IV. THE CLOISTER

Out of the nave, near the south transept, a door opens into the cloister. At the corner, where nave and transept met, is the pedestal which held a bowl for holy water. Here the brothers stopped to dip their fingers and sign their foreheads with

Principal Patterns of the Roman Floors at Fountains Abbey

From a print by Wm. Fowler of Winterton

To face p. 72

the sign of the cross. The green cloister court, without, had a porch about it on its four sides, and these covered places, whose width is now indicated by the grading of the turf, were called walks.

In the west walk, against the cellarium wall, sat the novices, busy with their books, studying church music and grammar and theology. Apt students, when they became monks, were sometimes sent to complete their education at Oxford, where they lived in the Cistercian Abbey of Bewley (founded in 1280), or in the Cistercian College of St. Bernard, now St. John’s (founded in 1432). There they learned to preach, and teach some simple theology to the novices who succeeded them. There they learned also to interpret and apply the canon law: they became the lawyers of the monastery.

It is likely that Fountains, like other great houses, maintained a grammar school for the sons of the neighbours. The master of such a school would not be a monk but a secular person, employed by the Abbey but not a member of the family. The school-house has not been identified. The building which once stood across the river at the south end of the cellarium would have been conveniently placed for this purpose. A glimpse of the discipline of such a school is had in the fact that, in the sixteenth century, a schoolmaster, receiving his degree of bachelor of arts, was presented with a birch as a symbol of his office, and was required forthwith, in the presence of his examiners, to flog a boy hired for that exercise.

Over the roof of the east walk, a line of windows opened out of the dormitory. This was a long room, with two rows of beds from end to end, like a ward in a hospital. The beds were provided with sheets of linsey-woolsey, and the monks lay on straw which was emptied out of its blue ticking and renewed once every year. At Durham, the custom was to carry his blue bed to the brother’s funeral, and hold it as a canopy over the grave during the service; so that every night when he lay down to rest he was profitably reminded of his last sleep. The monks laid aside their scapulars, but slept in their woollen cassocks, so that they woke ready dressed. The day stairs to the dormitory are in the south-east corner of the cloister. There was a room at the head of the stairs, extending south to the end of the dormitory, which may have corresponded to the master’s chamber in a like position in a school. Here the prior may have slept with an attentive ear for any breach of order. It is uncertain whether there were partitions between the beds, or whether the brethren were denied even such scanty privacy as that. It is plain that they had no “cells.” The building which opened at right angles with the dormitory beside the river was the toilet room, the necessarium. Through its hall communication was had with the abbot’s lodgings. The abbot, according to rule, must sleep in the common dormitory. He probably gave this regulation a liberal interpretation, as the house grew great, and considered that this hall made his room “constructively” a part of the chamber of the monks.

At two o’clock in the morning a great bell rang in the tower, and a little bell in the dormitory answered it. Then every brother bestirred himself. He threw a cloak about him, thrust his feet into his shoes, and descended the night stairs at the end of the room into the dark church.

The night service, called matins, consisted of a reading of many lessons and a chanting of many psalms, and was performed to the accompaniment of the organ. A light burned before the high altar, and there was a light in the loft at the organ, and another for the reader at the lecturn, perhaps still another at the chant-book of the precentor. But otherwise the great church was in darkness. The psalms were sung from memory. Now and then some one went about among the singing brothers to make sure that no man slept. This lasted for an hour or more.

After this service, the monks came out into the north walk of the cloister, where cressets flamed uncertainly against the walls, and there continued until dawn, reading or meditating, but having their hoods well pulled back from their faces to make it evident that they were wide awake. This study-hour was, of course, short in summer, but long in winter. When the weather was very bad, they sought refuge in the chapter-house. In some cloisters there was glass in the open stone-work of the porch; but, at best, this was a cold place of an early morning. The dormitory was cold, the church was cold, and the cloister was as cold as the sky; but they were used to it, like all their neighbours.

This north walk was the living-room and study of the monastery. The books in most frequent use were kept in a case which stood in a shallow recess still to be seen in the transept wall. Others were stored in two capacious closets on either side of the chapter-house door. Every year, at the beginning of Lent, all the books of the monastery were spread out on a carpet on the floor of the chapter-house, and a general accounting was had. A roll was called of brothers and of books. Each monk rose at the sound of his name, produced the book which had been assigned to him the year before, and returned it, humbly confessing if he had not read it through. Then the books were newly distributed and charged. At Ripley Castle, bound in an octavo volume, are several of the Fountains books: a Latin grammar, some sermons and some music, and a paraphrase of Ovid, in which that irresponsible writer is made to serve as a mediæval moralist. There is also a fragment of a book on medecine, to which they might profitably have added, as at Meaux Abbey, a book on eating,—De Edendo. No catalogue remains, but we can guess at the titles from the lists of other mediæval libraries. There were writings of the fathers, ancient and modern, with a pretty full set of the works of St. Bernard; and several commentaries on the Bible; and a good deal of biography, mostly ecclesiastical; and books on law and ritual.

So the brethren sat in the cold cloister reading their good books. The Benedictines, who were scholars and literary persons, provided by rule that these precious manuscript volumes should be handled with becoming care. “When the religious are engaged in reading in cloister or church, they shall if possible hold the books in their left hands, wrapped in the sleeve of their tunics, and resting on their knees.”

