CHAPTER X.
THE NEW ENGLAND.
1170–1206.

In the eyes of all contemporary Europe the most striking and important event in English history during the half-century which had passed away since the accession of Henry II. was the murder of Archbishop Thomas. The sensation which it produced throughout western Christendom was out of all proportion both to the personal influence of its victim during his lifetime and to its direct political results. The popular canonization bestowed upon the martyr was ratified by Rome with almost unprecedented speed, in little more than two years after his death;[2164] the stream of pilgrims which flowed to his shrine, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, was such as had hardly been seen even at the “threshold of the Apostles” or at the Holy Sepulchre itself; and it flowed on without a break for more than three hundred years. Yet Pope and pilgrims all alike were probably as blind as Thomas himself had been to the true significance for England of his life and his death. The great ecclesiastical struggle of which he was the hero and the martyr marks a turning-point in the social history of the reign of Henry II. even more than in its political history. With the quarrel between Henry and Thomas the direction of the moral and intellectual revival whose growth we have in earlier chapters endeavoured to trace from the accession of Henry I. to the death of Archbishop Theobald passed altogether out of the hands in which it had prospered so long and so well—the hands of the higher clergy and the monastic orders. The flight of Thomas scattered to the winds the little band of earnest churchmen who had been sharers with him in the inheritance of Theobald’s policy and Theobald’s work, and left the reforming party in the Church without a rallying-point and without a leader. One man alone still remained among the higher clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith.[2165]

The final settlement of the controversy was in some sense a defeat of both parties; but the one which seemed to have gained the victory really suffered the heaviest loss. The king was indeed compelled to abandon his scheme for reforming the morals of the priesthood by the strong hand of his royal justice; the privilege of the clergy was saved, to fall at last before another King Henry four centuries later. Yet its staunchest champions must surely have felt their cause reduced well-nigh to an absurdity when they found that the first result of its triumph was to secure the primate’s very murderers from the penalty due to their crime;[2166] and far greater than the seeming gain of Henry’s surrender at Avranches was the loss to the English Church involved in the break-down of Theobald’s plans for the reform of the episcopate. The cowardice of the bishops during the struggle left them at its close wholly at the mercy of the king. The vacant sees, of which there were eight besides Canterbury, were filled after long delays with secular clerks wholly subservient to the royal will; and before the end of Henry’s life the English episcopate was as completely secularized as it had been in the worst days of his grandfather. The inevitable consequences followed. As were the bishops, so, and even worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign through the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year, as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical policy. To that policy there were, indeed, two honourably marked exceptions. In 1186 Henry raised to the bishopric of Lincoln one of the holiest and wisest men then living, Hugh of Avalon. His dealings with the important and difficult question of the succession to the metropolitan see itself appear to have been prompted by equally disinterested motives. It was not the apathy or procrastination of the king, but the determination of the monks of Christ Church to use to the uttermost the favourable opportunity for asserting their independence, and the difficulty of finding any willing candidate for such a siege—perilous as the chair of S. Thomas was felt to be, that delayed the election of his successor for two years and a half, and his consecration for nine months longer still.[2167] The new Archbishop Richard was a monk of unblemished character, and though possessed of little talent or learning, fulfilled his office creditably for ten years;[2168]while Baldwin, who took his place in 1185, was a Cistercian of the best type—a type which, however, was now rapidly passing away.

The monastic revival which had shed such brightness over the earlier half of the twelfth century died down long before its close. S. Bernard had not yet been seven years in his grave when John of Salisbury, certainly not a hostile witness, was compelled to acknowledge that the love of power and the greed of gain had infected the whole monastic body, not excepting even the White Monks. Rome herself soon found it needful to make an attempt, although a vain one, to curb the arrogance of the military orders.[2169] Reformers in the next generation vied with each other in denouncing the vices and crimes of the Cluniacs and those of the “white-robed herd, the abominable order” of Cîteaux.[2170] The fall of the Cistercians indeed was the most terrible of all; within the space of two generations their name, once the symbol of the highest moral and spiritual perfection which the men of their day were capable of conceiving, had become a by-word for the lowest depths of wickedness and corruption. Startling as was the change, its causes are not far to seek. Pledged though they were by the origin and primitive constitution of their order to be a standing protest against the wealth and luxury of the Benedictines, they had nevertheless become, in less than a hundred years from their first appearance in England, the richest and most powerful body of monks in the realm. At the time of their coming, almost the whole extent of arable land throughout the country was already occupied; the only resource open to the new-comers was the yet unexhausted and, as it seemed in England at least, well-nigh inexhaustible resource of pasturage. They brought to their sheep-farming the same energy, skill and perseverance which characterized all their undertakings; and their well-earned success in this pursuit, together with the vast increase of the wool-trade which marked the same period, made them in a few years masters of the most productive branch of English industry. Temptation came with prosperity. But the more obvious temptations of wealth, the temptations to ease and vanity and luxurious self-indulgence, had little power over the stern temper of the White Monks; it was a deeper and a deadlier snare into which they fell; not sloth and gluttony, but avarice and pride, were their besetting sins. In the days of Richard and John, when we find them struggling and bargaining almost on equal terms with the king’s ministers and the king himself, they were indeed a mighty power both in Church and state; but the foundation on which their power now rested was wholly different from that upon which it had first arisen; its moral basis was gone. As an element in the nation’s spiritual life the Order of Cîteaux, once its very soul, now counted for worse than nothing.

