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(FIRST SERIES)

SECOND REVISED EDITION
WITH THREE APPENDICES

G. G. COULTON, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
From St. Francis to Dante, Chaucer and his England, A Medieval Garner,
etc., etc.

lonOon :
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON,
KENT y Co., Ltd.
1915

Preface to First Edition.

These essays, mostly reprinted from the Reviews, are intended to defend
the moderate Anglican position against the misrepresentations of writers
who disparage modern civilisation in comparison with a purely imaginary
and unhistorical idea of medieval life.
The Author attempts to show how much is lost, even from the purely
picturesque point of view, by thus sacrificing plain truth to false senti
ment ; for we shall never see the great men of the past in their full
greatness until we realize the difficulties under which they lived and
worked. Although the Studies are necessarily controversial to this
extent, they are written entirely from orthodox pre-reformation sources,
no others being quoted except here and there in corroboration of facts
already established : since the curse of Church history is the too frequent
habit of writing from second-hand or partisan documents.
As the plan of these pamphlets renders it impossible to give a crowd
of references which would only weary the general reader, the Author is
glad to give a definite guarantee of his good faith by offering four pages
in each pamphlet to any competent critic who will undertake to convict
him of serious error. If his statements are inaccurate, he thus under
takes to supply their refutation at his own expense. He has already
made a similar offer in vain to many Romanist controversialists, includ
ing all the writers of the Catholic Truth Society ; and he now repeats
the offer, in order to enable the general reader to realize how strongly
Anglicanism is supported on many important points by the most incontro
vertible medieval testimony.

'Preface to Second Edition.
These papers, though occasional and to a great extent controversial,
have one general purpose in view — to justify the main trend of modern
culture. Strongly as the author sympathizes with the triumph of medieval
over classical civilization, he is equally convinced of the necessity of
outgrowing the Middle Ages. St. Augustine had to combat a formidable
reactionary party which attributed all the evils of the fifth century to
Rome's abandonment of her old gods ; we, in the twentieth century,
have still to combat a similar reaction towards institutions which have
lost the universal obedience which they once commanded. Whatever
may be our attempts to solve the riddle of the universe, whether in the
religious or in the secularist sense, much must depend upon the appeal
to history. To a great extent, our theory of life and our hopes for the
future must be based upon the facts of the past ; and any falsification
of those facts must therefore, in the long run, impede true social progress.
Opinions will always differ widely and legitimately ; but many facts of
history might be established with practical certainty, if only we were
willing to take a little more trouble. The difference between a
Catholic, a Protestant, and an Agnostic is often even more philosophical
than historical. And those differences could be far more tolerantly dis
cussed if only all parties could agree more nearly on matters of ascer
tainable fact : the widest dividing gulf is the suspicion, on one side or
the other, of careless mis-statements, or even of literary dishonesty.
This is the main reason for a second edition of these essays ; though
the author, when the question was raised early in 1914, had decided
against republication. In the first edition, he merely exposed such mis
statements of Abbot Gasquet 's as came directly in his way. To these
exposures, though supported by unexceptionable documents of the Middle
Ages, the Abbot never directly replied ; and now he publicly claims his ,
promotion to the Cardinalate as an Apostolic testimonial to his historical
scholarship.1 To abstain from republication might therefore have en
couraged the impression, openly expressed in many quarters, that the
Cardinal's main contentions are in general based upon actual documen
tary evidence, and that the points on which that evidence fails him are
few and negligible. The author has therefore added to this new edition
a rough list of such blunders and mis-statements of facts as he has noted
during a far from exhaustive study of the Cardinal's books and of their
professed sources. These 54 pages of criticism may enable students to
realize the true meaning of Cardinal Manning's famous dictum, that the
appeal to History is a treason and a heresy ; or again of Cardinal New
man's despairing answer to the suggestion of founding a Catholic His-
1. See Appendix II,

Preface.

torical Review. " Who would bear it ? " wrote Newman : " unless one
doctored all one's facts, one would be thought a bad Catholic." In
short, just as these Studies were first printed because some plain protest
seemed necessary against the habitual distortion of historical facts by
Ultramontane writers, who profess to rely upon actual documents, so
they are now reprinted because that protest seems still necessary, and
because the author's silence, in the face of claims recently made by,
and in behalf of, the new Cardinal, might seem like allowing judgment to
go by default.
The English official historian seems sometimes a little excessive in his
disregard of the general public. Even our Professors had not always
realized, until a few months ago, how successfully the ideas of millions
can be moulded by the steady influence of teachers who preach
plausible untruths systematically ex cathedra ; and, in this direction,
Ultramontanism has exploited our indolence as steadily as Imperialist
Militarism. It was of the Ultramontanes that Pascal complained " they
find it easier to produce monks than reasons " ; and the same Pope who
promoted Abbot Gasquet to the purple had previously put Loisy and
Duchesne upon the Index. Here, in a nutshell, is the key to the furious
anti-clericalism of France, Italy, and Spain ; it is the inevitable reaction
of a long-poisoned public opinion. Moreover, even our official historians
are more truly products of contemporary public opinion than they
themselves always realize ; for they pick up many of their ideas in
Clubland, which in its turn owes them to the man in the street. English
historians of the highest rank have lately lent themselves, whether
through neglect or ignorance, to the comedy of exploiting a political
honour as proof presumptive of historical accuracy. They have looked
aside from the high interests entrusted to them, and have publicly con
doned, in their own domain of History, what would never have been for
given by men of equal distinction in the domain of Natural Science. If
any zoologist of repute had based an important theory upon the alleged
total absence of felidae from the fauna of Borneo, and if another zoologist
had replied by producing thirteen visible and tangible specimens of
different felidae, there might indeed have been much curious speculation
concerning the causes of the original error. But one thing is certain ;
the peccant theorist would never have dared to republish, without a single
word of apology, his original mis-statement of fact, and his original
theories based upon that falsehood. Or, even if it were remotely con
ceivable that he should have done so, we may at least feel assured that
his speculations would have been tabooed in all serious scientific circles
until he had repented and made public amends. If, moreover, for political
reasons, some Prime Minister had presently raised him to a peerage,
certainly the President of the Royal Society, with two other equally
distinguished scientists, would not have joined a committee formed for
the purpose of offering him a public testimonial. In the realm of Natural
Science, public opinion is too strong and too healthy to permit such
things ; and, if it be true that History cannot purge herself of her own
dross by the same straightforward methods, then History is irrevocably
doomed to that hopelessly inferior rank to which too many readers are

vi Preface.

already inclined to relegate her. Let us, however, have faith in the
ultimate victory of the public conscience. A century hence, the facts
to which I am here calling attention will very likely seem almost incredible
— almost as incredible as it seems to us that Pitt should have been the
first Paymaster who refused to enrich himself by robbing the army officers
of £30,000 a year. But, in the meantime, it is difficult to trace any
definite and immediate sign of an awakening conscience. We can scarcely
assert that the tone of literary morality is higher in this field than it
was fifty years ago ; and this is my main reason for deciding upon a
republication which might otherwise have been postponed altogether.
One essay has been omitted, because I have since published its con
tents in From St. Francis to Dante ; another has been added in its place
(No. 2). Minor alterations have been made to bring the essays up to
date, and small slips have been corrected. My inferences from Bp. Nicke's
visitations (p. 3) were vehemently attacked at the time by a Roman
Catholic theologian in a letter to a common friend ; but I was not per
mitted to publish this, and in fact his severest criticisms rested upon
certain popular theories, as to the nature of medieval visitation docu
ments, which are now abandoned by the majority of competent students.1
I have, however, revised Nicke's evidence in the light of these criticisms,
and find that I had rather understated than overstated my case. On no
other point, so far as I am aware, have my facts been questioned, though
a good many scholars may disagree with my deductions.
Appendix I. is designed to raise my criticisms as much as possible out
of the sphere of scattered detail. The piecemeal character of the papers
here reprinted might otherwise encourage the notion, expressed by the
late Mgr. Benson, that I am a pedant who has found a few mistakes in
Cardinal Gasquet's work, and who cannot look beyond these small flaws
to the main issues involved. I contend, on the contrary, that we have
here one of the broadest and most vital of historical issues. Is History to
be written without documentary references, or even with indefensibly false
references, by authors who are under every personal and professional temp
tation to see only one side ? or, on the other hand, must we not all gain
by submitting our prepossessions to the wholesome pressure of out
side opinion, by giving full and accurate references, and by imitating
at least the formal honesty of the children of this world, who know that
their whole public credit depends upon the soundness of their business
vouchers ? I have therefore put together, in this Appendix I, a rough list
of nearly 200 blunders and mis-statements noted during a perusal, some
times cursory and sometimes detailed, of most of the Cardinal's books.
The list could probably be made far longer if this were worth while ;
but for most readers it will probably suffice as it stands, and will tell its
own tale plainly enough.
1. See my article on The Interpretation of Visitation Documents in the English His
torical Review for Jan. 1914, Mr. R. C. Fowler, of the Public Record Office, had
already expressed much the same conclusions in his preface to Baldock's Register,
which I ought to have noticed in my article ; and three other editors of visitation docu
ments have since written to assure me of their full agreement,

Table of Contents.

PAGE

I. The Monastic Legend ..... i
II. A Revivalist of Six Centuries Ago . . . 19
III. Side-Lights on the Franciscans . . . .27
IV. The High Ancestry of Puritanism . . . 37
V. Romanism and Morals . . . . .46
VI. The Truth about the Monasteries ... 54
VII. Religious Education before the Reformation . 69
Appendices • . . . . . . 79

The Monastic Legend.
" To manipulate ancient writings, to edit history in one's own favour, did not
appear criminal [in the " Ages of Faith "] if the end in view were otherwise just
and good." — Dr. W. Barry (Papal Monarchy, p. 133).
[HE very thoroughness of the Reformation is, in one sense,
its weakness. Modern morals are already so far removed
from the medieval, that Anglicans are ready to disbelieve
the most undoubted scandals of the past ; and modern
tolerance listens candidly to the misrepresentations of
writers whose shrift in pre-reformation days would have been short. In
the face of opponents who devote their lives not only to exposing the
real faults and foibles of the Reformers, but also to raking up scandal
against them from the most tainted sources, one is driven sometimes to
the pertinent retort that, even if all these things were true, matters were
incomparably worse in the " Ages of Faith." But the very strength of
this argument from the point of view of historical truth makes it very
difficult of use in modern society ; just as, in good company, the very
grossness of a man's defects may save him from the obvious retort which
would crush him at once among his own class. Thus, the modern
Romanist controversialist finds a real protection, for a time at least, in
the very unsavouriness of certain chapters of medieval Church History.
Cardinal Gasquet — I name him as the most brilliant writer on the par
ticular subject with which I propose to deal — has argued for the last
twenty years, with very considerable show of historical apparatus, that
the Dissolution of the Monasteries was an act of unredeemed iniquity,
and that the blood of these innocent men is still on our heads. Many
students who are convinced of the contrary have yet been reluctant to
enter upon a somewhat invidious discussion ; and, meanwhile, the
Cardinal has found his strongest ally in the comparative decency of
modern society. That which, before the Reformation, was proclaimed
daily without reserve — by sinners with wanton laughter, and by saints
with bitter tears — is too shocking to be lightly believed by men who
know what their own clergy have been for generations past, and who
have never seen the monastic system at work except under the safeguards
afforded by modern laws and modern publicity. If we may believe a
certain section of the Press, Cardinal Gasquet has been lecturing in America
with conspicuous success on the innocence of the medieval monks and
the sin of their suppression. He is apparently about to repeat these

2 ^Medieval Studies,
lectures in England : it is, therefore, time to abandon the attitude of
distant scepticism, and to look closely into arguments which, if sound,
would call for an act of national repentance.
Six years ago, in going through a course of Roman apologetics, I came
upon Cardinal Gasquet's book. It struck me from the first page els ex
traordinarily inconsistent with original documents ; and one point
specially arrested my attention. The. Cardinal claims that "anything
like general immorality was altogether unknown among the Rehgious
of England. This much is clearly proved by the testimony of the acts
of Episcopal visitations . . . ."x I read this with some surprise :
for I knew a little of Enghsh visitation acts, and they seemed to me to
point clearly to the opposite conclusion. It was necessary, therefore,
to make sure first of all which were the documents to which he appealed
in support of a statement which, if correct, might almost have spared
him the trouble of writing all the rest of his book. I therefore expressed
my doubts by letter to him, pointing out that his mere general reference
to " the Episcopal Registers " or " the Acts of Episcopal Visitation "
was no reference at all ; and begging him therefore to supply this grave
omission by letter. To save him trouble, and for the sake of a clear un
derstanding, I enclosed a list of the score of volumes containing Episcopal
Visitations which I knew to be accessible to the general student, requesting
him to initial those upon which he could rely as supporting his statement,
and to draw his pen through those for which he could not answer from
personal study. At the receipt of my letter, he was unfortunately under
the doctor's orders ; but when I repeated my request six months later
his answer was final. It amounted to a confession that he had forgotten
the very names of the books on which he had professed to base the most
sweeping and vital statement, perhaps, in his whole history.2 His book
had, indeed, surprised me at first by the easy familiarity which it claimed
en bloc with documents so bulky, and so laborious to study, as the Epis
copal Registers : all the greater,- therefore, was my surprise to find him
now pleading that, without much search among his notes, he could not
even name such of these twenty volumes as he had studied and could
safely appeal to. In this embarrassment, I was driven to make what
I could out of the Cardinal's footnotes. I found that the Episcopal Acts
are, in fact, quoted somewhat sparingly — far less freely than many other
books of infinitely less historical value. Some of the references, being
to volumes still imprinted, are difficult to verify ; but, fortunately, by
far the most important are to books which, though still in MS. when he
wrote, have since been printed. These are, firstly, the Exeter Registers,
to which one very confident appeal is made, though apparently at second
hand ; and secondly, the Norwich Visitations of Bishop Nicke, to which
he thrice appeals for confirmation of some of his most sweeping state
ments.3 This simplifies the problem a good deal. In the days when the
i. I. 38. My quotations arefrom the 3rd edition, 1888.
2. I have these letters by me, and will gladly print them with the Cardinal's leave.
3. Of the six Exeter volumes only the least important had been published when Cardinal
Gasquet wrote.

The Monastic Legend.

learned Cardinal did know which Registers he had or had not read, he
appealed specially to the records of Exeter and Norwich, as proving (i) the
methods of visitation, (2) the fact that there was " nothing like general
immorality " in the monasteries, (3) that, for any grave breach of the
Rule, punishment was stern and unsparing, such as the instance which he
quotes in full from a York Register.1 Here, then, is a plain issue, which
I will test first by Nicke, from whose " two valuable volumes " he claims
support in the most emphatic words. " Nothing hke general immo
rality " is, of course, a somewhat vague plea : we find, for instance, an
earnest and learned Roman Catholic apologist in France congratulating
himself that the Thirteenth Century Visitations of Rouen show no more
than thirty-three unchaste nuns out of a total of 373, or nine per cent.2
Cardinal Gasquet, however, has evidently a far higher ideal of monastic
chastity ; for he claims that the registers give us a picture very different
from that of Henry's visitation, which, after all, accused scarcely more
than three per cent, of immorality.3 Yet, on Nicke's first visitation of
his diocese, in 15 14, he found nearly double of that percentage suspected
by their fellow monks or nuns of immorality. The arguments which fill
nine-tenths of the cardinal's two bulky volumes are meant to prove that
the reports of Henry VIII's commissioners are too bad to be credible.
In the course of these arguments he appeals confidently to the support
of certain episcopal visitations, still in manuscript, but well-known to
himself. When these are printed, it transpires that they yield a statistical
result far less favourable than Henry VIII's ! l And the most inexplic
able error is still to come. We are twice referred to Nicke for proof that
grave faults were vigorously punished.5 Yet, (to take one grave fault
only) Nicke found thirty-three monks or nuns suspected of incontinence
by their fellows. In fifteen, at least, of these cases, either a child had
been born, or Nicke's injunctions show that he held the charge to be
founded. Yet he records only two punishments ; though in one other
case, which was already ancient history, we hear that the prior himself
had " corrected " it at the time. Of the two punishments recorded, one
was inflicted upon an unchaste nun, and runs as foUows : " The Lord
Bishop  enjoined on the Lady Agnes Smyth that she should
sit for a whole month below all the other nuns, and should repeat during
that period the whole Psalter seven times over." The other offender was
the Prior of Walsingham, who had habitually embezzled moneys, stolen
jewels and plate from the treasury, committed manslaughter on a peasant,
and exalted John Smyth's wife to a quasi-official position as his own
helpmate. The bishop ordered the summary dismissal of Mrs. Smyth, and
within six weeks he had prevailed upon the prior to resign his office,
1. I, 36 note, 334 note: cf. 355.
2. E. du MiSril, in Soc, des Antiq. de Normandie, 1847, p. 125.
3 I 352. Elsewhere the cardinal reckons the total of monks, friars and nuns at 8,000
(Vol 11', p. 323). Assuming that figure, the 250 cases reported give us 3.1 per cent. The
numbers in Nicke are 332 monks and nuns, with twenty cases of immorality, i.e. 6.1 per
cent. 4 The later visits show considerably less ; but there are many obvious reasons why a
first visit should show a worse record than others. After all, Henry's also was a first visit.
5. I, 36 note, 334 note.

