Goulton, George (Jordon, 1858-
Medie'val studies ... no. 15,

J

MAS

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Bought with the income
ofthe
EDWARD WELLS SOUTHWORTH
FUND

ff-,\

/¦(^ Price 1/6 net.

AEDiEVftL Studies
No. J5.

jlote lEloman Catjjolit

JAN 22 1927

BY
G. G. COULTON
M.A. Camb.; Hon. D.Litt. Durham.

Eonhon :
^impftin, s^wcsMU ^amtlton, iflent anO Co., ItD.
1921

^ebieval Stubies.
FIRST SERIES. Second Revised Edition, with Appendix. Boards,
6/- net. Contents: (i) The Monastic Legend ; (2) A Revivalist of
Six Centuries ago : (3) Sidelights on the Franciscans; (4) The High
Ancestry of Puritanism ; (5) Romanism and Morality ; (6) The
Truth about the Monasteries ; (7) Religious Education before the
Reformation.
SECOND SERIES.
(8) Priests and People in Medieval England ...
(9) The Failure of the Friars
(10) Monastic Schools in the Middle Ages
(11) French Monasticism in 1503 ; a full summary of the
rare Monastice Reformationis Vindicie of Gui
Jouenneaux ...
(12) Medieval GraflSti
(13) The Plain Man's Religion in the Middle Ages
(14) The Roman Catholic Church and the Bible (2nd Ed.)
(15) More Roman Catholic History ...

ih

net.

6d.

>i

2/6

99

2/6

I,

1/-

ft

6d.

1,

21-

},

i/6

,,

Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 4, Stationers' Hall Court, E.C.

SOCIAL LIFE IN BRITAIN FROM THE CONQUEST TO THE
REFORMATION. Fourth Impression, with 45 plates and index.
Cambridge Univ. Press. 24/- ««'•
" It is one of those delightful books tbat do not demand to be read straight through,
but insist, so rich is the store of various information and entertainment, on being
read straight on from any page at whicb the would-be desultory reader may open it."
— The Times Literary Sttpptemetit.
CHRIST, ST. FRANCIS AND TO-DAY. Cambridge Univ. Press.
10/6 net.
" Mr. Coulton, we think, puts the modernist position better than most modernists
have put it." — The Times Literary Supplement.
A MEDIEVAL GARNER. 744 pages. 46 Illustrations. Bound in
buckram. Constable & Co., London. 30/- net.
" One of the most readable and entertaining books that have come io our way for
some time." — Academy.
CHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND. Third Edition. Methuen & Co.
12/6 net.
" Seldom indeed do we find the burden of leaming and scholarship so easily and
lightly carried as Mr. Coulton carries that of the fourteenth century." — Spectator.
FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE. Second Edition. Duckworth & Co.
18/- net.
" It will, I hope, be read by everyone who wants to know what the Middle Ages
were really like." — Independent Review (Dr. Hastings Rashdall).
FRIAR'S LANTERN. A Medieval Fantasia. The Wessex Press,
Taunton. 3/6 net.
" A book worthy of a place beside The Cloister and the Hearth as a true work of
art. ' ' — Commonwealth.
RHINELAND BY BOAT AND CYCLE. With 14 Illustrations.
The Wessex Press, Taunton. 2/6 net,
" This is a very pleasant book of journeying." — Spectator.

Medieval Studies
No. J5.

0tin Homan Catf)olic
J|tstrir|>

BY
G. G. COULTON
M.A. Camb.; Hon. D.Litt. Durham.

Eon&on :
^impWn, QiarsfjaU, Hamilton, Eent anD Co., HtD.
1921

Me-f la

More Roman Catholic History.

I. — This pamphlet falls into two parts ; apology and defence. And,
as controversies of this kind necessarily wander into details which may
easily weary the general reader, the most important passages are here
printed in heavy type.

2. — ^I have first to apologize for one serious and very careless error
pointed out by an anonymous correspondent in The Tablet, and for
another of minor importance pointed out by Mr. Beck in The Month
(Aug. 1921).
3. — In the sixth of my Medieval Studies (2nd ed., p. 57) I write of the
Cluniac Visitors' report of 1290 " almost all the houses are iU-managed
both spiritually and temporally and are heavily in debt." This is
quite wrong ; the visitors' actual report runs " AU are in a good state
spiritually ; financial matters are ill-managed in almost all the monas
teries, and the houses are much involved in debts." My only palliation
is that the misstatement was an afterthought, and that it does not
materially affect my argument on that page ; see § 26 here below. But
I owe my readers a very real apology for the misstatement.
3. — In my first Study (p. 6) I had occasion to note the comparative
impunity of a scandalous Abbot, Courtney of Tavistock, who, even in
his disgrace, was liberally pensioned ; and on p. 11 I asserted that " the
scandalous Abbot of Tavistock received far more for his single pension
than all the other monks together received for their needs." This is not
true ; the Abbot received 120 marks and the monks 100 pounds ; I had
carelessly attributed to the monks only 100 marks, whereas £100 = 150
marks. Moreover, in this summary on p. 11 I had omitted, what I
stated plainly on p. 6, that the Abbot was burdened also with the main
tenance of one of the monks as his private chaplain. On both these
points Mr. Beck corrects me in The Month, and very justly. But, at the
same time, he falls himself into a similar error. While the Abbot's share
was burdened with the maintenance of one monk, the monks' share was
burdened with the payment of all corrodies and liveries, which would
almost certainly have amounted to more than the chaplain's keep, and
might well have amounted to many times more (Grandisson's Register,
ed. Hingeston-Randolph, p. 889). I have, therefore, unquestionally blun
dered and exaggerated— perhaps, on the whole, by as much as 25 per
cent. But, the reader need only refer to my text to see how little this
affects my main argument as to the comparative impunity of monastic

4 Medieval Studies
sinners. A notoriously scandalous Abbot, under a Bishop of unusual
energy and integrity, is allowed for his pension a sum which, at the lowest
computation, would go two-thirds of the way towards satisfying the
necessities of all his fellow-monks put together. And when Mr. Beck
tries to excuse the job by emphasizing Courtney's noble connexions
(p. 6) he does but clinch my main argument, which is that, in the Middle
Ages, monastic discipline was very frequently governed not by justice,
but by expediency. The abundant visitatorial evidence is here bome
out by the explicit and repeated complaints of orthodox contemporaries.

