The Coming of the Friars

by Augustus Jessopp

Without wishing for a moment to defend or excuse a state of things which was always vexatious, and at last became intolerable, it is impossible to deny that a great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about these appeals. Almost exactly the same state of things exists in the present day both in civil and ecclesiastical matters. Parsee merchants fall to loggerheads in Bombay or Calcutta, and bring their disputes before the courts in India; one side feels aggrieved by the sentence, and straightway he removes the case to a court of appeal in London. Or some heretical person in Asia or Africa or somewhere else gets into hot water with an orthodox society for the promotion of religious persecution, and sooner or later the archbishop is appealed to, and the ecclesiastical lawyers have a most delightful time of it. It all costs a great deal of money nowadays, and leading advocates on this side or that are actually so extortionate and exorbitant that they will not do anything for nothing, and insist on receiving the most exorbitant fees. So it was in the old days. The final court of appeal in all matters ecclesiastical was before the Pope at Rome or Avignon, and the proctors and doctors, and all the canonists and officials, actually required to be paid for their work.

When a monastery was in for a great fight with a bishop, it was a serious matter for both parties. But it was much more serious for the bishop than for the convent. The bishop had always his state to keep up and his many houses to maintain, and his establishment was enormously costly. His margin for law expenses was small; and I suspect that a bishop in England during the thirteenth century who had no private fortune outside his mere episcopal revenues would have been likely sooner or later to find himself in serious difficulties. On the other hand, in a great monastery all sorts of expedients could be resorted to in order to effect a salutary retrenchment--as when the monks of St. Alban's agreed to give up the use of wine for fifteen years, and actually did so, that they might be able to rebuild their refectory and dormitory in the days of John the twenty-first abbot. Moreover, inasmuch as a corporation never dies, the convent could raise very heavy sums on the security of its estates, and take its own time to repay the loans. A bishop could not pledge his episcopal estates beyond his own lifetime, and the result was that, in the days when life assurance was unknown, a bishop who had to raise money for a costly lawsuit would have to pay a rate of interest which would make our blood run cold if we had to pay it, or our hearts leap for joy if we could get it in these days of two and three per cent. The bishop was always at a disadvantage in these appeal cases; he stood to lose everything, and he stood to win nothing at all except the satisfaction of his conscience that he was struggling for principle and right. And thus it came to pass that the monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely shrank from engaging in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a deputation from the convent to watch the case as it was going on, and there was all the delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a trip, in fact, to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.

But when there was no appeal case going on--and an appeal was too expensive an amusement to be indulged in often--there was always a good deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the convent, and to give them something to think about and gossip about nearer home. We have the best authority--the authority of the great Pope Innocent III.--for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth century were extremely fond of beer; but there was something else that they were even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history is almost made up of the stories of this everlasting litigation; nothing was too trifling to be made into an occasion for a lawsuit. Some neighbouring landowner had committed a trespass or withheld a tithe pig. Some audacious townsman had claimed the right of catching eels in a pond. Some brawling knight pretended he was in some sense _patron_ of a cell, and demanded a trumpery allowance of bread and ale, or an equivalent. As we read about these things we exclaim, "Why in the world did they make such a fuss about a trifle?" Not so thought the monks. They knew well enough what the thin end of the wedge meant, and, being in a far better position than we are to judge of the significance and importance of many a _casus belli_ which now seems but trivial, they never dreamed of giving an inch for the other side to take an ell. So they went to law, and enjoyed it amazingly! Sometimes however, there were disputes which were not to be settled peaceably; and then came what University men in the old days used to know as a "Town and Gown row."

Let it be remembered that a Benedictine monastery, in the early times, was invariably set down in a lonely wilderness. As time went on, and the monks brought the swamp into cultivation, and wealth flowed in, and the monastery became a centre of culture, there would be sure to gather round the walls a number of hangers-on, who gradually grew into a community, the tendency of which was to assert itself, and to become less and less dependent upon the abbey for support. These _towns_ (for they became such) were, as a rule, built on the abbey land, and paid dues to the monastery. Of course, on the one side, there was an inclination to raise the dues; on the other, a desire to repudiate them altogether. Hence bad blood was sure to arise between the monks and the townsmen, and sooner or later serious conflicts between the servants of the monasteries and the people outside. Thus, in 1223, there was a serious collision between the Londoners and the Westminster monks; the mob rushed into the monastery, and the abbot escaped their violence with difficulty by slipping out at a back door and getting into a boat on the Thames. On another occasion there was a very serious fray between the citizens of Norwich and the priory there, in 1272, when the prior slew one man with his own hands, and many lives were lost. At a later time there was a similar disturbance at Bury St. Edmunds, and in the year 1314 the great abbey of St. Alban's was kept in a state of siege for more than ten days by the townsmen, who were driven to frenzy by not being allowed to grind their own corn in their own handmills, but compelled to get it ground by the abbey millers, and, of course, pay the fee.

