The annual revenue of Margam was returned as 500 marks in 1383, but before that time the abbey had suffered severely from inundations, sea and sand covering whole villages and much of the best property of the house; and the finances were in a bad way. These were improved by grants of the tithes of parish churches—a favourite form of gift to a monastery, but a great scandal. The rectorial tithes were paid to a monastery, while the monks at best put in some under-paid vicar to look after the parish. Generally, wherever there is a vicar instead of a rector in England or Wales the explanation is the appropriation of the tithes by a monastery.
What did Margam do with its income? The first charge was the support of about forty monks and forty lay brethren. Next there were the construction and keeping in repair of the church and other monastic buildings; and, thirdly, the expense of charity and hospitality. The monasteries were the hotels of the Middle Ages, except that they made no charges, and Margam was celebrated for its hospitality for centuries. Gerald, the enemy of monks, says: “This noble abbey was more celebrated for its charitable deeds than any other of that order in Wales. And as a reward for that abundant charity which the monastery had always, in times of need, exercised towards strangers and the poor, in a season of approaching famine their corn and provisions were divinely increased, like the widow’s cruse of oil.” Two centuries later we find the Pope bearing witness to the well-known and universal hospitality of the Abbey of Margam. It was placed on the main road between Bristol and Ireland, at a distance from other places of refuge, and so was continually overrun by rich and poor strangers, the poor evidently preponderating. In this connection I will give one instance of wise charity on the part of these monks from the end of the twelfth century. Hugh, son of Robert of Llancarven, gives the abbey some land in return for “four marks of silver and a young ox, given to him in his great need by the Abbot.” The monastery performed some of the services of the modern bank.
Strata Florida presents some different characteristics. Like most Cistercian houses, it lay off the beaten track. It was founded in 1164 by the Lord Rhys, near the site of an older monastery. It was endowed with large expanse of lands, mostly mountain pastures, and the monks soon began building their church and refectory and cloister. The monastery was completed in 1201, when “the monks came to the new church, which had been erected of splendid workmanship.” The architectural details of this church are peculiar and almost unique. Mr. S. W. Williams notices especially the large amount of interlacing work in the carving, which one sees in the old Celtic crosses, and which is so characteristic of Celtic art. The convent seems to have become very soon essentially Welsh. Nearly all the abbots have Welsh names. It was the burial-place of the princes of South Wales; but as they were, after the Lord Rhys, quite unimportant, its political interest is connected with the princes of Gwynedd. When in the thirteenth century the princes of North Wales were attracting the allegiance of the South Welsh also they found Strata Florida a convenient place for important political assemblies. It was here that Llywelyn ap Iorwerth summoned all the Welsh chiefs to do homage to his son David. The monastery suffered damage during the wars of Edward I., who in 1284 granted it £78 for repairs. But it suffered the worst injuries during the rebellion of Owen Glyndwr, when the English troops used it as a barracks, and stabled their horses in church and choir.
The patriotic tone of Strata Florida is expressed in the Welsh chronicles written there. The later part of the Annales Cambriæ was written there, and the Brut y Tywysogion. At Margam also a chronicle was composed which has been preserved. When an abbey decided to begin a chronicle, the first step was to borrow a chronicle from some other house; thus Margam, founded by Robert of Gloucester, copied out the Chronicle of William of Malmesbury, which was dedicated to Robert of Gloucester. The monks of Strata Florida copied out the earlier portion of the Annales Cambriæ. These chronicles of course only became of historical value when they become independent and contemporary. They do not confine themselves to the monastery or local history, but relate events of general interest—to the whole of Britain and to all Europe—intermixed with notices of the burning of a monastic barn or the death of the local abbot. Knowledge of the great world came to an abbey through the travellers who stayed there; through political or ecclesiastical assemblies held there; and through public documents sent to the monks for safekeeping or to be copied. We generally do not know who wrote these chronicles; they were rather the work of the community than of the individual monks. “Every year (so runs a regulation on the subject) the volume is placed in the scriptorium, with loose sheets of paper or parchment attached to it, in which any monk may enter notes of events which seem to him important. At the end of the year, not any one who likes, but he to whom it is commanded, shall write in the volume as briefly as he can what he thinks of all these loose notes is truest and best to be handed down to posterity.” “Thus it was that a monastic chronicle grew, like a monastic house, by the labour of different hands and at different times; but of the heads that planned it, of the hands that executed it, no satisfactory record was preserved. The individual is lost in the community.”