4. — ^These are the only points on which I am yet conscious of error,
in a little book which is crammed with assertions of fact which differ
widely from those which are dear to modem Roman Catholic historians.
I know very well that there may be other errors behind, which I am
willing to face as plainly as these two. But it is some encouragement
to know that my Studies have now passed through the ordeal of detailed
scmtiny by a very determined adversary who has been judged worthy
of a prominent place in the standard Roman CathoUc monthly.
5. — In originally issuing these Medieval Studies, I tried to give the
public a guarantee of general accuracy by pledging myself to print within
the same covers, at my own expense, answers from Roman Catholics
who were vriUing to stand cross-examination. In sixteen years I had
only one acceptance of this challenge, from a Dominican Friar who
naively acknowledged that he had not even seen the essay which he was
now offering to confute ; I printed the correspondence on a leaflet at
the time. Only now, at last, has a critic come forward to offer what
proposes to- be serious documentary evidence in disproof of a -pari only
of my first essay ; and from him, again, I have, though with much diffi
culty, extracted the confession that, while twice accusing me in print of
having blundered grossly in my account of certain transparently simple
Latin documents, he had not himself actually read through the text of
those documents which we were discussing, but had been misled by the
editor's headlines in capital letters.^ In order to avoid, as far as possible,
all similar waste of time and money in future, I have thought it best to
deal with this critic far more fully than his essay intrinsicaUy de
serves ; for this attack has evidently been taken seriously by his co
religionists, and a brief notice of it has appeared in The English His
torical Review. It is well that the general public should have occasional
opportunities of realizing the sort of writing which passes for history in
the most solid of Roman Catholic monthlies, and which is at least pas
sively approved by that Roman Catholic hierarchy which, on the other
hand, rendered it almost impossible for men like Newman and Lord
Acton to speak their real minds.
6. — ^Last July, I heard that Mr. Beck had written a paper purporting
to supply documentary disproof of the first of my Medieval Studies, and
that he had found some difficulty in pubUshing it. I wrote at once,
I. See% 32 below.

More Roman Catholic History 5
offering to print it at my own expense, to restrict my criticisms to the
same space as his article, or his rejoinders, and to arrange so that neither
of us should have the tactical advantage of the last word. He met me
with a curt refusal ; and his article presently appeared in The Month,
a Roman Catholic journal which systematicaUy refuses to print protests,
lest these should shake the faith of that religious public which subscribes
to it. The first page of Mr. Beck's article contained an attack on the
Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, the whole founda
tion of which, as it seemed to me, lay in Mr. Beck's own ignorance of
visitatorial Uterature. The main body of the article attempted to show,
by taking statistics over a certain area, that " Cardinal Gasquet is amply
justified in claiming the Registers as witnesses favourable to the monks.
In any ease Mr. Coulton's contention is preposterous " (p. i6). This he
attempts to prove by giving a list of aU the monastic offenders he has
found recorded within a very limited documentciry area, of his own
choosing ; after which he reckons up the number of monasteries and
years with wliich these documents deal, and decides that the paucity of
recorded offenders, as compared with the vast number of monks and
nuns, " must decidedly suggest to the unprejudiced investigator that
such offences were sporadic " (p. i6).
7. — Now, the first question asked by an unprejudiced investigator who
seriously considers this statistical argument will be : " You have cal
culated the proportion between recorded offences and the actual numbers
of monks and nuns. But we want actualities on both sides, if your
calculation is to be of any value whatever ; what proportion, therefore,
do you suppose these recorded offences to bear to the actual offences ?
You give an exhaustive list of monasteries on the one side ; but, on the
other, how far is your Ust of offenders likely to be exhaustive ? " A
chUd, one would think, must see the fundamental necessity of arriving
at the clearest obtainable conclusion on this subject ; yet Mr. Beck, as
the foUowing letters wiU show, has consistently refused to face this, the
very first essential factor in his problem.
8. — Nor has he even the excuse of any expert opinion in his favour
here. There is practical agreement among present-day students of
visitatorial records that the class of documents which Mr. Beck chooses
do not give, and have never professed to give, anything Uke the ex
haustive records which his argument postulates. They correspond
roughly (as I have explained in the very essay which he attacks) to the
Joumals of the House of Lords, which may or may not happen to record
cases of immorality. Mr. Beck's obstinate refusal even to discuss this
point leaves him, therefore, in the position of a writer on modem social
questions who should attempt to prove the rarity of divorce in Britain
from the records of the House of Lords. He finds (let us say) that only
tliree cases per annum come before that august court of appeal ; he
compares these with the census returns, concludes that " such offences
are sporadic ; " and, when the question of the exhaustiveness of his
records is pressed upon him, insists upon treating this as irrelevant.
What should we think of such a man's claim to be an unprejudiced in
vestigator ?

6 Medieval Studies
9. — I must deal, however, with Mr. Beck's final excuse. He claims,
as wiU be seen "presently, the right of restricting himself to one single
point at issue between Cardinal Gasquet and myself. The foUowing
letters wiU expose some of his inconsistencies here ; indeed, the con
tention is at variance with his own title for his article in T'he Month,
which he caUs " Mr. G. G. Coulton and Monastic MoraUty " — ^not " Mr.
G. G. Coulton and Cardinal Gasquet." The full worthlessness of his
excuse, however, can only be realised by those who read my actual article
which he impugns. There is nothing in that article to suggest that I join
issue with the Cardinal on the sole ground of the Visitation Acts (let alone
the still narrower ground of Episcopal Registers proper), uninterpreted by
contemporary records. On the contrary, I explicitly emphasize the in
complete evidential value of Visitation Acts taken by themselves ; and
the greater part of my article is devoted to exposing these falsifications of
facts into which Cardinal Gasquet falls by quietly ignoring other illus
trative records. To take again that analogy of the House of Lords ; it
would be transparently absurd to rule out all contemporary evidence
which might help us to calculate the extent to which its recorded divorce
cases represented the whole number of divorce cases in the Kingdom.
It stands to reason that any appeal to the evidence of the Registers, or
of the Visitation Acts, is an appeal to these documents in aU the light
which is cast upon them by the whole body of relevant contemporary
evidence. In The English Historical Review for 1914 (pp. 22, 31, 33,
37) I have given samples of that evidence to prove how smaU is the pro
portion of monastic offences which ever found their way into the Epis
copal Registers.^ I cannot understand how the Editor of The Month,
as a responsible person, can have neglected to ask his contributor the
obvious common-sense question : " How far are you prepared to prove
that the cases you quote represent any calculable proportion of the
actual cases with which we are reaUy concerned ? " We cannot sup
pose that, having ascertained Mr. Beck's inabUity to answer this plain
question, he M'ould stiU have printed this article. By a word of poUte
refusal, he would thus have spared himself and his contributor the shame
of final exposure in their friendly contemporary The Tablet.
10. — Mr. Beck's article found me in Switzerland ; on my return I at
once wrote to request some sort of documentaiy evidence for his two
main assumptions. We discussed the. question first through the post;
then, at his choice, in the columns of The Tablet. He now refuses to
allov^ me to print his own letters ; inquisitive readers may judge of them
from the two which he himself printed in The Tablet (Oct. 8th and 29th),
and from my replies which follow here.

