aving thus given a sketch of the history of the various monastic orders in England, we proceed to give some account of the constitution of a convent, taking that of a Benedictine monastery as a type, from which the other orders departed only in minor particulars.
The convent is the name especially appropriate to the body of individuals who composed a religious community. These were the body of cloister monks, lay and clerical; the professed brethren, who were also lay and clerical; the clerks; the novices; and the servants and artificers. The servants and artificers were of course taken from the lower ranks of society; all the rest were originally of the most various degrees of rank and social position. We constantly meet with instances of noble men and women, knights and ladies, minstrels and merchants, quitting their secular occupations at various periods of their life, and taking the religious habit; some of them continuing simply professed brethren, others rising to high offices in their order. Scions of noble houses were not infrequently entered at an early age as novices, either devoted to the religious life by the piety of their parents, or, with more worldly motives, thus provided with a calling and a maintenance; and sometimes considerable interest was used to procure the admittance of novices into the great monasteries. Again, the children of the poor were received into the monastic schools, and such as showed peculiar aptitude were sometimes at length admitted as monks,[55] and were eligible, and were often chosen, to the highest ecclesiastical dignities.
The whole convent was under the government of the abbot, who, however, was bound to govern according to the rule of the order. Sometimes he was elected by the convent; sometimes the king or some patron had a share in the election. Frequently there were estates attached to the office, distinct from those of the convent; sometimes the abbot had only an allowance out of the convent estates; but always he had great power over the property of the convent, and bad abbots are frequently accused of wasting the property of the house, and enriching their relatives and friends out of it. The abbots of some of the more important houses were mitred abbots, and were summoned to Parliament. In the time of Henry VIII. twenty-four abbots and the prior of Coventry had seats in the House of Peers.[56]
The abbot did not live in common with his monks; he had a separate establishment of his own within the precincts of the house, sometimes over the entrance gate, called the Abbot’s Lodgings.[57] He ate in his own hall, slept in his own chamber, had a chapel, or oratory, for his private devotions, and accommodation for a retinue of chaplains and servants. His duty was to set to his monks an example of observance of the rule, to keep them to its observance, to punish breaches of it, to attend the services in church when not hindered by his other duties, to preach on holy days to the people, to attend chapter and preach on the rule, to act as confessor to the monks. But an abbot was also involved in many secular duties; there were manors of his own, and of the convent’s, far and near, which required visiting; and these manors involved the abbot in all the numerous duties which the feudal system devolved upon a lord towards his tenants, and towards his feudal superior. The greater abbots were barons, and sometimes were thus involved in such duties as those of justices in eyre, military leaders of their vassals, peers of Parliament. Hospitality was one of the great monastic virtues. The usual regulation in convents was that the abbot should entertain all guests of gentle degree, while the convent entertained all others. This again found abundance of occupation for my lord abbot in performing all the offices of a courteous host, which seems to have been done in a way becoming his character as a lord of wealth and dignity; his table was bountifully spread, even if he chose to confine himself to pulse and water; a band of wandering minstrels was always welcome to the abbot’s hall to entertain his gentle and fair guests; and his falconer could furnish a cast of hawks, and his forester a leash of hounds, and the lord abbot would not decline to ride by the river or into his manor parks to witness and to share in the sport. In the Harl. MS. 1,527, at fol. 108 (?), is a picture of an abbot on horseback casting off a hawk from his fist. A pretty little illustration of this abbatial hospitality occurs in Marie’s “Lay of Ywonec.”[58] A baron and his family are travelling in obedience to the royal summons, to keep one of the high festivals at Caerleon. In the course of their journey they stop for a night at a spacious abbey, where they are received with the greatest hospitality. “The good abbot, for the sake of detaining his guests during another day, exhibited to them the whole of the apartments, the dormitory, the refectory, and the chapter-house, in which last they beheld a splendid tomb covered with a superb pall fringed with gold, surrounded by twenty waxen tapers in golden candlesticks, while a vast silver censer, constantly burning, filled the air with fumes of incense.”
A Benedictine Abbot.
An abbot’s ordinary habit was the same as that of his monks. In the processions which were made on certain great feasts he held his crosier, and, if he were a mitred abbot, he wore his mitre: this was also his parliamentary costume. We give on the opposite page a beautiful drawing of a Benedictine abbot of St. Alban’s, thus habited, from the Catalogus Benefactorum of that abbey. When the abbot celebrated high mass on certain great festivals he wore the full episcopal costume. Thomas Delamere, abbot of St. Alban’s, is so represented in his magnificent sepulchral brass in that abbey, executed in his lifetime, circa 1375 A.D. Richard Bewferest, abbot of the Augustine canons of Dorchester, Oxfordshire, has a brass in that church, date circa 1520 A.D., representing him in episcopal costume, bareheaded, with his staff; and in the same church is an incised gravestone, representing Abbot Roger, circa 1510 A.D., in full episcopal vestments. Abbesses bore the crosier in addition to the ordinal costume of their order; the sepulchral brass of Elizabeth Harvey, abbess of the Benedictine Abbey of Elstow, Bedfordshire, circa 1530 A.D., thus represents her, in the church of that place. Our representation of a Benedictine abbess on the previous page is from the fourteenth century MS. Royal, 2 B. vii.
Benedictine Abbess and Nun.