An Abbot travelling.
The abbot, too, sometimes gave license to the monks to go and see their friends, or to pass two or three days at one or other of the manors of the house for recreation; and sometimes he took a monk with him on his own journeys. In a MS. romance, in the British Museum (Add. 10,293, f. 11), is a representation of a monk with his hood on, journeying on horseback. We give here, from the St. Alban’s Book (Nero, D. vii.), a woodcut of an abbot on horseback, with a hat over his hood—“an abbot on an ambling pad;” he is giving his benediction in return to the salute of some passing traveller.
Hermitages or anchorages sometimes depended on a monastery, and were not necessarily occupied by brethren of the monastery, but by any one desirous to embrace this mode of life whom the convent might choose. The hermit, however, probably, usually wore the habit of the order. The monastery often supplied the hermit with his food. In a picture in the MS. romance, before quoted (Add. 10,292, f. 98), is a representation of a knight-errant on horseback, conversing by the way with a clerk, who is carrying bread and wine to a hermitage.
The woodcut with which we conclude, from the Harleian MS., 1,527, represents the characteristic costume of three orders of religious with whom we have been concerned—a bishop, an abbot, and a clerk.
Bishop, Abbot, and Clerk.