Who were these men? Whence had they come? and why?

As for their origin, they belonged, so far as we can now discover, to the same class from which the ministry is still mainly recruited: to the great company of those who are neither rich nor poor, who neither earn their living by their hands nor inherit the means of living from their fathers, represented in mediæval England by the gentry, as distinguished on the one side from the peasantry, and on the other side from the aristocracy.

As for their motive, each had his own. “What are you here for, Bernard?”—the great saint of the Cistercians had the question written on his wall. Ad quid venisti, Bernarde? To this inquiry the abbey might have returned as many as fifty different answers. Some of the white-gowned men came in pure love of God, deeming a life of continual prayer the most blessed of all lives, delighting in it

Fountains Abbey.

From the South East.

Photo. Watson. Art Repro. Co.

all, finding in the cloister the four-square city of God which is pictured in the Book of the Revelation. Some came from love of leisure, or of simple peace and quiet: the worse ones, disposed to be respectably idle; the better, finding the outer world too boisterous for their gentle souls. Some came because they were disappointed; some because they had failed; some because they had suddenly seen the emptiness of common life, the baseness of much of it, the flagrant evil of some of it, and had come out of it that they might live to a good purpose.

Thus Ralph, the seventh abbot, had begun life as a soldier. He was a contemporary of Robin Hood, who in the ballad met a friar of Fountains and by him was soundly ducked in the middle of the little river. Richard of the Lion Heart was at that time ruling England after his fashion. Men were marching across Europe to the Holy Land. The profession of arms must have appealed strongly in those days to the heroic, and even to the religious nature of many men. But Ralph did not like it. It displeased him much. And one day, coming to Fountains, where his father had already become a monk, he consulted a lay-brother, whose name was Sunnulph, homo simplex et illiteratus but wise in the counsels of God. And presently, the soldier and the brother each had a dream in the same day. The knight dreamed that he was in a church, and that the figure on the crucifix cried saying, “Why do you not come? Why do you wait?” To which he replied with tears, “Behold, Lord, I come!” The monk, sleeping in the long dormitory over the storehouse, saw the soldier dressed in a monastic habit. So Ralph became a monk, and presently an abbot.

The possibility of that promotion brought some men into the monastery. In a world hopelessly divided into classes, the monastery was the residence of democracy. Here the humblest man, if he could but read and write, might rise as he deserved, to be the kitchener, the hospitaller, the sacrist, the cellarer; some day—who could tell?—the abbot, wearing a mitre, consorting on terms of equality with the noblest in the realm, ruling his fellow men.

But here are the brethren sitting in the chill cloister, reading their good books, and awaiting the day. At the first light the bell rang and they went again into the church for the psalms of lauds. After that, they returned to the dormitory and washed their hands and faces in the room over the river. By this time the sun was fairly up, and the hour was come for the psalms of prime. The first psalm, according to the gracious arrangement of St. Benedict, they said very slowly, in order to give late-comers time to get in. Prime was followed by mass or by chapter meeting, the order differing with the season of the year. The monastic year was in two parts: winter began on September 14, being Holy Cross day, a date still used in the Prayer-Book for determining the autumnal ember days; summer began at Easter.

Out of the church, from prime or mass, the brethren proceeded to the chapter-house. This great hall opened through three noble arches from the east walk of the cloister. Two of these arches were blocked, as it appears, by book closets; but not at the beginning. The books were probably stored at first, as in other Cistercian abbeys, in the room between the transept and the chapter-house. Afterwards this room was put to other uses.

At the further end and on the sides the brothers sat on triple tiers of stone benches. The meeting began with a reading from the monastic book of martyrs, how this brother and that in the old time had lain down his life for his Master. Then there were prayers; and sometimes a sermon, to the hearing of which the lay brothers might be summoned. Then was read a chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict, a custom which gave its name both to the meeting and to the house in which it was held. Thus their high ideal was kept continually before them. Once a week a list was read of the household duties and of the brethren to whom they were assigned. For these homely tasks came to the monks in turn. One after another, they cooked the dinner, or waited on the table, or swept the dormitory. Finally, cases of discipline were considered.

In a life which at best was somewhat monotonous and narrow, the minor annoyances of human fellowship would easily be exaggerated. The rule of silence could not restrain the brothers from thinking; and some of the thoughts would naturally take the direction which is indicated in Browning’s “Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister.” The chapter meeting was, accordingly, a place for the summary adjustment of all the petty grievances. Brother Robert made his complaint against Brother William, and Brother William confessed or explained, and whoever was adjudged to be at fault was properly punished: sometimes by loss of precedence, sometimes by lack of dinner; in serious cases, by flogging. Down got the brother on the cold floor, paved with tombstones of past abbots, and there was soundly whipped, for the good of his soul and for the edification of the brethren. When whipping was not sufficient, he was put in prison. Under the abbot’s lodgings, beneath the ground, were three convenient dungeons, in whose walls and floor are to be seen to this day the staples for the chains.