4 ^Medieval Studies.
under assurance of " a competent annual pension " for the rest of his life.
Again, the Prior of Aldby complains to Nicke against the system of
banishing " incorrigible " monks to the smaller priories, where they
spent their days in dicing and indiscipline.1 There are several complaints
against drunken monks, but none are punished — indeed Dr. Rashdall
has pointed out that drunkenness was not recognised as a punishable
offence by the medieval Oxford statutes. The gravest peculations and
betrayals of trust are recorded without punishment. An excellent case
is that of Wymondham in 1514. The late abbot had peculated ; the
present abbot had not rendered his accounts. The prior had broken
open a chest and abstracted documents without the abbot's leave ; had
tried to kill two fellow-monks with a sword ; had thrown a stone at
another in the abbot's presence ; had not been to confession for nine
months. When threatened with my Lord Bishop's displeasure, he had
said : " tell my Lord both and my Ladie, for I care nott " ; the sting
of which lay no doubt in the fact that Nicke's own morals were in evil
repute among his contemporaries. The night services were often ne
glected, the choice books and ornaments were out of repair : other books
had been stolen. There was no schoolmaster. Some monks had broken
the cloister bounds. One was a drunkard, had openly denied the Resur
rection of the Dead in the Flesh, absented himself from matins, and was
suspected of adultery. Another's cell was frequented by " suspected
women," two married, and two of the widow's daughters at the abbey
dairy. Another was grievously suspected of adultery. One of the con
fessors had broken the seal of confession, and the prior complained that
his attempt at reform had caused the monks to " blaspheme his name
in pubhc. places without the monastery." This would seem a sufficiently
heavy bill of offences for a community of eleven monks ; I here subjoin,
word for word, all the notice the Bishop takes of it. " The Lord Bishop
enjoined that henceforth no layman should be admitted to any office within
the aforesaid abbey until he had first pledged himself to keep faithfully the
secrets of the abbey. He further enjoined that he (the abbot) should elect
another mqnk in the prior's place within- a month. After which injunc
tions and the aforesaid evidence taken, my Lord concluded his visitation
for this time." The deposed prior was succeeded in that office by one
of the worst sinners of a previous visitation (p. 161). I must beg the
reader to note the words I have italicized, for I shall recur to them. In
the meantime I only wish to point out how these MS. volumes, when
printed, contradict Cardinal Gasquet flatly by showing an impunity
almost incredible to modern readers ; yet, (as I am ready to prove, if
necessary), absolutely normal in the Middle Ages.
So much for Nicke's evidence : now for that of the Exeter Registers.
Cardinal Gasquet argues, with an emphasis which may seem even ex
aggerated, that the Black Death of 1349 dealt a blow to the monasteries,
materially and morally, from which they had not yet recovered at the
Dissolution (1. 7.) Therefore, in choosing the first twenty-one years (1327-
48) of the Register of Bishop Grandissonj perhaps the greatest of all the
f. pp. 197, 265. Cellulas is used here, as sometimes elsewhere, in the sense of cellas.

The Monastic Legend. 5
medieval bishops of Exeter, I am choosing a field which ought to be
eminently favourable to Cardinal Gasquet. How far this is so, the reader
may judge from the history of three monasteries which I find extracted
in my notes.
(1) St. James' Priory, near Exeter. In 1334 (p. 279) the prior of this
house, WiUiam de Bittendene, is stigmatized as " oftentimes convicted
of embezzlement and fornication, and lately refusing to allow himself
to be visited . . . pretending himself exempt," in spite of documen
tary evidence to the contrary. The priory was waste, the church in ruins,
and divine service had ceased. The bishop excommunicated him and tried
to sequestrate the revenues of his priory. In 1335 he was " wandering
about the country, having let loose the reins of honesty and utterly cast
away the modesty of his monastic profession," and the Bishop therefore
writes sadly to the prior of the parent house of St. Martin " Would that
you would send some good man to rule the said house : for this person
fears neither God nor man, which is a blot upon the honour of monas-
ticism and justly offends God's majesty." In 1338, however, William
was still prior, and the bishop wrote of his past " enormously dissolute
hfe " without implying any present amendment. Next year we find him
again as prior, and noted among the clergy who have not paid the last
tax to the Pope. There is no record of his being deposed (pp. 71, 279,
289, 305. 745. 883).
(2) Tavistock Abbey. In 1328 Grandisson wrote to the Pope, his
good friend and patron, " God is my witness that I lie not : the Abbot
of Tavistock in my diocese, a native of Aquitaine, now promoted by
your Holiness through the deceit of others, hath since his first arrival
held himself aloof from all rehgion and all worship of God." This was
Robert Bonus, who had previously been Abbot of La Reole in Gascony.
The bishop, out of reverence for the Pope and his noble French friends,
had first " coaxed him gently to myself " and then, when kindness failed,
had threatened his own wrath and the Pope's ; but both ahke in vain.
Bonus had already begun to waste the abbey revenues, and " in a fit of
drunkenness, had almost slain " a young French squire of his own retinue.
Grandisson, though a man of noble birth, high attainments, great force
of will, and special favour with the Pope, was quite unable to enlist the
help of the Papal court. On the contrary, in 1333 he had to justify him
self to some of the cardinals for such pressure as he had dared to bring
upon Bonus, over whose morals he thinks it better to draw a veil, " out
of reverence to your Paternity and to his Order." " In these days es
pecially, wherein the wickedness of the human race is increasing " it is
almost impossible for a prelate to do his duty without incurring slander :
he therefore prays his friends at the Court to credit no reports of his
alleged indiscretions, or illegalities, until at least they have heard his
own version of the matter. How httle he deserved such accusations,
his own letters to the erring abbot prove only too clearly. As early as
1328, he found himself compelled by popular outcry to come and visit
the abbey : but, the abbot having put in the usual plea of exemption,
he offered to waive his episcopal rights, and come informally as a friend.
It was only in 1333, when both cajolery and threats had proved un-

6 Medieval Studies.
availing, that the bishop proceeded to sequestrate the revenues of the
house, whose abbot " wasteful not only of goods but also of his own fame,
is leading and is wont to lead a hfe detestable to God and man, publicly
and daily eating flesh in Lentehtide without reasonable cause, and damn
ably committing very many other enormous offences which we pass in
silence through reverence for the monastic order and profession." He
" has notoriously so dilapidated and consumed the monastery's pro
perty that it is now brought to the disgrace of almost irreparable ruin,"
and that " some monks of the convent have needed to be sent wandering
abroad to beg for their bare daily ^livelihood." Therefore, " lest the
wickedness of this his obstinacy and dilapidation escape utterly un
punished," since he has already scorned our mandate of sequestration
and excommunication, we commit to the Abbot of Buckland and certain
other monks the duty of seeing our orders strictly obeyed. Moreover,
since he has set us at nought and refused to appear before us, we hereby
depose him (pp. 97, 98, 109, 395, 405, 703-6, 717).
Nor was this the end of troubles at Tavistock. The prior and monks
put the choice of a new abbot in the bishop's hands, and the latter
chose John de Courtenay, whom he had before selected as one of those
who were to enforce his sentence against the late abbot. Grandisson,
in his joy at getting rid of Bonus, described his new choice as " a man
recommended by many virtuous gifts " : but he was soon bitterly un
deceived. Only five years later, he finds the abbey again bankrupt and
suffering from " certain proved faults both in the Head and in the
Members, which we, willing to spare your reputation, have thought best
to pass over in silence for the present." He cuts off the abbot from all
share in the money affairs of the house, banishes him from the precincts
until the debt shall be paid, orders him to abandon his unmonastic
foppishness of dress, and directs that one of his fellow monks, " recom
mended by his honesty and cleanhness of hfe " should be always in
attendance on him as chaplain, and sleep in his chamber. Meanwhile
he is to have, for his own and chaplain's support, a pension of 120 marks
— or about £1600 a year of modern money — the rest of the monks being
put off with 100 marks a year between them. Seven years later, in 1345,
Grandisson visited the abbey, and found " very many faults ; some of
which — to say nothing for the present of the greatest and most grievous
— we set forth clearly to you." The abbot has again relapsed into secular
finery, and has imitators among the monks ; three of them have " fre
quently offended hitherto by casting off their monastic habit." Nearly
all the monks ate forbidden flesh in their own cells. The abbot had been
proved to " consort day and night with secular persons, even of sus
pected morals, in damnable contempt of our former mandates " : on
which account the bishop again directs that a monk of acknowledged
purity of life should act as his chaplain, be always with him, and sleep
in his chamber. The monastic, moneys were wasted on a pack of hounds,
and two of the monks had been guilty of embezzlement. In 1348 again
the abbot, " defamed by many excesses and crimes weU-known to you
and to the whole convent " has not only for many years wasted the abbey
property ; but " finding no more moveable goods wherewith further

The Monastic Legend.

to satisfy his pleasures," has begun to sell and alienate even farms and
rents. The beautiful buildings were falling to ruin ; and the monks
were as deformed in inward religion as was their abbey in outward aspect.
The bishop therefore decrees the abbot's suspension. He is no longer
to enjoy his liberal pension, but " removing all his costly retinue and all
hunting dogs whatsoever," to live in common with the rest of the monks.
A few months afterwards came the Black Death, and we hear no more
of John de Courtenay (pp. 887, 889, 996-8).
(3) Barnstaple Priory. This was a cell to St. Martin des Champs
at Paris. In 1332 the prior was John de Gemma, who preferred Paris
life, and did not reside, " to the grave peril of the souls committed to his
charge, and as a pernicious example to very many others." The bishop
therefore sequestrated the priory revenues to compel his return, and took
proceedings against one John of Paris who had intruded himself as prior
during the real prior's absence. The prior of St. Martin, instead of sending
the latter back to his work, appointed in his stead one John Soier. Gran
disson then wrote to St. Martin's, begging earnestly and almost humbly
that this appointment might be quashed : " otherwise, we beg you not
to take it ill even if we freely use our right of reforming those points on
which, with bitterness of heart, we perceive the said priory [of Barnstaple]
to need reformation. For we must tell you truly that Bro. John Soier,
your monk and presentee, is said, as one who is prodigal both of his re
putation and of his salvation, to have lived in Wales a hfe so enormously
dissolute (even begetting a family and bringing it up notoriously at the
expense of church goods, and likewise publicly defamed of the vice of
simony recently committed here at Barnstaple for the aforesaid reasons,
and suspected of future embezzlement), that he himself should rightly
fear to climb to the high post of prior of this monastery, and we
must fear to admit him against our own conscience." The protest was
utterly unavailing : and one of the strongest bishops, in perhaps the
most independent of all great European countries, found himself com
pelled to accept this ruffian as prior of Barnstaple ! In 1334 Soier died,
but that brief space of two years had sufficed to justify all the bishop's
fears. In protesting against the prior of St. Martin's sudden recall
of the new prior after only a few months' residence in England,
Grandisson writes : " If you often acted thus, the priory would be
ruined and all observance of rehgion dissolved. . . . For the present
income, and even all that will come in for a long time hence, will scarce
suffice for the bare necessities of the prior and his monks at that house ;
since his accursed predecessor (I say it with shame) together with one
John Colecote his abettor, have inhumanly dealt the priory almost
irreparable harm."
Let me point out here the full significance of this evidence. Cardinal
Gasquet appeals to the Exeter Registers to prove two main points (1)
" The graver irregularities which are recorded against the rehgious after
the most searching scrutiny, made by the bishops or their commissioners,
are after all few and far between " ; and (2) " the extreme punishment
with which such irregularities were visited proves that, so far from not
being heeded, the moral reputation of the monastic and conventual

8 ^Medieval Studies.
establishments was considered of the first importance." Let me take
those two points in order.
(i) The rarity of immorality in the diocese cannot possibly be proved
from the Episcopal Registers : for the registers do not contain any full
accounts of monastic visitations. It is most important to insist upon this
point, since it is almost always bhnked by apologists.1 The actual Visi
tation records were written in separate rolls or books which have seldom
survived and still more seldom been published.2 The Bishops' Registers
themselves contain only here and there a few extracts from, or allusions to,
these records, in cases where the gross scandal of ihe offence, or the sinners'
contumacy, rendered the usual summary proceeding unavailing, and ne
cessitated special aud repeated attention from the bishop himself. Even in
these cases, the misdemeanours are constantly veiled in a cloud of phrases,
to avoid scandal. They therefore no more present a full record of serious
monastic offences than the Journals of the House of Lords present a
full record of the offences of British subjects.3 If I am right in this
assertion — and I offer Cardinal Gasquet the chance of contradicting
me within the covers of this very pamphlet, besides the fact that here
at least I have on my side a determined defender of monastic morality —
then it shows sheer ignorance of the true facts to speak of the silence of
the registers (where they are silent) as proving the innocence of the
monks. The registers can at most offer us only records of a few cases
(not necessarily even the worst), and leave us to infer vaguely from
these samples what the batch was hke.
(2) This brings me to Cardinal Gasquet's second contention — that the
Exeter Registers prove " the extreme punishment with which irregu
larities were visited." On the contrary, they entirely agree with that
of Nicke in proving exactly the opposite. This exceptionally strong and
determined Grandisson, with his exceptional influence at the Pope's court,
is obhged to accept a notorious adulterer as prior of Barnstaple without
hint of his punishment, and is quite unable to bring to justice the equally
notorious prior of St. James's, or even to get rid of him from his priory.
1. An Athenceum reviewer, who seems to be responsible for several articles containing
obiter dicta in defence of monastic morality, has apparently at last begun to realize this truth.
(April 22, 1905, p. 490). This may be connected with the fact that I pointed it out a year
or two ago in a letter addressed to the editor, begging the reviewer at about the same time
to jot me down on a postcard (without prejudice to his anonymity) full references to a manu
script which he cited as proving monastic innocence. I received no reply to my request
for this reference : but my trouble has not been wasted if I have at last made him understand
that the registers do not profess to record Visitation comperta with any completeness.
2. Nicke's and Goldwell's visitations are of this kind : and Cardinal Gasquet evidently
recognizes this, though only dimly (p. 36, note), and without realizing the crucial importance
of the difference to his argument. (See, for a fuller discussion of this question, my article
in the English Historical Review for January, 1914).
3. This accounts for the striking fact that the worst cases are to be found in the registers
of the strongest and best bishops. Grandisson's gives us a far worse picture of clerical morahty
than that of his predecessor Stapledon or his successors Brantyngham and Stafford, who
were all three great ministers, busy to their finger-tips with state affairs, and compelled to
treat the government of their diocese as a secondary matter. Stafford, the best of them,
spent scarcely more than half his twenty-five years' episcopate in active episcopal work.
Abuses which such men winked at or compounded with, Grandisson fought against with all
his might ; and hence his register shows us more immoralities than theirs, though nobody
who knows the character and work of the four bishops can doubt that the diocese was in a
far better state of discipline under him.

The Monastic Legend. 9
It costs him a struggle of five years to get rid of Bonus, and he has
scarcely less difficulty with Courtenay !
Here again the very strength of my case is, in a measure, its weakness.
Is it credible, the reader may well ask, that a writer of such reputation
can have referred the unsuspecting public so confidently to MS. sources
which contradict him so flatly on such simple issues ? I cannot say how
far it is credible, I only say that it is true, and that I will willingly affirm
its truth by the one guarantee in my power — by offering to put myself
in the pillory if I am wrong. Before publishing this pamphlet I will
gladly allow Cardinal Gasquet eight pages in it for any denials or ex
planations which he would care to see printed within the same covers
as my criticism. If he takes me at my word, my readers will know that
they have both sides of the question before them. If, however, he de
clines the chaUenge, I may here refer by anticipation to two articles in
the Church Quarterly for October, 1900, and January, 1901, in which he
is proved to have supported his theories on the Old English Bible by
mis-statements and omissions only a few degrees less inexplicable than
these which I here expose.1
Having thus dealt with what are reaUy the Cardinal's most important
witnesses, I wiU review very briefly the abundant evidence which proves
that Henry's condemnatory report was substantiaUy correct. I say
substantially, because I have httle more behef than Cardinal Gasquet in
the unsupported evidence of Henry's commissioners. The King found
in the monasteries one of the most serious hindrances to his political
schemes. He dreaded their power and coveted their money ; therefore
he appointed commissioners to make out a case against them. In this
he simply foUowed the precedents of medieval justice ; for Cardinal
Gasquet entirely blinks the fact that Henry was a true child of the Middle
-Ages. The injustice with which he carried out his designs was incom
parably less revolting than that with which a fourteenth century King
and Pope suppressed the Order of the Templars. The barefaced dis
honesty with which he pocketed the spoils compares favourably, after
aU, with that of the Popes for a good three centuries before the Reforma
tion. During these three centuries, the Pontiffs had regularly squeezed
vast sums out of Europe for the Crusades, and had spent them as regu
larly on personal wars, personal luxuries, or personal vices. StiU, the
fact remains that Henry's injustice and cupidity were very great. Cardinal
Gasquet easily proves thus much ; and, indeed, it had been clearly
proved before him.2 But here, on the very threshold of the real question,
nearly all his arguments stop. Yet the real question is far more im
portant than that on which he spends nine-tenths of his arguments.
For three centuries and more before the Reformation, public opinion^had
1. I need hardly say that neither the Cardinal nor any of his supporters have taken me
at my word. The Cardinal consoled himself with throwing mud at me in the preface to
his next edition, while carefully avoiding every issue of historical fact.
2. Even Fuller and the Whig Burnet, in the seventeenth century, disclose much of the
truth ; and in modern times the point has been laboured at great length, and with ample
evidence, by Blunt, Brewer, and Dixon. A clear and popular abstract of Brewer and Dixon
would quite suffice to correct Froude's exaggerations : by taking a line midway between
Froude and these critics, we should come very near to the truth.

