PART III
RELIGIOUS HOUSES
[CHAPTER I]
GENERAL
The history of the Monastic Life, with its rise and its decay, its work and its importance, has attracted many writers and historians. It has been fiercely assailed; it has been vehemently defended. In speaking of the Dissolution it was necessary to state plainly the condition into which Monks and Friars had fallen in the early sixteenth century. (See Appendix VIII.) In this place, and as a fitting preface to a review in detail of the Monastic Houses of London, it may be permitted to quote those who could speak in praise of the Religious Life. There are two writers who seem to say all that can be said in favour of Monasticism. The first was contemporary with the Dissolution; his work is in MS. in the British Museum. I quote it at second hand from Cunningham, Growth of English Industry (p. 472):
“There was no person that came to them heavy or sad for any cause that went away comfortless; they never revenged them of any injury, but was content to forgive it freely upon submission, and if the price of corn had begun to start up in the market, they made thereunto with a wain load of corn, and sold it under the market to poor people, to the end to bring down the price thereof. If the highways, bridges, or causeys were tedious to the passengers that sought their living by their travel, their great help lacked not toward the repairing and amending thereof, yea oftentimes they amended them on their own proper charges.
If any poor householder lacked seed to sow his land, or bread, corn, or malt before harvest, and came to a monastery, either of men or women, he would not have gone away without help: for he should have had it until harvest, that he might easily have paid it again. Yea if he had made his moan for an ox, horse, or cow, he might have had it upon his credit, and such was the good conscience of the borrowers in those days that the thing borrowed needed not to have been asked at the day of payment.
They never raised any rent, or took any incomes or garsomes (fines) of their tenants, nor ever broke in or improved any commons, although the most part and the greatest waste grounds belonged to their possessions.
If any poor people had made their moan at their day of marriage to any Abbey, they should have had money given to their great help. And thus all sorts of people were helped and succoured by abbeys: yea, happy was that person that was tenant to an abbey, for it was a rare thing to hear that any tenant was removed by taking his farm over his head, nor he was not afraid of any re-entry for non-payment of rent, if necessity drove him thereunto. And thus they fulfilled the works of charity in all the country round about them, to the good example of all lay parsons that now have taken forth other lessons, that is, nunc tempus alios postulat mores.”
The second writer is Tanner in his Notitia Monastica (Preface):
“John Wethamsted, Abbot of St. Albans, caused above eighty books to be transcribed (there was then no printing) during his abbacy. Fifty-eight were transcribed by the care of one Abbot of Glastonbury, and so zealous were the monks in general for the work that they often got lands given and churches appropriated for the carrying of it on. In all the greater abbeys there were also persons appointed to take notice of the principal occurrences of the kingdom, and, at the end of every year, to digest them into annals. In these records they particularly preserved the memories of their founders and benefactors, the years and days of their births and deaths, their marriages, children, and successors, so that recourse was sometimes had to them for proving persons’ ages and genealogies, though it is to be feared that some of these pedigrees were drawn up from tradition only, and that in most of their accounts they were favourable to their friends and severe upon their enemies. The constitutions of the clergy in their national and provincial synods, and (after the Conquest) even Acts of Parliament were sent to the Abbey to be recorded, which leads me to mention the use and advantage of these religious houses.