The refectory, which in many ruins shows least signs of decay, corresponded to the modern dining-hall, and was often a noble and spacious apartment. But the most important of the abbey buildings, in our eyes, was the Scriptorium—the abbey library and study. Here were preserved and copied the writings of the times, and the greater part of our history, prior to the sixteenth century, is owing to the work of these priestly scribes.
The monks formed independent colonies, asking, and indeed needing, no help from the world around them. At first, their lands in many instances were small in extent, and their poverty was amply sufficient to deter any but devout men from casting in his lot with them. Poverty and work they considered the two great antidotes against sin. Even in those early times, they were fully acquainted with the adage which connects mischief with idle hands. Their employments were as various as their tastes. The building of the abbey must have furnished employment for several generations of monks. The stained-glass windows and the bells of their churches were their own handiwork. Visitors to the Patent Museum at South Kensington are attracted by the loud ticking of a clock, still said to be a capital timekeeper, although the three centuries of its infancy were passed in measuring time for its makers, the monks of Glastonbury. As further instances of the versatile occupations of the monks, it will be remembered that Roger Bacon, the inventor of the common lens, was a Franciscan. Gardening, too, occupied much of their time, and we even read of Becket and his monks tossing hay in the harvest-field.
But as time went on, the abbey lands became extensive, by the grants of men who thought to compensate for their misdeeds by becoming liberal in their dying hours to mother-church. In the course of time, the abbots had become in reality great landowners, and monks only in name. From a glimpse left us of the state of affairs round the abbey of St Edmonsbury, it is plain that the abbot was held more in awe by the surrounding tenantry than the king himself. The abbot of Furness was virtual lord over the country north of Morecambe Bay from the Duddon to Windermere; and the estate of the abbey of Fountains stretched to the foot of Penygant, a distance of thirty miles.
As numerous instances have shown, wealth is a power, which, if not wisely used, may not only demoralise individuals, but communities and nations. The abbeys, whose walls had been raised to encircle piety and poverty, became in time the abodes of indolence and luxury. Indeed, it is probable that the scanty knowledge we possess of our country’s history during the two centuries prior to the destruction of the monasteries, is owing to the fact that the monks, who had formerly been our chief historians, had thrown aside a task which few others were then competent to take up. The new learning, which carried knowledge outside the monasteries, had not yet sprung into being, and the only learned sect in the land had become idle.
The monastic system, had it been allowed to live on, would certainly have met with a severe check, if not destruction, in the religious reforms which took place in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. As it was, the end came before its time, and like all premature reforms, the dissolution clashed with the spirit of the age, and was regarded by the common people as an injustice. The monks had never driven hard bargains with their tenants, and their popularity as landlords was great. Even when their dissolution was discussed in parliament, the members showed themselves averse to extreme measures, and compromised the matter by striking at the smaller monasteries only. But the insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace soon gave Henry VIII. a pretext for their total suppression, and in 1539, the work of dissolution was finished in a most ruthless manner. The abbots of Fountains and Jorvaulx were hanged together at Tyburn, and the abbot of Glastonbury shared the same fate. The abbot of Furness, to escape death, was compelled to sign a deed conveying his whole estate to the king.
The abbeys were for the most part despoiled by the people of the district. A stained-glass window of Furness Abbey was carried off to adorn Bowness Church, on the banks of Windermere. An oriel window from Glastonbury Abbey was used in the building of a neighbouring inn; whilst the houses of the village owed great part of their building materials to the destruction of this noble church. In the case of Crowland, the abbey seems to have suffered little until the time of the Civil War, when a band of the Parliament army destroyed it, after using it as a shelter. In those instances where man has not wreaked his vengeance, time and the elements have effected a slow but sure ruin.
Such was the sudden collapse of these powerful and at one time useful institutions. Whatever may have been the faults and drawbacks of their later existence, they were in earlier periods of immense service to the country, as they conserved within them all that was best and highest in literature, arts, and civilisation. They kept the lamp of knowledge burning throughout the dark ages, ready for a time when its light could be more generally diffused among the nations. And one thing they did which ought to be held in grateful remembrance: they were the chief promoters of the abolition of serfdom, and the manumission of the slaves, both in England and Scotland. When giving the rites of the church to the dying landowner, the monks, although anxious for their own share of his property, never forgot to plead for the slaves. And so it came about that, by the close of the fifteenth century, slavery was virtually abolished, not by Act of Parliament, but by the monastic Orders.
TWO DAYS IN A LIFETIME.
A STORY IN EIGHT CHAPTERS.
BY T. W. SPEIGHT.