io S\dedieval Studies.
discussed the merits and demerits of monastic hfe. Does the pubhc
judgment of those three centuries show us a state of things compatible
with modern civilization ? or does it show us the monks 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 same state in
which the Dissolution found them ? That is the real question, and that is
what Cardinal Gasquet has made no serious attempt to answer. He blinks
the obvious fact that, from the date at which Dissolution first became a
burning political question, evidence on either side must be received with
the greatest caution. Nearly all his witnesses are as ex parte and as un
trustworthy as the commissioners themselves. An old man (name un
known), who just remembered the Dissolution as a boy — another later
and equaUy anonymous author, many of whose statements are so patently
false that I can only wonder how the cardinal dared to print them — these
are two of the main piUars of his great fabric.1 Apart from the registers
which he misquotes so incredibly, he makes scarcely any pretence of
bringing historical evidence for the condition of the monasteries during
the four centuries preceding the Reformation. In his introductory
picture, he skips from St. Anselm in the early twelfth century to an anony
mous reactionary of the late sixteenth. What theories could not a future
historian maintain about the England of 1905 by this simple method of
judging it from two documents dating respectively from 1600 and 1950
a.d. !
Moreover, even within the narrow and vicious circle to which he hmits
his enquiry, he shows strange ideas of evidence. To take a few instances :
one of his trump cards is the formal comphment paid to the greater
monasteries in the preamble of the bill which dissolved the smaller
houses. Has there ever been an age in which a statesman's formal utter
ances in one year's Parliament could not be turned against him some
other year ? Again, while justly reprobating the alleged indignities
offered to nuns by Henry's commissioners (and this is one of his strongest
points, though the assertion rests only on the word of two bitter partisans,
of whom one was not even a contemporary), he ignores the fact that the
very best of medieval visitors permitted themselves on similar occasions
1. (1) The Rites of Durham is a little book by an anonymous hand, of which the earliest
MS. dates from half-a-century after the Suppression. It describes the monastery and church
of Durham Cathedral, chiefly from the point of view of a ritualist and antiquary, referring
only incidentally to the monks' morals, etc. It remained in MS. during the years when its
publication might have provoked flat contradictions from others who also remembered the
monastery in their youth ; and, when finally unearthed and printed, it was at once attacked,
(rightly or wrongly), as apocryphal and legendary. (2) The Cole MS. is equally anonymous
and obscure ; its author, I believe, does not even pretend to have seen most of what he
describes, and tells us definitely that for a knowledge of the monks' morals and usefulness
he was dependent on his father's report (II, 321). It was apparently never published, even
partially, until Henry and the dispossessed monks had been more than two centuries in their
graves. Yet these are documents on which Cardinal Gasquet lays special stress, to the ex
clusion (as will be seen) of the most definite and irrefragable evidence. Moreover, the author
of the latter MS. at once puts himself out of court by asserting that the cottages of England
had increased fivefold in the sixty years following the Suppression : a statement which
Cardinal Gasquet renders still more absurd by italicizing the word towns and laying stress
on it in its modem sense of boroughs and market-towns. To a sixteenth century writer, as
to modern villagers, the term town includes even hamlets. On this blunder he founds what,
to many readers, would be one of his most telling arguments. It is not enough for him to
build upon such worthless hole-and-corner documents ; but he must also misread them in
order to get the results he needs.

The Monastic Legend. n

liberties which are absolutely revolting to modern ideas. He accepts,
whenever they suit his purpose, statistics which are demonstrably wrong
by at least 4,000 per cent. (I 2 — II 504). He misapplies to the sixteenth
century monks a testimonial which Professor Thorold Rogers does indeed
give to those of the thirteenth century, but expressly refuses, on the
very same page, to those of Henry VIII's reign in whose favour Cardinal
Gasquet quotes them ! 1 Again, Cardinal Gasquet imputes the miseries
of modern England to the Dissolution, without pausing to consider what
was the state of the working-classes in aU countries where the monasteries
were spared until the French Revolution. He takes care to name rehgious
houses where Nicke's visits give a better result than those of Henry's
commissioners, but suppresses the cases in which Nicke corroborates or
even outdoes the others in blame. But perhaps his weakest and most dan
gerous argument, though one of his most frequent, is to emphasize the
very grossness of this or that accusation made by the commissioners, and
then to work upon the modern sense of decency. " Can you, as Enghsh
gentlemen, beheve this to be true ? " To the credit of modern Angli
canism, that has proved one of his most effective arguments, as I know
by experience. Yet, however successful such an argument may be with
candid modern opponents, it would have been simply laughed out of
court in the Middle Ages. Of all these cases which the cardinal seeks
to discredit as inherently improbable because they shock nineteenth-
century minds, there is not one which cannot be paralleled and out
matched from the most unimpeachable medieval sources. For instance,
one of Cardinal Gasquet's strongest points is that so many of the accused
monks and nuns were afterwards pensioned. Yet the reader has already
seen how Bishop Nicke pensioned the adulterous, thieving, and homicidal
prior of Walsingham : how the scandalous abbot of Tavistock was aUowed
far more for his single pension than all the other monks together
received for their needs ; and far worse cases might be quoted. A cen
tury earlier, Balthasar Cossa, chamberlain to Pope Boniface IX, scan
dalized even the people of Rome by more shameless immorahty than any
that Henry's commissioners record ; and the Pope found no better
1 . I will give the quotations here, since they exemplify clearly in a few lines the cardinal's
habits of Uterary dishonesty — it is impossible to use a milder phrase. In a chapter designed
to set forth the harm done to England by the Suppression, he writes (II, 49-5). " In strong
contrast with the caricature drawn from the imagination of novelists, who at best clothe the
cloistered life with a poetic unreality, the description given of it by a deeply-read writer of
modern times may be here quoted. ' The monks,' says Mr. Thorold Rogers, ' were the men
of letters in the middle ages, the historians, the jurists, the philosophers, the physicians, the
students of nature, the founders ot schools, authors of chronicles, teachers of agriculture,
fairly indulgent landlords and advocates of genuine (sic) dealing towards the peasantry.' "
Here, as often, he gives no reference ; but his allusion is evidently to the following passage
from Thorold Rogers' " Six Centuries of Work and Wages." (p. 362). " These monasteries
were in the zenith of their reputation during the first half of the thirteenth century, when
they had, it would appear, been stimulated to a beneficent activity by the rivalry of the
two new orders of preaching friars, those of Dominic and Francis. They had, to be sure,
the fatal gift of wealth, but they seem to have used their wealth well. They were founders
of schools, authors of chronicles, teachers of agriculture, fairly indulgent landlords, and
advocates of generous dealing towards the peasantry." But, only eleven lines lower down,
Professor Rogers goes on " It is not easy to understand how these monasteries declined in
character and usefulness till they came to the condition which is described so indignantly
by Gascoigne — a condition which renders probable the charges which Henry the Eighth's com
missioners made against them. But many causes appear to have contributed to the result."
Ihe italics are mine-: the quotation needs no further comment.

12 ^Medieval Studies.
remedy than to create him Cardinal and send him as Legate to Bologna.
Here he outdid even his previous enormities, and was presently raised
to the Papacy. Anyone who has been impressed by Cardinal Gasquet 's
argument ex incredibili should read the catalogue of the crimes with
which he was charged by the Council of Constance.1 What is more, the
cases which Cardinal Gasquet tries to put out of court as too impossible
to be believed can aU be matched from these very Visitations to which
he has appealed as proving the contrary ! He finds inherent improba
bility in the statement that the prior of Crutched Friars was found in
gross misconduct at eleven o'clock on a Friday in Lent : yet we find an
orthodox and irreproachable visitor accusing a monk of Wendhng of
adultery " not only in the holy time of Lent, but also in Passion Week."2
The abbot of Langdon was accused of incontinence and drunkenness
to which Cardinal Gasquet objects that " if Layton 's accusations were
true the abbot could have been got rid of without expense and without
the scandal of proposing to place such a man in cure of souls." Yet neither
Nicke nor Grandisson, as we have seen, could get rid of worse offenders
without expense : and in pleading the improbabihty of Layton's story,
Cardinal Gasquet simply supphes another proof that he does not know
his own documents. Again, in the case of the abbot of Wigmore,
he claims that " the accusation of murder is absurd on the face of
it, and may be dismissed." Yet Nicke's abbot of Walsingham had
murdered a peasant : Grandisson 's abbot of Tavistock had tried to
murder his squire : and the registers give no hint in either case of what
we should consider a fit punishment for such an offence. Eudes Rigaud,
a far stronger prelate than either, was entirely unable to prevent his
subordinate Bishop of Lisieux from giving a canonry in that cathedral
to a nephew who was " iU-famed of homicide " (p. 61). Nobody who
had really faced the facts of the Middle Ages could appeal to impunity
for a proof of innocence, as Cardinal Gasquet more than once does.
Nicke, for instance, found the prior of Eye in 1514 "suspected" with
Margery Bery, for whose son he had built a house. In 1520, at the same
monastery, Margaret Verre, who may or may not be a different person,
" is dwelling with the prior and hves suspiciously." There is no record
of punishment in either case. The reader wiU remember how the Bishop's
injunctions for Wymondham, which I italicized, show far more solicitude
to avoid scandal outside the monastery than to inflict punishment.inside ;
and we find that even the most energetic and saintly prelates of the
Middle Ages left the plainest immorahties unpunished whenever they
could thus avoid a public scandal.8 As a far more accurate scholar than
r. Lea, Celibacy, p. 344. A case even more shocking, perhaps, is to be found lower down
on p. 431.
2. Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 4934, p. 82. Cardinal Gasquet is at present editing the register
from which Peck made these extracts : I am not aware that he refers to it in his Henry VIII,
but it was well-known and easily accessible then.
3. Cf. the following extract from the register of Archbishop Eudes Rigaud, the friend of
St. Bonaventura and one of the most determined medieval reformers, whose contemporaries
surnamed him " the Pattern of Good Life." He is visiting a Chapter at Pontoise. " Richard
de Triguel is accused of sin with a certain prostitute ; yet there was no great scandal : we
warned him to desist. Again Master Robert is accused with the gardener's daughter, and
has but lately had a child by her, but the scandal is not great : we warned him to desist.

The Monastic Legend. 13
Cardinal Gasquet has pointed out, (in speaking of the constant abuses
revealed by visitations of the Wells, Ripon, Beverley and Southwell
chapters), even the frequency and gravity of the accusations is far less
significant than the impunity of admitted guilt. "Next to contumacy,"
writes Mr. A. F. Leach, " revealing the secrets of the chapter or the
Vicar's Hall to the laity seems to have been the most heinous crime. . . .
Only two of the innumerable cases are actually suspended for sexual mis
behaviour. . . . We can only conclude that neglect of duty and sexual
immorality were so common that they were never punished, except when
some public scandal was created by them."1
That is the real clue to the visitation records which have come down
to us. Religious houses had, even at the crown of the Middle Ages, such
good reason to dread lay criticism, that nothing might not be pardoned
so long as scandal could be avoided. Even St. Bonaventura, and at
least one archbishop worthy to be placed by his side in Dante's heaven,
felt this as strongly as it was felt by inferior men. For, of aU Cardinal
Gasquet's mis-statements, perhaps none is so hopelessly inaccurate as
his repeated assertion that the Middle Ages did not accuse the monks,
and that their evil repute dates from Henry VIII or later. This assertion
sums up the whole object of his two bulky volumes, and I must contrast
it very briefly with notorious facts.
On the one hand, the ascetic writers assure us emphaticaUy and re
peatedly that immorality will ensue in monasteries if the monks cease
to work hard, are allowed pocket-money, gad abroad, or eat flesh except
with the utmost parsimony. On the other hand, we know that not one
only, but aU of these relaxations were rather the rule than the exception
in the sixteenth century. The desperate efforts made to prevent the
monks from possessing private property testify not only to the serious
bearing of this point on convent morahty, but also to the irresistible
growth of luxury and indiscipline. Innocent III, among his other reforms,
decreed that the " proprietary " monk or nun should be buried hke a
dog in a dunghiU, as a token of the soul's certain damnation. Torquemada
gravely asserted that a Rehgious committed mortal sin by merely claiming
a book as his own, except by a mere shp of the tongue. No clause of
the Benedictine Rule was more exphcit or hedged round with greater
safeguards ; yet Dr. Kitchin points out how the Winchester monks had
their regular pocket money or private incomes ; and to Nicke they
clamour again and again for the money which, if he or they had taken
the Rule seriously, was the wages of death to their souls. Again, in the
matters of labour, of strict attendance at the services, of wandering
outside the walls — in all those safeguards of monastic morahty, the
Rule was equaUy relaxed. The Carthusians alone (I beheve) kept to
the original Benedictine Rule about flesh ; and they alone have been
1. Introd. to " Southwell Visitations," (Camden Soc), pp. 75, 85, 89.
Moreover, he behaves improperly in going barefooted outside his door to a certain workshop
where women of ill fame are often congregated : we warned him to desist from such be
haviour" (p. 42). This hushing-up spirit is constantly traceable in the visitation records,
ahd damages them very seriously as witnesses for the defence. When the register of one of
the strongest prelates in the Middle Ages reads like this, how can we argue from the silence
of bishops who scarcely ever lived in their dioceses, or whose own lives were immoral ?

H Medieval Studies.
able to take for their motto with some real truth " Never reformed,
because never Reformed." Henry's commissioners, therefore, only
professed to find in the monasteries that which monastic disciplinarians
had prophesied as certain.
Again, medieval literature simply swarms with tales of monastic im
moralities — not only or mainly, as Cardinal Gasquet asserts, of a ribald
character and imported from the East — but solemnly told in solemn
works of theology written by monks or friars. I beheve it might be
safely asserted that such stories, told to point a moral, in rehgious books,
outnumber those told in jest by medieval satirists. Moreover, very
definite and almost unquotable attacks on monastic morality are made
in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventura, and his
fellow-cardinal Jacques de Vitry ; in the 14th by Merswin, Gower,
Langland, St. Catharine of Siena, and Wychffe ; and in the fifteenth by
Gerson, one of the reputed authors of the Imitation of Christ and the
greatest churchman of his age. Of these nine, Wychffe is far from "being
the most emphatic. Jacques de Vitry stigmatizes the monks, before the
Franciscan reform, as " keeping an outward show of piety but denying its
inward virtue . . . disobedient, murmurers, backbiters, bearing Christ's
cross unwillingly, unclean and incontinent, walking after the flesh and not
after the spirit." Turning to the nuns, he asserts that a girl's virtue was
safe among none but those of the Cistercian Rule (Hist. Occ. cc. 4, 15).
The learned Gower, who hated Lollardy and chose to spend his last years
within the priory of St. Saviour's, Southwark, complained how " in some
monasteries " of his time, chastity was dead, and lechery had taken her
place ; how " very many " monks (plures) went to hell for women, and
how nuns were sometimes seduced not only by their confessors but by
the very visitors who were supposed to guard them.1 (Vox Clamantis.
IV. 327 ff., 461, 595 : an abstract of these complaints may be found in
Morley's English Literature, vol. iv, p. 187.) Gerson, among other remarks
almost equally strong, says in one place " I actuaUy doubt whether boys
and girls do not sometimes learn worse morals ... at schools and
among monks and nuns2 than they would in brothels." Dr. Lea's Sacer
dotal Celibacy swarms with the most damaging quotations from medieval
sources, and no Romanist has ever dared to grapple seriously with this
book, now nearly forty years old. I recently pointed this out in vague
and general terms a propos of a blunder in the Church Times, and appealed
for several weeks to readers of that paper and of the Catholic Times to
supply me with any_ contemporary denial of the numerous and definite
accusations of medieval writers against monks and nuns. Nobody sup
plied me with such evidence, and both papers finally salved their con
sciences by suppressing my later letters. So far as I am aware, the
orthodox theologians who undertook to refute LoUards with painful
minuteness on other points, never dared to assert that the accusations
of widespread monastic immorality were mere slanders. Gascoigne,
though Wychffe was one of his pet abominations, agreed with Wychffe
1 . It is noteworthy that Gascoigne, a contemporary, accuses Archbishop Stafford, while
Bishop of Bath and Wells, of having had " sons and daughters " by a nun.
2. In religionum el scholarum conluberniis. Ed. Paris, 1606. II, 628.