I. A still more striking example is the case of Sir John Arundel (Walsingham, Hist.
Ang. an. 1379 ; Traill, Social England, 2nd ed., vol. 11, p. 260 note ; Oman, Polit. Hist, of
England, p. 18 note). In 1379, Sir John Arundel and his soldiers ravished from a convent
near Southampton a multitude of nuns and convent boarders — to the number of sixty, says
Walsingham. With these they sailed for France ; and, a storm arising, they cast them
overboard " with the same hands wherewith they had caressed them in lustful embraces."
The Winchester Registers exist for this period, but have no record of this event ; it was not
a case which the Bishop had any motive to register for future action, and there was no reason
why he or his secretary should deal with it in that place.

More Roman Catholic History 7
II. — My first letter, of Sept. 14th, ran : " Having come back to work,
I take an early opportunity of replying to your criticisms. Your cor
rections of detail (in so far as they themselves turn out to be correct)
shall be duly acknowledged, without waiting for a fresh edition, in a
cancel-sheet for my Medieval Studies. I have not yet verified them all ;
but in one case at least it is you, and not I, who have misread the very
plain statements in the documents.
You yourself, however, have pointed out that aU these detaUs are of
minor significance. Meanwhile, we differ upon two absolutely vital
points, which wiU really interest historical students, since they lie at the
very root of all speculations as to the significance of visitatorial records.
(a) On your first page, you assert that the monks had to give evidence
before Alnwick's visitor under oath, and therefore under pain of perjury.
May I ask what evidence you have for this ? Such as I can remember
points the other way.
(6) The whole of the latter part of your article — i.e., aU your main
argument — crests on the assumption that the Episcopal Registers give
an exhaustive, (or at least fairly exhaustive,) record of the monastic
delinquents reported by the visitors. A very small proportion of the
monks and nuns comprised in your whole survey come into the complete
reports of the Norwich and Lincoln visitors ; for the vast majority—
probably, for more than 99 out of 100 — you depend entirely upon the
Registers, and argue directly from their comparative silence. Yet aU
professed students of these volumes, so far as I know, agree with me
now in holding that they are far from exhaustive — that, in fact, they
make no pretence of being exhaustive. They correspond to the records
not of an ordinary Court, but of a Court of Appeal ; the Bishop en-
registered only those documents which were likely to be needed for future
reference. This is not only clearly indicated in my Study which you set
out to criticize (p. 8) and again in my English Historical Review article
on the Interpretation of Visitation Documents (1914, pp. 22, 37), but I
think I may confidently claim the support of three of our ablest editors
— Mr. A. HamUton Thompson and Messrs. Charles Johnson and R. C.
Fowler of the Record Office. May I ask here again, therefore, your
evidence for that assumption, which is essential to your presentment of
the statistics, that the Registers contain a roughly exhaustive record of
known offences ?
You wUl see, upon reflection, that your readers have every right to ask
for such evidence. If there was no question of any oath imposed by
Alnwick's visitor at Eynsham, the whole argument of your fkst page is
destroyed. If, again, the Registers do not even pretend to reproduce
any considerable proportion of the monastic lapses actually discovered
by the visitors, then the whole of your main argument, based upon the
assumed exhaustiveness of those records, is equally valueless."
12.— Mr. Beck, in his reply, ignored my first question altogether,
and pleaded m answer to the second : « I deliberately excluded from
my article all discussion of the value of the registers as evidence."
This refusal compeUed me now to turn to the personal question of
his own accuracy or mine on certain questions of detaU.

8 Medieval Studies
My answer admitted my mistake (now corrected) as to Courtney's
pension, but pointed out that, even in that matter, he himself had
made an almost equally important miscalculation on the other side.
The other points were those which wiU be found more fully discussed
in the Tablet letter here below (§§29-31). I then added : —
13. — " All these detaUs, however, have little but a personal interest.
Even though I had been as mistaken on aU these five points as you aUege,
my main arguments would have remained almost untouched, and very
little would have been done to clear medieval monasticism from the
accusations which orthodox contemporaries bring against it. Let us
retum to my own two questions, which went to the root of the matter.
The fiist you sUently ignore ; the second you put aside ; yet they are the
obvious questions suggested by your line of argument to any enqnirmg
reader. I must therefore press again for evidence in favour of your
assertion that the depositions before Bp. Alnwick in 1445 " were made
on oath," and therefore under pain of perjury. Such evidence as I
know suggests .that, even if there were some perfunctory form of oath
(which I doubt, apart from special cases) it was not such as the Bishop
himself would credit with the deterrent force which your argument essen
tiaUy postulates.
14. — ^As to my other question, you plead " I deUberately excluded
from my article aU discussion of the value of the Registers as evidence."
Exactly ; but you thus deliberately remove, so far as the pubUc is con
cerned, all value from your professedly statistical argument. On p. 8
of the essay which you criticize in such detail, I point out that " the
Registers ... no more present a fuU record of serious monastic offences
than the Journals of the House of Lords present a fuU record of the
offences of British subjects." I have since been assured, by the three
most competent editors of such records known to me personaUy, that
they agree with me here. In this year 1921, therefore, it is not fair to
the public to print eight pages of elaborate argument which impUes that
your statistical enumeration is fairly exhaustive within the field of your
survey — for your footnotes on p. 13 rather obscure than reveal the vast
gap that exists between your printed list and the fuU facts. Sixteen
years ago, in the very essay which you set out to controvert, I had
written : " it is most important to insist upon this point, since it is almost
always blinked by apologists" (p. 8). Your eight pages of professedly
statistical argument have no value whatever, for any one who knows the
facts, as a proof of monastic innocence.
15. — But, you argue, they have a value as against me personaUy ; to
you, the real " point at issue," — " that and nothing else concerns us " —
is " the worth of your [G. G. C's] suggestion that the e\'idence of the
Registers pointed to the general immorality of monks and nuns." Here
again, therefore, under protest, I must deal with it as a personal point.
16. — And I must first protest against your inaccurate presentation of
my position. I do indeed appeal to visitation documents against Cardinal
Gasquet, who had claimed that " anything like general immorality was
altogether unknown among the Religious of England." But I do not
confine myself to visitation documents alone. I am concerned, as the

