Part 5
“3. At the _third hour_, or _nine of the clock before none_: when, according to _S. Marke_, Christ was condemned, and scourged by _Pilate_.
“4. At the _sixt hour_, or _twelve of the clock at high noon_: when Christ was crucified and darknesse over all the earth.
“5. At the _ninth hour_, or _three of the clock in the afternoon_: when Christ gave up the ghost, and, which was an hour of publick prayer in the Temple, and privately in his closet with _Cornelius_.
“6. Vespers: at the _twelfth hour_, or _six a clock in the afternoon_: when the evening sacrifice was offered in the Temple, and when Christ is supposed taken down from the Crosse.
“7. At _seven of the clock at night_ (or the first hour beginning the nocturnall twelve): when Christ’s agonie in the garden was conceived began.
“The first of those was performed at two of the clock in the morning: when the Monks (who went to bed at eight at night) had slept six hours, which were judged sufficient for nature.”
Further, we read:--
“Let every Monk have two Coats, and two Cowles, etc.”
“Let every Monk have his Table-book, Knife, Needle, and Handkerchief.”
“Let the Bed of every Monk have a Mat, Blanket, Rugge, and Pillow.”
We may part from them with the words of Hasted in our ears; of the Reformation and of the destruction of Becket’s shrine, he says: “This great change could not but seem strange to the people who had still veneration for their reputed saint; and the violence offered to his shrine could not but fill their hearts with inward regret, and private murmurings; but their discontent did not break out into open rebellion here, as it did on some like occasion in different places in the kingdom. To quiet the people, therefore, and to convince them of the propriety, and even necessity, of these changes, the monks were in general cried out against, as given to every shameful and abominable vice; and reports were industriously spread abroad, that the monasteries were receptacles of the worst of people.... The greater monasteries were, for the most part, well governed, and lived under the strictest discipline; ... they promoted learning, they educated youth, and dispensed charity with a liberal hand to all around them.... The Prior, who at the time of the dissolution had presided over this convent for three-and-twenty years, was a learned, grave, and religious man, and his predecessors had been such for a length of time before. The convent was a society of grave persons; the aged were diligent to train up the novices both in the rules of their institution, and in gravity and sobriety.... All their revenues and gains were expended, either in alms and hospitality, or in the stately and magnificent building of their church.... Their time was for the most part spent in exercises of fasting, penance, and devout meditations, and in attending the divine offices in the church.”
The lives of nuns in convents of women were to all intents and purposes practically the same as those led by monks, so we will visit for a few minutes--in spirit--the nunnery of St Sepulchre, which stood near the old Riding-gate. It was founded by St Anselm about the year 1100 for Benedictine nuns, whose lives were passed very much in accordance with those of their brother monks. Hasted tells us that Prior Walter, of Christ Church, gave to the nunnery “as much wood as one horse, going twice a day, could fetch thence, where the wood reeves should appoint"--namely, from the wood of Blean, beyond Harbledown; “but there being much uncertainty in this grant, the nuns, in 1270, releasing it, procured in lien and by way of exchange for it a certain portion of the above-mentioned wood to be assigned and made over to them; which wood retains from these nuns the name of Minchen Wood at this time.” And further on he says discreetly, “Time and indulgence of superiors bringing their corruptions, nuns became in process of time not such recluses as their order required.” So in 1305 steps were taken by Archbishop Winchelsea to keep them more straitly. It was here that the Holy Maid of Kent, “the great impostor of her time, was a veiled nun and votaress.”
The story of Elizabeth Barton, more generally known as the Holy Maid of Kent, throws not a few curious lights upon the beliefs and manners of the sixteenth century. She was born in or about the year 1506, and when about nineteen years old was living in the service of Thomas Cobb, who was steward to an estate of Archbishop Warham at Aldington, which lies four miles south-east of Ashford, commanding an extensive prospect over Romney Marsh. The living here, St Martin’s, was presented by Warham to Erasmus in 1511, but he held it for only a few months.
