CHAPTER XXIV.

MONKS AND FRIARS.

We have only to deal here with the relations of the religious houses with the clergy, and their influence upon the general religious life of clergy and people.

First of all, the monasteries kept before the minds both of parish priests and of their people the ideal of an unambitious, self-denying, studious, meditative, religious life. No doubt many of the monks and nuns fell short of their own ideal, and there were occasional scandals; we find notices in the registers of the bishops of their intervention in such cases. But the lives of the majority were sufficiently respectable to maintain the credit of the institution, and there were always some whose lives were exemplary. We may produce an evidence of the general feeling on the subject from the report of the commissioners of Henry VIII., who were sent to inquire into the state of the smaller monasteries, with a view to their suppression. The report stated that there were all sorts of abuses and scandals in the smaller houses, and recommended that they should be suppressed, and that their inhabitants should be transferred to “the great solemn monasteries of this realm, wherein--thanks be to God--religion is right well kept and observed.” As to their report against the smaller houses; they had been employed on purpose to make out a case against them, and the world has long since come to the conclusion that their adverse testimony is not to be believed.

If we are right in these enlightened days in thinking that fine public buildings for the housing of parliaments, municipal corporations, and the like civil institutions of the nation tend to give dignity to the national life; and that galleries of sculpture and painting, and museums of art, exercise an elevating influence on the popular mind; it can hardly be denied that the religious houses, with their stately groups of buildings, their sublime churches, and the numerous beautiful works of sculpture, painting, embroidery, and goldsmiths’ work which they contained, must have had a similar influence upon the religious sentiment and the æsthetic education of the people. A mediæval town was greatly the richer, religiously and intellectually, for having a great monastery in its suburb. The half-dozen religious houses--great and small--in a rural county had a religious, civilizing, elevating influence over the whole country-side. Even their empty ruins have not lost all their influence. The stately relics of the Yorkshire abbeys give added interest and dignity to the great northern county. What would the Isle of Ely be without the solemn grandeur of its cathedral church?

There is not enough left of any one of our own monasteries to enable the visitor to its mournful ruins to realize how each was a little town, protected by its walls and gate towers; with the roofs and chimneys of its numerous domestic buildings, and the trees of its gardens and orchards appearing over the walls; and the towers of its great church forming the centre of the architectural group, as it was the centre of the life of the inhabitants. We have, therefore, borrowed an illustration from Clugny, the parent and prototype of the houses of the Reformed Benedictine Orders.

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The “Religious” and the upper classes of society were more in touch than at first sight appears. The great families kept up friendly relations[407] with the houses which their ancestors had founded, of which they were still the patrons, and from time to time benefactors. People of the upper classes, in travelling, usually sought hospitality at the religious houses, and were entertained by the abbot, while their people were cared for in the guest house. The monks and nuns were largely taken from these classes.

Throughout the Middle Ages the monks--especially the Benedictines--continued to cultivate learning, both secular and religious. The chroniclers of the greater monasteries were the only historians of the time, and their collections of books were the libraries of the nation. Some of the great monasteries served the purpose of the great public schools of modern times, and the nunneries especially were--as they are still in Continental countries--the schools of the daughters of the gentry.

Long after they had ceased to be the pioneers leading the way in reducing the waste lands under cultivation, the monks continued to set an example to the lay gentry and landowners in enterprising scientific agriculture and horticulture; and in the refinement of domestic economy they were ages ahead of the rest of the community; they utilized streams for water power, for irrigation, and for sanitation; they sought out pure water for domestic use, and brought it long distances by conduits. The Church, regular and secular, was a liberal landlord. Not a few of its tenants, seated generation after generation on its manors, grew into knightly and noble families.

The monasteries exercised a most important direct influence upon the parochial clergy and their people owing to the fact that they were the patrons of a large proportion of the parishes; and nominated the vicars who were to teach and minister to the people of those parishes. In many cases where a monastery adjoined a town, the convent had the patronage of all the vicarages in the town in its hands; and their bias would lead them to appoint men of a “religious” tone of character.

That the monks were not unpopular is proved by two facts. First, that the House of Commons only passed the first Act of Suppression of the smaller houses under the coercion of the king’s personal threats; and, secondly, that the suppression was so resented by the people that in several parts of the country the people rose in armed rebellion against it.

But we must be content to indicate thus briefly that the monastic institution in many ways exercised a powerful influence upon the national life and religion.