More Roman Catholic History 9
general pubUc is concerned, with getting at the facts from aU sources ;
and a good third of my essay is devoted to this more general evidence.
Nobody can read the Registers to any profit who ignores the emphatic
and repeated testimony of great churchmen living at the time when
those Registers were compiled ; and, (may I add ?) nobody can fairly
criticize my essay who practicaUy ignores, as you do, the arguments of
my last eight pages. Again, you misrepresent me as undertaking the
burden of proof from the visitation documents. Cardinal Gasquet had
gone so far ; but I took care not to foUow him. He claimed that these
" clearly proved " his own point ; I contented myself with replying that
" they seemed to me to point clearly to the opposite conclusion " ; you
must not ignore my choice of the far more cautious form. I am still
convinced that, so far as they go, they point clearly my way ; but I am
far from arguing that they can prove it ; on the contrary, I spend a good
deal of space — wasted, so far as you are concerned — in showing that
their fragmentary character makes it necessary for those who would
prove either side to supplement them by that mass of evidence from other
sources which Cardinal Gasquet persistently ignores. So far as the
frequency of monastic immorality is concerned, my contention is fully
justified if I can secure a verdict of " not proven by the evidence of epis
copal visitation documents." The Cardinal, on the other hand, is com
mitted to the positive " these documents clearly prove my contention."
With regard to the proportion of punishments inflicted, however, the
documents do give us far more statistical evidence, which I have taken
some pains to work out ; and there I am willing to commit myself to the
stronger claim, that they actually prove a startling amount of impunity.
It is tedious to explain these things at such length ; but a blindness to
these obvious distinctions lies at the bottom of nearly aU your arguments.
My deepening conviction is that, when Cardinal Gasquet was unable to
give me even the titles of the visitation acts upon which he could rely
for his positive statements, it was because he knew little but what he
had found at second hand in Dr. Oliver, whom you strangely cite in your
own favour as a man who wrote " in a spirit of detachment." Are you
unawcire that Oliver was a Roman Catholic priest, who worked for forty-
four years on a Jesuit mission under control of the Jesuit authorities —
practicaUy, a Jesuit in all but his official title ? It is he who is mainly
responsible for that rash assumption that the Registers may be accepted
as exhaustive records of monastic immoralities. From this Dr. Oliver,
the Cardinal quotes as to " the extreme punishment with which irregu
larities were visited (I, 37). As you yourself say, he " adopts this view
and extends it generaUy " ; and it is in those general terms that he repeats
this contention on p. 333, adding : " this is clear by instances which
appear in their [the Bishops'] registered acts." Of these " mstances "
he quotes only one ; and I have proved by abundant evidence, m the very
Studies which you profess to refute, that this is not a normal but an ex
ceptional case. You, defending him, quote one more example from the
York Registers, and ask whether I do not think that punishment savage
enough, ignoring altogether {a) that what we know of simUar cases renders
it extremely doubtful whether the punishment was actually inflicted in

10 Medieval Studies
the form decreed by the visitor, and (6) that my detailed examination
of the visitatorial evidence {Medieval Studies, pp. 3 — 4, 126 — 131) tends
to prove that it was very exceptional for a visitor even to decree such a
punishment as this which you cite as t}7pical. Only on p. 7 do you make
any pretence of exhaustive enquiry, and there you confine yourself to
the Exeter Registers proper ; an argument which you yourself stultify
by your " deliberate " refusal to consider whether the Registers proper
even pretend to give us anything like exhaustive records. Yet I must
foUow you even into this refuge.
17. — ^You succeed in discovering seven punishments actually decreed, out
of the records of a whole diocese for sixty-eight years. Then, to support
your contention of the severity of these punishments, you write : " what
would he [G. G. C] say of a Master of Trinity who should be deposed
and sent about his business, or of a Fellow of the neighbouring coUege
who, if it were possible, should be gated for a year, and once a week have
a dinner of bread and water, sitting on the floor of the haU ? " I answer
that, if this Master of Trinity had the record of that Abbot with whom
you are comparing him, we should soon see the difference between modern
Cambridge and medieval monastic discipline. If the Bishop of Ely
could write of him in 1921 to the king and his ministry : " God is my
witness, I lie not . . . in a fit of dmnkenness, he has nearly kiUed a
squire " — if again, five years later, the Bishop was stiU complaining of
him as " leading habitually a Ufe detestable to God and man, . . . and
damnably committing very many other enormous offences which, for
reverence of the academic profession, I do not specify " — if, aU this
while, he were " so dUapidating and wasting the revenues of the CoUege
that its state was hopeless " — ^if, even so, there was considerable diffi
culty in getting rid of him, and, even then, without any hint of further
punishment — if, I say, these things had happened at Trinity which you,
if you had verified my references, might have found happening at
Tavistock Abbey in 1328-33, then the modern world would say that
there was something extraordinarily rotten in the discipline o^ our
University ; and students of the Middle Ages might add : " We are
really going back to the Ages of Faith ! " Or, again, if a Fellow of
St. John's had been convicted of the same offences as his Devonshire
prototypes whom you quote, there would be no question of his sitting
on the hall-floor ; for he would quietly disappear for ever ; and that
summary punishment would be far more effectual and impressive than
to decree a childish penance which, in all probability, was never carried
out in aU its fulness.
18. — For you ignore the fact that I have laboriously worked out the
full statistics of punishments, on pp. 126 ff of the book you profess to be
answering, from the Collectanea Anglo- Premontratensia, i.e. from three
of the only six volumes yet printed which give anything like an exhaus
tive record of these things. I show that, of seventy-five offences re
corded, eighteen were met b}' merely frivolous punishments such as the
recital of a single psalter ; that thirty-eight other criminals were sen
tenced to banishment to other monasteries, but in twenty-eight of these
cases the Dunishment was remitted on the si>ot, whUe in other cases the

