to heaven, though less innocently than before. The building where they were met is shaken; the floor, at least that part of it which was occupied by the adversaries of Dunstan, sinks from under their feet; and whilst Dunstan and his friends continue to sit in safety, the rest are destroyed or disabled in the ruin. There is much in both these adventures to fasten suspicion upon the saint; for Dunstan, like Cromwell and many more, began his career, in all probability, as a bold and honest zealot, till height begot high thoughts, and he ended with being an ambitious and unflinching adventurer. He was, however, one of the master-spirits of the age. He was, strictly speaking, the founder of the monastic orders in England. They regarded him, whilst living, as their fearless champion," and when dead, as their most powerful intercessor: he gave a triumph to their party which they never forfeited; and having once by his means taken the lead of the secular clergy, they kept it to the Reformation. From amongst the monks of Abingdon, Winchester, and Glastonbury, the three greatest monasteries in England, and from the last more especially, which was Dunstan's own abbey, were for a long while chosen almost all the abbots, principal ecclesiastical officers, and bishops of England1: such was the influence which this extraordinary man had established in his generation; and the natural consequence of so great and so successful an innovation was, a deep-rooted jealousy on the part of the ancient clergy towards the regulars,

1 Hen. Wharton, Angl. Sacr. i. 126.

REGULARS AND SECULARS.

27

who had supplanted them, and heart-burnings between both parties, which were injurious alike to religion itself and to the establishment which should have been its support. Traces of this schism, for such it really was, may be discovered both in great matters and small. It spread through the whole church system like a leprosy. The architecture and ornaments of the churches bespoke it. Many of those grotesque figures which are seen to this day decorating the spouts of the roof, c: the labels of the windows, were probably meant as a fling at the monks; and satirical caricatures to the same effect may still occasionally be met with on the painted glass of our cathedrals. It gives a complexion to our early literature; and the old chroniclers, being chiefly monks, betray on their side the same besetting sin, often without intending it, and sometimes to their own confusion. Thus we are told by one, that as long as the canons were in possession of the church of Winchester no notice was taken of the remains of St. Swithin, nor had a single miracle been wrought at his grave; but that no sooner were the monks in possession, than they carefully deposited his honoured bones within the cathedral in a case of silver and gold, and miracles ensued abundantly;-premises from which the worthy Thomas Rudborne, himself a monk of Winchester, did not mean that we should infer (what, however, we naturally must) that the canons were the more honest men of the two. Thus, again, the biographer of Ulstan, a bishop of Worcester in the eleventh century, tells us that as the bishop was on a journey to court, to

be present at the Christmas festival, he halted for the night at Merlave, where he was hospitably entertained; that he informed his attendants he should on the morrow go to a distant church which he named; that the morning came, and with it a heavy storm of snow and rain; that his clergy made objections to such a journey in such weather; that go, however, the bishop would, even though he should be alone; that they were vexed, indeed, but held their peace; that one Frewen, a man of more audacity and address than the others, volunteered to be the good bishop's guide; that he acquitted him of his office but scurvily, somewhat as Ariel might have done, taking him by the hand and leading him by a road which proved knee-deep in mud and mire, and wherein the bishop lost a shoe; for it was a plan of the clergy, says William of Malmesbury, who tells this precious story, to make the bishop repent of his resolution, and be ruled by his chaplains. Ulstan, it is to be remembered, was a monk, and so was his biographer, and hence this impotent attempt to exalt the order at the expense of the poor seculars.1 Such adventures are old wives' tales, it is true; but they are not on that account the less fitted for showing the quarter from which the wind was setting in. On the other hand, the secular clergy, though on many accounts acting at a disadvantage, and certainly as a body less literary than the monks, could occasionally retaliate. We have seen that one of their weapons of warfare was to decorate their churches with monkish

1 Willelm. Malmesb. ap. Wharton, Angl. Sacr. ii. 260,

DIVISIONS IN THE CHURCH.

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figures in burlesque; but their means of molestation were not confined to these inartificial expedients. Langland, for instance, was a secular priest and a satirical poet, and in his vision of Pierce Plowman he lashes the regulars (though chiefly a class of them of whom we have not yet had occasion to speak) without moderation or mercy. Their artifices to procure endowments for their houses, their love of pleasure, their luxury, their horses, hawks, and hounds, are all touched in a spirit sufficiently caustic. It is probable that the nobles in general took a malicious pleasure in encouraging this exposure of a class of men who were their rivals in wealth, and their superiors in intelligence, and thus widened the breach. Chaucer, who was a courtier as well as a poet, no doubt reflects the feelings of the upper ranks of his day, and he cleaves to the seculars. Meanwhile, neither of these ecclesiastical parties seems to have been aware that by their mutual criminations they were preparing the nation to demand a reformation in the manners of them all; and that each was throwing stones at the other, when the houses of both were made of glass.

But their strife was not merely a strife of tongues; it was their pleasure to thwart one another in deed as well as in word. Whenever the monks got footing in the cathedrals (which in many instances they very soon did), they proved a perpetual thorn in the side of the bishop, more especially if he happened to have been promoted from the secular clergy himself. Then

See Warton's Hist. of English Poetry, i. 266. 4to.

they carried themselves towards him in a spirit of "untamed reluctance." They would not have this man to reign over them. The bishops were vexed at thus having to encounter foes in their own households, and sometimes we find them expressing an angry but impotent wish, that England was clear of them; and sometimes we find them by a stretch of power expelling the whole fraternity at once, and filling up their places with canons who were ever went to be faithful and obedient to their diocesan. On one occasion, indeed, this policy is not caly put in practice by a bishop of Winchester, but an attempt is made by him to induce all the prelates of England to adopt the same. William the Conqueror (for it was under him that the thing occurred) was nothing loth to listen to the overture of Walkelin (for that was the bishop's name), and to second this violent measure 2, probably meaning to lay claim to a lion's share of the spoil; for the Norman princes, like some more modern reformers, had the appetite of the dragon of Wantley,-"houses and churches were to them geese and turkies;" but archbishop Lanfranc, the first metropolitan under the Norman dynasty, a good man and a wise, stood in the gap, and saved his church from the tender mercies of a reform, which being interpreted, would have been a robbery. He, again, had been himself a monk, and probably would on that account view the transgressions of the monks with more charity, and, perhaps, be personally less 2 Angl. Sacr. i. 255.

1 Angl. Sacr. i. 435. 3 Angl. Sacr. i. 248.