MONASTIC PRIVILEGES.

31

exposed to their malice. And, indeed, if there must needs be this division of seculars and regulars, it was a happy circumstance for the church, and we will add for the country (for with all its gross defects it was the fountain of life and light to the nation in those times), that the dignitaries were taken from both classes, though chiefly, no doubt, from the regulars; and that thus they mutually acted as checks upon those classes, in any momentary ebullitions of party spirit; not to say that those who were removed from the monastery to the mitre would find their past prejudices corrected by a new position and new interests, and by the discovery that men of their own order were not always the most dutiful of their sons. Thus in the working of the system, there were some of those selfcorrecting principles and balances brought into play which in part protected it from itself, and the like to which (though so often overlooked or undervalued) constitute the real worth of many a system which wears an unpromising aspect, and which, in spite of those querulous empirics who assure us that it ought to go intolerably wrong, persists in going tolerably right notwithstanding. This observation is thrown out merely to account for the long continuance of a system, containing within itself such active elements of ruin, as, abstractedly considered, might have been expected to put an end to it much

sooner.

But this is not all. In our post-mortem examination of the Roman catholic church of England, undertaken with a view to ascertain

the complicated disorders which made a way for its final dissolution, another feature presents itself, akin to the last. William the Conqueror, who cared as little for the discipline of the church as for the laws of the land, thought proper to exempt a monastery which he had founded (that of St. Martin de Bello) from episcopal jurisdiction altogether. From this moment a mad ambition drove the monks of the principal religious houses to seek for themselves a similar privilege. Baldwin, abbot of St. Edmunds (Bury), at that time one of the finest foundations in England, obtained such exemption from pope Alexander, although, in the deed which conferred it, and which was executed before the year 1073, the pope, as if lending himself to a transaction hitherto unattempted and unheard of, expresses himself with some reserve, "as far as the thing could be done, salva primatis obedientiâ,” consistently with obedience to the primate. Lanfranc, however, then archbishop, who watched over the interests of the church (as we have already seen) with a cautious and prophetic eye, took away this dangerous privilege from the abbot, on his return to England, and reduced him to submission. But less resolute men, such as Radulph, William, and Theobald, succeeding him in the primacy, and the liberties of the church of England having been, in the mean while, crippled by the machinations of Rome, the monks took courage, and, feeling their own strength, claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of archbishops as well as bishops, as a matter of right; and, producing certain charters

CHARTERS OF EXEMPTION.

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of ancient date (so they pretended), granted to them by popes or princes, carried their suit into the courts of Rome, and got it confirmed. This dispensation, bad in theory, was not better in practice. The monks of Malmesbury, for instance, had lately (about A. D. 1180) elected an abbot. The bishop of Salisbury interdicts the abbot elect from receiving the benediction at any other hands than his own; whereupon the latter goes into Wales, and procures it from the bishop of Landaff (for the Welsh church was still independent of England); on this the archbishop suspends the abbot until he can justify his disobedience by producing his letters of exemption. The abbot presents to the archbishop his charter, which turns out to be faulty in the style, the thread, and the seal, and which savours little of the court of Rome. The bishop asserts it to be spurious, and exhibits many professions of submission on the part of the abbots of Malmesbury, made to him or his predecessors. The abbot is contumacious, declares that he holds himself bound to answer to no superior, whether bishop or archbishop, but to the pope only; and adds, "Poor and miserable is the abbot who does not utterly annihilate the jurisdiction of a bishop, when, for a single ounce of gold a year, he may buy full liberty for himself from Rome." The archbishop, therefore, entreats the pope not to aid and abet this turbulent person; and, at the same time, bitterly laments the injury done, not to the bishops only, but to the whole church, by these papal exemptions, exemptions which had proved ruinous

D

to the peace, discipline, and good order of the monasteries themselves which enjoyed them.1

Here, therefore, was a rift in the church, which time only widened, and which unfitted it for sustaining a storm whenever it should come. But the mischief did not end here. Long before the monks had escaped from the eye of their bishop, they had relaxed from the Sabine simplicity of their primitive institutions: now that they were left at liberty to do what seemed good in their own sight, matters went worse. Giraldus Cambrensis, a writer of the twelfth century, tells us, that on his return from abroad (he had been prosecuting his theological studies at Paris) he dined with the monks of Canterbury. Having caten of their bread, he lifts up his heel against them, and maliciously exposes their bill of fare. It is curious as a picture of the times: - sixteen lordly dishes and upwards, besides a course of herbs, which latter, however, were not in much request; fish of divers kinds — roast and boiled, stewed and fried; omelets, seasoned meats, and sundry provocatives of the palate, prepared by cunning cooks; wines in ample profusion, sicera, piment, claret, must, mede, and moretum (mulberry), any thing and every thing but ale, the boast of England, and more especially of Kent. "What would Paul the hermit have said to all this?" thinks the splenetic Giraldus to himself, " or St. Anthony? or St. Benedict, the founder of the order?"2 Such evidence, however, is to be received with considerable Angl. Sacr. ii. 480.

1 Angl. Sacr. ii. præf. p. 4.

DECAY OF DISCIPLINE.

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suspicion. There was, for ages before their suppression, a run at the monks. A strong party spirit discovers itself in almost all that relates to the church in these middle ages, much as we are told of the harmony that prevailed in it before the reformation. The writer just quoted was a Welsh archdeacon, very far from a good-natured Sir Hugh, who would " persuade a man not to make a star-chamber matter of it;" on the contrary, he finds nothing as it should be: he is one of those dissatisfied spirits that delight in the study of morbid anatomy; neither monks nor bishops please him; he vexes himself because he cannot make a hundred watches go by his own, never suspecting that, after all, his own may be wrong; and, in his Memoir of the Rights and Conditions of the Church of South Wales, he sums up the merits of the Cambrian clergy with a testy anathema, something after the manner of Bruce's benediction of the monks of Gondar, against the whole body, as traitors to him (though it does not appear that they had ever trusted him), and to the liberties of the church to which they belonged. But, when every allowance is made for the prejudice of the witnesses of the day, it is clear that, by the thirteenth century, monks were no longer men of St. Benedict, and that another Dunstan, or a better man, was wanted to revive the monastic spirit, and to recover for the regulars the credit they had lost. Accordingly, in this century, the mendicant orders recently brought into being,

1 Angl. Sacr. ii. 611.