More Roman Catholic History \i
records show that it was never actually carried out ; that some of the
worst offenders were even promoted to higher offices — in two cases, to
abbacies — and, finally, that Cardinal Gasquet's summaries and prefaces
to these three volumes falsify these facts so frequently and systemati
caUy that it is difficult to acquit him of intentional manipulation of the
evidence. Why do you ignore these completer records, and try to make
out a case from eight instances taken from records which you know to
be of the most fragmentary description ? If you expect to be taken
seriously yourself, you must begin by taking the reading pnblic seriously ;
this whole attack upon my facts is one which you could not have pub
lished with impunity except in a partisan Roman Catholic journal
which, on principle, refuses to print replies from the persons attacked.
19. — I have gone out of my way to meet you on that ground which,
you say, alone concerns you, although the general public is concerned
with the wider questions. I must now ask you to meet my points as
directly as I have met yours. But I must first add a word or two in
self-defence. Your methods, and those of other Roman Catholic con
troversialists, have compelled me to protest with such uncompromising
emphasis upon certain matters of ascertainable fact, that a hasty reader
might take me for an indiscriminate adversary of monasticism. This
is far from my real thoughts and cannot, I think, be fairly read into
anything I have ever written. Certainly I have not (as you assert on
p. i) " an idee fixe that monks as a rule were raen of evil life, and nun
neries Uttle better than houses of iU-fame." My only comparison of
nunneries to brothels is taken textually from the greatest churchman
of the 15th century, and contains his important softening adverb some
times, which in your controversial zeal you ignore. When I speak for
myself, I am equaUy guarded : my careful estimate is given on p. 10
and suggests that the i6th century monks were " so idle and useless on
the average, so depraved in many instances, that few people would wish
to .see them among us again at this moment, in the state in which the
Dissolution found them." Where I try to work out a statistical ex
pression of this phrase " in many instances," my most unfavourable
calculations put the proportion of actual monastic criminals at about
12 per cent., and the proportion actuaUy reported by the visitors at
6 per cent. (p. 62). If these figures are correct, they justify my criticism
of Abbot Gasquet's verdict, for which he never vouchsafed any real
references. If they are incorrect, I will gladly consider any criticisms
you may have to offer, though I cannot undertake to reply in detail unless
they prove more accurate and more relevant than this Month article.
Meanwhile I must beg you to study my actual words more closely, and
not to put into my mouth, for your controversial purposes, sentiments
which I altogether repudiate."
20. — Mr. Beck replied that he was now transferring the discussion to
The Tablet ; that, with regard to the punishments which he had
cited, neither he nor any one else could say whether they were
typical ; and that the Praemonstratensian evidence was irrelevant.
21. — October 4th. " I find yours of October ist waituig for me, and
learn from it that I am to suspend my judgement untU the next issue of

12 3dedieval Studies
The Tablet. MeanwhUe, however, I must ask you agam, whether in
The Tablet or elsewhere, to pay ordinary attention to the actual words
which I use in the essay which you undertake to confute. You now twice
repeat your assertion that the " purely personal question " of my credi-
bUity on the one hand, yours and Cardinal Gasquet's on the other, " with
which alone you are concerned," is confined to the evidence of the
Episcopal Registers, a phrase which you once underline for emphasis,
and upon the narrowest construction of which your argument entirely
depends : "we are dealing with Episcopal Registers, and the Praemon
stratensian evidence is irrelevant." But I pointed out plainly in my
last letter that Cardinal Gasquet's own words are not merely Episcopal
Registers but .Acts of Episcopal visitations " ; and the phrase which I
myself employ in chaUenging him is English 'Visitation acts. Both his
phrase and mine, I must again remind you, are far wider than that which
you persistently attribute to us ; they very clearly include such records
as the Praemonstratensian Register of Bp. Redman. The fact that
Redman recorded his findings not in his diocesan capacity but as Prae
monstratensian visitor, if it at all affects the value of his Register as
historical evidence for or against the monks, teUs on the whole in my
favour ; a Praemonstratensian visitor would be more tempted than a
diocesan to gloss over the faUings of his feUow-Praemonstratensians.
Not only do I appeal to the Praemonstratensian evidence in my pamphlet
itself (p. 12), but, in the letter posted to Cardinal Gasquet on Nov. 13th,
1901, I asked him if he could venture to maintain that it, (with other
visitation acts which I specified by name for clearness' sake) bore out
his incriminated general contention. I asked him the same probing
question with regard to the volume of Norwich visitations, which cer
tainly is not an " Episcopal Register " in that narrowest sense to which
you now attempt to confine the phrase. In fact, the Cardinal himself,
and you also in your article, appeal to these Norwich visitations when
ever it suits your purpose. If the reading public is to treat your criti
cisms seriously, you must no longer evade the Cardinal's actual words
and mine; you must adopt the actual phrases upon which both of us
argued ; for the whole of your present position rests on the falsification —
hitherto, no doubt, only careless — of that phrase. Therefore both the
Praemonstratensian and the Norwich records come definitely within even
those very narrow limits which you set to this discussion. They were
included both implicitly and expUcitly in my original difference of
opinion with the Cardinal, and in the pamphlet you attack ; and even
the most desperate controversial necessities cannot justify your ruling
them out now.
22.— I say advisedlj', the reading public, since you write of this now as
" a private correspondence." It is in no sense private. Your article,
indeed, was in one sense private, since you declined my offer to give it
gratuitously whatever publicity I could — an offer which need not have
interfered with any previous arrangement — and you printed it in a
sectarian religious organ which refuses to admit protests from persons
attacked. But my repeated requests that you should now produce some
sort of historical evidence for your most important historical arguments

More Roman Catholic History 13
are public requests ; I have the right which every reader has to ask you
for ordinary vouchers ; and I propose, with your leave, to publish this
whole correspondence, together with the corrections of fact which you
and " X " of The Tablet have pointed out, in a supplementary sheet to
be added to the essay which you impugn. It wUl give my readers farther
light upon the difficulties which beset a student who tries to portray
from medieval documents the realities of medieval life."
23. — Mr. Beck repUed with further evasive reasons for ignoring the
Praemonstratensian evidence on this fundamental question of im
punity for monastic offences, and reproached me for the mis
statement exposed by " X " in The Tablet, stigmatising this as
a " Ue " which had now " done its work for years." With regard
to the question whether the Praemonstratensian documents had
been included from the very beginning of my discussion with
Cardinal Gasquet, he remarked " You alone can know what you
intended, and naturaUy I accept your word."
24. — Oct. 9th. " I cannot thank you for your tardy courtesy in
offering to " take my word " for a thing which I could have shown you
in black and white, if you had wasted more time in disputing it. The
Praemonstratensian evidence, therefore, is now strictly to the point, even
within the narrow issue within which you would confine us ; and not
only does "this reduce to absurdity the confessedly fragmentary calcula
tions of your Month article with regard to monastic punishments, but
also it teUs far more heavUy than the rest against the Cardinal's historical
trastworthiness — ^which, you plead aU this time, is your one real point —
than even his inaccuracies and his refusal to give vouchers for his state
ments in other fields. If, then, you persist in ignoring the Praemonstra
tensian Registers, from which I show fuU statistics in the Appendix to my
incriminated Medieval Studies, this must be upon some better excuse
than you give in your present letter. Experience, you say, has taught
you to deal with one point at a time. But it is possible that riper ex
perience may bring home to you the contrary consideration, that we can
never get even approximate truth except by the co-ordination of many
points. Visitation documents cannot be really understood except in
the Ught of other records of the time ; and, if you had carefuUy read the
weU-known story of Abbot Marleberghe in the Evesham Chronicle, for
instance, or the Cistercian visitation documents pubUshed by Dom
Martene and Dom JuUan Paris, or those Benedictine documents recorded
by Abbot Tritheim, you would have recognized the worthlessness of your
argument on p. i. Again, if you had kept abreast of modern research
in your narrower field of the EngUsh Episcopal Registers proper, you
would have reaUzed that, since the days when Cardinal Gasquet wrote
that book upon which you chaUenge discussion, scholars have entirely
abandoned his assumption, derived from Oliver, that the Registers afford
even approximately exhaustive data as to monastic delinquencies. Yet
all those pages of statistics which form the gist of your article depend
entirely for their significance upon this exploded assumption.
25. — But (you farther plead) you have not, in fact, consistently ig
nored these Praemonstratensian records, nor those Norwich visitations