The Monastic Legend. 15
in repeatedly describing the monks as idle, uncharitable, and immoral-
He looked upon them as a hindrance rather than a help to rehgious or
secular education ; and he echoed with even wearisome iteration Wychffe 's
plea for their disendowment. Over and over again he appeals to the
Pope and the Lords of the Church to acknowledge that the then state
of things was intolerable ; and indeed the final crash was only delayed
for eighty years more. The fact is that, not content with misquoting
the witnesses he brings forward for his own special plea, Cardinal Gasquet
has turned his face steadily away from aU that would have thrown real
hght on his subject. To say nothing of the great Continental visitation
records — Eudes Rigaud at Rouen, Busch in North Germany, Ambrose
of Camaldoli in North Italy, Ninguarda in Bavaria and Austria — he
knows nothing even of English visitations which give the lie to all the
main contentions of his book. He knows nothing of Gascoigne, though
Prof. Thorold Rogers refers emphatically to him in the very passage
from which Cardinal Gasquet has quoted with such signal bad faith.
Yet Gascoigne, one of the greatest chancellors Oxford ever had, supplies
by himself enough evidence to upset the whole apologetic fabric which
Cardinal Gasquet has reared so painfully in two large volumes. Cardinal
Gasquet, for instance, pleads that the lack of fifteenth and sixteenth
century monastic chronicles points less to the idleness of the monks than
to the " probabihty that many such monastic records were destroyed at
the Dissolution " (p. xxx. note). Gascoigne, however, teUs us plainly
" Formerly the Kings kept, in the monasteries which they had founded,
writers of the books of great Doctors and of chronicles which recorded
the examples of former kings : but alas ! for now books are rather ruined
and lost and corrupted than written afresh among monks ! O then, O
that Kings and Lords who have the advowsons of monasteries, moved
thereto by good confessors, would enjoin on the abbots and convents
to keep continuaUy certain writers of [the works of] holy doctors and men
great in science, under certain penalties imposed by the King or by such
Lords ! " (p. 73, cf. 112). It is hardly too much to say that every argu
ment of any importance in " Henry VIII and the English Monasteries "
is similarly contradicted by the experience of this distinguished scholar,
who in 1450 unwillingly prophesied much that was verified at the Re
formation. Even if Cardinal Gasquet had not already known that
Gascoigne's " Liber Veritatum " was one of the most precious authorities
for Enghsh hfe a few generations before the Reformation, Prof. Thorold
Rogers' words must have drawn his attention to it. A single glance at
the index would have shown that it was full of information about the
monasteries ; a couple of days' work, at the most, would have shown
that Gascoigne, an eye-witness, gives the he direct to all these theories
of monastic innocence which are, after all, purely modern.
For I beg the reader to note that every word of my criticisms rests
upon the statements of orthodox and learned medieval writers, except
so far as I quote Wychffe on points on which he agrees with the rest.
From the testimony of these contemporaries, it follows that any attempt
to whitewash the monasteries must take account of the following in
contestable facts.

1 6 ^Medieval Studies.
(i) Ascetic writers prophesy intolerable abuses if once the Rehgious
get into the habit of neglecting any one of the main outward observances
of their Rule. Four of these main outward observances, at least, were
habitually neglected long before the Dissolution — monks habituaUy ate
flesh, possessed property, had ceased to labour, and went in and out of
their precincts pretty weU as they pleased.
(2) Not only satirists and comic writers almost without exception, but
noble churchmen from whom the bitter confession was wrung by the
necessity for reform, accuse the monasteries of deep unfaithfulness to
their religious ideal, and often lay stress on those very immorahties which
modern apologists ignorantly attribute to Protestant slanders.
(3) While LoUards and other heretics found one of their strongest ar
guments in the accusation of immorality, their orthodox opponents,
replying point by point to heretical attacks, avoided this particular
accusation with the most significant persistence. What is more, from
the thirteenth century onwards, great churchmen are themselves found
complaining that heretics drew their strongest arguments from the
frequent immorality of the clergy.
(4) Although we have no diaries or autobiographies of medieval mo
nastic reformers for England, such as those which throw so lurid a hght
on French, German and Italian monasticism before and after the Re
formation, yet even the scantier Enghsh official documents frequently
show us scandals which would not be tolerated in modern society.
(5) All the countries which did not suppress their monasteries in the
sixteenth century have been obhged to do so since, at one time or another.
The state of the French and Italian monasteries just before the Revo
lution was such as no apologist, so far as I am aware, has seriously at
tempted to defend.1
These, then, are the questions which every champion of monastic
purity must set himself to answer before he even begins to consider the
evidence of Henry's commissioners. Let us set this evidence altogether
aside, for good or for evil. Let us take our stand on the years before Henry's
visitation, and look back over the available evidence for the preceding
three or four centuries of monasticism. We shall then ask ourselves,
Why did the Fathers prophesy monastic immorality ? Why did medieval
saints and sinners, orthodox and heretics, complain of monastic immo
rahties ? Why do the records of Visitors reveal gross offenders enjoying
absolute or comparative impunity ? And then (looking forwards over
the next few centuries), Why had those monasteries which were spared
in the sixteenth century become intolerably corrupt, in the most ex
clusively Romanist countries, before the end of the eighteenth ? These
are points with which, hitherto, Cardinal Gasquet has made no
attempt to deal, though they stare the historian in the face. His in-
1. See Dom Paul Denis, " Le Cardinal de Richelieu et la Reforme des MonastSres Ben£-
dictins " (Paris, 1913), especially Preface, pp. vii, viii, and pp. 163-212. With this evidence
from the early seventeenth century, compare the very rare little book published in 1503
by the Abbot of St. Sulpice at Bourges under the title of " Reformationis Monastice Vindicie "
(Paris, Marnet). This booklet, which throws more light upon monastic conditions, perhaps,
than any sixteenth-century document of equal compass, is fully summarized, with copious
¦extracts, in my Medieval Studies, No. 11 (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 2/6 net).

The Monastic Legend. 17
discreet and disingenuous advocacy, though disguised under an appearance
of candour and commended by an easy style, can only prejudice his
chents in the long run. Not until the original documentary evidence
has been sifted and summed up by some first-rate historian — and it is a
disgrace to Enghsh historical scholarship that this and kindred subjects
have not yet found special students, but have been left in the hands of
writers whose very profession tempts them to subordinate strict truth
to " edification " — only then will educated Englishmen be able to render
more enhghtened homage to the undoubted virtues of the earlier monks,
wMle clearly distinguishing them from those who formed too large a
proportion of the communities suppressed by Henry VIII. Nothing is
so wasteful as untruth, even in the hohest of causes : and the rancorous
anti-clericalism of modern France, Italy, and Spain, is directly traceable
to the incurable propensity of the Romanist clergy, medieval or modern,
" to edit history in their own favour," as Dr. Barry puts it with charac
teristic tenderness.
It only remains for me to mention a popular book on " English Monas
teries " (reprinted from a series of anonymous articles in the Church
Times), which, with much show of evidence from the registers, rehes
almost whoUy on Cardinal Gasquet for its most important statements.
I challenged the anonymous author some six months ago to correspond
with me pubhcly on crucial points on which he seemed to mis-state the
plain facts. He kept a discreet silence ; but, even now, in case Cardinal
Gasquet should decline my offer of eight free pages on this subject, I
willingly offer them to the author of " The Enghsh Monasteries," without
asking him to break his resolution of anonymity. Failing him, I am
ready to extend the same hospitality to any writer for the Cathohc Truth
Society ; any weU-known Romanist apologist hke Messrs. Wilfrid Ward
or W. S. LiUy ; or, indeed, anyone else who can claim to have actuaUy
studied the Visitation records.

PS. — As wiU be seen from pp. 2-9, it is probable that Cardinal Gasquet
knew practicaUy nothing of the Exeter Registers beyond the scraps he had
read in Ohver. When chaUenged to produce chapter and verse, he found
it safest to f aU back on his reputation, leaving the public to take his word
against mine for the assertion that the testimony of medieval Visitation
Records is favourable to the monasteries. Let me, therefore, cite two
independent witnesses, who have written since Cardinal Gasquet's book
was pubhshed. Sir George Duckett, writing in 1893, summed up his
impressions of a series of Cluniac visitations extending from 1269 to
1529, and embracing England, most of Germany, and part of France.
(" Visitations and Chapters General of Cluni," p. 331.) His judgment
runs : " But who, we may ask, after reading these several Reports and
Resolutions, forming an endless hst of crimes and misdemeanours, which
(be it remembered) were never intended to see the hght, can for a single
moment wonder at the Reformation, or secession from the Romish
Church in 1517, or in any way pretend to deny or palhate the state into

1 8 ^Medieval Studies.
which rehgious foundations had sunk in this and every other country
at the time of that event ? History has handed down to us their state ;
the foregoing records go distinctly to prove and verify the same. There
are some who pretend to deny both, though after such a tissue of excesses
and abominations as the foregoing disclose, reading more hke extracts
from the Newgate Calendar, what other results could ensue but that
Reformation ? " The second witness, Mr. A. HamUton Thompson, has
kindly permitted me to quote from his Lincoln Visitations, now ready
for the press.1 It wiU be seen that he writes less dogmaticaUy : not
only that he is a better and more judicious scholar, but his material is
considerably smaUer than Duckett's, and seems to show less definite
evidence of monastic decay. Yet, with every wish to do justice to the
monasticism of the fifteenth century, he writes " No one can fail to draw
the conclusion that in many houses matters were far from satisfactory.
Not merely are there specific instances, as at Eynsham, Godstow, and
Markyate, of blots upon the fair fame of a convent ; but in four cases
(Huntingdon, CaldweU, Daventry and St. Neot's priories) the preamble
selected for use by Bishop Gray is a sweeping indictment of a state of
utter slackness and degeneracy. Gray's injunctions to Ramsey abbey
were accompanied by further sealed injunctions, dealing with faults
more serious than he cared to pubhsh ; and he also took this course with
regard to the dean and chapter of Lincoln. . . . But we may beheve
that there were monasteries in the diocese, which, under the headship
of capable men, were stiU instant in the observance of their rehgious
duties and needed httle correction and few injunctions from the visitor."
I quote these, not to imitate Cardinal Gasquet's habit of deciding
medieval questions by appeals to modern authors, but to emphasize
the absurdity of his claim to beg the whole question by a single sweeping
appeal to the reader's faith or creduhty. Modern historical method
demands that a writer should produce his documents, or should at least
give clear and detailed references.

i. " Introduction to Injunctions, etc., from the Registers of Richard Flemyng and WiUiam
Gray, bishops of Lincoln, a.d. 1420 — a.d, 1436 " (Lincoln Record Soc. and Cant, and York
Soc), pp. xi-xiii.

II.1
A Revivalist of Six Centuries Ago.

iHERE is a charming essay on Rehgious Revivals in Medieval
Italy among the old Cornhill essays of the late J. A.
Symonds. He describes in the first place the " Great AUeluia "
of 1233, and the marveUous career of John of Vicenza,
under whose influence north Italy seemed for a few weeks
to have no business but prayer and praise and religious processions.
John and his companion friars healed for a time the most inveterate
feuds : city after city surrendered to them at discretion, and aUowed its
statutes to be made or unmade by these wandering preachers. Vivid
as is Symonds 's description of the Revival, he yet leaves some of the most
curious details ungleaned. The Statutes of Parma, for instance, show
us the friars cleansing that great cathedral of the corn which, to the
scandal of the more devout, was habituaUy stored in its nave — just as,
in the year after Dante's great vision, a Devonshire parson was found
using his church as granary and brew-house combined. Again, the Fran
ciscan Sahmbene gives us many curious details of the Great Alleluia,
which probably determined his own conversion. Sincere believer as he
is, he nevertheless describes with great gusto the ingenious bogus miracles
which his great friend Brother Gerard of Modena used to concoct in con
junction with John of Vicenza ; and he assures us that many were con
verted by this means. He also describes how Brother John's head was
turned by his success. When the great preacher was shaved during a
visit to a Franciscan convent he was naively disappointed (it appears)
that the Brethren did not pounce on the shavings for relics. Such httle
touches go to explain John's final fall. He demanded to be created Duke
and Count of Vicenza, and used his sudden power so recklessly that he
was cast into prison, from which he emerged a discredited and neglected
man. For the Great AUeluia had died away as rapidly as it rose ; and
within a few months family feuds and civil wars were raging worse than
before. Symonds describes other similar revivals in medieval Italy — half
sincere, half theatrical, but always fierce and short-lived. I propose here
to speak of a very different mission-preacher of the same age, the greatest
perhaps of aU the Middle Ages, the German Berthold of Ratisbon. He,
too, produced effects difficult to be imagined in these days of widely
1. This paper, from the North American Review, June 7, rgo7, is here substituted for
my original 2nd Study, which is now incorporated in the second edition of "From St.
Francis to Dante."

2° Medieval Studies.
diffused education ; but in him there was no touch of quackery, and his
influence outlasted that of his Italian coUeagues. The linden under which
he preached at Glatz was stiU famous in the seventeenth century ; and
his sermons, printed in modern German as a book of hving theology, are
in their third edition.1 Born in 1220 of an upper-class burgher family
at Ratisbon, Berthold joined the Franciscans while stiU a youth, and was
the favourite pupil of David of Augsburg, whose writings have often
been attributed to St. Bonaventura. In 1250 he was already a famous
preacher ; until his death in 1272 he tramped from town to town, from
viUage to viUage, hke a Wesley or a Whitefield of later days. In this
fashion he traversed Bavaria, the Rhineland, Switzerland, Swabia, Austria
proper, Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia, Thuringia and Franconia. His fame
was great even in Italy, and is enshrined in the early Franciscan chronicles.
At this moment, especially, it may well interest a modern reader to get
a ghmpse of medieval mission-preaching.
Of the effect of these sermons we have very marveUous stories, even
when due aUowance has been made for medieval exaggeration. The best
description of him, as we might expect, is to be found in the autobio
graphy of bis contemporary Sahmbene, who always gives hfe to whatever
he touches :
" All who have heard him say that, from the days of the Apostles even to our
own, there was never his like in the German tongue. He was followed by a great
multitude of men and women, sometimes to the number of sixty or a hundred
thousand ; or, again, the whole populations of more than one city would come
together to hear the honeyed and saving words which flowed from his lips. He was
wont to ascend a wooden belfry, which he used as a pulpit in country places : and
they who set up the structure crowned it with a pennon, that folk might see whither
the wind blew, and so seat themselves as to hear most clearly. And, wonderful to
relate ! he was heard and understood as well by the most distant as by those who
sat by his side ; nor did any rise to depart until he had made an end of his preaching.
And when he preached of the tremendous Judgment of God, all would tremble as
a rush quivers in the water ; and they would beseech him for God's love to speak
no more of that matter ; for it grieved them beyond endurance to hear him. One
day, when he was to preach in a certain place, a ploughman besought his master
for God's sake to let him go and hear the sermon ; but his lord answered, ' I myself
shall go, but thou shalt go plough in the field with the oxen.' So, when the plough
man had set himself to plough in the field at dawn, straightway by a miracle he
heard the voice of Brother Berthold preaching, though he was thirty miles distant ;
and forthwith he unyoked his oxen and let them feed, and sat down to listen to the
sermon. And when the sermon was done he ploughed as much as he was wont to
plough with a full day's work."
A precious fragment printed in the appendix to the first volume of the
Analecta Franciscana reports a conversation of Berthold with St. Louis
and with the King of Navarre. The latter questioned the great preacher
about this reported miracle of the ploughman, and Berthold rephed :
" Good my lord, believe it not, and give no faith to tales of this kind which men
tell of me as though they were miracles. . . . There are certain men who, either
for lucre's sake, or for some other vain cause, follow me among the rest of the mul
titude, and at times invent such tales and tell them to others."
Yet the real wonders he worked led inevitably to such reports. A noble
lady had " foUowed him for six whole years from town to viUage, with
1. Regensburg, Mainz, 1873.

tA Revivalist of Six Centuries Ago. 21
other women that were of her company, yet could never get speech of
him in private." At last, when all her money was spent, she was able
to see him and teU him of her distress. He sent her to a banker in the
town, who would give her (he said) " the money value of one single day
of that indulgence for which she had followed Brother Berthold these
six years." The banker, contemptuously humouring her fancy, was
astonished to find that all his gold was as a mere feather in one scale so
long as the lady breathed into the other ; "for the Holy Ghost lent such
weight to her breath that no weight of coin could balance that scale."
He was converted, as was also a robber-knight so notorious that the
burghers of the nearest city had adorned their council-haU with a fresco
representing him by anticipation on the gallows.
Berthold, hke aU mission-preachers, especiaUy in the Middle Ages,
appealed most constantly to the simple themes of Heaven and Hell.
According to an often-repeated legend, a woman was so overcome by his
terrible invectives against her own besetting sin that she gave up the
ghost in the middle of his sermon ; but his prayers recaUed her to hfe
for just long enough to make her confession and her final peace with God.
She told the horror-stricken congregation that, out of 50,000 souls which
had departed at the same moment with herself, three only had been
worthy even of Purgatory, and one of Heaven ; the remaining 49,996
having gone straight down to heU ! Something of this vivid imagination
may be found in Berthold's sermons even after six hundred years. We
see him addressing his vast congregations in the open air. At one moment,
speaking of the glory of Transubstantiation, he says :
" Grant now that our dear Lady St. Mary, Mother of God, stood here on this
fair meadow, while all the Saints and all the Angels found room around her, and
that I were found worthy to see this sight. ... I would rather turn and bow
the knee before a priest bearing the Lord's body to the sick, than before our Lady
St. Mary and all the Saints of the whole host of heaven."
Again, he answers an objection from his hearers :
" ' Brother Berthold, thou speakest oft and oft of these devils and all their sleights ;
yet we never see or hear or touch or feel a single devil.'
" ' Lo, now that is even the worst harm they can do thee : for, hadst thou but
once seen a single devil in his true form, I should know for certain that thou wouldst
never sin more. ... If the devil came out at this moment from this forest hard
by, and this city that we see before us were a burning fiery furnace heated through
and through, then should ye see such a press of folk as never was seen, and such
as never shall be seen in this world, and all of them thronging headlong into that
burning fiery furnace I ' "
Berthold's sermons give a gloomy view of society even during the
years between St. Francis's death and Dante's boyhood. The Pope could
make and unmake emperors ; Cardinals and Bishops were among the
greatest princes of the day ; the parish priest had inquisitorial and dis
ciplinary rights over almost every act of his parishioners, yet the people
were not only far more ignorant, but had even less of true rehgion than
to-day. " The laity are evil, the religious are evil," is a quotation con
stantly recurring in Berthold's sermons. He finds himself compeUed to