It is not likely that these dungeons were in frequent use. Many hard things were, indeed, said about the monks at the time of the suppression, but it must be remembered that they were said by interested persons in the heat of controversy. Even then, it was agreed that in the “great and solemn monasteries,” such as Fountains, religion was “right well kept.” The monks were slandered that they might the more conveniently be robbed. Henry VIII. desired for various reasons, good and bad, to destroy the monasteries and take possession of their lands and treasures. He desired also, like all the Tudors, to keep the good will of the people. The royal commissioners, sent to visit the religious houses and report upon them, understood the situation and met it. They showed that the monasteries were so bad that a good nation ought to be happy to have its king suppress them. It is true that the enthusiasm for the monastic life was waning; the best men were turning their energies and finding their ideals in other directions. The strength and devotion of the people were being put into politics, into preaching, into the practical life of the parish. Moreover, there had gradually grown up a social as well as a religious separation between the monks and their neighbours. Fountains Abbey, for example, was built, as we have seen, by the benefactions of rich and noble persons. It was on that side an aristocratic institution. It differed in this respect from the parish churches which were erected and maintained by the plain people, and especially by prosperous citizens of the mercantile order. Mr. Micklethwaite has put the situation clearly in his paper on “The Cistercian Order.” “To a citizen or a franklin,” he says, “a monk was a dignitary, but the parish priest was his neighbour and friend, and the parish church was his own.” This fact, that the great substantial middle class were no longer deeply interested in the abbeys, not only accounts in some measure for the indifference with which they witnessed their destruction, but for the difficulty which the monasteries found at last in getting recruits among men of this good kind. The personal quality deteriorated. There were bad monks, no doubt, as there are still bad ministers; and the few bad ones attracted more attention than all the cloistered saints. And, anyhow, the life which they were endeavouring to live was an abnormal life, apart from the wholesome influences of natural human society, and from the helpful engagements of the common routine. The monasteries inevitably degenerated. But “an enemy,” as Burke said, “is a bad witness; a robber is a worse.” The quiet judgment of the modern historian is in favour of the monks, and finds most of them to have been men of respectable and pious lives. The sober persons in white cassocks, who confessed faults in the chapter meeting and cheerfully suffered chastisement for them to which the man in the street gave not a moment’s thought, had a passionate longing to be good. They were intent upon the living of a righteous life.

The day’s work would begin about seven o’clock. In the winter it continued until three in the afternoon, making an eight-hour day. In the summer there was a long intermission while the sun was high and hot, but two hours of it were occupied in study. During the day the church bell rang for the offices of terce and sext and nones; but these were brief services, and men who were hard at work at a distance stopped where they stood, and said them under the sky. There was a bite of breakfast called mixtum—a piece of bread and somewhat wherewith to wash it down—which was served before the work of the day began to those who were so old or so young as to be unfit for their tasks without it. In the summer the meal of the day was eaten at noon, and after it the brethren lay on their beds in the dormitory and slept for an hour; or, if they chose, read a book during that time, lying down, being careful not to stretch out their feet into the passage between the beds, and turning the leaves quietly so as not to disturb their sleeping neighbours. Late in the summer afternoon there was a slight repast of bread and fruit. In the winter, until Lent, the one meal was served when the brethren came in from work; that is after three o’clock; in Lent, not until about five.

The monastic ideal of seclusion from the world demanded economic independence. Everything that was needed in the monastery was to be produced upon the premises. That, at the least, implied a garden for vegetables, and an orchard for fruit, and a field for corn with a mill in which to grind it, and ponds for fish, and woods for fuel. It meant architects, builders, masons, carpenters and plumbers. In the infirmary, which was the abbey hospital, there must be physicians and attendants. In the guest-house, which was the abbey inn, there must be porters, hostlers, cooks. The common details of a domestic establishment of a hundred men were enough to keep many persons busy. It is true that much of the heavy work was done by the lay brothers; but every choir brother had his share also, and went out daily with axe or spade, with fishing-rod or pruning-hook, with basket or barrow, to his appointed task. The crops must be planted or garnered, the apples must be picked, the hay must be got in, the wood must be cut, the buildings must be kept in repair, horses must be shod, sheep must be shorn, and at all seasons, in all weather, and under all circumstances, dinner must be cooked.

Accordingly, after the daily mass and chapter, this substantial activity engaged the mind and muscle of the monastery. The abbot betook himself to his executive affairs, the prior and the sub-prior to their daily inspection of the establishment, the cellarer to his house-keeping, the sacrist to his care of the church, the bursar to his accounts, the infirmarius to his hospital, the terrararius to his inn, the almoner to his dependents at the gate, the master of the novices to his school, the scriptor to his copying, the kitchener to his cooking, others to the fields and forests. For such as were unemployed about these matters, there was the cloister with its books, and the church with its frequent services. It is likely that there were idle monks; for the monk was of like passions with us, and was beset by the same temptations which assail us. As the Abbey increased in wealth, and the early ardour of the monastic life began to cool, there was, no doubt, a disposition to hire men to do some of the homely tasks which at first the monks had done themselves. But the ideal of the monastic life was an active day, wherein from dawn till dark there should not be an idle moment. Indolence, as St. Benedict declared, is an enemy of the soul; and all his arrangements of time and task were made with that in mind. Eastern monasticism had two dominant notes, of pain and prayer. St. Benedict took pain out and put work in the place of it. No man was to afflict his soul or body needlessly, but every man was to devote himself, for his physical and spiritual good, to vigorous exercise. The idle monk was like the idle minister: he existed, but not often.

