XXIII. INDUSTRY AND TRADE.
We are rather inclined to think that large organizations of industry and trade were reserved for comparatively modern times. To think so, however, is to forget the place occupied by the monasteries and convents in the olden time. We have heard much of the lazy monks, but only from those who know nothing at all about them. Idleness in the monasteries was one of the accusations made by the commission set to furnish evidence to Henry VIII. on which he might suppress the monasteries, but every modern historian has rejected the findings of that commission as false. Many forms of manufacture were carried on in the monasteries and convents. They were [{458}] the principal bookmakers and bookbinders. To a great extent they were the manufacturers of art fabrics and arts-and-crafts work intended for church use, but also for the decoration of luxurious private apartments. Most of us have known something of all this finer work, but not that they had much to do with cruder industries also. They were millers, cloth-makers, brush- and broom-makers, shoemakers for themselves and their tenantry; knitting was done in the convents, and all the finer fancy work. A recent meeting of the Institute of Mining Engineers in England brought out some discussion of coal mining in connection with the early history of the coal mines in England. The records of many of the English monasteries show that in early times the monks knew the value of coal, and used it rather freely. They also mined it for others. The monks at Tynemouth are known to have been mining coal on the Manor of Tynemouth in 1269, and shipping it to a distance. At Durham and at Finchale Abbey they were doing this also about the same time. It would require special study to bring out the interesting details, but there is abundant material not alone for a chapter, but for a volume on the industries of the Thirteenth Century, which, like the education and the literature and the culture of the time, we have thought undeveloped, because we knew nothing of them.
The relation of the monasteries to trade, domestic and foreign, is very well brought out in a paragraph of Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain" (New York, The Churchman Co., 1905), in which he describes the remains at Beaulieu, which show the place of that monastery, not by any means one of the most important in England, in trade. For the benefit of their tenantry others had done even more.
"Some idea of the power of one of these great monasteries may be gained from traces still existing of the center of trade built up by the monks outside their gates. Here, at the head of tide water, in a most out-of-the-way spot, a great stone quay was constructed, to which came ships from foreign lands. Near by was a great marketplace, now, as then, called Cheapside, though commerce exists there no longer. At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually the chief centers of industry and civilization, and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent landlords they were as well, even in their last days, for we have many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to the tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."