as who should say, "It is as well not to trust these provincial Priors further than you can see them."
We get to know also from the grant[ 7] of another anniversary at the Abbey's daughter Priory of Hurley, in Berkshire, that his father's name was Reginald, and his mother's Alice. He had a sister who in 1389-90 was living in Cambridge, for in that year his Receiver entered a gift of 12d. to a man who came from my lord's sister at that town; and we shall find that he had other connexions, some poor enough to bring him a basket of poultry, some rich enough to receive from him a present of jewelry. Evidently he sprang from a burgher stock of no great eminence, for whom the Church seemed the sphere in which the career was opened to the talents.
How he came to enter our Monastery we shall never know, for with all the wealth of our materials there survives not a trace of his or of any other postulant's testimonials. He came, he was seen, he was admitted. We know what the requisites were—that he must have examined his conscience as to the motives which led him to apply, that he must be sound in body, free in civil status, unburdened by debt or other obligations, and as a rule not less than eighteen years of age.[ 8] What steps the Fathers of the Convent took to secure outside evidence of a candidate's fitness in these respects must be left to the imagination. He passed muster and joined their number.
Our first trace of William Colchester's name on the books of the House is in connexion with his ordination as priest. I cannot tell what Bishop admitted him to the ministry, nor where it took place, but it can be ascertained that he said Mass for the first time during 1361-2 (the conventual year was reckoned for administrative purposes, as it is still, from Michaelmas to Michaelmas), and we are able to discover this, not because it was felt to be an event worth chronicling for its own sake, but because in that year three of the officers note that they severally expended 1s. 7½d. in bread and wine as "exennia"—i.e. a complimentary gift[ 9]—made to him in honour of the event. We may suppose that he was then twenty-three years of age; he may have entered the Convent in or about 1356; and we may take 1338 as the probable year of his birth. If, as we have assumed, he entered the Convent some years before his ordination, then he did so during the reign of Simon Langham, the most eminent of all our Abbots, but it is not possible to say whether he received priest's orders before or after the election of Nicholas Litlington to the Abbacy in April, 1362. The Monastery was still suffering in numbers from the ravages of the Great Pestilence in 1349, and consisted in 1356-7 of only thirty-five monks and two novices. Colchester was the last of five new members of whom we hear first in 1361-2.
Five years later, in 1366-7, he was chosen by the Convent as one of two of their number whom they thought specially apt to learning, and whom it was therefore their duty to send up to Oxford to join the other Benedictine students at Gloucester Hall, an institution established by the Order in its General Chapter held at Abingdon in 1290.[ 10] Our custom was that the Convent Treasurer paid £10 yearly to each Westminster student for his maintenance,[ 11] besides the cost of his journeys to and fro; so that it is possible to compile from the Treasurers' rolls a fairly complete list of our Oxford scholars from 1356, when I came upon the first signs of a definite system, until the Dissolution. The plan tended to the great advantage of the monasteries; it meant that the likely young men were taken at an impressionable time in their lives out of the narrow rut of cloistral life, and were associated with the world of scholarship and of affairs; and it will be found that a large proportion of those who were sent to Oxford rose quickly to positions of trust in the Convent. William Colchester remained at Oxford, save for periodical visits to the Abbey, from 1366 to 1370. It cannot be said that the Latin prose of which he was capable does credit to his University, and even monkish Latinity was seldom worse than that in which his few surviving letters are couched. But it is fair to assume that he learnt how to deal with men, and we can now go on to see that the Convent which had supported him at Oxford was satisfied with the product of its expenditure.