22 Medieval Studies.
advise his hearers on dehcate points of spiritual relationship arising from
the numbers of " parson's children " who were to be found everywhere.
" It often happens," he continues, " that a Bishop has children, few or
many " ; yet for two hundred years clerical celibacy had been the strict
rule of the Church. He complains that bribery and corruption are as
rampant in the spiritual as in the lay courts. In consequence of the
depredations of robber-nobles, " in places where there might weU be two
or three parish priests, there is scarce one ; and even he may weU be
found unlearned." The pagan superstition stiU flourished which held
it an evil omen to meet a priest the first thing in the morning. Berthold
aUudes to the constant tithe-quarrels ; as an Enghsh bishop of the same
date complains that parishioners, indignant that priests should exact
tithes even of milk, revenged themselves by bringing their pailful to
church and pouring it on the floor before the altar. The priest himself,
again, was often excommunicate, and the whole parish involved with
him in mortal sin. Nor, with aU his nominal authority, could the parson
put down the constant habit of Sunday work, or secure regular attendance
at church. " Lo, a stinking goat of a Jew has more reverence for his
holy days than thou ! " The people's rehgious education also left much
to be desired. " Many rise in the morning without even making the
sign of the cross, and very hkely reach the age of twenty years without
being able to repeat the Lord's Prayer." Many, again, are so ignorant
of the creed that they faU a prey to the first doubt suggested by the ex
perience of hfe : " Ah, God ! who, then, are in the right — Jews, heathens,
or heretics ? I know not how things stand, nor who hath the right faith."
Of Bible study in the modern sense there was of course no question, nor
would it have been permitted even if it had been otherwise possible.
The laity are therefore warned against disputing with Jews : " For ye
are unlearned, whUe they are learned in the Scriptures, and they have
pondered carefuUy how they may persuade you ; so that ye wiU be ever
the weaker in faith for that dispute." As St. Louis pleaded in the same
century, a layman's only vahd argument in such cases was "to thrust
his sword into the Jew's beUy as far as it would go."
But had not the parish clergy strong auxiliaries in the swarms of friars
who filled the land ? The best influence of the friars was fast waning
during Berthold's lifetime, though these new Orders were scarcely half
a century old. Too often the friar and the parish priest were at daggers
drawn ; or heretics carried on their propaganda in the name of St. Francis,
just as the first Franciscan missionaries had been taken for wandering
heretics. Berthold's constant and impassioned warnings show clearly
(if we did not know it from other sources) how httle the Roman faith
could claim to reign unquestioned even during this its golden age. He
reckons the heretical sects of his time at " a good hundred and fifty,"
and appeals to his hearers' knowledge of " how many thousand men are
led astray by unfaith." The process of perversion, as he describes it,
is simple. A heretic is never converted ; his heart is turned to stone ;
" and just as crystal is petrified water, so are heretics petrified Christians :
as httle, therefore, as the crystal can ever be turned to water again, so
httle can a heretic be turned back to Christianity, however fresh and

xA Revivalist of Six Centuries Ago. 23
green he may be in bis heresy."1 On the other hand, it is only too easy
to make a Cathohc into a heretic. The preacher illustrates this through
one of his most picturesque, and least accurate, iUustrations from natural
history. Playing upon the German names for heretic and cat (Ketzer,
Katze), he says :
" No household beast can work so great harm in so short a time as this, more
especially in summer : let all take good heed of the cat. She goes away and licks
a toad, under some hedge or wheresoever she may find it, until the toad begins to
bleed ; then the poison makes her thirsty, and she comes and drinks at the same
water whereat men drink, and defiles it, so that many a man is sick for half a year,
or a whole year long, or even to his life's end ; or it may be that he takes his sudden
death therefrom. Or again the cat drinks so greedily that a drop falls from her
eye into the water, or that she sneezes therein : and he who uses that water must
taste of bitter death. . . . Wherefore, ye folk, drive her away, for the breath
that cometh from her throat is most unsound and perilous : let her be driven forth
from the kitchen or from wheresoever ye may be, for she is deadly unclean. And
thence also hath the heretic his name of Ketzer, since in all his ways he is like no
beast so much as a cat. He goes as demurely (geistlich) to other folk, and speaks
as sweetly and can bear himself as softly as any cat ; and even so suddenly has he
defiled men's bodies. He holds so sweet speech of God and the angels, that thou
wouldst swear a thousand oaths that he is an angel himself ; yet is he the devil
incarnate. And he promises to let thee see an angel, and teach thee to see God with
thy bodily eyes **. yet he hath swiftly parted thee from thy Christian faith, and thou
art lost for evermore. . . . Had I a sister in a country wherein were only one
heretic, yet that one heretic would keep me in fear for her, so noisome is he. There
fore let all folk take heed of him. I myself, by God's grace, am as fast rooted in
the Christian faith as any Christian man should rightly be ; yet, rather than dwell
knowingly one brief fortnight in the same house with a heretic, I would dwell a whole
year with five hundred devils ! What, heretic ! art thou by chance in this congre
gation ? I pray to Almighty God that there be none here present ! "
These sermons explain, almost more plainly than any other document,
the state of mind which drove honest and good Cathohcs into such whole
sale and systematic barbarities as we can scarcely think of without a
shudder. If, even in the Age of Faith par excellence, faith was so frail
as to be shattered by the least breath, and heresy so strong as to resist
all orthodox arguments, then persecution was plainly the only resource
of men who denied to the heretic the name of Christian, and looked upon
him and his as mere food for heU-fire. Nor does Berthold show us only
heresy rampant ; he constantly aUudes to free-thought also. But for
the stern repression of the Jews, he thinks that these might have suc
ceeded in smothering Christianity altogether. Again, men found it hard
to understand why Cato should be in hell with Nero : a point which may
explain Dante's promotion of the former to Purgatory. Again :
" Many say, ' the man who is used to hell is more at his ease there than anywhere
else.' That is a great lie ; for man can never be used to hell. . . . Some also
say  I have heard it even from learned folk — that our Lord makes for many a man
some mansion and comfort in hell, that no pain may torment him. That again is
a lie and a heresy. . . . Many again preach openly that, whether a man do well
or ill he will be saved if he be destined to salvation ; and, however well he do all
through the world, he must go to hell if hell be appointed for him."
1 The contemporary Dominican preacher, Etienne de Bourbon, complains also that
heretics too often know their Bible far better than Catholics, and that, while many are per
verted from the faith, practically none are ever reconverted. He explains it ingeniously :
wine often turns to vinegar, but never vinegar to wine.

24 Medieval Studies.
This, of course, is the predestinarian fatalism which many modern writers
imagine Calvin to have invented, though JoinviUe and Sahmbene show
us how common it was among the sceptical upper classes in the thirteenth
century in France and Italy. But the most popular arguments of medieval
sceptics were drawn from the hves of the clergy :
" Men say ..." we see none that work such evil as the parsons, nor that do
such injustice, as may be seen daily : pay no heed therefore to what the parsons
tell thee.' This is the root of almost all unbelief and heresy."
This brings us back again to the body of nominal believers : yet even
here the picture is no brighter. The system of Indulgences was com
paratively new, and far as yet from that colossal pardon-traffic which
shocked Luther ; yet even Luther scarcely spoke more strongly than
Berthold: " Fie, penny-preacher, murderer of mankind ! . . . Thou promisest so much
pardon for a single penny or halfpenny, that many thousands trust thee and dream
they have atoned for all their sins with the penny or halfpenny, as thou pratest to
them. So they will never repent, but go hence to hell and are lost forever. . . .
Thou hast murdered true penitence amongst us 1 "
Almost equaUy fatal was the trust in pUgrimages. Many dehberately
ran up a long bill of sins in accordance with the devil's suggestion : " put
off- (repentance) until thou has gained and laid up money ; and then do
penance bravely with a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or a Lententide in
Rome, or a journey to ComposteUa." Moreover, the pilgrim's extrava
gance often reduces wife and child to poverty; though he himself "gorges
himself so that he comes back far fatter than he went, and has long tales
of aU that he saw, which he dins into men's ears during service and
sermon-time." For the custom which made " Paul's Walk " into a sort
of Piccadilly for our Stuart ancestors was simply the survival of a medieval
abuse. St. Bernardino's sermons show us the churches fiUed with folk
who came in and went out when they hked, and scarcely suspended talk
and laughter to doff their hoods for a moment at the elevation of the
Host. Berthold returns again and again to such irreverences :
" Men talk nowadays in church as if they were at market, each calling across to
the other and boasting and telling what he has seen in foreign lands ; so that one
man may easily trouble six or ten who would gladly be silent. . . . And ye women !
ye never let your mouths rest from unprofitable babble. One complains to another
of her maid-servant, how greedy she is of sleep and how loth to work ; another tells
of her husband ; a third of her children, how this one is a weariness, and that other
thriveth not. To what devil art thou complaining thus in church ? "
The churchyard was used for fairs and markets, with aU their attendant
disorders, and for indecent pagan dances that were practised in the
Middle Ages on Christian festivals ; Berthold teUs us that it deserved no
longer its old German name of Friedhof, or Court of Peace. Nor were
these dances the most painful relics of paganism. The Mass itself had
become a mere pagan incantation, to all practical purposes, for the

^4 Revivalist of Six Centuries Ago. 25
majority of the laity. Berthold is preaching reverence for the Mass, and
one of the congregation expostulates with him :
" But, Brother Berthold, we understand not the Mass, and cannot pray thereat
so well as we should, nor feel so great reverence as if we understood it. We under
stand every word of the sermon, but the Mass we understand not, nor know what
is being read or sung ; we cannot comprehend it."
The preacher therefore spends the rest of his sermon in giving a rough
explanation of the service. No wonder that the holy wafer, the holy
oils, the holy water in the font, needed to be kept under lock and key
from the common people, who used them as engines of sorcery :
" Many of the village folk would come to heaven, were it not for their witchcrafts.
. . . The woman has spells for getting a husband, spells for her marriage ; spells
on this side and on that ; spells before the child is born, before the christening,
after the christening ; and all she gains with her spells is that her child fares the
worse all its life long. . . . Ye men, it is much marvel that ye lose not your wits
for' the monstrous witchcrafts that women practise on you I "
Like aU medieval moralists, he is never weary of gibing at women's
dress :
" They take a bit of cloth, and twitch it hither and twitch it thither ; they gild
it here and there with gold thread, and spend thereon all their time and trouble
. . . they will spend a good six months' work on a single veil, which is a sinful great
travail. . . . They itch for praise, and to hear men say ' Lord ! how fair ! was
ever aught so fair ? ' Yet our Lady was far fairer than thou, but she was humble
withal ; so was St. Margaret, and many saints more."
" ' But, Brother Berthold, we do it for the goodman's sake, that he may gaze the
less on other women.' "

To which Berthold answers with the pitiless logic of a man and a bachelor.
If the goodman be honest, he wiU care more for your chaste conversation
than for your outward adornment ; if he be wanton, aU your " crimple-
crispings " and " criss-crosses " and gold thread wiU not avaU to
fix his wandering eyes. Encouraged by these words of sober reason, a
man's voice is raised amid the congregation :
" Alas ! Brother Berthold, ... I have oftimes besought my wife, first kindly,
and then sternly ; but she would never leave her follies. I fear to tear one gewgaw
from her lest she go and buy another twice as dear, and so my last loss be worse
than the first."
The friar's answer, ungallant as it sounds to modern ears, is the true
voice of the thirteenth century, from the king to the beggar, from the
moralist to the poet or romancer :
" Come, man, take heart of grace ; art thou not a man, and hast not a sword by
thy side ? Wilt thou be lightly overcome by a distaff ? Pluck up thy courage, take
heart and tear the stuff from her head, even though thou tear away a hair or twain
therewithal ; and cast all together into the fire ! Do thus not thrice or four times
only ; then will she leave her follies. Man should be woman's lord and master."

26 Medieval Studies.
Berthold has his own definite ideas, too, about children. Why is theie
such mortality among rich folk's children in especial ?
" Because the baby's sister makes him a mess of pap, and coaxes it into him. Now
his little belly is soon filled, and the pap begins to bubble out ; but she coaxes it
in and in. Then comes his aunt, and does the same. Then comes his nurse, and
cries, ' Alas, my child has eaten naught this day ! ' and sets herself to coax the
pap in again, as before. Meanwhile the child whimpers and tosses its little limbs."
Don't you know (asks Berthold in another place) how your bodies are
made ? The stomach hangs in the middle, for aU the world hke a great
caldron ; and next it hes the hver, by whose heat the pot is -kept boiling.
If you fiU it too fuU, what can it do but boil over ? — hence come heart
burn, fevers, dropsy, and aU the iUs that flesh is heir to !
An article hke this can give only a shght idea of the wealth which
Berthold offers to students of the past. There are few works equaUy
accessible and equaUy rich in hints for the student of manners. The great
Revivalist wiU not teach us pharisaical content with our own civihzation ;
but he may weU cure us of impotent hankerings after a dead past.

III.
Side-Lights on the Franciscans.1
j|0 those who knew and loved St. Francis before M. Sabatier's
Life gave such an impulse to Franciscan literature in
England, the satisfaction which they feel in the saint's
immense popularity is somewhat aUoyed by the regret
that this literature should run in so narrow a groove. Even
in M. Sabatier's book, the hght is concentrated too exclusively on the
saint and his immediate disciples. We are indeed reminded, here and
there, that the ordinary friar of the next generation was already of a
very different type ; but the story seldom passes beyond that first small
group, and everyone seems to avoid the more complicated and laborious
question : " What manner of man was the ordinary friar of the second
generation ? " And yet, until this question is at least approximately
answered, we cannot reaUy understand certain traits in the Founder's
own character. Scientific history can never admit Goethe's poetic plea :
" Ich brachte reines Feuer vom Altar,
Was ich entziindet, ist nicht reine Flamme."
It is the sower's business to look weU, not only to his seed, but to bis
soil ; for soil wiU give the increase only by strict natural law, and a man's
disciples are, in a sense, only his own thoughts and deeds writ large.
The medieval reaction of the last seventy years in England is, in many
ways, a very curious phenomenon. In spite of the number of fine in-
teUects which have led it, it has been far more a matter of sentiment than
of logic. The impression that " they ordered these things better in the
Middle Ages " prevails among the clergy in direct proportion to their
ignorance of actual medieval life ; while most laymen, bred under the
tolerant traditions of ten generations of Protestantism, hsten to pleas in
favour of the old religion with the same half-contemptuous sympathy
which they extend to the monks and nuns expeUed from France. The
current clerical conception of the Middle Ages is thus rather the product
of a negative subtraction from modern life, than of a positive synthesis
from medieval facts. It is too often assumed that to repudiate any tenet
current among Nonconformists is necessarily to work back towards an
older and purer Church ; that, the less we sympathize with Bunyan and
Baxter, the closer we must approach to St. Bernard or St. Bonaventura.
I wiU attempt here to show how mistaken this assumption is, and what
true community of spirit may be found between the Enghsh Puritans
i. Independent Review, February, 1905.

28 Medieval Studies.
and those friars who are generally assumed to stand at the very opposite
rehgious pole. If I seem here to lay undue emphasis on the weaker side
of the Franciscan movement, it is only that it now seems high time to
protest against the growth among us of a Franciscan legend as unhealthily
one-sided, in its own way, as that Napoleonic legend which renders so
many Frenchmen incapable of understanding the real lessons of modern
history. The Fioretti, the Three Companions, the Mirror of Perfection,
are, in a sense, partisan manifestoes, and give us only one side of the
truth. Thomas of Eccleston's idyllic descriptions refer, as he himself
plainly teUs us, to an earher, heroic age, which had already passed away
before he wrote, though this was only some thirty-five years after the
Founder's death. To form an idea of the average friar, we must look
wider afield — to the misceUaneous notices brought together in Wadding's
coUections, to the Chronicle of the Twenty-four Generals, to the Seven
Tribulations of Angelo Clareno, to the Chronicle of Sahmbene, to the early
Constitutions of the Order, and, above aU, to the disciplinary writings of
St. Bonaventura and his school. The most important of these have been
pubhshed in a cheap form by the Fathers of Quaracchi, in two volumes
which cost about half a crown each.
These httle manuals aim at presenting complete codes of conduct for
novices and fuU-fledged friars ; and one's first feehng in reading them
is one of gloom and depression. We are already far, indeed, from the
real freedom of St. Francis — from that sense of open air and sunshine
in God's world rather than the Devil's, and from an earth where a man
may be cheerful without irreverence to greater realities beyond. The
model friar of these books is a slave to the letter of the law in petty
things, a man who sees danger and defilement everywhere in the world :
in short, a Puritan in the invidious sense of the word. The disciphne is
the discipline of the quarter-deck : hold your tongue in your senior's
presence ; avoid addressing him by name if possible, and, in any case,
never venture to pronounce the bare name " without the sign of his re
hgious title " ; never presume, however weU-meaningly, to pat him
familiarly on the head or the cheek. Rise up when he comes, and never
dare to sit while he stands ; put back your cowl when you speak to him ;
never cross the cloister-garth, while the friars are sitting there, " without
due soberness and decency in the disposition of thy hmbs and of thy
habit." Never " thou " and " thee " the senior Brother, except in places
where, by the custom of the country, this constitutes no undue
hberty. But these, however petty and un-Franciscan, are among the least
tyrannous of the precepts. The rules for rehgious deportment, as a whole,
smack far less of the Fioretti than of Praise-God Barebones. The general
precepts, it is true, merely inculcate an impossible theory of detachment
from the world. " Keep thy heart," writes St. Bonaventura, after a
passage of great beauty :
" Keep thy heart with all diligence, and let it be given up to spiritual exercises
only ; suffer no images of earthly things to leave their impress thereon, that so it
may remain a stranger to all things created, and free to devote itself solely to its
Creator."