Coming now to the Friaries in Wales, we find ourselves in a different atmosphere. The friars were not troubled with questions of property: they had none; they depended for their livelihood on the alms of the faithful. Again, speaking generally, one may say that while the Benedictine priory is found under the shadow of a castle, and the Cistercian abbey in the heart of the country, the friaries were built in the slums of the towns. As there were few towns in Wales, the houses of the Mendicant Orders were not numerous or important. The Dominicans (or Black Friars) had houses at Bangor, Rhuddlan, Brecon, Haverfordwest, and Cardiff; the Franciscans (or Grey Friars) at Cardiff, Carmarthen, and Llanfaes; the Carmelites (or White Friars) at Denbigh; and the Austin Friars at Newport in Monmouthshire. It is remarkable that the Dominicans had more houses in Wales than the Franciscans; though the Franciscans—the mystic apostles of love—were more in sympathy with the Celtic spirit than the Dominicans, the stern champions of orthodoxy. Francis of Assisi strove to reproduce again on earth the life of Christ—in the letter and in the spirit; and the religious poetry of Wales in the thirteenth century is saturated with Franciscan feeling—full of intense realisation of the childhood and suffering of Christ, the humanity of God. This may be illustrated by the following poem by a Welsh friar of the thirteenth century, Madawc ap Gwallter:—
“A Son is given us,
A kind Son is born ...
A Son to save us,
The best of Sons.
A God, a man,
And the God a man
With the same faculties.
A great little giant,
A strong puny potentate
Of pale cheeks.
Richly poor
Our father and brother,
Exalted, lowly,
Honey of minds;
With the ox and ass,
The Lord of life
Lies in a manger;
And a heap of straw
As a chair,
Clothed in tatters;
Velvet He wants not,
Nor white ermine—
To cover Him;
Around His couch
Rags were seen
Instead of fine linen.”
I do not know the dates of the foundations of the Welsh Franciscan houses; the dates given in Mr. Newell’s scholarly “History of the Church in Wales” are impossible. Llanfaes is said to have been established by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, and Franciscan influence would come to Wales through Thomas the Welshman, Bishop of St. David’s (1247), who had been lecturer to the Franciscans at Oxford, and was famous for his piety and learning. Another Franciscan I wish to mention is Friar John the Welshman, who in his old age was employed to negotiate with the Welsh in 1282. He had studied and taught at Oxford and Paris, and made a creditable show beside such intellectual giants as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, his contemporaries. The widespread and lasting popularity of his works is shown by the large number of manuscripts and early printed editions which have come down to us. But his chief interest and life-work was the popularisation of knowledge in the service of morality. He devoted his energies to training up lecturers who should go to the Franciscan friaries in the chief towns in England and Wales and teach friars and clergy the art of popular preaching. Friar John of Wales was one of the chief inspirers of the “University Extension” movement of the Middle Ages. These popular preachers or lecturers did not do much for the advancement of sound learning, because they did not study any science for its own sake, but only for the moral lessons they could find in it. But, to rouse some intellectual interest in the people at large, and stimulate their moral sense, was a work not unworthy of the universities; and this aim was to some degree attained. One of the favourite ways of spending a holiday in the Middle Ages was to go and hear a friar preach. Here is a summary of a friar’s sermon constructed after the method of Friar John of Wales, on the relative merits of the Ass and the Pig.