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The Mendicant Orders require a more lengthened consideration, for they were founded as an auxiliary to the ancient diocesan and parochial institution, in direct pastoral ministrations to the people, and played an important part in the religious life of the nation.

In the thirteenth century--as again in our day--the increasing population had grown too great for the agricultural needs of the country, and the surplus population had flocked into the towns. The result then, as now, was overcrowding, the building of unhealthy houses in the suburbs, poverty, dirt, and disease; and, as a consequence, ignorance and irreligion. Leprosy, brought probably from the East by the returning Crusaders, had become permanent and widely spread among all ranks and classes.[408] At the same time a wave of wild opinions, political and religious, was sweeping across Europe which reached this island almost a century later under the name of Lollardism, and created disaffection in Church and State.

The intellectual disorder excited the zeal of the Spanish canon, Dominic, who organized an order of preaching friars, to go about teaching the truth and contending against dangerous error. About the same time the heart of Francis, a citizen of Amalfi, was fired with compassion for the misery of the poor and sick, and he organized an order of brothers, whose duty it was to minister to suffering humanity. Both orders speedily became very popular, and spread over Europe. The Dominicans introduced themselves into England at Oxford, in 1221, and were patronized by Archbishop Stephen Langton. The first Franciscans came three years afterwards to Canterbury; and both orders spread as rapidly here as in the other countries of Europe.

The organization of both orders ran on the same lines. Each was an ecclesiastical army. Each had a general of the order residing in Rome, under the special protection and correction of one of the cardinals. Under the general was a provincial in each country into which the order extended. The houses of the order in each country were gathered into groups, called by the Dominicans, “Visitations,” and by the Franciscans, “Custodies.” The English province of the Franciscans was divided into seven custodies or wardenships, each including eight or nine convents,[409] and comprising most of the great towns. The Dominicans had fifty-eight convents here; the Franciscans 75. The officers were all elected at a chapter, were required to resign at the ensuing chapter, and might be removed at any time for insufficiency or misconduct.

The Carmelite Friars had their origin in the East, and were introduced into England by Sir John de Vesey, on his return from the Crusade in the early part of the thirteenth century. It had ultimately about five houses in England. The Austin Friars, founded about the middle of the century, had about forty-five houses here. These make up the four orders, Black, Grey, White, and Austin. All smaller foundations were suppressed or included in the Austins, by the Council of Lyons, in 1370.

The great difference between the monks and the friars was that the ideal of the monastic life was seclusion from the world for prayer and meditation with a view to the cultivation of one’s own soul; that of the friar’s life was devotion to active work. The great economical difference was that the monks were individually vowed to poverty, but as communities they were wealthy, while the friars were vowed to have no property individually or collectively, and to live of the alms of the people.

At first the friars were very successful in England, as elsewhere. Bishops like Stephen Langton and Grostete patronized them. Before long members of the mendicant orders became themselves bishops and archbishops. They sent their young men to the universities, and cultivated learning so successfully that they soon became the most famous teachers in the universities of Europe. Among the people generally they effected a great revival of religion, which Sir J. Stephen compares with the revival in more modern times effected by the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.

The friaries were always founded in, or in the suburbs of, the larger towns, for their mission was to the masses of the people. But they had a system of itineration, which seems to have divided the country into districts, and sent the friars two and two, visiting not only the villages but the houses of the gentry and farmers. This brought the friars into rivalry with the parish priests. In the towns the Dominicans often built a large church, planned so as to form an auditorium, and attracted large congregations by their popular preaching. The friars laid themselves out also for special services, which would attract the sluggish and popularize religion, such as miracle plays and the observance of special festivals. In the villages the itinerant friar preached in the church or churchyard, and heard the confessions of those who chose to come to him; and there were many who preferred to confess their misdoings to a comparative stranger, who did not live among them, rather than to their parish priest.

So says Chaucer--

He had power of confession, As said himself, more than a curate, For of his order he was licentiate. Full sweetly heard he confession, And pleasant was his absolution. He was an easy man to give penance There as he wist to have a good pittance, For unto a poor order for to give Is sign that a man is well yshrive. “Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.”

Both in town and country they offered the fraternity of their convent to benefactors, with its prayers for their good estate while living, and sought to have masses for the dead entrusted to them on the ground that a convent of friars would pray them out of purgatory ten times as soon as a single parish priest.