All the work was done, as far as was possible, in silence. Out of the east walk of the cloister, beside the chapter-house, opened the parlour. There, as the name indicates, the monks could talk. The original rule specified only the dormitory and the refectory as places wherein speech was forbidden; but silence came to be the common habit of the monastic life, its enforcement depending much upon the disposition of the abbot. The monastery was the abode of blessed stillness. Within its walls men lived in peace and quiet. They did their tasks without conversation. They read their books, and ate their meals, thinking their own uninterrupted thoughts. They sat in the cloister, where the wind and the sun played in the grass, and were altogether undisturbed. It was not so much a penitential as a protective silence, good for the soul, and restful.

There was even a bit of quiet pleasure in the midst of these silent labours. In the south walk of the cloister, between the dormitory stairs and the refectory, was the warming house, the abbey fireside. Here, in the cold weather, the monks came to warm their hands. The abbot had a fire-place of his own; the cellarer had one in his office; and the infirmary and the guest houses were cheerfully warmed; but the common brotherhood had but this one hearth. Here was concentrated all the heat of the place, in the huge fire-places. One of these great openings is now blocked, having been disused before the suppression, when the number of monks was growing smaller, but the other is still ready for a load of logs, whose smoke would pour out of the tall chimney. Two large openings in the west wall gave some heat to the refectory. Here, in the warming house, in Advent, the brothers kept a “solemn banquet” of “figs and raisins, cakes and ale,” of whose celebration at Durham it is said that there was “no superfluity or excess, but a scholastical and moderate congratulation amongst themselves.” A door in the south-west corner opened upon a little court; the woodhouse stood in the eastern part of it, and a wooden bridge, from the refectory corner, led across the river. Over this bridge came the stout brothers in their gowns of brown or white, their arms full of wood. At Durham, near the warming house, there was a garden and a bowling alley.

The muniment room at Studley Royal contains among its treasures a

Fountains Abbey.

From the South West.

Photo. Frith. Art Repro. Co.

book of accounts of the bursar, kept in the time of Abbot Grenewell (1442-1471). There it appears that they had “a pair of clavichords” at the Abbey—the pianoforte of the Middle Ages. This would seem to imply domestic music. Somebody must have played, while the brethren stood about and sang. There are also various records of fees paid to persons who went about the country from abbey to castle, from manor-house to market-square, for the entertainment of their neighbours. Minstrels came from Beverley, with those of Lord Arundell, of Lord Beaumont, of Lord Fitzhugh, even of the King; who not only sang but acted as conjurers, gymnasts, contortionists, and variety showmen. Sometimes the audience of the Abbey was given to a story-teller—fabulator—“the story-teller of the Earl of Salisbury”; with selections from the Hundred Merry Tales or the Gesta Romanorum. Players came from Thirsk and Ripon. Sometimes the entertainer was a jester, or, as they said, a fool. One of the bursar’s items shows a payment of fourpence “to a fool called Solomon (who came again).” These diversions would perhaps be given on the cellarer’s terrace; that is, in the space to the west of the cellarium, which was once enclosed within a wall, from the church porch to the cellarer’s office.

One of Abbot Grenewell’s purchases was a great clock, made by John Ripley, and probably set in the south transept of the church. In the middle of the hot day in summer, after the service of sext, and late in the afternoon in winter, after nones, when the clock pointed to the proper hour, a bell in the cloister rang for dinner; either a bell or a board struck with a mallet. Outside the refectory door, on either hand, were stone troughs with running water from the river. In the middle of the cloister is a great stone bason. When that welcome sound was heard, the brothers washed their hands in the troughs or in the bason, wiping them on a roller towel which hung beside the door. Then they entered their noble dining-hall, lofty as a church, with ceiling of wood and floor of stone, wainscoted above the height of a man’s head, and having down the midst a row of marble pillars. At the end opposite the door, and along the wall on both sides, were stone benches, and in front of them were tables of oak, covered with linen cloth. The prior commonly presided, the abbot dining in his own lodgings. All stood in silence till the prior was in his place, and remained standing while he rang a little bell during a time sufficient for the saying of the fifty-first psalm. When the bell stopped, the priest of the week said grace, and they all sat down.

In the fair gallery of stone in the west wall, deeply recessed and lighted by great windows, reached by a short flight of stone steps, the reader stood to accompany the silent meal with words of Holy Scripture and of ancient authors. The kitchen adjoined the refectory on the west, having its great ovens in the middle of the room, and entered from the refectory by a service door which had a round revolving shelf across the middle of it. Between the door to the gallery and the door to the kitchen there was perhaps a sideboard; and in the corners toward the cloister were cupboards for cups and plates and spoons, each provided with a sink. There were forty-five silver spoons here when the inventory was made, but only three small cups or mazers, and one big one, of silver. This would appear to indicate that the cups and plates were of some cheap material and not worth counting.