14 Medieval Studies
which tell almost as clearly against you. That is quite true ; in fact,
I had drawn your attention to this fact in my last letter ; and, if the
question had interested me or the public, I could have filled a page with
simUar inconsistencies from your article and your letters. But, under
all these inconsistencies, you have been consistent on one single and
essential point ; you have steadily refused to give documentary vouchers
for your statements or assumptions of capital importance. Your excuses
vary ; but your refusal has never varied. This is a fact which the pubUc
will be able to see and judge, even though you refuse me permission to
print your own letters, which would make it even clearer.
26. — And, since you attach so much importance to one of the errors
of detail which I am publicly retracting in this postscript to my Monastic
Legend, I must add one word of explanation. If you look again at the
context, you will find that my mis-statement about spiritual decay,
however untrue to the actual document, does not sensibly affect the
argument of that paragraph. I am there combating Mgr. Benson's idea
that monastic dUapidations were mainly due to Cromwell and his agents ;
the whole paragraph accumulates instances of dilapidations by the
monks themselves long before the Reformation. On this subject my
quotation is perfectly correct ; but I foolishly (or, with ciUpable care
lessness, if you prefer it) added an afterthought on the spur of the
moment, due to the fact that my eye caught the word spiritualiter im
mediately preceding temporalia, and that I remembered the visitors'
preceding report to have been unfavourable on both counts.' The result,
as you say, exactly reverses their actual report on the spiritual state of
the EngUsh Cluniacs at that particular visit ; but it does not deserve all
your strong language. You might give a reader a copy of the paragraph
as it stands, and another with this erroneous statement of three words
expunged, and he might easily read them on two consecutive days with
out noticing any alteration whatever. There is much truth in your
obliging suggestion to The Tablet, that I might have been birched for
this at school ; but your attitude towards this, and towards the two
much smaller errata which you have found, reveals a difference of mental
horizon which goes far to explain the cleavage between Catholic and
non-CathoUc. To you, it evidently seems more shameful to have erred
than to refuse acknowledgement of error. My conviction, on the con
trary, is that God and the thinking public wiU judge different students
and different religious denominations not so much by their separate
inaccuracies as by their fundamental attitude towards errors once pointed
out to them ; that, in fact, we are all fallible, and those are most faUible
who are slowest to recognize this painful condition of humanity. I seem
to you pitUess towards certain errors, it is because these are still un
blushingly defended. According to my creed, this world and the next
belong not to those who have never blundered but to those who can
repent and amend. It is no mere form of speech, therefore, when I
thank you in advance for any other error of fact which you can give me
I. The Latin runs as follows : " Omnia sunt in bono statu spiritualiter ; temporalia fere
in oranibus locis male tractantur et domus sunt multum debitis obligatae." — Duckett, Vis.
and Chap-Gen. of Cluni, p. 242.

More Roman Catholic^ History 15
the opportunity of correcting in my published writings ; since it is only
by such reciprocal corrections and acknowledgements that ecclesiastical
history wiU ever be cleared from the cloud of suspicion under which it
has rightly lain for many generations past."
27. — Oct. Sth. Mr. Beck now transferred the discussion to The
Tablet ; he attacked me on three points, to which I replied in
detaU.
The Tablet, Oct. 22nd. — " Mr. Egerton Beck declined my original
offer to print his ' exposure ' of me at my own expense ; in a corres
pondence of nearly a month I have been vainly begging him for
documentary evidence for two of the historical assertions or assump
tions upon which his Month article was based ; he insists, ' it is, as
you see, a purely personal question.' I must, therefore, deal with
the three points which he disputes ; on a fourth point, equaUy im
portant as a personal issue, he apparently abandons his attack now
in the face of my repUes to him.
29. — (a) I state that Archbishop Lee visited five nunneries in
1535 ; ^r. Beck asserts that he only visited three, emphasizing my
supposed blunder with a note of exclamation. I asked him to look
^ain at the documents to which we both appeal, even giving him
page references ih the most important cases. Yet he now vmtes to
you, ' there is nothing confirmatory in the documents,' and hints
that I have fallen into another ' indefensible error.' I must, there
fore, waste my time and your space in refuting, for the second time,
an accusation which ought never to have been made. On p. 437,
Mr. Beck wUl find Lee's formal premonition to Clementhorpe that he
would visit that nunnery on August 22nd ; in the absence of nega
tive evidence, there is every reason to assume that he did so ; and
the Editor (Mr. WUUam Brown, who has brought out four volumes
of episcopal registers among his many other labours as secretary and
editor for the Surtees Society) takes it for granted that the visita
tion took place (pp. 425, 428). Page 440 gives the injunctions from
Lee's visit at Sinningthwaite ; 443 those of Nun Appleton ; then
the register records that he gave injunctions at Nunbumham ' con-
simUes iniunctionibus factis priorisse et conventui de Synnyng-
thwate ' (446) ; fifthly, p. 451 gives his injunctions at Esholt. My
impugned assertion, therefore, was strictly true ; two sets were
consimiles, which in Latin means ' identical,' and I think nobody
who reads the two others wiU deny that they were ' simUar to '
those of Sinningthwaite. The documents themselves are so trans
parently clear that I cannot understand Mr. Beck's attitude when
once his attention had been called to them. Smee, however, he still
persists in his serious accusation against me, I must resort to a test
which has served me effectively once before. Let us each send you
a cheque for £5, and leave you to choose a responsible umpire who,
under his own name, wUl report in your paper whether my enumera
tion is right on pp. 90-1 of my Medieval Studies, or Mr. Beck's on
p. 5 of The Month, where he flatly contradicts me. Let the umpire
retum one cheque to the party in whose favour he decides, keep £1