“Thomas, Thomas, so might I ride or go, And by that lord that cleped is St. Ive, N’ere[410] thou our brother shouldest thou not thrive. In our chapter pray we day and night To Christ that he here send hele and might[411] Thy body for to welden hastilee.”

The rustic roughly answers--

“God wot, quoth he, I nothing thereof feel, So help me Christ as I in fewe years Have spended upon divers manner freres Full many a pound, yet fare I never the bet.” “Ye sayn me thus how that I am your brother. Ye, certes, quod the friar, trusteth wee, I took our dame the letter under our sel.”[412] Chaucer, “The Sompnour’s Tale.”

So “Piers Plowman” says--

“I am Wrath, quod he, I was sum tyme a frere And the convent’s gardyner for to graff impes On limitours and lesyngs I imped Till they bere leaves of low speech lordes to please, And sithen they blossomed abrode in bower to hear shrifts. And now is fallen thereof a fruite, that folk have well liever Shewen ther shriftes to hem than shryve them to their parsons. And now parsons have percyved that freres part with them, These possessioners preache and deprave freres, And freres find them in default, as folk beareth witness.”

Bonaventure, when General of the Franciscans, in a letter to one of his provincials, expresses great dissatisfaction with those of the brethren who, contrary to the rule of Francis, assault the clergy in their sermons before the laity, and only sow scandal, strife, and hatred, and with those who injure the parish priests by monopolizing to themselves the burial of the dead and the drawing up of wills, thereby making the whole Order detested by the clergy. But he complains of the injustice done by accusing the whole of what was the fault only of a few--“the scum floats on the surface, and is noticed by every one.”[413] It was rather hard, perhaps, on the parish priest, that he should not only be obliged to submit to the intrusion of the friar, but should be expected to offer hospitality to the intruder, and make much of him, as a constitution of Archbishop Peckham desires him to do.[414]

It is the popular belief that the friars, after having in the first burst of their enthusiasm effected a great revival of religion, very soon departed from the principles of their founders, became useless, if not mischievous, and fell into universal disfavour. There is no denying that the splendid enthusiasm of their first institution cooled down, and the wonderful revival of popular religion which it brought about seemed to die out; it is the inevitable course of all such revivals; but it left good perennial results behind.

The burgesses of the towns in which the friaries were situated seem to have regarded them as useful workers among the poor. In many of the towns the civic authorities consented to hold the site and buildings of the friaries in trust, in order to evade the rule which forbade the orders themselves to hold property. The friars continued to live, and their continuance depended upon the daily voluntary alms of the townspeople. The churches of the friars were favourite places for civic functions and miracle plays; the people sought burial in their precincts; and down to the very eve of their dissolution a great number of wills, both of clergy and laity, contain small bequests to the friars. Perhaps the most striking evidence in their favour at the very end of their existence in England is that Edward IV. was a great patron of the Observants (the strictest section of the Franciscans); Henry VII. founded six convents of them; and Henry VIII. took one of them as his confessor. It is a fact which tells in their favour that they had not grown wealthy. When the dissolution came, the jackals of Henry VIII. found nothing but the houses and their precincts, usually in a poor neighbourhood, and their churches. Their income is commonly returned at 20_s._ to 40_s._, and the total value of the property, when the prior’s house and the garden and orchard and the whole convent was let out on rent, was seldom over £10 a year.[415]

The truth seems to be that the friars continued to be the most popular preachers, and to carry on a steady work among the poor of the towns. But, strongly papal in sentiment, their constitution made them an organized propaganda of any ideas which the cardinal protectors and generals of the orders residing in Rome suggested to the provincials in the several nations, they to the wardens of the districts, they to the priors of the houses, they to their individual friars, and they through the streets of the city and the length and breadth of the land. It was, perhaps, their political opposition to Henry VIII. more than any other cause of offence or dereliction of duty, which provoked their overthrow.

The two chief faults of the system were the principle of mendicancy and the exemption from episcopal control. It is worth while to study the institution carefully, for something of the same kind--brotherhoods of educated and trained men, who are content to abandon the world’s ambitions, to live among the poor, to preach the gospel in a popular way, and to minister to the temporal sufferings of the people--is exactly what is wanted to produce a new revival among the masses of the people; and we need to ascertain the secrets of the friars’ strength and of their weakness.