The bill of fare showed bread and vegetables and fruit and fish. Sometimes there was meat, but this was cooked in the kitchen of the infirmary, and served in the misericord, or House of Merciful Meals. No flesh which had ever walked about upon four feet was dressed in the cloister kitchen or served in the cloister refectory. But fowls were eaten, and eggs were a staple of monastic diet. The monks had wine and beer for drink, according to the custom of the country. In the book of signs—De Signis—which shows how the monks of Ely indicated their wishes at the silent table, four gestures are set down to mean beer: signifying good beer, bona servisia, small beer, mediocris servisia, smaller beer, debilis servisia, and a very common beer called skagmen. In the “Mirroure of Our Ladye,” the sister of Sion House who desired an apple was directed to “put thy thumb in thy fist, and close thy hand, and move afore thee to and fro”; for milk, “draw thy left little finger in the manner of milking”; for mustard, “hold thy nose in the upper part of thy right fist, and rub it”; for salt, “philip with thy right thumb and his forefinger over the left thumb”; for wine, “move thy forefinger up and down upon the end of thy thumb before thine eye.” A dinner to the accompaniment of these cheerful communications, while one read aloud from a good book, may well have been a pleasant meal.

At Ely, during the week beginning August 5, 1336, the brethren of the monastery had on Sunday eggs, chickens, pigeons and dripping; on Monday, pottage and cod; on Tuesday, fresh meat and mutton; on Wednesday, fresh fish, white herring and cod; on Thursday, fresh meat, white herring and cod; on Friday, white herring and cod; and on Saturday, dripping, milk, white herring and cod.

When Abbot Grenewell went to attend the assizes at York, as he did in 1455, at the March session of the court, he dined the first day on fish alone; on the second day, having guests at his table, he added salt and mustard to the fish; on the third day, fish was served with figs, raisins and gingerbread; the fare of the fourth day was like that of the second, and the fifth day followed the third. With this were bread and beer and wine.

Monastic meals, though monotonous, were wholesome; and there was a good deal of variety in the preparation of the fish. St. Bernard, in his day, complained of the ingenuity with which eggs were cooked in religious houses. “Who can describe,” he cries, “in how many ways the very eggs are tossed and tormented, with what eager care they are turned over and under, made soft and hard, beaten up, fried, roasted, stuffed, now served minced with other things, and now by themselves! The very external appearance of the thing is cared for, so that the eye may be charmed as well as the palate.” As the monasteries increased in wealth, there would be a constant temptation to dine more abundantly. Eating is not only one of the earliest but one of the most universal of arts, and no cook nor convert could completely resist its allurements. For the most part, however, the abbey fare was fit food for soldiers, for men in training for a war with Satan.

Thus the silent meal progressed, the level voice of the reader at his desk in the gallery, accompanying the cheerful sounds of honest eating and drinking. No brother was permitted to leave until the meal was ended, nor walk about while his companions were eating. Neither was he allowed to wash his cup with his fingers, though he might wipe it with his hand. He was forbidden to wipe either his hands or his knife on the table-cloth,—until he had first cleansed them on his bread. When he helped himself to salt it must be with his knife; when he drank, he must hold the cup with both hands. “Eyes on your plates, hands on the table, ears to the reader, heart to God”: thus ran the rule. Then the prior rang a sharp note on his bell. If the great mazer of silver with a gilt band, which is mentioned in the inventory, was a grace cup, then it was at this moment that it went its round, each brother lifting it to his lips, holding its two handles. Then, two by two, they marched into the church and said the miserere psalm.

Out of the cloister, in the south-east corner, between the parlour and the day-stairs to the dormitory, a passage led to the buildings which lay beyond. The beginning of this passage crossed a long room which extended to the south, whose central line of pillars upheld the dormitory floor. The ceiling was low and the windows were at the south end, so that its use is not apparent. It may have been the chamber of the novices; it may have been the tool-house. It may have been an office or checker, wherein the master of the warming house kept his hogshead of wine, and his spices, figs and walnuts, with which to mitigate the austerities of Lent. Or the chamberlain may have used it, whose charge was to furnish the brethren with linsey-woolsey for their shirts and sheets; in which case, the tailor may have sat in the light of the south windows, mending frayed scapularies and darning holes in cowls and gowns.

The passage led into a gallery, with open arcading of stone on either side, and a second storey over. Out of the gallery, to the right, opened the abbot’s lodgings, where a long hall gave entrance into several rooms. Beside the door a stairway rose to the upper chambers, which appear to have been large and light, with comfortable fireplaces, and oriel windows looking out to east and south over the river. In one of these rooms, or in the misericord which was connected with this building by a hall, the abbot dined with visitors of state. Here, at the time of the inventory, were two gilded basins of silver, three silver ewers, eight “standing pieces” with covers, nine “flat pieces,” all of silver, with a goblet and some spoons: so that the abbot’s table must have presented a shining and sumptuous appearance. The open space bounded by the dormitory basement on the west, the arcaded passage on the north, the rere-dorter or necessarium on the south, and the abbot’s lodgings on the east, may have been the abbot’s garden, his hortus inclusus. Somewhere, at a convenient distance, must have been the abbot’s stable for his six horses—sex equi ad stabulum domini abbatis,—in charge of his boy, whose russet suit cost fifteen pence. The chalice, paten and cruets which were in the abbot’s house would seem to mean that one of the rooms was an oratory, with an altar. Under the abbot’s lodgings were the cells for offenders.

