“That Fabric rises high as Heaven,
Whose Basis on Devotion stands.”
Matthew Prior.
With the help of the Abbey we have taken a long, and perhaps rather hurried, journey through many centuries of our country’s history, and have tried to think of the many links by which the Abbey is bound to all English hearts. We must now turn back again across those centuries, and try to remember something of the old monastery, of its buildings, of the Abbots who governed it, and of the sort of lives the monks lived.
The Abbey, as we already know, was dedicated to St. Peter from the earliest days. The monks belonged to the great Benedictine order. That order, which had spread over all Europe, “from Poland to Portugal, and from Cumberland to Calabria,” was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century after Christ. St. Benedict was born in Italy about the year 480, during a very restless and troubled time, just after the last Emperor had been driven out of Rome. Benedict very soon determined to live the life of a monk, and when he was quite a boy he went away from Rome to a place in the mountains near. From this place he went to a yet more remote and lonely one, the wild and beautiful Subiaco, where the Emperor Nero had once had a “villa” or country house.
There are two famous Benedictine monasteries at Subiaco, and it is an interesting thing to remember that the first books printed in Italy were printed at one of these monasteries, just as in England many of Caxton’s books were printed under the shadow of the Benedictine Abbey of Westminster.
Again, when St. Benedict built his great monastery at Monte Cassino, he built it on the site of a Temple of Apollo, just as King Lucius is said to have done in those far-off days at “Thorney,” or Westminster.
St. Benedict directed that the monks of his order should divide their time between the services in the church, study, and manual work of some kind. It should never be forgotten that it is largely to the monasteries that we owe the preservation of learning, and our inheritance of the great writings of the Greek and Roman world.
The idea of making monasteries places of study and learning did not begin with St. Benedict, but Western Europe owes him a great debt for having insisted that study should be an important part of a monk’s work. This was a great service to mankind and to civilisation in those wild days of barbarian invasion and almost constant war.
It should be remembered, too, that the clergy and monks were the chief, if not the only, teachers during several centuries. If we want to see and understand this we can find an example in what our own countryman, Alcuin of York, did for education under the patronage and with the help of Charlemagne.