So far as the visitation of monasteries by delegated ecclesiastics from the parent house is concerned, we are not aware of any general record of that character having come to light, either at home or on the continent, with regard to the Cistercians. As to the visitations of English Cluniac foundations, Sir G. F. Duckett did good service in printing a great amount of matter of the thirteenth century, together with some of later date, from the original records in the National Library at Paris. As these important visitations have recently been the subject of controversy, it is not necessary to allude to them any further, save by saying that it is best to consult Duckett’s two volumes in Latin, rather than the abbreviated English rendering; and that they cannot possibly fail to carry conviction to every unjaundiced mind of the good lives that were on the whole led by the monks under alien rule amid circumstances of peculiar difficulty.
The Royal Historical Society has lately printed the first of two volumes entitled Collectaneæ Anglo-Premonstratensia by Abbot Gasquet, which are devoted to the contents of an original register of the order of White Canons, in the Bodleian and other documents in the British Museum. The second volume will contain also details of Richard Redman’s visitations of all the English Premonstratensian houses. Redman was originally Abbot of Shap, Cumberland. In 1478 he was nominated by the Abbot of Prémontré to be vicar of the English province; at that time he had been already Bishop of St. Asaph for ten years, and thence he was successively translated to Exeter and Ely, dying Bishop of Ely 1505. He remained visitor of the Premonstratensians till the time of his death. Redman’s visitation register, well known to the writer of these chapters, shows that there was often much to correct; but the houses far oftener could show a clean bill of health, and where there was evil it only affected one or two individuals. It will also be found that the punishment of the guilty was usually most genuine and severe.
For serious sins Redman’s usual punishment was forty days gravioris culpa, with the further penance of being sent to another house of the same order for seven years, during which long period the offender was under a certain amount of particular discipline and observation, and never allowed to leave the precincts. The chief points of the preliminary forty days’ punishment were:—To sit alone in the refectory on the ground at meal-times, with bread and water as the only fare; to lie prostrate at the entrance to the choir when the canons were entering or departing at the various hours; to be spoken to by no one; and to be excluded from the Communion.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TWO COMMISSIONS OF HENRY VIII
MOVED, as he chose to assert, with a desire “to purge the Church from the thorns of vices and to sow it with the seeds and plants of virtue,” Henry VIII., the most immoral and covetous king that England has ever known, determined towards the end of 1534 to take active steps to secure the suppression of the religious houses. The Supreme Head Act of that year had conferred visitatorial powers on the Crown. For this purpose Henry appointed Thomas Cromwell as his Vicar-General, suspending meanwhile all episcopal or other forms of visitation. This absolutely unscrupulous minister, well worthy of the king who appointed him, and who never lost an opportunity of obtaining bribes in money, goods, leases, or estates, had the fullest authority and jurisdiction conferred upon him, with power to visit and exercise such control through his appointed commissaries. The visitation of Cromwell’s agents began in August, 1535, and extended to February, 1536. The chief visitors were the notorious Legh, Layton, and London. They had not completed the visitation of the Northern Province when Parliament met, but reports were forwarded to Cromwell of the visited houses, both small and great. They had also during this period managed to frighten some houses into making “voluntary surrenders,” and, by imposing a series of harsh and unreasonable injunctions, had endeavoured to drive out the remainder. Legh, writing to Cromwell with reference to these injunctions, had no hesitation in showing his hand: “By this ye see that they shall not need to be put forth, but that they will make instance themselves, so that their doing shall be imputed to themselves and no other.” In March 1536 a bill for the dissolution of the smaller houses under £200 a year was introduced and forced through Parliament by royal threats—“I hear that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads.” About 400 houses then fell; the superiors receiving pensions, and the monks, notwithstanding their alleged depravity, obtaining admission to the larger houses or leave to act as secular priests. This first suppression was hateful to the majority of English folk, save those who profited by the spoils, and brought about the Pilgrimage of Grace, with the execution of twelve abbots, as well as many monks and sympathetic laymen of all ranks.
The main excuse for this step in the general suppression was the report of Cromwell’s visitors as to the condition of the monasteries. This was the infamous Comperta, a pestiferous document of unrivalled mendacity and malignity, which for three-and-a-half centuries surrounded the memory of the latter days of England’s religious with a miasma of noxious effluvia. If any unscrupulous or hasty controversialist desires to think evil of monks and nuns, he will herein find a surfeit of garbage. But with the printing of the Domestic State Papers, and the revelations therein afforded of the character of the visitors as displayed in their own letters, the falsity of most of their statements has been manifested beyond gainsaying. Dr. Gairdner’s cool judgment in editing the official Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.’s reign gave the first definite blow to the possibility of placing any reliance on the Comperta documents, as they are flatly contradicted in so many places, and are obviously incredible in others. Abbot Gasquet has further exposed their worthlessness after a masterly and searching fashion; but it has been reserved for scholarly members of the Anglican communion, such as the late Canon Dixon and Dr. Jessopp, to denounce the authors of the monastic Black Book in terms of extraordinary but justifiable severity. In short, it would not be possible for anyone of a decently-balanced mind—we care not whether he is English Catholic, of the Roman obedience, nonconformist, or agnostic—to make a careful documentary study of the times of the suppression of the monasteries of this country, without rising from the task with a feeling of almost unqualified disgust for the actual visitors, and of indignation with a king and a minister who could use such miscreants as their tools.
“When the Inquisitors of Henry VIII. and his Vicar-General, Cromwell,” writes Dr. Jessopp, “went on their tours of Visitation, they were men who had had no experience of the ordinary forms of inquiry which had hitherto been in use. They called themselves Visitors; they were, in effect, mere hired detectives of the very vilest stamp, who came to levy blackmail, and, if possible, to find some excuse for their robberies by vilifying their victims. In all the Comperta which have come down to us there is not, if I remember rightly, a single instance of any report or complaint having been made to the Visitors from anyone outside. The enormities set down against the poor people accused of them are said to have been confessed by themselves against themselves. In other words, the Comperta of 1535—6 can only be received as the horrible inventions of the miserable men who wrote them down upon their papers, well knowing that, as in no case could the charges be supported, so, on the other hand, in no case could they be met, or were the accused even intended to be put upon their trial.”
On another occasion, when criticising minutely Legh’s reports of the Papist houses, the same scholar says:—
“This loathsome return bears the stamp of malignant falsehood upon every line, and it could only have been penned by a man of blasted character and of so filthy an imagination that no judge or jury would have believed him on his oath.”
Such testimony is all the more remarkable, for Dr. Jessopp tells us that few men in their early days had the current views against the monks more firmly fixed in their minds, and few had more difficulty in surrendering them under the stern pressure of historic facts.