From the north-west corner of the second story, over the entrance, a passage opened into the upper course of the long gallery. Here was a hall with many windows, warmed here and there with fire-places, extending east to the infirmary, north to the chapel of nine altars, and west to the dormitory. Here the abbot could walk; here, in the oriel which projected into the chapel, he could say his prayers and hear mass quite by himself. He was the only member of the monastic family who had the privilege of privacy.

The gallery is almost entirely ruined, but a comparison with the arrangements of other monastic houses suggests that the upper storey of the western part, next to the dormitory, was the library or the writing-room. Here, where there was plenty of light, the records and accounts may have been kept. Here the books may have been copied which were used in the choir, and in the cloister and in the school. The completed records, especially such as related to the abbey lands, may have been stored in the room over the warming house, now used as a museum for fragments of pottery and broken carvings found in the ruins. This room, reached by the day stairs to the dormitory, had a bar at the door by which the occupant could lock himself in. This bar is a perplexing fact, and nobody has as yet explained why any official of the abbey should need to defend himself against intrusion in this peremptory fashion. If this was the muniment room, it held the great books of the Chartulary of Fountains, of which the volume A to C is in the British Museum. D to J is at Ripley Castle, and K to M is in the library of the late Sir Thomas Phillips. The remaining volumes are not yet traced. Here were kept the bundles of title-deeds, now at Studley Hall; with pendant seals, which show that there were neighbouring farmers who attested their signatures with impressions of Roman gems which their forefathers had turned up with the plough. The President Book would be kept here, with its dated list of abbots up to 1471; and the Coucher Book, with its register of the dealings of the monks with their manors. These two probably lay by the abbot’s side as he sat in his place in the chapter house at business meetings. They are now preserved in the muniment room at Studley Hall.

The long corridor, which connected the cloister with the infirmary, passed, as we have seen, the abbot’s lodging on the right and the entrance-way to the chapel of the nine altars on the left. Opposite the chapel entrance there was an opening into the coal-yard. Coal was found here when the recent excavations were made. In the south-east corner of this yard lay the abbey rubbish heap, the materials of which were apparently shovelled out from the window beside it, whose sill shows the marks of this daily exercise. Here were found various broken dishes, a sickle blade, a copper can, bushels of oyster shells, and bones identified as belonging to beef, mutton, pork and venison, together with a great quantity of ashes.

The room out of which this refuse was thrown is reached by a passage which opens out of the long corridor close by the infirmary door. Here, according to Mr. Walbran, stood the reservoir, fed by a lead pipe from a spring on the high bank.

The meat bones in the rubbish heap suggest the near neighbourhood of the House of Merciful Meals. This is the room which lies to the south of the reservoir and the coal-yard. A screen extended across the east end of the misericord, and there was a dais for the high table at the west end. Along the north wall are still remains of one of the stone benches. Tables stood here, as in the refectory of the cloister.

The long corridor ended at the door of the infirmary. This was a noble group of buildings, now ruined almost to the ground. There was a great hall, one of the finest in the kingdom, with two rows of stately pillars. It had a fire-place at each end, and the aisles were divided by partitions into small rooms, some having fire-places of their own. Back of it, to the east, reached by broad stone steps, eight of which remain, stood a two-storied structure, with vaulted basement probably for domestic stores, and with upper apartments which may have served for the entertainment of guests of unusual distinction. Up these stairs, then, attended by officers of the Abbey, went the Nevilles, the Marmions, the Mauleverers, on their visits to the monastery. In the chamber above slept the abbot of Clairvaux, when he came on his round of inspection of the Cistercian houses. Adjoining this lodging, on the south, was the chapel, into which a flight of narrow stairs descended from this guest-room. The base of the altar is still in situ. Next the chapel, with a yard between, was the spacious kitchen, whose great round ovens are still in place. Here, was cooked the food for the infirmary, for the misericord, and for the occupants of the lodging. A staircase beside the chapel-door seems to have led from the kitchen to the guest-room, over the arch of the entrance.

Here, in the infirmary, were gathered the old men, who had been monks for fifty years. Here the sick were cared for. Here regularly, in groups, a fourth part of the brethren at a time, came all the monks in succession for the periodical minutio, or letting of blood, according to the medical discipline of the time. In this comfortable seclusion they regained their strength. The doors of the infirmary were shut against the harsher regulations of the monastic life. Fires blazed on the hearth and roared up the great chimneys, and there were good things on the table at dinner time. The place was both a hospital and an old men’s home. The buildings extended over the river, which flowed in four tunnels beneath. To the north, beside the chapel of the nine altars, lay the cemetery. In this quiet place, remote from even the peaceful stir of the cloister, the monks expected to end their days. Their longest journey out of this blessed haven was when they crept along the corridor, and the nine-altars chapel, and the presbytery aisle, to their place on the stout oak bench against the back of the rood screen, to hear mass on some high festival. They awaited only one longer journey, when they should be carried out of the infirmary chapel to the green cemetery.

When the time for that last journey drew near, the abbot came to administer the sacrament, with all the brethren assembled. Then a cross of ashes was traced upon the floor, with a merciful covering of straw upon it and a quilt on that; there the sick man was laid. When the brother’s breath grew faint and difficult, and it was plain that the moment of his departure was at hand, a board in the cloister was struck repeated blows with a mallet, and all the monks hastened to their brother’s side. Thus he closed his eyes, amidst the prayers of his friends, and passed from the peace of the monastery to the rest of paradise.