1 6 3\dedieval Studies
for his half-hour's trouble in verifying the documents, and hand
over the £4 to any hospital you yourself may choose. If I might
venture to suggest a name, Dom Bede Camm is one who, Uke myself,
bears a certain pubUc responsibUity to Cambridge University for
his published pronouncements.
30. — (i) The disputed question of Abbot Courtney's dress is not
so simple ; and here I cannot defend myself vrithout entering into
certain details of social history which Mr. Beck ought to have as
certained before making this attack, or which he might at least have
inferred from plain bints in my letters to him. He evidently thinks
a priest's dress as natural for a 14th-century monk as for the monks
whom he sees round him to-day ; the priest's costume, again, he
visualizes very differently from what it really was. When Abbot
Courtney threw off his monastic garments (a fact about which there
is fortunately no dispute) he became in strict Canon Law ipso facto
excommunicate, and was living in mortal sin. That fact, evidently
unknown to Mr. Beck — with another which he ignores, that the
Bishop knew of worse faults behind (' ut de majoribus et gravioribus
ad praesens taceatur ') — must necessarily colour our interpretation
of these two letters in which the Bishop is so evidently saying no
more than he is compelled to say. A study of the two words on
which Mr. Beck lays such stress — abbatibus and provincie — in all the
places where the Bishop uses them, and his explicit complaint that
the offences rehearsed in 1345 are post et contra his own prohibitions
of 1338, show pretty clearly that Courtney's offences, though not
described in absolutely identical words in both letters, were the
same in both years ; in which case he had already thrown off the
cowl in 1338. But I need not press this, since the actual phrase to
which I committed myself, ' unmonastic foppishness of dress,' is
justified by the natural interpretation of Grandisson's actual state
ment that Courtney needed correction ' tam in indumentis et cal-
ceamentis quam tonsura et gestu exteriori.' In the second letter,
he is explicitly asserted to have cast off his monastic habit and to
be clothed ' ad instar secularis sacerdotis,' which Mr. Beck loosely
renders ' wearing the dress of a secular priest.' Ad instar does not,
like consimilis, imply identity ; it is commonly used for the most
far-fetched comparisons, and cannot, even by itself, bear this strict
interpretation. Moreover, it does not stand by itself, and Gran
disson's next words explicitly justify my other incriminated phrase,
¦ relapsed into secular finery.' Courtney went about " manicis bo-
tonatis et calciaturis indecentibus ' — that is, in finery constantly,
though vainly, forbidden to the secular priest, whose dress was very
iiearly that of the layman. It is Mr. Beck's ignorance of this essen
tial fact which makes him so angry with me. The medieval clergy,
in general, dressed exactly like the laity of simUar income and status,
under certain sumptuary restrictions. As the canonist Lyndwood
puts it, ' they have no definite dress assigned to them either in colour
or in shape ; wherefore they may wear any dress befitting their
station in Ufe, except in so far as this is expressly prohibited.' The

More Roman Catholic History 17
priest or dignitary, over his other garments, was expected to wear
a ' cappa clausa ' ; but the canonist Ayton, who wrote possibly in
the very year of Grandisson's letter, says that this order was seldom
obeyed ; many clerics, he complains, went about dressed ' Uke
apes ' ; Lyndwood, a century later, seriously doubts whether the
command is binding, in the face of general neglect ; and many
learned antiquarians would hesitate to commit themselves to a
description of this ' cappa clausa,' or to identify it in a picture or
on a priest's effigy. Therefore, even Grandisson's ' after the fashion
of a secular priest ' simply commits him to the ordinary middle-class
or upper-middle-class secular dress ; and, in his added phrases, he
specifies ' finery ' which was not permitted to the secular priest.
These ' buttoned sleeves ' and ' indecorous shoes ' refer to. two of
the most worldly fashions of that time. Such sleeves are conspicuous
on weU-known monuments like the Lynn brasses ; they were the
newest and most expensive fashion after those stitched sleeves
which more than one s5niod had expressly forbidden to the clergy.
The shoes were a stiU greater offence ; a whole series of synods had
forbidden the fashionable ' beaked ' or open-worked shoes of the
day ; in Chaucer and ' Piers Plowman ' the clerical fondness for
such finery is satirized ; Mj^rc warns the priests against it ; yet in
1463 the Council of London was still compelled to wrestle with
clergy who wore ' sotulares nimium rostratos.'
31. — (c) Mr. Beck's third attack rests upon equal ignorance. Gran
disson twice (Mr. Beck, after the trouble I took to emphasize this in
my letter to him of September 3rd, has no excuse whatever for
writing ' in an official document ') accuses John de Ste. Gemme of
having deserted his priory of Barnstaple temere, which word, in
Canon Law, means ' without reasonable excuse.' Upon this the
Editor, Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph, commented : ' the Prior
was too fond of the attractions of Paris ' ; my mUder phrase runs,
' he preferred Paris life ' ; and this again makes Mr. Beck very
angry. He knows just enough of Canon Law to understand that
the Prior, nominaUy, was under the orders of an Abbot, and there
fore no free agent ; but he has not read enough of visitation docu
ments to realize that, in every Order, one of the most constant and
serious disciplinary problems was that of subordinates who, by fear
or by favour, extorted from their superior an ' obedience ' to suit
their own preferences. Therefore, confronted with Grandisson's
repeated assertion, he tries to evade it partly by the false implica
tion that the teU-tale phrase occurs only once, and finaUy by pleading
that it is ' quite clear, to anyone not blinded by prejudice, that that
excellent prelate must have known that his official utterances in
this matter were bunkum.' In short, a living student is either
ignorant or dishonest if, by dint of hard work, he has discovered
anything undreamt of in Mr. Beck's limited phUosophy ; and a
dead Bishop is equally guilty when Mr. Beck cannot understand
bim." 32.— On Oct. 29th, the editor printed a reply from Mr. Beck, adding

