To this account it may be added that the House does not seem to have attracted many other benefactors, while in the Calendar of Wills there are only six bequests to the Abbey. One testator devises money for the buildings; one gives a small sum of money; three leave houses; one founds a chantry. It may be presumed that the proportion of bequests to this House compared with those made to others was the same with the wills not presented in these two volumes. Yet its surrender value, as we have seen, was considerable. In the first volume of the Transactions of the Lond. and Midd. Archæological Association is published an early representation of the Abbey, taken probably just before the Dissolution.
[CHAPTER XXVII]
THE SMALLER FOUNDATIONS
Among the Houses mentioned by Arnold FitzThedmar are two or three not considered in the above enumeration. There are the Houses of St. Anne by the Tower Hill, St. James in the Temple, St. James in the Wall, St. Stephen’s at Westminster, St. Thomas’ Chapel of the Bridge, St. James in the Field, St. Mary Magdalen Guildhall, St. Mary Rouncevall, and St. Ursula in the Poultry. There are one or two others which shall here be briefly mentioned.
Concerning many of these Houses, so little is known that the list becomes merely a catalogue. The position of these smaller Houses in the City in some respects corresponded to that of the humbler Dissenting Chapels of the present day. That is to say, although at the time there could be no thought of separation or of schism, the poor folk found themselves more at home in the smaller Houses. With them they had their Craft Fraternities; their priests were not the great Ecclesiastical Lords of the stately Abbeys and priories, but of humbler guise, men accessible to themselves.
The Order of Penitence or Fratres de Saccâ
The Order of Penitence grew out of the teaching of Francis of Assisi very early in his career. It was brought under rule by the Bull “Significatum est,” dated December 16, 1221, but it is said to have existed before this date.
Among other things, the order actually forbade the carrying of arms. They anticipated the Quakers, they anticipated the Peace Society, they were many centuries in advance of mankind. Like the Quakers, they did not understand that the very existence of a people under the conditions of the time—and of our time as well—rests upon force and strength of arms.
The great innovation designed by the Third Order was concord; this fraternity was a union of peace, and it attempted to bring before astonished Europe a new truce of God.
The second essential obligation of the Brothers of Penitence appears to have been that of reducing their wants as far as possible, and while preserving their fortunes, to distribute to the poor, at proper intervals, such portions of the revenue as remained after contenting themselves with the strict necessaries of life.