Side-Lights on the Franciscans. 29
Yet a detail here and there shows what this theory involves in practice :
" Avoid all games, especially with the young . . . never speak a word
to any man which is not premeditated, ordered, useful, and honest . . .
wherever thou mayst be, avoid aU women and beardless youths except
for reasons of necessity or manifest profit . . . never have any spiritual
familiarity with anyone, but behave thyself ahke to all, so that none
may be able to mark in thee any difference or special love for any : . . .
avoid special civilities, friendships, and familiarities." But it is in the
more detailed exposition of the same theme by St. Bonaventura 's secretary
Bernard of Besse, and by David of Augsburg, that Puritanism weighs
upon us in all its self-imposed gloom. Every, speech and gesture and
action must be measured and calculated : no spontaneity, no Nature ;
for Nature is evil.
" Let not novices be easily moved to laughter," writes Bernard, 
" tittering in general is a great disgrace to the gravity of a Religious. It is utterly
despicable for a man of Religion to titter like a boy. No man of Religion should
utter laughter with undisciplined lips, but show with a glad face the gladness of
his heart."
There is a true ring of St. Francis about this last sentence : but the
negative precept far outweighs the positive, as we may read in many
other passages, and especially in one which Bernard quotes from his
greater namesake :
" Trifles among worldly folk are mere trifles, but in the mouth of a Priest or a
ReUgious they are blasphemies. If they are forced upon us, we must perchance
suffer them, but never repeat them. To open thy mouth to such things is unlawful ;
to accustom it thereto is sacrilegious ; it is base to be moved to tittering, and still
baser to move another."
It must be noted that even the author of the Mirror of Perfection cannot
quote St. Francis's love of cheerfulness without adding, as a warning, that
the saint never meant thereby to encourage laughter, which on the con
trary he speciaUy abhorred : "for he would that the servant of God
should not only not laugh himself, but should not afford to others the
least occasion for laughter." That even " we who were with him "
could have written these words, shows clearly how rash is the common
assumption" that the saint's admirable combination of inward fervour
and outward gladness was shared by his disciples as a body. Many were
fervent in spirit, and many were merry of heart ; but the fervent and
the merry were soon at daggers drawn within the Order.
It is startling in this context to find an express warning against oaths ;
but the oath was, in the Middle Ages, as natural a garnish even to the
churchman's conversation as it is to the modern soldier's. Not only did
Chaucer's Poor Parson incur the suspicion of Lollardy by his protest
against profane language ; but the same is gravely recorded as a common
characteristic of heretics by a thirteenth century inquisitor. Eccleston,
in his catalogue of the extraordinary virtues of the early friars in England,
thinks it necessary to enumerate that they gave up aU oaths in their
speech. .The novice, therefore, needs the serious reminder that —
" To swear at one time by the Head, at another by the Saints, or in any other fashion,
is most unbecoming of a disciple of Christ, Who saith, ' Let your speech be yea,

30 Medieval Studies.
yea ; no, no.' Among servants of God, there should be comparison of opinions ;
but no altercation, which is a perverse thing ; especially if the mouth of a Religious
be opened with damnable boldness to railing or curses (which, as the Apostle saith,
exclude from God's Kingdom) ; or if he take the Devil's name in his speech, or use
it often in common talk."
As JoinviUe remarked in the same generation : " I never heard [St.
Louis] name the Devil, whose name is much used throughout the King
dom, which I beheve to be far from agreeable to God."
So far, then, so good ; though we must remember how strongly all
this would smack of the precisian to the worldling of those days, and
what sad nicknames the French nobles did in fact give to St. Louis for
his squeamishness on this and similar points. But readers of the Fioretti
wiU be pained to find, not only that the novice is forbidden to jest, but
also that he is exhorted to a truly Quakerish avoidance of civil worldly
phrases in his letters and his speech. David would even forbid the con
ventional How d'ye do? " wherein is no true care for the health of him
to whom they speak." It is true, this may be deduced logically enough
from St. Francis's scruples about using the name " Good," and the common
titles of " Father " or " Master " ; and yet the saint himself would scarcely
have pushed his logic so far. When once such precepts are codified and
registered, and imposed upon a whole Order of men, this can only result
in a formahsm worthy of the seventeenth century precisians. Moreover,
the novice is bidden to pay the same minute and painful attention to
the matter of speech as to its manner : the " D.V." and the perpetual
" edification " of the Clapham sect are also the ideal of the model friar.
" In speaking of doubtful or future matters let them never speak without quali
fication, but always add some condition to assertions of this kind ; for Religion
alloweth not precise words concerning things indifferent. No man hving hath it
in his choice to say ' Yea ' or ' No ' without qualification, concerning things which
are yet mere contingencies. . . . When thou art about to go forth among the
public, forearm thyself, and purpose firmly in thy mind to abstain from empty words.
Provide thyself, before going forth, with some useful matter wherefrom to weave
thy speech if need be."
This, it is true, " condemns idle loquacity, not opportune affability " ;
but the line of demarcation depends so much on the individual mind !
Here, for instance, is the talk prescribed to the brethren as they walk
two and two :
" At that time they should beguile their toil by recounting examples of the Fathers,
or any other good examples, which may either kindle their affections or at least
instruct their intellect. It is most disgraceful to be unable to pass the time with
any but frivolous and fabulous stories. Woe unto those who are silent of thee, O
Lord ; for the loquacious are dumb ! "
Again :
" Let friars beware of carrying news about, even though it be good and probable.
It is unbecoming of Religious to be everywhere carriers of news. The falsehood
which is very often in the report itself, or which is brought in by secular men who
pass it on, is imputed to its first author. . . . Let them be honest and serious in
their talk, not showing themselves worldly in worldly words, and such as move to
laughter. A servant of God should speak of God, to fulfil the Scripture : ' if any
speak, let him speak as it were the speeches of God ' : otherwise vain words disclose
the vanity of the mind."

Side-Lights on the Franciscans. 31
The same formality extended itself to prayers : " never pray without
sighs " (or groans). The gift of tears in prayer was a frequent and much
cpveted sign of grace : he to whom it was not vouchsafed prayed to have
it ; for, after all, this is a VaUey of Tears. St. Louis bitterly regretted
that he could so seldom weep in prayer. The Blessed Umiliana, having
lost for a while this gift of tears, nearly blinded herself by putting quick
lime into her eyes to provoke the accustomed signs of grace. In spite of
St. Francis and the Fioretti, " God's Minstrels " are now forbidden even
the solace of song.
" Let them not sing on their way, especially to secular airs, even though the words
be good ; for layfolk understand the bare sound only. And besides this, it befitteth
not a Religious to raise his voice above the ordinary."
A vast amount of early Church music was adapted, hke the Salvation
Army hymns, from secular music ; St. Francis once took two hnes of
a popular song for the text of his sermon ; Frate Eha was held to have
shown his un-Franciscan spirit by grudging that the saint should sing
so loud upon his deathbed. Yet already, in St. Bonaventura's days,
the Puritan estimate of song is officiaUy ratified. What a gulf hes between
this and the holy freedom of the first days, when a scoffing knight was
converted by hearing a friar sing as he trudged with bleeding feet through
the snow ! But those first friars had been real missionaries. What we •
find now is an Order, very jealous of its honour, and aU the more
sensitive to the breath of scandal because its decay in real rehgion and
popularity was already only too notorious.
MeanwhUe, the more grievously aU weightier matters of the law are
omitted, the more punctiliously are the tithes of mint and anise and
cummin paid. The smaUest gestures are prescribed. " It is unbecoming
in an honest and humble Friar to put his leg over his thigh, or to cross
his feet in pubhc, as he sits." He must utterly avoid aU bodily games,
as St. Bonaventura also commanded. For a friar " to take anyone,
without necessity, by the hand or the girdle, to carry idly flowers, fruit,
or a staff in his hand, or to twirl the end of his girdle round in his fingers,
is not in accordance with seemly behaviour ; nay, rather, it is to some
extent a token of wantonness." " When they go among the laity, let
the modesty of discipline shine forth in their words, their walk, and their
habit : let them speak briefly and little, let them cover their head de
cently, and hide their hands [in their sleeves], utterly avoiding to kiss,
or touch the bare hand of any woman, however nearly related to them."
For it would be difficult to overrate the prudery of the model friar, if
prudery that may be caUed which had so real underlying reason. Again
and again, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find solemn re
petitions qf the ancient decrees which, for the avoidance of scandal,
forbade a priest to five in the same house even with his mother or his
sisters. It was one of the distinctive virtues of St. Louis of Toulouse
that, after his conversion, he dared not kiss even his mother. Bernard
of Besse specifies this as dangerous, with much more that is almost
equaUy significant. The Blessed Clara of Montefalcone, a sainted Fran
ciscan nun of the same thirteenth century, is commended for having re-

32 Medieval Studies.
fused to look at her brother unveiled, though he was himself a friar.
She would never show an inch of her naked flesh, even to her doctor :
and when once, in sleep, she had thrust one bare foot from under her
gown, and her sister had told her of the fact, " she expiated it with many
tears as a grievous act of impiety." What most distressed her contem
porary, the Blessed Umihana, on her death-bed, was the thought that
the crowd which would come to worship her corpse might kiss her naked
feet. To avoid this danger, she caused her shoes and stockings to be
drawn on while the breath was yet in her body.
Nor was the model Franciscan behind his sisters in these proprieties.
" When the friar washes his feet, he should avoid there, as elsewhere, to show
his bare shins ; nay, he should, with all the greater diligence, wrap his frock around
him : for it is a disgrace for persons of Rehgion to be seen with naked flesh. Every
honest [Religious] is careful that his bare flesh be never seen, save in case of manifest
and compelling necessity. We read of St. Antony that, when he needed to ford a
river, he begged his fellow to withdraw somewhat from his sight, lest each should
see the other's nakedness. His fellow withdrew, yet even then he was ashamed
when he would have bared himself. And, as he thus pondered within himself, God's
power bore him across to the further bank of the stream : for doubtless this honest
thought of his was acceptable to the Lord."
It is told of a Dominican and a Cistercian monastery, and I think also
of a Franciscan, that the Blessed Virgin came one night into the dormi
tory to see whether all was weU, and was much shocked and embarrassed
to find one friar showing his bare shins. Here again we are already far
from the clfildlike simpUcity of the first times. In the Fioretti, the Breth
ren show no such prudery : Ruffino preaches in a church " naked as he
was born, save his drawers only " ; and St. Francis joins him in the
same condition. Juniper is more unconventional stiU : for the earlier
version of the story expressly denies to him even the one scanty garment
which the Fioretti leaves him ; and on at least two occasions St. Francis
also is recorded to have appeared in pubhc without a single rag of covering.
The hair shirt, with which Canon Rawnsley covers him in the Bishop's
presence, is a mere piece of later prudery. The first free association of
penitents and missioners founded by St. Francis soon became a Rehgious
Order, and must perforce fah in with the old monastic routine, which is
admirably iUustrated by a story in Caesarius of Heisterbach.
" Ulrich, Abbot of Steinfeld . . . rode abroad one day with one of the youths
[who were reared in the monastery] ; and, as they talked together, they met a fair
maiden. The abbot, of set purpose, reined in his steed and saluted her most cere
moniously : she in her turn stood still, and bent her head to return his salute. When,
therefore, they were gone a Uttle further, the abbot, wilUng to tempt the youth,
said : ' Methinks that was a most comely maiden.' ' Believe me,' replied the youth,
" she was most comely in my eyes also.' Whereupon the abbot answered ' she hath
but one deformity, namely, that she hath but one eye ! ' 'In truth, Lord,' repUed
the youth, ' she hath both her eyes ; for I looked somewhat narrowly into her face.'
' And I,' said the abbot, moved to indignation, ' will look narrowly into thy bare
back. Thou shouldst have been too simple to know whether she was male or female.' "
The threat was publicly and solemnly fulfiUed that very evening ; and
Caesarius presently goes on to extol the exceeding sanctity of a nun who,
having hved in the convent from the age of seven years, " scarce knew
the difference betwixt a layman and a brute beast." So St. Doucehne,

Side-Lights on the Franciscans. 33
one of the most remarkable saints of the thirteenth century, " knew no
man by sight " ; though, as a Beguine, she moved amongst her fellow-
creatures. When a little girl of seven, who was in her Beguinage, looked
at some workmen who were employed on the house, the ascetic saint
" beat her most grievously, so that the blood ran down her ribs, telling
her meanwhile that she would sacrifice her to God." To the strict Fran
ciscans, the other sex existed only as a temptation, permitted by God's
inscrutable providence. All their earhest disciplinary writings take up
the theme of the monks, their predecessors : that the secular woman' is
dangerous indeed, but spiritual friendship is even more perilous than
worldly familiarity. David of Augsburg describes in four separate places,
with great plainness and detail, from his own wide experience, the gradual
development of such famiharities from apparent good to open evil. He
asserts that " the reverence for Religion (i.e. for the Franciscan Order)
is made vile through such famiharities, and very many evils come to
pass." But (as he complains) it is very difficult to avoid evil companion
ship : there are so many " by whom men are drawn into sin, not only
by their example, but even by their persuasion and derision, and ' the
sinner is praised in the desires of his soul.' And this evil conformity is
now almost the principal cause why evils are so multiphed in the Church,
and spiritual studies have failed in Religion, and many have become
backshders to external studies and business  " There are so
many, too, of whom it may be said, after years of rehgious routine,
" He is drawn away little by little from his first fervour, and his desire of spiritual
progress grows languid, and there gUde into his heart affections for religious women
(or vice versa, of men), and frequentings of such women : and at last, when all else
is extinct, nothing is left but this poor solace, that he can still speak of the spirit ;
whereby either he sets himself above many who have not felt such spiritual ex
periences, or he gets for himself a name among religious women, who fancy that he
speaks from the abundance of his heart, and is a good instructor in spiritual Ufe
and inward devotion. Very many are tossed by this storm of temptation, and few
come safely to land."
" Often love, which seemed at first good and spiritual . . . changes
to carnal love " : " very many have perished by the sin of lechery."
St. Bonaventura constantly harps on the same theme. There is no real
safety but in flight. As Bernard of Besse remarks, after his warning
against touching the hands of, or kissing, even a baby sister :
" I can call that man neither chaste nor honourable who abhors not to touch a
woman or to suffer her touch. How should it be lawful to touch that which it is not
lawful even to behold."
No doubt this is to some extent a piece of rehgious rhetoric ; yet it is
impossible to study carefuUy the records, even of the earhest times,
without realizing how fatally the Order was shut out from healthy in
fluence over one half of the world. Even if the Franciscan ideal had
been otherwise practicable, it must, sooner or later, have been wrecked
on this rock. The friar's reputation was as dehcate as that of Caesar's
wife ; and the satire of outsiders hke Chaucer or Langland is abundantly
explained by the painful sohcitude of aU earnest brethren within the
Order.

