CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE CHANTRY.
he characteristic feature of the Church work of the seventh century was the conversion of the Teutonic heathen people who had conquered the eastern half of England, and the foundation of a bishopric in every one of the heptarchic kingdoms; of the eighth century, the multiplication of monastic centres of evangelization; of that and the succeeding centuries the spread of the parochial system of a priest for each manor; of the twelfth century, the foundation of monasteries; of the thirteenth century, the foundation of vicarages in the appropriated parishes, and the institution of the new Order of friars; of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the foundation of chantries: during these two centuries about two thousand chantries were founded.
A chantry is a foundation for the maintenance of one or more priests, to offer up prayers for the soul of the founder, his family and ancestors, and usually of all Christian souls; and this was the motive of the founders of the majority of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
In the Religious Foundations of earlier times the condition of prayers for the donors was incidental. A man did not build a church for his ville or found a monastery on his estate, with the sole or principal view of securing perpetual prayers for himself; but in accordance with the religious views of those times when a man did found any pious work, from a great monastery intended to be a nursery of saints to an almshouse for twelve poor people, he asked—he stipulated in the terms of his foundation deed—for the prayers of the members of his foundation. It would have looked like a want of proper religious feeling had he neglected to seek the benefit of their intercessory prayers. The desire for the prayers of the Church by those who could not found monasteries or build churches, found its satisfaction in benefactions to religious foundations, which secured for the donors the privileges of confraternity, and among these, the prayers of the community.[496] Every religious house had its catalogue of benefactors, or its list of confraters; and the grateful convent offered prayers for their good estate while living and the repose of their souls after death.[497] At Durham there lay on the altar a book very richly covered with gold and silver containing the names of all the benefactors of the cathedral church collected out of ancient MSS. about the time of the Suppression.[498] But far more interesting is the “Catalogus Benefactorum” of the great monastery of St. Alban, preserved in the British Museum Library; in it the name of every benefactor is entered, with a note of his gift—of an estate, or house, or sum of money, or sacred vessel; and in many cases a picture of the donor and of his gift is given, the house being shown in the background of the picture, the flagon or purse of gold held in his hand.
Error came in when a man founded a Divine service the sole object of which was to obtain prayers for himself; it was mitigated by the association of family, benefactors, and friends, and the usual addition of all faithful souls. After all, a saint of old was glad that his name should be enrolled in the diptych of his Church, and remembered in her prayers. But a saint would have been content to be included in the general sentence with which the roll concluded—“and all those whose names, O God, Thou knowest.” We, at least, may be satisfied with the commemoration by our Church of “all those who have departed in Thy faith and fear,” without being too ready to find fault with those whose eschatology differed somewhat from ours, and was less scriptural; but whose simple desire, after all, was for God’s mercy on themselves, and who, in anxiety for themselves, did not forget “all faithful souls.”
In some cases it is probable that the common human desire to be remembered after death took this shape; a chantry was a monument; and a monument of living men keeping a name in remembrance has very respectable countenance. This is the explanation of a good number of English titles of nobility, with grants of suitable estates to maintain the title. The Dukedoms of Marlborough and of Wellington, the Earldoms of St. Vincent and of Nelson, were intended by the sovereign who granted the titles, and the Parliaments which granted the estates, to keep in memory those great men and their services to the country, and have well served their purpose. So, many a chantry kept the name of the founder fresh in the recollection of his descendants, and of the people of his neighbourhood, which would otherwise have been forgotten. The desire to have one’s name kept alive on the lips of prayer was not an unworthy one.