Still the monastic impulse which had guided so many religious movements in the past was not wholly dead. On the continent it was giving indeed fresh proofs of its vitality in the growth of two remarkable orders, those of Grandmont and of the Chartreuse, both of earlier origin than that of Cîteaux, but overshadowed until now by its transcendent fame. These however had little influence upon English religious life. The “Good Men” of Grandmont—as the brotherhood were commonly called—although special favourites of King Henry, never set foot in his island realm; the Carthusians reached it only in his last years, and the few settlements which they formed there never rose to any great importance.[2171] Out of all the English monasteries, of various orders, whose dates of foundation are known, only one hundred and thirteen arose during the thirty-five years of Henry’s reign, while a hundred and fifteen owed their origin to the nineteen troubled winters of his predecessor. In Yorkshire alone no less than twenty new houses had been founded under Stephen; only eleven were founded there under Henry.[2172] Towards the close of the century, indeed, the reputation of English monachism had fallen so low that in the high places of the Church a reaction in favour of secular clerks began to set in once more. One bishop, Hugh of Coventry, not only ventured to repeat the experiment which had been vainly tried elsewhere under the Confessor and the Conqueror, of turning the monks out of his cathedral and replacing them by secular canons, but actually proposed that all the cathedral establishments served by monks should be broken up and put upon a new foundation of a like secular character. Hugh himself was however scarcely the man to meet with general recognition in the capacity of a reformer; and his bold anticipation of the ecclesiastical revolution which was to come four centuries later ended in ignominious failure.[2173] It was, however, no less a personage than Archbishop Baldwin himself who in 1186 proposed to endow out of his archiepiscopal revenues a college of secular priests at Hackington by Canterbury, with the avowed object of providing a dwelling-place and a maintenance for the scholarship which monkish jealousy and monkish sloth had all but driven out of the cloisters where from the days of Theodore to those of Theobald it had found a home. This scheme was at once met by a determined opposition on the part of the monks of Christ Church, who suspected, perhaps not without reason, that it was part of a design for curtailing the privileges and destroying the independence of the metropolitan chapter. They instantly appealed to Rome, and the appeal opened a contest which absorbed the unlucky primate’s energies throughout the remainder of his life. He was steadily supported by the king; but the weight of the whole monastic body, except his own order, was thrown into the opposite scale; the general drift of ecclesiastical feeling still lay in the same direction; and after nearly four years of wearisome litigation at Rome and almost open warfare at Canterbury, the building of the new college was stopped by order of the Pope. The undaunted primate transferred his foundation to a new site at Lambeth, where it might have seemed less open to suspicion of rivalry with the Canterbury chapter; but the jealousy of the monks pursued it with relentless hatred, and Baldwin’s absence and death in Holy Land enabled them to secure an easy victory a year later. The next archbishop, Hubert Walter, took up his predecessor’s scheme with a zeal doubtless quickened by the fact that he was himself a secular clerk. The dispute dragged on for five more years, to end at last in the defeat of the primate, and, with him, of the last attempt made in England systematically to utilize the superfluous wealth of a great monastic corporation for the promotion of learning and the endowment of study.[2174] The attempt was made under unfavourable circumstances, perhaps by unskilful hands; and it was moreover made too soon. In English national sentiment, monachism was inseparably bound up with Christianity itself. To the monastic system England owed her conversion, her ecclesiastical organization, her earliest training as a nation and as a Church. Even if the guides to whom she had so long trusted were failing her at last, the conservatism and the gratitude of Englishmen both alike still shrank from casting aside a tradition hallowed by the best and happiest associations of six hundred years. The bent of popular sympathy was strikingly shewn by an episode in Baldwin’s quarrel with his monks, when their insolent defiance of his authority provoked him to cut off all their supplies, in the hope of starving them into submission. For eighty-four weeks not a morsel of food reached them save what was brought by their friends or by the pilgrims who crowded to the martyr’s shrine; so great however was the amount of these contributions, some of which came even from Jews, that—if we may believe the tale of one who was himself an inmate of the convent at this time—the brethren were able out of their superabundance to give a daily meal to two hundred poor strangers.[2175] As a spiritual force, however, monachism in England was well-nigh dead. Though it still kept a lingering hold upon the hearts of the people, it had lost its power over their souls. It might produce individual saints like Hugh of Lincoln; but its influence had ceased to mould the spiritual life of the nation. The time was almost ripe for the coming of the Friars.