34 Medieval Studies.
Meanwhile, however, the vast and unwieldly phalanx was attempting
to foUow in the footsteps of the most spontaneous and unconventional
genius of many ages ; and with the natural result. St. Francis had let
the world go by, because he had already in his soul a richer inheritance,
the kingdom of God. But, apart from the first band of his personal
foUowers, most friars began at the other end, hke most men of any age
whose rehgious feehngs have received a sudden and violent stimulus from
without. The world seemed to them a positive evil, a Thing to be fought
against in much pain of soul and body. In the naive records of the
Mendicant chronicles, we get constant glimpses of a terrible gloom of
life. The world was to them, as truly as to Bunyan, a VaUey of the Shadow
of Death, set off only by the painted mockeries and ghastly gaiety of
Vanity Fair. St. Bonaventura names, under breaches of the Seventh
Commandment, besides " curious gazing on women," " the curious listen
ing to news, or to musical instruments . . . the sight of fair things,
and the contemplation of delectable things with inordinateness of
affection." Again, " the desire to see fair things and possess rare things "
is, in a nun, " concupiscence of curiosity." The rules drawn up for Fran
ciscan and Dominican Tertiaries — i.e. folk who, without entering the
cloister, pledged themselves to lead a rehgious hfe in the world under
the friars' guidance — forbid attendance at weddings or dances, among
other " unhonest " and " worldly " spectacles. It is true, dancing is in
variably spoken of as an immoral and dangerous pastime by medieval
theologians, and with only too much justification from the manners of
the time. The objection to weddings, too, may be partly explained by
the not infrequent statutes against the practice of throwing snow, saw
dust, and street sweepings on these occasions. But the fact remains,
that the strict thirteenth century friar looked with as httle favour as
Calvin himself upon the ordinary amusements of his time. The Blessed
Salomea, sister-in-law to St. Elizabeth, showed her sanctity by keeping
away altogether from the festivities of her court.
Moreover, outside the narrow circle of writings immediately inspired
by the Founder, there is but httle love of nature in early Franciscan
literature. Even the not very frequent tales of love for animals are coun
terbalanced by others of an opposite sort, as of Brother Juniper cutting
off the hve pig's foot for a sick friend ; of the hawk which God sent to
rend sparrows who " presumed " to come into the refectory at Saragossa ;
of the flies which Benedict XIII cursed away from the convent of Morella ;
and the swaUows which Brother Adam drove away from his sermon.
The medieval habit of looking for the Devil everywhere in Nature pre
cluded anything like the widespread modern consideration for animals.
St. Dominic is related, in the Appendix to Lives of the Brethren, to have
dehberately plucked ahve a wretched sparrow which disturbed his preach
ing, and which he therefore imagined to be the Devil, " amid much
laughter from the Brothers and Sisters, and awful shrieks of the sparrow."
The Marquis de Rambures, in his L'Eglise et la Pitie envers les Animaux,
has produced very few examples in favour of his thesis, against the
many that could be quoted of medieval indifference to dumb beasts ;
and the very tone of his quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas shows what

Side-Lights on the Franciscans. 35
a gulf there was, on this subject, between the general thirteenth century
feeling and the modern. It is not surprising, therefore, that the general
attitude of the friar towards nature is rather that of the monk, by whom
the beauty and variety of the visible world were deemed spiritual hin
drances. Life was not worth hving, if God had not imposed it on us
as the one road to eternal salvation. As St. Bonaventura says : " Why
do we desire hfe to last so long, wherein the longer we hve the more we
sin ? the longer our span, the more numerous our faults ! For evil grows
daily, and good diminishes." David of Augsburg blames worldly folk
for —
" Mourning when their children die, though it is safer they should die after baptism
and before they can lose eternal life by mortal sin, than afterwards at a ripe age ;
for we know not of what sort they will grow up, and manifold are the snares of sin,
from which very few escape."
Berthold of Ratisbon, again, complains how life is a prison, but good
men —
" Stand ever at the door of their dungeon. As the imprisoned dog ever stands at
the door, whining, scratching, travailing to come forth, so stands the righteous ever
at the gate of death."
Another fault generally looked upon as specially characteristic of
modern Puritanism — the complacent assurance that one's own clique is
in the way of salvation, and that all others are on the broad way to dam
nation — is not only thoroughly medieval, but speciaUy characteristic of
those who had taken rehgious vows. Pious men in the Middle Ages
contemplated with the most Calvinistic complacency the hopeless dam
nation of the whole non-Christian world, including miUions of unbaptised
infants for whom Christian parents had shed bitter human tears.
Jonathan Edwards's sermon on the doom of unbaptised infants, which
is often quoted as a typical specimen of Puritanism, is simply a survival
of the Middle Ages. St. Bonaventura only voices a medieval tenet,
common at least from St. Gregory onwards, when he says that —
" The sight of the pains of the damned heaps up the measure of the accidental joys
of the righteous."
In the contemporary Diaeta Salutis, perhaps falsely attributed to him,
the author quotes the Psalms to the same effect, describing with merciless
glee how the saints at the Last Day, " shaU rejoice in the damnation [of
the unrighteous] as it is written 'the just shaU rejoice when he seeth the
revenge : he shah wash his hands in the blood of the sinner.' " His great
Dominican contemporaries, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas of Chantimpre\
and Humbert de Romans, write to the same effect. Later on, the saintly
Gerson, who has often been credited with the Imitation of Christ, speaks
with even more ghastly assurance, if possible, on this point. The diffi
culty is to understand, not how men of these convictions showed such
readiness to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord for a question of belief ;
but rather how they managed so often to rise superior to their creed,

36 ^Medieval Studies.
and to suffer that men of different opinions should breathe the same air
with themselves.
Space fails me for more than a bare enumeration of other equaUy im
portant points. That " personal assurance of salvation," which to
Newman seemed a special characteristic of " the extreme of Calvinism
or Methodism," is ubiquitous in Franciscan legends. Again, Bunyan
himself never wrestled more bitterly with the problems of predestination
than many medieval Rehgious, to whom Satan would also come as an
angel of hght, and persuade suicide or homicide as the last stage of re
hgious perfection. No viUage tabernacle was ever plainer than the first
Franciscan churches : St. Bernard insists on the most Quakerish sim
plicity for his Cistercians, and Gerson feared that the images overdid
their purpose of stimulating even the grosser minds of the laity. Many
Franciscans believed that the Saint had forbidden church music alto
gether. The worst Vandahsms of the seventeenth century may be more
than matched from the thirteenth and fourteenth ; and a long chapter
might be written on this one point. Churches were ravaged and ruined
wholesale in war ; even in peace, corn was found stacked in the Cathedral
of Parma, and a Devonshire parson used his nave not only as a barn,
but as a brewhouse. Abundant evidence of this kind may be found in
Father Denifle's La Desolation des Eglises, and, the visitations of
Dean and Chapter churches for St. Paul's, Salisbury, and Exeter. In
Italy, tombs were foully desecrated for mere political reasons ; and
jealous monks not only defaced paintings of St. Francis, but tore down
the friars' crucifixes, and cast one at least into a cesspool.
In short, the unlovely features of Puritanism are simply such as have
attended most great religious revivals. It would be difficult to name
any doctrine or practice distinctively Puritan — as distinguished from
those common to aU Protestants — for which ample authority may not
be found among orthodox medieval churchmen. Much of the odium
rightly incurred by the zealots of the seventeenth century is simply due
to the fact that they were the first party strong enough to enforce, on
an enormous scale, that exaggerated and often repulsive other-worldhness,
which had for centuries been the ideal of the hermitage and the cloister.

IV.

The High Ancestry of Puritanism.1

ii

jiHE more generaUy the history of medieval religion is studied,
no longer by one party exclusively, but by men of widely
different views and sympathies, the more evident it becomes
that the lessons of Church history contain correctives for
the one-sided tendencies of all rehgious denominations.
Nothing, for instance, has more hopelessly undermined extreme ritualism
than the historical researches of the most learned ritualists, who have
discovered that the thirteenth century altar was bare indeed, compared
with many which seem quite moderate nowadays ; and that (to quote
from one of them) " Some pious usages [of later ritual] flow from very
muddy sources." We are here on the outskirts of a truth which only
wider study wiU finally estabhsh, but which is dawning more clearly
every day, that the pre-Reformation Church resembled modern Enghsh
rehgion, with all its cross-currents and tangle of authority and conflict
of sects, far more nearly than either Romanists or " advanced " Anglicans
care to realise. A man dissatisfied with the modern world, if sud
denly set back into his imaginary paradise of the thirteenth century,
would find himself still confronted by a great deal which he speciaUy
abhors in modern nonconformity ; and it would, perhaps, grate on Trim
all the more for being then labelled with the label of the Church. Even
Baptists and Rituahsts are on better terms with each other nowadays
than were the parish clergy and the friars of the Middle Ages : and the
modern priest, who loses no opportunity of expressing his dishke for
Puritanism, little suspects how much Puritanism there was in the highest
places during the crowning period of the pre-Reformation Church. St.
Bernard, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas go farther sometimes
in this direction than a moderate Anglican of to-day would care to foUow
them : and, in spite of St. Francis's own joy in religion, there is a very
strong note of Puritanism among the early friars. Even M. Sabatier,
with his admirable historical sense, generalizes too hastily in this respect
from St. Francis and the Fioretti to the friars in general. Records older
than the Fioretti, and of a more strictly historical character, reveal
among the early Franciscans and Dominicans a gloom of life, an exag
gerated and stereotyped other-worldhness, an indifference or aversion to
some of the noblest things in creation, which we are accustomed to at
tribute too exclusively to post- Reformation rehgious movements. The
evidence which I am about to quote here is, of course, only a small portion
r Contemporary Review, Aug, 1905.

38 Medieval Studies.
of all that might be brought forward. It is taken from some of the
earhest and most authentic Franciscan documents — from the genuine
writings of St. Bonaventura and those by his secretary, Bernard of Besse,
and his contemporary, David of Augsburg, which have commonly been
attributed to the Saint himself — from such early chronicles as Sahmbene
and " the XXIV Generals," and the similar Dominican " Lives of the
Brethren." AU these documents, with many more like them, point to
the same fact, that much which the modern Anghcan brands as dis
tinctively sectarian was thoroughly characteristic of the average friar
in the earher and purer days of the two Orders.
To Newman, for instance, the " personal assurance of Salvation " was
a special characteristic of " the extreme of Calvinism or Methodism."
From a purely modern point of view this idea is natural enough : for it
is mainly Calvinists and Methodists nowadays who lay stress on that
" conversion " of which the other' is a natural corollary. But a wider
view of rehgious history sweeps away this narrow limitation : since to
the friar also there came a definite moment of " conversion " ; and the
friars, too, as Newman would have recognized if their original records
had come within his reading, rivaUed any Calvinist in the personal as
surance of salvation. The ancient " Provinciale," published by Conrad
Eubel, which gives a hst of the friaries and of their most noteworthy
occupants, contains such notices as, " Bro. Andrew earned, while yet
he hved, the assurance of the Crown of Life " ; or, " Bro. Rolandino,
of Florence, being in prayer, was certified of a Crown laid up for him in
heaven " : and more detailed accounts of similar assurances are frequent
in the early chronicles. Moreover, every separate Franciscan might
boast something of the same certitude ; for the world was never aUowed
to forget the aUeged promise to St. Francis that aU who kept his Rule
should come to eternal hfe. If Newman, therefore, could have escaped
from his modern world of Calvinism and Methodism back to the Middle
Ages, he would have found himself in far closer and more inevitable
contact vrith these self-elected Predestinates, diverting parishioners
from his services and offerings from his church ; often preaching doc
trines which to him seemed rank heresy ; no longer to be loftily thrust
aside as schismatics, but impregnably entrenched behind the special
favour of Pope and people.
Nor was this — which I have taken first because of the importance lent
to it by such an authority as Newman's — by any means the closest point
of contact between modern schism and medieval orthodoxy. Nothing
but a close study of the manuals of conduct written for friars by St. Bona
ventura and his school can make us realize how httle the ordinary con
scientious Franciscan retained of St. Francis's joy in hfe, or in how many
respects he was enslaved to a formalism worthy of the post-Reformation
Puritan. The disciphne of the convent (as I have pointed out elsewhere)1
was the disciphne of the quarterdeck : the rules of conduct were precise
and narrow.- Laughter and play are absolutely forbidden in these books :
beautiful sights and sounds are condemned as savouring of " concupis-
i. " Side-Lights on the Franciscans." — Independent Review, February, 1905.

The High Ancestry of Puritanism. 39
cence " ; the formal religious talk and the " D.V." of the Puritan are
inculcated ; prayer is to be accompanied by sighs and tears ; dances
and public festivities are improper, not only for the professional " Reh
gious," but for all who wish to save their souls. No right-minded friar
wiU gaze upon a woman if he can avoid it ; the very existence of the
other sex is a temptation permitted by God in His inscrutable Providence ;
upon this theme our friars wax as eloquent as the Wife of Bath's husband.
That which to modern ideas is most repulsive in Calvinism — the iron
logic with which it condemns so huge a proportion of mankind to eternal
pain — is simply inherited from medieval orthodoxy. Even Dante dared
not save the unbaptized children of Christian parents from hell ; while
Saints Gregory, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas reckon the sight
of the wicked in heU-fire to be one of the joys of the blessed in heaven.
To the medieval friars, as to the later Puritans, heU was too often a far
more vivid reahty than heaven ; nor did the elaborate theory of con
fession and absolution save men from the same bhnd gropings, the same
rash confidence on the one hand or unreasonable despair on the other,
which are sometimes spoken of as pecuhar to later revivals. David of
Augsburg writes of his own time as one might write of the eighteenth
century. " Some trust only to God's goodness, dreaming that He will
save them even in their sins. . . . And others again have nought but
mistrust of God, dreaming that if they are converted, He will not give
them perseverance in the spirit or sustentation for their body." It is
very remarkable how many medieval saints— and friars at least in pro
portion to the rest — are recorded to have fought against despair, or
against visible devils, on their very death-bed ; St. Catherine of Siena
is a typical instance. The devil was everywhere — legions of devils, often
in bodUy form. The Blessed John of La Vernia fought them with his
staff as a man drives away flies ; it was revealed to another of the brethren
that " more than 8,000 demons " had been specially deputed to lay siege
to a convent manned by only seven friars ! The Fioretti shows us how
difficult St. Francis himself found it to expose the wiles of the devil who,
in our Lord's shape, had assured the saintly Ruffino that he was destined
to damnation. Giles, more saintly if possible than Ruffino, spent long
hours of such agony with devils in sohtude that " at night, when he
went back to his ceU, he would say with a sigh, ' Now, I look for my
martyrdom.' " Saints of the Middle Ages often tortured themselves
as much with mysteries of Predestination as any Calvinist of them aU.
And it was worse stiU when Satan came in the shape of our Lord or of
the Virgin Mary, with aU the glory of heaven around him, and unutterable
temptations on his hps. It was thus (we are often told) that he was
specially wont to appear to " men of singular perfection and of good
progress in rehgion." In this guise he would persuade the friar, crazed
with his own doubts and fears and ecstasies, that the last stage of reh
gious perfection was to be found in suicide or homicide. Such stories
are frequent everywhere, and two chroniclers teU us of a friar who crucified
himself to consummate his Imitation of Christ. In fact, the more careless
was the merriment of the great world, the worse were the struggles of
those conscientious rehgious who retired from it. Behind the bright

4° Medieval Studies.
pageants of the Middle Ages there is a constant undertone of spiritual
waihng and gnashing of teeth. Even the tournament, dearest of aU to
modern romance, was anathema to the religious mind of the thirteenth
century. But a modern partisan of the Middle Ages might plead, " All this is
merely a natural cloud cast upon earnest minds by the rough conditions
of hfe in those days ; this is only one side of Puritanism. You cannot
attribute to the Catholic Revivals of the thirteenth century what to my
taste is the most hateful feature of the later Puritan. The friars en
joyed aU the rich ritual of the Roman Church, and they have left us some
of the most splendid churches in Italy. Even if they were Puritan in
heart, at least they were Catholic in eye and ear." No, not even so were
they Catholic (in the lower sense in which the word is used nowadays
even of a pattern in church- tiles), except so far as they were false to their
first ideal. The thirteenth century parish church, to begin with, was
bare of ornament in comparison with even a moderately " high " An
glican church of the present day. And, beyond this, it is difficult to
exaggerate the extent to which rehgious revivals of the Middle Ages
revived also simplicity of worship. The early Cistercian ideal is extra
ordinarily bare. MabiUon rejects a rehgious poem often ascribed to
St. Bernard " because the Cistercians admitted nothing which was bound
by the laws of metre." St. Bernard, in his Epistle to Abbot WiUiam,
writes of sumptuous churches and their ornaments in words which George
Fox might have echoed. The pictures of saints on the waUs (as he says)
" attracting the worshippers' gaze, hinder their devotions, and almost
remind me of the Jewish ritual." In parish churches, this may pass :
for the bishops, " unable to excite the devotion of the carnal multitude
with spiritual things, do so with material ornaments." But we monks
" who have reputed as filth all that shines bright or sounds sweet to the
ear, what fruit do we expect from these things ? The admiration of
fools, or the offerings of the simple ? or, since we are mingled among the
heathen, perchance we have learned their works and even yet serve their
idols ? " Nor is such Puritanism confined to monastic churches ; though
St. Bernard, as we have seen, would permit pictures and ornaments to
the laity who hve on a lower rehgious plane. The saintly Gerson shows
plainly that he believed true rehgion to be imperiUed in many ways by
the gorgeousness even of the parish churches of his day. "Is it ex
pedient," he asks, " to have so great a variety of images and pictures
in our churches, or do they not sometimes pervert many simple folk to
idolatry ? " His older contemporary Eustache Deschamps speaks stiU
more plainly to the same effect.
This feeling that the highest rehgion is least dependent on beautiful
sights or sounds was strong among the early friars. They were Puri
tanical in the plainness of their services. St. Francis expressly forbade
the saying of more than one Mass daily in each of their little churches —
a prohibition which was neglected almost before his corpse was cold ;
for more Masses meant more money, as the parish clergy had long ago
discovered. The majority of the first Franciscan settlements had no
church at all, no singing, and not always even a separate oratory for the

