English monasteries

It is proposed, in the course of a few chapters, to put on record certain facts and statements on the “religious” (using the word in its technical signification) life of England...

When the religious houses were possessed of manors--and all save the smallest houses held at least one or two and frequently many--it was incumbent upon them to discharge the ob...

A considerable educational work was accomplished by the monks and regular canons, quite outside the careful claustral teaching of the novices who were being trained to enter the...

The accounts of every monastery show certain definite sums set apart for charitable distribution, either in money, clothing, or food. These sums being charged on real property,...

One of the commonest and cheapest ways of abusing the religious, and bringing monastic life into contempt, has always been to depict the monk, and sometimes the nun, as usually...

Seeing that a well-occupied life is always acknowledged to be the least likely to fall into mischief and sin, the rule of St. Benedict--which required a monastery to be, as far...

In accordance with the various Canons and Councils, both general and particular, all English monasteries in pre-Norman times were subject to the Bishop as visitor; but after the...

Moved, as he chose to assert, with a desire “to purge the Church from the thorns of vices and to sow it with the seeds and plants of virtue,” Henry VIII., the most immoral and c...

Altogether apart from the outrageously scandalous way in which the suppression of the English monasteries was carried out--a fact that any historian worth his salt is now bound...