She was afflicted with some form of nervous complaint, which exhibited itself in the form of trances or fits; for days together she would lie half conscious, giving vent to wondrous sayings, telling of events in other places of which apparently she could have no knowledge, and holding forth in marvellous words in the rebuke of sin. It can scarce be wondered at that the ignorant and superstitious neighbours were amazed and that they began to talk of her, some saying that she was inspired of the Holy Spirit, others that a devil possessed her. Her master consulted the village priest, Richard Masters, and together they watched the girl, coming to the conclusion that it was a good and not an evil spirit that was speaking through the mouth of the Maid. The affair was brought to the notice of the archbishop by the priest, and a gracious message of encouragement was sent to the girl. But as the months passed by her illness left her, and she missed the notoriety which she had gained, although she was still held in pious reverence by friends and neighbours. She was unable to resist the temptation to feign a continuance of her trances and inspired utterances.
Her renown spread abroad and Warham decided that the matter should be inquired into, sending down two monks of Christ Church, Edward Bocking and William Hadley. Bocking is believed to have been educated at Canterbury College, Oxford, now Christ Church, and to have been warden there. He left there for Christ Church, Canterbury, probably in 1526, the fatal year in which he was despatched upon this mission of inquiry. We know not what manner of man he was, save for these dealings of his with the Maid; could we gain the details of his story, it would add another and striking chapter to the history of villainy. He saw in Elizabeth a tool, which would be useful to him if he could but temper it. He instructed her in the Catholic legendary lore, and taught her to argue with and to refute heretics. Strype includes Masters in the plot, as thus: “And to serve himself of this woman and her fits, for his own benefit, he, with one Dr Bocking, a monk of Canterbury, directed her to say in one of her trances, that she should never be well till she visited the image of Our Lady in a certain chapel in the said Masters’ parish, called the chapel in Court-at-Street; and that Our Lady had appeared to her, and told her so; and that if she came on a certain day thither, she should be restored to health by miracle. This story, and the day of her resort unto the chapel, was studiously given out by the said parson and monk; so that at the appointed day there met two thousand persons to see this maid, and the miracle to be wrought on her. Thither at the set time she came, and there, before them all, disfigured herself, and pretended her ecstasies.... In her trance in this chapel she gave out, that Our Lady bade her become a nun, and that Dr Bocking should be her ghostly father.” Also the “spirit” moved her further: “It spake also many things for the confirmation of pilgrimages and trentals, hearing of masses and confessions, and many other such things.” “And one Thwaites, a gentleman, wrote a great book of her feigned miracles, for a copy to the printer, to be printed off,” which was called _A Miraculous Work of late done at Court-of-Strete in Kent, published to the Devoute People of this Tyme for their Spiritual Consolation_. Soon after this exhibition she was admitted to the priory of St Sepulchre at Canterbury, and became known as the Nun of Kent. She was wise enough to stifle rivalry, for “there was one Hellen, a maid dwelling about Totnam, that had visions and trances also. She came to this holy Maid and told her of them. But she assured her (it may be because she had a mind to have the sole glory of such visions herself) that hers were but delusions of the Devil; and advised her from henceforth not to entertain them, but to cast them out of her mind.” Other monks assisted Bocking in the deception.
“Archbishop Warham having a roll of many sayings which she spake in her pretended trances, some whereof were in very rude rhymes, sent them up to the King; which, however revered by others, he made but light of, and showed them to More, bidding him show his thoughts thereof. Which after he had perused, he told the King, that in good faith (for that oath he used) he found nothing in them that he could either esteem or regard: for a simple woman, in his mind, of her own wit might have spoken them.”
Then, unfortunately for herself, Elizabeth embarked on the dangerous sea of politics, especially unsafe in those days when the axe or the rope put a stop to any unfavourable comment. As when the divorce of Catherine came upon the tapis, and Elizabeth indulged herself in expressing such opinions as these, embodied in a fantastic tale “of an angel that appeared, and bade ‘her’ go unto the King, that infidel Prince of England, and say, that I command him to amend his life; and that he leave three things which he loveth, and purposeth upon; that is, that he take off the Pope’s right and patrimony from him. The second, that he destroy all these new folks of opinion, and the works of their _new learning_. The third, that if he married and took Anne to wife, the vengeance of God plague him.” But Henry was not moved, unless it was to anger; Warham was convinced of the Maid’s holiness, and withdrew his promise to marry Henry; further, he persuaded Wolsey to see her, with exactly what result is not definitely known. She gained vast popularity as Catherine’s champion, and many noble persons became her patrons. She even went to the extreme length of forcing herself into the King’s presence when he visited Canterbury. Anne did not die within a month of her marriage, as the Maid had predicted, so she added to her offences by declaring that Henry was before God no longer King. Cranmer, who had succeeded Warham, ordered the Maid to be subjected to a strict examination. Eventually, in September 1533, she confessed her fraud: “she never had visions in all her life, but all that she ever said was feigned of her own imagination, only to satisfy the minds of those which resorted to her, and to obtain worldly praise.” Her counsellors, including Bocking, Hadley, Masters, and Thwaites, were committed to the Tower, brought before the Star Chamber, and they too confessed. So the plot exploded. A scaffold was erected near to Paul’s Cross, from which the Nun and her chief aiders and abettors read their confessions; this function was repeated at Canterbury in the churchyard of the monastery of Holy Trinity. We need not here go into the political capital which Cromwell made out of the intimacy of various enemies of the King with the Maid.