This quiet end of life was continually symbolised in the quiet ending of the monastic day. Late in the afternoon, the office of vespers was said in the church, somewhat elaborately, with much singing and organ-playing. After vespers, in the twilight, the monks sat in the cloister, about the refectory door, and somebody read aloud from a good book, preferably the Collations of Cassian. On Saturday afternoons during the reading, the brothers by turns sat in a row on the stone benches which were over the lavatory troughs on either side of the refectory door, and had their feet washed in the running water by the cooks of that week and of the week to come. Then the compline prayers were said, in the summer about seven o’clock, in the winter about eight. And at the end of the service, every monk pulled his cowl over his head and went to bed.

CHAPTER IV
THE SUPPRESSION

For two hundred and fifty years—from the time of Abbot John of Kent, whose day ended in 1247, to the time of Abbot John, called Darnton, whose day began in 1479—no notable additions were made to the fabric of the Abbey. The energies of the brethren were directed to the diligent living of their daily life.

In Craven, the Abbey owned a hundred square miles within a ring fence; in the neighbourhood of Ripon, their lands ran in one direction for thirty uninterrupted miles. The monks of the daughter house of Kirkstead had farms in Lincolnshire, forty thousand acres of pasture land in Wildmore Fen, and property in Boston, Lincoln and London. They had tithes of the deer in Kirkstead Chase and the swans on Witham river. They sold wool in Flanders. They maintained several large mills and an iron works. And Fountains was much richer than Kirkstead. These possessions brought heavy responsibilities, and made a great demand on the monks’ time. There were tenants and title-deeds to be looked after, collections to be made, markets to be considered, with buying and selling, and the care of sheep and cattle.

In addition to these cares, the abbot was the official visitor of eleven other abbeys—the eight daughter houses, with three which had grown out of the first—and went about among them on journeys of inspection and encouragement and counsel. Also, as late as the fourteenth century, he had a seat in Parliament, where he wore his mitre and discussed the affairs of the wide world. Early in the fifteenth century he attended the Council of Constance, where he heard Wyclif condemned and saw Hus burned. Late in the same century, when Henry VII., the last of the mediæval kings, kept St. George’s Day in state at York, it was the Abbot of Fountains who read the epistle at high mass in the Minster.

This abbot was John Darnton, who resumed again the old enthusiasm for making the Abbey beautiful. He put new windows in the place of the plain old ones, in the west end of the nave, and in the chapel of the nine altars, east and north and south. After him, on the very eve of the Suppression, looking forward to centuries more of prosperity and peace. Abbot Marmaduke Huby built the noble tower.

About this time the Abbey bought a map—“a paper map of the world”—for which the bursar paid eight pence. There it hung upon the parlour wall, that all the monks might see what sort of place they lived in—a small world, whose centre was at the altar of St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But while the new glass was being put in the big new windows the tidings came that a new world had been found across the sea; and to this expansion it soon became necessary to readjust the horizons both of maps and of ideas. In the process of this readjustment the Abbey came to an end.

When the Reformation began, the abbeys were all against it. To the men of the cloister, living by rule and wonted to silence, the bold ideas of the robust prophets of the new time had a harsh and forbidding sound. Rumours of the current sayings and doings found their way into the Abbey—the farmer made report to the cellarer when he brought in his beets and onions—and the brethren shuddered to hear them, as men shake and shiver upon whom the cold wind blows around the corner after a day spent by the warm fire. In the quickening contention between the old learning and the new the monks held with the past.

Thus it was also in the increasingly embittered politics of the time. At Jervaulx Abbey, on a July Sunday in 1536, a monk sharply interrupted the preacher who was maintaining that the king was the head of the Church. The monk said that he neither would nor could take the king’s highness for to be the only and supreme head of the Church of England. He affirmed that the Pope was the head of the Church, and not the king. And his brethren agreed with him. That was what they held at Fountains. On one side were the king and the bishops, on the other side were the Pope and the monks. The contrast between abbey and cathedral—between the monks’ church and the bishops’ church,—is of like significance with the contrast between the castles of Kenilworth and Warwick. The two castles took different sides in a great national division; and Kenilworth, which chose the side of Charles, and lost, is a battered ruin, while Warwick, which chose the side of Cromwell, and won, is a stately inhabited mansion. The abbey and the cathedral made their choice in an earlier division. It needs but a glance to tell which chose the side that was defeated.

Fountains, like the other monasteries, was ill prepared for the heavy storm. The convent had decreased in numbers. One of the fire-places in the warming-house, one of the ovens in the refectory kitchen, had been blocked up as being no longer needed. The partitions down the rows of pillars in the nave had been removed, for there were no lay brothers to sit in the long lines of stalls. Men were asking menacing questions as to the practical value of these vast establishments which were withdrawing from the general life of the nation so much wealth and strength. Parliament suppressed nearly four hundred of the lesser monasteries, partly on the ground that they were places of evil living, partly on the ground that their revenues were needed for the better benefit of the people; and there were few complaints. Though the greater abbeys were expressly exempted at that time from the accusations of immoral conduct, even they could not escape the charge of rendering but a scanty and uncertain service to the community.

