London

by Walter Besant

There must have been in every convent such times of madness and revolt, even though the vital powers were kept low with poor and scanty food. It is not every man who can be thus changed into a slave and a praying-machine. The noblest souls must break out from time to time; only the ignoble sink contentedly day by day into lethargic, passive, mechanical discharge of the rules; their mouths mechanically mumble the litanies; the sacredness falls out of the most holy acts and words by reason of their familiarity; they drop into second childhood in the vigor and strength of manhood. If the walls of the convent could speak, what tales would they tell of madness and despair and vain rage and drivelling idiocy! One thing, however, came to the relief of these poor men in every order; it was the gradual relaxation of the Rule, until, by the Dissolution, the laws of the Founder had passed into forms and words, and the House, enriched by benefactions, had become a pleasant club, consisting of none but gentlemen, where certain light duties removed the tedium of an idle life.

For two hundred years this House of the Salutation continued. There remains no record of that long period; no record at all. There is no history of those poor souls who lived their dreary lives within its walls. The monks obeyed the Rule and died and were forgotten. Nay, they had been forgotten since the day when they assumed the hood. The end of the Carthusians came in blood and prison and torture; but that belongs to Tudor London.

The accompanying view ([p. 130]) of the Charter House after the Dissolution, and when Sutton had altered it for his new Foundation, is useful in showing the arrangement of the older monastic buildings. Chapel, cloisters, courts, bowling green, kitchen garden, and "wilderness" are all exactly as the monks left them, though most of the buildings are of later date. The founder, Sir Walter, lived to see only the commencement of his work. He died the year after his House was established, and was buried in the chapel, he and his wife Margaret, and many other gallant knights and gracious ladies, who thus acknowledged, when they chose to be laid among the dust and ashes of the poor folk who had died of the plague and those who had died by the gibbet, their brotherhood with the poorest and the humblest and the most unfortunate.

The modern visitor to London, when he has seen great St. Bartholomew's, is taken up a street hard by. Here, amid mean houses and shops of the lower class, he sees standing across the road St. John's Gate, a place already as well known to him and as frequently figured as St. Paul's itself. This is the gate—and it is nearly all that is left—of the great Priory of St. John of Jerusalem.

It was founded in the year 1100, and therefore belongs to Norman London. Its founder was Jordan Briset, a Baron of the Realm, and Muriel, his wife. They had already founded a priory for nuns close by Clerkenwell. A church of some kind was certainly built at the beginning, but the great Priory Church, one of the most splendid in London, was not dedicated till the year 1185, and then by no less a person than by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, then in England in quest of aid and money for another Crusade.

In its Foundation the brethren took the vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty. They were to have a right to nothing but bread, water, and clothes. They begged their food; on Wednesdays and Fridays they fasted; a breach of their first vow was punished by public flogging and penance; no women were to do any offices at all for them; they were to be silent, never to go about alone; they were to be the servants of the sick and poor; they were valiantly to defend the Cross. "Receive," says the ritual of admission, "the yoke of the Lord: it is easy and light, and thou shalt find rest for thy soul. We promise thee nothing but bread and water, a simple habit of little worth. We give thee, thy parents and relations, a share in the good works performed by our Order and by our brethren, both now and hereafter, throughout the world. We place, O brother, this cross upon thy breast, that thou mayest love it with all thy heart, and may thy right hand ever fight in its defence! Should it happen that in fighting against the enemies of the faith thou shouldest desert the standard of the Cross and take to flight, thou wilt be stripped of the holy sign according to the statutes and customs of the Order, as having broken its vows, and thou wilt be cut off from our body."

THE CHARTER HOUSE

This poor, valiant, and ascetic society became in two hundred years enormously rich and luxurious. By its pride and its tyranny it had incurred the most deadly hatred of the common people, as is shown by their behavior during the insurrection of Wat Tyler and John Bull. The first step of the rebels in Essex was to destroy a fair manor-house belonging to the Knights Hospitallers, and to devour and waste the stores of food, wine, and clothes contained in it. On their way to London they destroyed another manor belonging to the Knights, that of Highbury. After they had burned and pillaged Lambeth and the Savoy, they went in a body to St. John's Priory and destroyed the whole of the buildings, church and all. And they seized and beheaded the Grand Prior, who was also Treasurer of the Realm. The church soon rose again, and the monastic buildings were replaced with more than the ancient splendor, and the luxury of the Knights was in no way diminished by this disaster. The Gate itself, part of the later buildings, now belongs to the English Knights of St. John, who have established an ambulance station close beside it and maintain a hospital at Jerusalem. The very beautiful crypt of the church still stands and may be visited. Part of the walls of the mean modern church also belongs to the old church.