On the 20th April 1534, the unhappy girl and others were done to death at Tyburn; and these were her last words: “Hither I am come to die; and I have not been only the cause of mine own death, which most justly I have deserved, but also I am the cause of the death of all those persons, which at this time here suffer. And yet, to say the truth, I am not so much to be blamed, considering that it was well known to these learned men that I was a poor wench, without learning; and therefore they might easily have perceived, that the things that were done by me could not proceed in no such sort; but their capacities and learning could right well judge from whence they proceeded, and that they were altogether feigned: but because the thing which I feigned was profitable to them, therefore they much praised me; and bore me in hand, that it was the Holy Ghost, and not I, that did them; and then I, being puffed up with their praises, fell into a certain pride and foolish fantasy with myself, and thought I might feign what I would; which thing hath brought me to this case; and for other which now I cry God and the King’s highness most heartily mercy, and desire you all, good people, to pray to God to have mercy on me, and on all them that here suffer with me.”
There is tragedy lurking there, and light upon those days. But can we laugh--we who are without superstition and too often without respect?
OTHER SHRINES
There is an old house outside the West Gate, built about 1563 on the site of an hostel, where, when the city gates were shut of a night time, belated pilgrims were wont to seek refreshment and rest. But as we stand and look at the ancient gables, and think of those still more ancient which these replaced, does any Canterbury Pilgrim come forth to greet us? No; but we have “stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low lattice-windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too, so that,” we fancied, “the whole house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old-fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills.”
We have never seen Uriah Heep peeping slyly out of those quaint little windows, for somehow Uriah has never quite lived for us; but we have seen Agnes there, to whom David eventually lost his heart--which has always seemed to us an unwise proceeding, for men do not like taking a permanent second place by marrying their
guardian angels; there have looked out at us old Mr Wickfield and young David, Miss Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick--all very much alive. Then it is delightful on a frosty morning to see Doctor Strong bestowing his gaiters “on a beggar-woman, who occasioned some scandal in the neighbourhood by exhibiting a fine infant from door to door, wrapped in those garments, which were universally recognised, being as well known in the vicinity as the Cathedral.” But who would wish to meet the Old Soldier? And was it not Mr Micawber who came to “see the Cathedral. Firstly, on account of its being so well worth seeing.... And secondly, on account of the great probability of something turning up in a cathedral town”? Then we may sit, if we list, with little David in the Cathedral any Sunday morning, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black-and-white arched galleries and aisles affecting us as they did him, being as wings that take us back to childish days.
A giant of a man meets us in these city streets, a long-legged, white-haired, bespectacled man, one who signed a letter “W. M. T.,” in which he wrote: “I passed an hour in the Cathedral, which seemed all beautiful to me; the fifteenth century part, the thirteenth century part, and the crypt above all, which they say is older than the Conquest.... Fancy the church quite full; the altar lined with pontifical gentlemen bobbing up and down; the dear little boys in white and red flinging about the incense pots; the music roaring out from the organs; all the monks and the clergy in their stalls, and the archbishop on his throne--oh, how fine! And then think of the ✠ of our Lord speaking quite simply to simple Syrian people, a child or two maybe at his knees, as he taught them that love was the truth.” Thus spake Thackeray the cynic.
In the days of Elizabeth--to be exact, in the year 1561, on May 22nd--John Marlowe was married to Catherine Arthur in the church of St George the Martyr, the said John being a man of some standing and a member later of the Guild of Shoemakers and Tanners. Then in the same church, in the year 1564, on February 26th was christened Christopher, the eldest son of the above. The boy when fourteen years of age won a scholarship in the King’s School, of which the master then was Nicholas Goldsborough. When Kit left the school we know not; he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; he went to London; he wrote _Faustus_, _Tamburlaine the Great_, _The Rich Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._, _Hero and Leander_; sang
“Come live with me and be my love.”
