But the privileges were secured only to be lost almost immediately. The King’s officers arrived at St. Albans, no attempt at resistance was made, and the trouble subsided as quickly as it had arisen. The fifteen executions that followed (Grindcob being the most notable victim and dying finely) were, for the age, mild enough retaliation on the part of a panic-stricken government. As a matter of course, the Abbey was restored in its privileges, and the town subjected to it until the Dissolution.
After 1381.
In this way the Abbey was officially confirmed in its retention of an economic system which had become both unjust and unprofitable. Yet economic change was inevitable, and received a grudging recognition. In 1424 the Abbot secured a papal bull[57] allowing the Abbey complete freedom to let out its lands in farms to rent-paying tenants—the system long since in vogue on lay estates. Later in the century manumissions of bondmen become more and more frequent. At first manumission is regarded as a privilege by the serfs, and the price paid for it is commonly entered in the margin of the document; but gradually examples grow more common; no more money entries occur, and it seems that the Abbot was only too happy ‘to be rid of the presence of persons who had claims upon him as a landowner without any power on his part to exact a return to himself of commensurate advantage.’[58] Thus the old agricultural system slowly broke up, despite the monks who to the last retarded the transition to the new order.
Towards the town the Abbey remained to the last unbending, though not on account of any diminution in the resentment with which it was regarded by the inhabitants. In 1424 a large crowd appeared at the gate of the Abbey, armed with swords, to demand concessions similar to those of the extorted charter of 1381; but they were still cowed by the recollection of their late rising, and the affair came to nothing.[59] The last mention of open resistance occurs in 1455 when John Chertsey erected a private mill, and so withdrew corn from that of the Abbot. To such an act of daring he seems to have been inspired by his wife, a woman of spirit. Chertsey, however, was a timid creature; his heart failed him, and he was induced to make humble apology to the Abbot and to destroy the mill.
There can be little or no doubt that in the sixteenth century monastic lands were far behind lay estates in economic development. According to M. Savine, the agricultural revolution had scarcely affected the lands of the monks at the time of the Dissolution.[60] ‘Arable land occupies ... a very considerable part of the area that the monks kept in their own hands; it was very little, if at all, less than the area of the several pastures. As agriculturists the monks carried on a large, or at any rate, a fair-sized business. Now if the conversion of arable land into pasture land had become general under the first two Tudors, then in these thriving monastery farms it ought to be in much greater evidence than in the small homesteads of the peasants, who tilled the land for their own subsistence, and were fettered on all sides by communal regulations.’ But that the revolution was in full swing on lay estates we know from More’s Utopia, which was written as early as 1516.[61] Even at this date agriculture was being widely abandoned by lay farmers who were converting what was formerly arable into pasture land, the growing woollen industry being found more profitable.[62]
Summary.
To the last St. Albans strove to check economic development. At what was perhaps the great crisis in its history—the revolt of 1381—it had definitely refused to adapt itself to altered conditions. By that refusal it ensured its economic decay, and finally its ruin. For while it was highly desirable that religion should flourish within the monastery, it was absolutely essential that such a huge establishment should rest on a sound economic basis if it was to continue. In the sixteenth century, or even earlier, this condition was no longer fulfilled. It is, however, scarcely a matter for which blame attaches to the House. The mediaeval ideal, which in one aspect was the monastic ideal, was stability, not progress. St. Albans was identical in its attitude with the other great monasteries; it was neither more nor less conservative. Its inability, rather than its refusal, to change or admit change was its condemnation. Such a splendid immobility has something of grandeur about it. At the same time the picture of a town deprived of its ‘natural right of self-government,’ and hindered accordingly in its prosperity, and of the mass of the Abbey’s country tenants living unprosperously under an antiquated agricultural system, constitutes a crushing argument for the necessity of its dissolution.
(B). The Decay of the Monastic Spirit in the 15th century.
St. Albans in the 15th Century.
The task of interpreting the Abbey’s history during the fifteenth century is difficult in the extreme. The confusion, the aimlessness which characterised political history are reflected in the records of St. Albans. Although the material is at least as plentiful as before, the impression conveyed by the facts is blurred and uncertain. With the death of De la Mare the lines of development become obscured. The fourteenth century had witnessed a steady upward movement culminating in the Abbacy of De la Mare. There is a temptation to see in the fifteenth century a consistent, growing degeneracy: the more as it is beyond question that by the year 1490 the Convent had sunk into deeper degredation than ever before. In one sense such a theory is true. The tide of economic decline and growing material decrepitude, stemmed by De la Mare’s careful administration, proceeded unchecked after his death. Within the convent the decay of the monastic spirit was everywhere apparent. Living became inevitably more luxurious, and the religious life grew cold and formal.[63] Yet the reputation of St. Albans was as great in 1460 as in the days of Abbot Thomas. Up to 1464 (the year in which Whethamstede died) no flagrant abuses appear to have invaded the cloister, nor was there any considerable slackening of the discipline. The problem, of which we can offer no adequate solution, is to account for the extraordinary rapid decay between 1464 and 1489, by which time the Abbey had become publicly scandalous. The history of these twenty-five years is quite obscure.