Thirty years later, again, that man of sin, Sir Philip de Lymbury, lifted up his heel against the Abbey of St. Alban's, and actually laid hands upon Brother John Moot, the cellarer; and on Monday, being market day at Luton in Beds, did actually clap the said cellarer in the pillory and kept him there, exposed to the jeers and contempt of the rude populace, who, we may be sure, were in ecstasies at this precursor of Mr. Pickwick in the pound. But the holy martyr St. Alban was not likely to let such an outrage pass; and when the rollicking knight came to the abbey to make it up, and was for presenting a peace-offering at the shrine, lo, the knightly nose began to bleed profusely, and, to the consternation of the beholders, the offering could not be made, and Sir Philip had to retire, holding his nose, and shortly after he died--and, adds the chronicler, was speedily forgotten, he and his.

Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the canvassing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a convent might be turned for years into a house divided against itself, the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog. Nor did it at all follow that because the convent had elected their abbot or prior unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by the king, to whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable instance in Carlyle's "Past and Present.">[ King John kept monasteries without any abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the meantime, and leaving the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an abbot was forced upon a monastery in spite of the convent, as in the case of Abbot Roger Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks not only detested because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they denounced as actually immoral. Sometimes, too, the misconduct of a prior was so abominable that it could not be borne, and then came the very difficult and very delicate business of getting him deposed: a process which was by no means easily managed, as appeared in the instance of Simon Pumice, Prior of Worcester, in 1219, and in many another case.

Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to relieve the monotony which it has been too readily assumed was the characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent, was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look after them, it was assumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?

Nor, again, must we suppose that the monks were debarred all amusements. On August 29, 1283, there was a great wrestling match at Hockliffe, in Beds, and a huge concourse of people of all sorts were there to see the fun. The roughs and the "fancy" were present in great force, and somehow it came to pass that a free fight ensued. I am sorry to say that the canons of Dunstable were largely represented upon the occasion. We are left to infer that the representatives were chiefly the servants of the canons, but I am afraid that some at least of their masters were there too. In the fight one Simon Mustard, who appears to have been something like a professional prize-fighter, "a bully exceeding fierce," says the annalist, got killed; but thereon ensued much inquiry and much litigation, and Dunstable and its "religious" had to suffer vexations not a few. In fairness it should be remembered that these Dunstable people were not monks but canons--regular or irregular--and those canons, we all know, would do anything. We protest against being confounded with canons!

The amusements of monks were more innocent. The garden was always a great place of resort, and gardening a favourite pastime. We may be sure there was much lamentation and grumbling at St. Alban's when Abbot John de Maryns forbade any monk, who from infirmity could only be carried on a litter, from entering the garden at all. Poor old fellows! had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the flower-beds? Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion among them; but in the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by his letters, there were other diversions of a far more reprehensible character. Actually at the small Priory of Coxford, in Norfolk, the prior and his canons were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was dreadful! In other monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only the abbots, but the common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to be found as monks keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister, Peckham denounces these breaches of decorum as grave offences, which were not to be passed over and not to be allowed. What! a black monk stalking along with a bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse than the Jackdaw of Rheims, using bad words in the garth, and showing an evil example to the chorister boys, with his head on one side!

But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all delights to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking. "Sir, I like my dinner!" said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one thought the worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in a great abbey was clearly a very important event in the day--I will not say it was _the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important one. It must strike any one who knows much of the literature of this age that the weak point in the monastic life of the thirteenth century was the gormandizing. It was exactly as, I am told, it is on board ship on a long voyage, where people have little or nothing to do, they are always looking forward to the next meal, and the sound of the dinner-bell is the most exciting sound that greets the ear in the twenty-four hours. And so with the monks in a great monastery which had grown rich, and in point of fact had more money than it knew what to do with: the dinner was the event of the day. It is not that we hear much of drunkenness, for we really hear very little of it, and where it is spoken of it is always with reprobation. Nor is it that we hear of anything like the loathsome and disgusting gluttony of the Romans of the empire, but eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the curtailing the luxury of the refectory.