And there is a foolish monument to him, where once stood the butter-market, outside Christ Church gate. Of the man’s manner and appearance we know not anything; his works live, but the man is dead even to our mind’s eye. Yet there are some of us who would rather meet his shadow here than even those of Chaucer and of Dickens; perchance because we know him not.
Canterbury is yet in many ways a mediæval city, despite railways and electric lights. We can enter it by the fourteenth century West Gate, built by Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, the one gateway mercifully spared to us out of six; then we can walk down an old-world High Street, overlooked by beetle-browed, gabled houses. Is not the King’s Bridge and the old home of the Canterbury Weavers quaintly beautiful? This old house dates back possibly to the fifteenth century, of course having been pulled about more or less by rude restorers; at any rate it is old, at any rate it is quaint. Stand thereby on a moonlit night, drink in the picturesqueness of the dark masses of black shadow and reflection, the bright masses of cold light; there is no corner more charming in Nuremberg or Rothenberg; the sluggish waters of the many-branched Stour flow beneath, and the air is tremulous with the chiming of bells from many a steeple. The passers-by of to-day are not those whom we should see, for we should bend our mind’s eye on monk, priest and pilgrim, on knight, dame and squire, or king, queen and prince; it needs no vivid imagination to call up these shades of the past. But above all and through all the pageantry of old days looms the church; Canterbury is a city of churches, of priories, monasteries, hospitals. There is St Dunstan’s, where in the Roper vault they say is the head of Sir Thomas More; St Alphege, with a curious epitaph referring to dancing in the churchyard; St Margaret’s, where sleeps Somner, antiquary and loyalist; St Peter’s, once used by a French congregation; and many another. The Black Friars, the Grey Friars, the White Friars, all had houses in Canterbury. On the banks of the river, hard by St Peter’s, the Black Friars in the reign of Henry III. founded one of their first homes, and now their ancient refectory is a Unitarian Baptist Chapel! Therein Daniel Defoe was wont
to preach. A portion of the house of the Grey Friars still stands on arches above the waters of the river; but as we look on it of no friar do we think, but of the gay cavalier, Richard Lovelace, gallant and poet, who sang--
“When flowing cups run swiftly round With no allaying Thames, Our careless heads with roses crown’d, Our hearts with loyal flames; When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go free-- Fishes that tipple in the deep Know no such liberty.”
But he wrote other and more pleasing verses, though none more curious. The Brethren of St Francis, the Franciscans or Grey Friars, came to this country in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, and their first habitation was this in Canterbury. They numbered but nine, these first comers, of whom only one was a priest, a man of Norfolk, by name Richard Ingworth. The monks of Christ Church were hospitable to them; they acquired a small piece of land and built thereon a wooden chapel. But it was felt to be incumbent on this begging fraternity not to become owners of land, so the donors of this plot handed it over to the city to be held for the friars. They did not, however, remain on their original site, but moved in 1270 to a tiny island in the Stour called Bynnewith. Henry Beale, mayor in 1478, was buried in their church. Then in bad time came Henry VIII., and the brotherhood was turned out of house and home. In the days of Good Queen Bess the house was in the possession of the Lovelaces; so here dwelt Colonel Richard, cavalier and poet, who wrote this immortal lyric:--
“Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, To war and arms I fly.
“True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield.
“Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.”
Then there are the East Bridge Hospital, possibly founded by Becket for “wayfaring and hurt men,” now an almshouse, and St John’s Hospital, with its charming half-timber gateway, and others. And what should such a city do without a castle? Yet the good citizens are content with a neglected ruin, the remnants of a fortress first built in the twelfth century, and full of historic memory. But castles have no living faith to keep them whole and sound; they have no usefulness, and this is a utilitarian age. Indeed, it is solely due to accident that any part of the fine old keep remains, for in the early years of last century the city fathers decided to utilise it as a quarry. But modern picks found ancient cement too strong for them, and the undertaking, not proving remunerative, was abandoned. It would have been a gross blunder to leave Canterbury unfortified, standing as it did upon the most important coast road in the kingdom. The keep was completed about 1125, and the castle further strengthened by Henry II. At one period it was the principal county prison. Here it stands amid the prosaic modernity of to-day, a hoar and unhonoured relic of the wild past.