1 8 Medieval Studies
" this correspondence may now cease." But the appeal to the umpire
and the money-penalty had proved as effectual as I had anticipated.
Confronted with the painful altemative of facing the plain documentary
evidence or losing £5, Mr. Beck now admits that I had been right
about Lee all the time ; he apologizes for his mistake, and his explana
tion amounts to a confession that he himself, aU these three or four
months, had been arguing not from the actual text of the documents in
dispute, but from the editor's capital headUnes, which had misled him.*
On the other points, which unfortunately do not lend themselves to this
acid test, he holds his ground as bravely as ever. On the second, he has
no fresh reasons to supply, but sneers at my " display of erudition."
On the third, he argues that, since Grandisson did not in fact succeed in
enforcing his order for the return of the absentee Prior, we must there
fore conclude that " his claim was, as I said, bunkum." I leave this
argument to the judgement of all readers who have any acquaintance
whatever with the actual working of mediev^ laws ; indeed, it would
be difficult to measure the controversial necessities of a writer who
should find himself driven to apply this reasoning to the law-courts of
even the most orderly state in the modern world.
33. — ^To this defence on his three points the Editor allowed Mr. Beck
to add a long paragraph complaining that the discussion was being
side-tracked — as if I had not exactly followed his lead, and dealt
seriatim with the only three points he emphasized — and that the " sub
stantive issue between Mr. Coulton and myself" is the question whether
Cardinal Gasquet is right in appealing to the English visitation acts as
proving that " anything like general immorality was altogether unknown
among the religious of England." By appl57ing the guiUotine at this
juncture, the Editor therefore aUowed Mr. Beck to give his own version
on a point entirely new to readers of The Tablet, which Mr. Beck now
claimed to be the main point at issue, yet upon which 1 had no chance
of reply. Therefore I sent the following brief letter, to show that I was
at least prepared with a reply, and that such readers of The Tablet as
really desired to read both sides of the question might obtain that reply
gratis. The Editor declined to insert this letter. It is true that the cor-
respondfence had by this time run to inordinate length ; but I cannot
see how this could excuse his permitting a fresh attack without aUowing
even these few words of warning to his public that a defence was, after
all, forthcoming in other quarters, though not in his own paper. If he
had had an equal sense of justice and of space, he could have gratified
both by declining to accept those 22 additional lines in which Mr. Beck
went off from his own chosen three points to an entirely fresh subject
of discussion. My suppressed letter ran as follows ; —
I. Even after I had taken a good deal of trouble to point out his mistake (letter of Sept.
23rd) he had written to The Tablet (Oct. Sth) " There is nothing confirmatory in the docu
ments. Experience has made me distrustful of anything but official documents . . . the
injunctions for Clementhorpe and Nunburnholme are not printed among the visitation
documents." Who could have suspected that, behind this quiet confidence of assertion
and re-assertion, lay the secret consciousness of not having actually read through the docu'
ments in dispute ? Yet this is the kind of writer against whom serious students have tp
defend themselves when the study of medieval history leads them to conclusions un
welcome to The Month.

More Roman Catholic History 19
34. — (Oct. 31), "I s5mipathise with your feeling that the three points
have been sufficiently discussed ; but you have allowed Mr. Beck to
pass beyond them into a whole paragraph of extraneous matter, which
he now claims as the real question at issue beween us, and on which I
have no chance of reply. May I therefore say that I have already an
swered these arguments through the twopenny post, that I am printing
my letters (he does not allow me to print his), and that any reader of
The Tablet may procure a copy gratis by sending a stamped and ad
dressed wrapper, between now and Nov. 19th, to The Wessex Press,
Taunton."

35. — If some readers feel this whole matter too farcical for serious
notice, let us remember the enormous crowd-force of the Roman CathoUc
Church. By its numbers and organization it gives real seriousness to
aU that it openly or tacitly approves, however little intrinsic weight there
may be in the thing thus supported. The Month is widely read, and has
a Wgh sectarian reputation, within its own community ; it enjoys un
wavering support from the hierarchy, which in tum it supports un
waveringly. The docUe Roman Catholic feels that he is safe whUe he
reads it. If a writer pretends to famUiarity with highly technical detaUs
of medieval history, the readers assume that he has a certain soUd founda
tion for that claim. If they have never heard his name, or even if they
know him to have been inaccurate in the past, they trust in the Editor's
impUed guarantee, which again is. supported by the impUed guarantee
of the whole hierarchy. Just as the Irish peasant takes aU his theology
from the priest, so a large number of more educated folk get their history
from The Month ; they have little opportimity of hearing the other side ;
they are at the mercy of loud and pretentious claims ; and thousands of
people are growing up in disastrous ignorance of the world's actual past.
Nothing can combat this set-back to civUization but the occasional un
sparing exposure of writers who, negUgible in themselves, borrow an
intrinsic importance from priestly, episcopal, or even Papal patronage
and support. It is not reaUy charitable to the average Roman Catholic
to leave him at the mercy of mis-statements which he has no chance of
checking ; and I may conclude by repeating here the distinction which
I have lately had occasion to draw between Roman CathoUcs as a religious
community, and the professional methods of too many Roman Catholic
writers.* After pointing out that the historical untrastworthiness of
certain living Roman CathoUc historians, in the highest positions, bears
out those condemnatory words of Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton,
which, if Protestants had written them, would have been stigmatized
as blind bigotry, I proceeded :
I. Newman to Father Coleridge, July 4th, 1864. " Unless one doctored all one's [his
torical] facts, one would be thought a bad Catholic." Lord Acton to Gladstone, [1872],
" 1 think you are too hard on ultramontanes, or too gentle with ultramontanism. You
say, for instance, that it promotes imtruthfulness. I don't think that is fair. It not only
promotes, it inculcates distinct mendacity and deceitfulness. In certain cases it is made a
duty to lie. But those who teach this doctrine do not become habitual liars in other things."
{Correspondence, ed. Figgis and Laurence, igi?-)

20 Medieval Studies
" But I draw a strong distinction between these public personages
and the rank and fUe of Roman CathoUc laity, or even of priests.
These latter confess frankly that they have no time for historical
questions, or even for abstract questions in general, which they
leave to ' specialists.' Therefore, except in so far as any one of
them individuaUy encourages ' speciaUst ' falsehoods by open
support or by wUful sUence, my words in the text have nothing to
do with them. I know how many good works there are in that
Church, and how much good teaching ; I should be very sorry if
my readers thought otherwise. But I separate this altogether from
what I advisedly caU ' the appalling Uterary methods ' of their
professed historical champions : and I must continue to expose
those methods, wherever necessary, without reference to what is
reaUy an extraneous question, the mentality of the average Roman
CathoUc."*
With the individual sincere Roman CathoUc, I have a sympathy which
deepens from year to year, in proportion as we all draw nearer towards
the day when we hope to see no longer per speculum in aenigmate. But
against those who, claiming to be teachers, are poisoning the very sources
of history, and who compel the public to ask whether it is possible to be
both reUgious and truthful, I hope to fight to the very last. And my
trouble, in this particular case, wiU not be altogether wasted if it does
something towards recalling the Editor of The Month to a sense of the
moral responsibUity incumbent upon those who systematicaUy cut off
their readers from aU opportunity of hearing the other side ; or if it
suggests to one or two among the Roman CathoUc hierarchy that such
strict spoon-feeding with foods so carelessly guarded from corruption
must, in the long run, prove a policy disastrous to the Church herself.
I. The Roman Catholic Church and the Bible, Simpkin, Marshall and Co. 2.'- ; 2nd ed.
P- 37-

Printed at The Wessex Press, Taunton.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 02947 0417