It was the misfortune of Fountains, at this critical time, to have an incompetent and unworthy abbot; though even a saint could not have saved the place from the hand of the spoiler. In 1530, the Earl of Northumberland appealed to Cardinal Wolsey, in behalf of the brethren of Fountains, to remove the abbot. Abbot Thirsk, he said, doth not endeavour himself like a discreet father towards the convent and the profit of the house, but hath, against the same, as well sold and wasted the great part or all of their store in cattle, as also their woods in divers countries, neither does he maintain the service of God like to the ancient custom there. The King’s commissioners, Layton and Legh, said worse things about him. They declared that he was defamed a toto populo. They complained that there was no truth in him, one day denying and the next confessing various sins laid to his charge. They were especially indignant because one night he took secretly out of the sacristy or treasure room a gold cross adorned with stones, and in company with a jeweller, who had come from London, whom he took into his lodgings, did abstract from the cross an emerald and a ruby, which the London jeweller bought of him, cheating the abbot badly. It is plain that the poor man was at his wit’s end, sorely badgered by these insistent visitors, seeing the ruin of his holy house, and trying, if possible, to save something out of it. Finally, he resigned his office into the hands of the commissioners, who assigned him a scanty pension. He took refuge in the Abbey of Jervaulx, where he became involved in the revolutionary proceedings of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and atoned for such misdeeds as he may have committed by being hanged at Tyburn.

Abbot Thirsk’s successor, Marmaduke Bradley, was selected by the commissioners. They said that he was the wisest monk in England; and he showed that he was even as wise, as the Bible says, as a serpent, by doing what his masters bade him. In 1539, at their demand, he surrendered the Abbey to the King.

The commissioners came down from London, late in the November of that year, and called a meeting, probably in the chapter house. There they assembled the abbot and the convent and the chief people of the neighbourhood, to whom they duly declared “the godly determination of the King’s majesty to alter and change that house, with many others, from an unchristian life to a trade of virtuous and honest living.” The thirty-two brethren were promised proper pensions. They were accordingly advised “to submit themselves to his Majesty’s clemency and goodness, and by way of surrender to yield up into his Grace’s hands their monastery, with all the lands, possessions, jewels, plate, ornaments, and other things belonging to the same.” The commissioners then took possession of the convent seal, with all the keys, and made an inventory. Thus politely, and even piously, was this royal robbery effected.

The abbot betook himself to Ripon, where he held a prebendal stall. The prior and his thirty brethren were turned briskly out of doors to face the approaching winter. Despoiled of their own garments they were given suits of citizen’s clothes, and were set outside the gates of their fair paradise to make their way, as best they could, over the strange roads of the cold world.

The gold and silver of the rich altars, with all things of value such as could be moved, were put in waggons and sent to the king. Distant though the Abbey was from any town, the rumour of these proceedings would attract a crowd. And the crowd stole what they could. The servants of the commissioners, who had a better chance, stole more, according to their opportunity. They rode about in those days, from the wreck of one abbey to the ruin of another, with rich copes for travelling cloaks and chasubles for saddle cloths. The master thief was abroad, and it was a pity if the little thieves could not have a share.

Then the windows were taken out, so carefully that but a handful of the precious glass remained in all the ruins, and were disposed of, nobody knows how or where. The bells were taken down and carried off; one to be hung, tradition says, in the cathedral tower at Ripon. Finally, the roofs were pulled off, and the lead brought into the dismantled church; and there between the great pillars, betwixt the broken altars of St. Mary and St. Bernard, in a fire whose fuel was the carved work of the choir stalls, it was melted into convenient shape for the market.

An eye-witness has left a description of the spoiling of the dependent house of Roche Abbey. “The sudden spoil fell,” he says, “the same day of their departure from the house.... The church was the first thing that was put to the spoil, then the abbot’s lodging, dorter and frater [i.e., dormitory and refectory] with the cloister and all the buildings thereabout within the abbey walls.... The persons that cast the lead into fodders plucked up all the seats in the choir where the monks sat when they said

Fountains Hall.

Photo. Frith. Art Repro. Co.

service, which were like to seats in minsters, and burned them and melted the lead therewith, although there was wood plenty within a flight-shot of them, for the abbey stood among the woods.” Everybody was busy, he says, pilfering what he could and hiding it among the rocks, “so that it seemeth that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could.” At Fountains, the ashes of such fires remained until the last century, amidst the general wreck.

The place was sold within a few months to Richard Gresham, a gentleman of London, who paid seven thousand pounds for it. In 1597, the heirs of Gresham sold it to Stephen Procter, a courtier of Elizabeth, who pulled down some of the buildings outside the cloister that he might get materials for his fine new Fountains Hall, near the west gate. His affairs falling into great confusion the place was again sold, and thereafter passed from hand to hand until, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it came into the possession of William Aislabie, the owner of the neighbouring estate of Studley Royal. From whose granddaughter, Miss Lawrence, it passed by will to the Earl de Grey, the uncle of the present owner, the Marquess of Ripon.

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HISTORICAL GROUND PLAN

FOUNTAINS ABBEY

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