The High Ancestry of Puritanism. 41
daily offices of the brethren. When the early friars were near a town
or a viUage, they heard Mass singly like other folk, at the parish church.
But many of them worshipped in a sohtude of contemplation which
seldom needed any outward forms whatever. The blessed Conrad of
Offida was one of the chiefs of the Spirituals, and is conspicuous in the
Fioretti. Yet he confessed that, since he had been made priest and sung
Mass for himself, he had lost sadly in spiritual consolation. It was no
doubt for the same reason that Brother Thomas the Irishman, one of
the special glories of the friary at Aquila, " cut off his thumb, lest he
should be compelled to take priest's orders." The stricter of the friars
had even a definite dishke for Church music ; as we have seen that St.
Bernard thought it wrong for a monk to find actual enjoyment in sweet
sounds. " If God," writes David of Augsburg, " took delight in the
melody of a voice, then should the mere music of instruments or the
song of birds charm Him : for these are sweet enough in their own fashion.
Purity of heart, and a mind devoted to Him — these are that wherein
He delighteth. The servant of God should not care greatly for what
soever is indifferent to Him." Roger Bacon expresses his disgust at
the " curiousness of new harmonies . . . and foolish pleasure in
manifold songs," which has invaded the Church music of his day. So
widespread was this dishke of elaborate music, or of music at all, that
Wadding, in the seventeenth century, feels obliged to argue against
certain of the Order who beheved St. Francis and his first companions
to have forbidden singing and organs in church, and who therefore
" utterly forbid " the same in his own day.
The early taste in buildings was equaUy plain, not to say sordid. A
Carthusian of the twelfth century, rebuking his brethren for having
borrowed money to build a fine convent instead of the old mud huts,
writes, " These beauties and outward elegancies quickly enervate the
manly purpose and effeminate the mascuhne mind. ... It better
befits a mind intent on its inward health, that all without should be rude
and neglected." St. Francis, too, loved mud huts, and even wanted to
have the new stone buildings at Bologna and Assisi pulled down. The
few friars' churches built at this time, as we know from Angelo Clareno,
were extremely smaU and plain. " Our smaU churches will preach,"
said St. Francis, " and men wiU be more edified by these things than by
words." The church at Cambridge, as described by Eccleston, would
have been almost too miserable for a viUage meeting-house in our day.
The building of fine churches coincides exactly, not only in time but in
logic, with the persecution of those brethren who clung strictly to the
primitive Franciscan rule. The splendid Basihca at Assisi, with its frescoes
by Giotto, was almost as definitely contrary to the teaching and example
of St. Francis as was the Golden Calf to that of Moses. Thomas of Celano
relates how an otherwise exceUent friar was damned everlastingly for
his share in the construction of these glorious buildings ; Eccleston is
not certain whether any were absolutely damned, but he knows by
revelation that many expiated it bitterly in purgatory. Some of the
dearest friends of St. Francis were imprisoned for their vehement protest
against these and other violations of the rule : one of them, Caesarius of

42 Medieval Studies.
Speyer, was kiUed by his gaoler. Such buildings as Sta. Croce at Florence
were a terrible scandal to the Spirituals, and St. Bonaventura finds in
them one of the main symptoms of spiritual decay. A vain attempt was
made to check these " excesses " at the General Chapter of Narbonne
(1260), where it was decreed that the churches must be as small, as plain,
and as cheaply furnished as possible. Not only were beU-towers for
bidden, but even stained glass, except that the east window might have
figures of our Lord, the Virgin, St. Francis, and St. Antony of Padua.
Yet even this was a falling away from the first ideal : for Eccleston teUs
us how the visitor of the Enghsh provinces (about 1230) " took very
stringent measures concerning the [painted] windows in the chapel of
the Gloucester convent ; and deprived a friar of his habit by reason of
a pulpit which he had painted ; the same punishment was inflicted on
the guardian of the convent for having suffered such paintings."
Even the iconoclasm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries finds
its worthy counterpart in the thirteenth and fourteenth. Sahmbene
describes how medieval boys, hke their modern successors, threw stones
at priceless sculptures and frescoes ; and how a whole town, in a fit of
passion, would subject its artistic glories to the basest mutilations and
defilements. Not only theologians, but men of genius hke Ruskin and
WiUiam Morris have helped to spread false ideas on this point. No more
systematic destruction of ancient buildings was ever carried out than
in medieval Rome ; and aU careful students of Gothic architecture know
that the buUder of the Middle Ages was pitiless to any older work which
stood in his way. The pious and learned Johann Busch describes with
unholy glee, among his other " reforms " in a conventual church, the
" conveyance " of an effigy which had long graced the tomb of a mere
ordinarily holy bishop, in order that it might be placed over the bones
of a sainted predecessor who had lain three hundred years under a plain
stone. Nor were even the church buildings and furniture so much re
spected in the thirteenth century as in our own. The " Mirror of Per
fection " teUs us how sordid they often were in St. Francis's day, and
what pains he took to sweep them. Here, again, is Brother Salimbene's
description of the Italian churches even after seventy or eighty years of
Franciscan influence. " I have found priests who . . . when the
people communicate, thrust the consecrated hosts which remain over
into clefts of the waU : though these are the very Body of our Lord.
And many other foul things they do, and horrible to be told, which I
pass over for brevity's sake. They keep their missals, corporals, and
church ornaments in an indecent state — coarse, black and stained ;
tiny chahces of tarnished pewter, rough country wine or vinegar for the
Mass. The hosts they consecrate are so httle as scarce to be seen betwixt
their fingers ; not circular, but square, and all filthy with the excrements
of flies. Many women have better shoe-bands than the cincture, stole
and maniple of many priests, as I have seen with mine own eyes. One
day when a Franciscan friar had to celebrate mass in a certain priest's
church on a feast day, he had no stole but the girdle of the priest's con
cubine, with the bunch of keys attached ; and when the friar (whom I
knew personally) turned round to say Dominus vobiscum, the people

The High Ancestry of Puritanism. 43
heard the jinghng of the keys " (p. 215). This is no exaggeration, for
we have the surest documentary evidence to the same effect. Eudes
Rigaud, the great Archbishop of Rouen under St. Louis, orders church
windows to be walled up for economy's sake, in as matter-of-fact a way
as if he had been a churchwarden of the eighteenth century. Surviving
surveys of churches, appropriated to the deans and chapters of Exeter,
Salisbury and St. Paul's respectively, show that our English sanctuaries
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were often scandalously ne
glected. The worst part of these dioceses was naturaUy Cornwall, where
the visitation of 1331 shows the following results from the sixteen churches
or chapels. At one only " all is in a good state, as it seems, for the
present." In three the chancel is more or less ruinous ; in eleven the
church books and furniture are in a scandalously bad state ; in three
others " there are practicaUy none of the necessaries for divine service."
It is only fair to add that one of these cases was due to a recent sacri
legious robbery. At St. Marychurch, in 1301, the parson was found stack
ing his corn and brewing his beer in the nave of his church, and we find
similar corn-stacks in the cathedral of Parma about 1240 a.d. Again,
the wholesale vandalism which came in the train of medieval wars can
scarcely be realized now. Not only were churches constantly piUaged
and destroyed by either party, but they were regularly used as fortresses,
in spite of repeated prohibitions. Here they were exposed not only to
the ordinary fate of a besieged or captured stronghold, but also to the
most reckless treatment from a dissolute garrison, including nameless
desecrations which their worst enemies would not impute to the Puritans
of the seventeenth century. Details which cannot be quoted here may
be found in Sacchetti's Sermons, No. vu. The Hundred Years' War
was a disciplined and orderly affair compared with those of Italy and the
South of France during the thirteenth century ; yet those who would
realize how much beautiful architecture perished long before the Re
formation should read the terrible array of fourteenth and fifteenth
century documents pubhshed by Fr. Denifle, sub-librarian to the Vatican,
under the title of La Desolation des Eglises, etc. Nor was that spirit
wanting which thinks to do God service by destroying objects of art
which the veneration of one party has rendered odious to their rehgious
adversaries. There was at first a good deal of disbelief in the stigmata
of St. Francis. Rehgious rivals who envied the popularity accruing to
the Order from this miracle, (unique then, though it has become common
enough since), were wont to disfigure the paintings in which the saint's
stigmata were shown. Again, certain Cluniac monks of the diocese of
Agen, enraged with the friars for settling there, broke through the roof
and doors of the church during service time, and piUaged the furniture
and books ; Wadding records several cases of the same kind. Next to
the Holy Wafer, no material object was so profoundly revered in the
Middle Ages as the Crucifix. Yet the Cluniacs who tried to drive the
friars from Charheu did not hesitate to break their crosses ; and the
Bishop of Piacenza, for a like reason, caused a Franciscan wayside crucifix
to be torn up by his clergy and thrown into a cesspool. The lamentable
iconoclasm of our reformers was simply a survival from earlier and stiU

44 Medieval Studies.
more barbarous times ; an old leaven of malice working under specially
favourable conditions.
St. Francis was too beautiful a character to be tainted by the worst
faults of his age, and a few of his best disciples kept the true spirit of
their master. But the vast majority soon became either men of the
world or Puritan ascetics of almost the old pre-Franciscan type. It is
painful to note how soon they shd into much of that " holy selfishness "
(sancta rusticitas) which they themselves so condemned in the older
Orders. The blessed Angela of Fohgno is singled out for our special
admiration in Canon Knox-Little's St. Francis. She was the spiritual
instructress of Ubertino da Casale, whom Dante names as the typical
spiritual of his day. She was suddenly converted by the preaching of a
friar, and " within a few days she profited so rapidly in the school of
Christ that she loved nought but Him, and all became vile dross to her
in comparison of Him alone. She mourned to be held by obedience to
her husband, by reverence for her mother, and by the care of her children,
for she would fain have devoted herself whoUy to Christ, on Whose love
she desired to spend aU her care. She besought the Lord with frequent
prayers that He would deign to remove aU hindrances, both within and
without, that her soul might be whoUy set on cultivating virtue and on
contemplating the mysteries of Heaven ; and so it befel that, within
a brief space, her mother first, then her husband, and presently all her
children passed away from this world." The real significance of a story
hke this hes less in the facts themselves than in the naive admiration with
which they were passed from mouth to mouth among the Franciscans,
the official solemnity with which they were recorded for posterity, and
the gravity with which they are reproduced, even in the middle of the
seventeenth century, by so sober a scholar as Wadding. The pages of
Franciscan and Dominican chronicles simply teem with indications that
both Orders were stiU deeply tinged with the old selfish idea of hfe as a
sort of jostle for salvation, a rehgious sauve qui peut. " Be not much
disquieted about studying for others' profit," says Brother Giles in the
Fioretti (pt. v, c. 12), " but ever study and be anxious about thyself,
and do those things which are profitable to thyself ... for it is not
credible that thou shouldest love others' souls more than thine own."
(cf. ibid., pt. 1, c. 42, 45 ; and v. 5, and contrast with Romans ix, 3).
The extreme Spirituals, as Angelo Clareno shows us again and again,
were scandalized and not edified by the extent to which their brother
friars mixed among their feUow men. Even Berthold of Ratisbon, per
haps the greatest popular preacher of the Middle Ages, is not whoUy free
from this sancta rusticitas ; nor even Berthold's master, David of Augs
burg, who deplores the loss of spiritual fervour which comes from frequent
intercourse with the laity ; and who writes in another place : " Beware
lest thou regard or scrutinize curiously other men's persons, faces, dis
positions, dress, gestures, deeds, words or duties. So far as it pertaineth
not to thee to scrutinize these things for the sake of [spiritual profit],
pass them by and think no more thereon than if they were sheep or other
beasts ; let them claim no more either of thine eyes or of thine heart."
Who could imagine, from a study of the Fioretti and kindred records,

The High Ancestry of Puritanism. 45
that such words had been written by one of St. Francis's sincerest fol
lowers, and passed down semi-officially to posterity among the works
ascribed to St. Bonaventura !
Perhaps the foregoing considerations may give serious thought to
those who are apt to look upon Puritanism as an invention of the six
teenth century, and to discredit modern religious revivals by comparison
with the romantic friar of the Fioretti. That charming idyll no more
represents the real bitterness of the war against the world in the thirteenth
century, than Lucy Hutchinson's memoirs show us the bitterness of
the seventeenth century LeveUer. A closer study of the real thirteenth
century would not be comforting to the weU-meaning men who are dis
satisfied with their own generation mainly because it is their own. Puri
tanism, indeed, is not of one time, but of most times, and especiaUy of
most religious revivals. Its faults are simply the faults of exaggeration,
an exaggerated behef in the value of religious phrases and religious
deportment, with an exaggerated depreciation of " the world," in that
narrow sense which was of hoary antiquity before the sixteenth century
was born. Revivals are nothing if not in earnest ; yet the word earnest
itself has gradually acquired an invidious meaning, so impossible is it
to avoid exaggeration, and to fight (where there is no doubt that one
must fight somehow) with a pleasant smile on one's face. The Puri
tanism of the Reformation was simply the strictest and most logical
attempt yet made to realize certain thoroughly medieval ideals ; its
theory had long been the theory of the religious, but none had yet dared
to enforce it wholesale. Charles I, as we know, lost his head simply by
trying to realize the ideals which his father had held with equal conviction
though with less courage. So the pursuit of an exaggerated and im-*
possible otherworldhness, with aU its natural fruits of frequent formality!
and hypocrisy, has damaged for ever the reputation of that religious
revival which for the first time found itself strong enough to force time-
honoured ideas for a brief moment upon an unwiUing nation.

V.
Romanism and Morals.1

"|||||P|g|EVER was there so great a show of wisdom, nor such restless
and world-wide activity in so many branches of study,
as in the last forty years . . . yet never did such ig
norance and error reign as now. . . . For more sins
sway the world in these days than in any previous age ;
and sin is incompatible with true learning. . . . Therefore, since men's
hves contradict the laws of Wisdom, they cannot possibly understand
Her, even though they roU pompous phrases in their mouths, like boys
gabbhng their Psalms by rote, or hke clerks and country priests repeating
the Church services — of which they understand httle or nothing — after
the fashion of brute beasts."
The first sentences, a reader might say, are from Dr. Barry's indictment
of this agnostic century in a recent number of The National Review ;
the last words are the words of Mr. Kensit. Yet in fact the whole quota
tion is from one of the greatest philosophers of the Ages of Faith, and
one of the greatest Enghshmen of all times : Roger Bacon. It may be
found (with much more to the same purpose) in the beginning of his
Compendium of the Study of Philosophy, dedicated about 1271 to the
reigning Pope. The " forty years " refer, as he expressly teUs us, to the
Franciscan and Dominican reform ; yet, after a generation of that reform,
the boasted learning of the thirteenth century was, in Bacon's judgment,
rotten to the core. Moreover, he traces its rottenness directly to the
wickedness of the age, and asserts that his fellow students were as defi
nitely inferior to the pagan philosophers in morals as they were in true
learning, in spite of the help which professing Christians ought to have
found in God's grace, through baptism and Holy Communion. Nor does he
stop short at generalities, but enters into details about professors of
Divinity and students at Paris which show a state of things far worse
than anything aUeged in Dr. Barry's indictment, though it can be proved
to the hilt from other sources. Not only does this contemporary of St.
Thomas Aquinas condemn en bloc the learning of bis own age, but he
criticises St. Thomas himself in words which might have been echoed,
rightly or wrongly, by Dr. Barry's bite noire, Huxley. The Thomist
system, he says, is a magnificent building to the eye ; but it rests upon
a Bible misunderstood, an Aristotle misunderstood, and omits altogether
two of the corner-stones of true philosophy — the mathematical and the
physical sciences.
1. Independent Review, August, rgos.

Romanism and Morals. 47
How, in the face of these facts, can Dr. Barry write as he does ? The
question is best answered by another. How, in the face of the notorious
immorality of pagan times, could Bacon put ancient morals far higher
than those of the Golden Age of Cathohcism ? The cause in both cases
hes in ignorance of past history. In Bacon's days, the real knowledge
of antiquity was impossible ; and Bacon could no more have constructed
a true picture of the age of Socrates than he could have turned out a
modern locomotive. In our age, sufficient materials for reconstructing
thirteenth century hfe are indeed to hand ; but Dr. Barry has not cared
to use them. He has chosen to write as an impassioned advocate rather
than as a sober student, even though he claims, " with past history open
before me," to date his article from " the Palace of Truth." And his
logic is as false as his history. If, (as he argues), the moral decay with
which he charges our age is due to a waning behef in dogma, then the
whole history of European morals since the thirteenth century should
show a steady downward progression. Dr. Barry knows very weU that
this is not so ; for he has written otherwise in his Papal Monarchy.
After a survey of thirteenth century corruptions, which, however im
perfect, still shows that he reahzes the civilization of that age to have
been lower than our own, he adds : " We can neither conceive nor imagine
such a time ; therefore we shaU do weU to refrain from judging it." He
does not, however, refrain from judging very mercilessly the age in
which God has cast our own lot ; and I claim the right of speaking here
as plainly about the " Age of Faith," as Dr. Barry has spoken about the
" Age of Agnosticism." For if, during the six hundred years in which
the civilized world has adopted an increasingly critical attitude, first
towards the Romanist creed, and finally towards aU creeds that would
confine human enquiry within too narrow dogmatic hmits — if, during
those six hundred years, morahty has not actuaUy gone far backwards,
then it is evident at once that something halts in Dr. Barry's theory. If,
on the other hand, with aU our faults, we stand as high above thirteenth
century morahty as that age, with aU its faults, stood above the ages of
Socrates or Marcus Antoninus, then we shaU only wonder how a professed
student of history can claim historical authority for so strangely un-
historical a theory. As a special student for many years of thirteenth
century life, I know how far even the most plain-spoken historians are
from telhng the naked truth, which I wiU try to lay very briefly here
before the reader. If Dr. Barry believes me to be exaggerating, and
wiU stake his authority on that behef, I wiU gladly print and pubhsh at
my own expense anything which he chooses to write in answer to this
article, only allowing myself as many pages of rejoinder as he takes for
his reply.
Roger Bacon, though hving in the main current of the new reforms,
looks upon his own age as utterly degenerate. He hopes — with a hope
that is nine-tenths despair — for some Deus ex machina, for a Good Pope
or a Good Emperor, to reverse the worldly policy of his predecessors.
Faihng that, he sees no hope but in Christ's sudden coming, to
judge a world already brimful of iniquity. He lays special stress on the
prevalence of the sins of the flesh. Like all other moralists of his time.

48 Medieval Studies.
he names the clergy as the fountain-head of evil. " Everywhere we shaU
find boundless corruption ; and first of all in the Head. . . . Let us
consider the Rehgious Orders ; I exclude none from what I say. See
how far they are faUen, one and aU, from their right state ; and the new
Orders [of Friars] are already horribly decayed from their first dignity.
The whole clergy is intent upon pride, lechery, and avarice." The same
testimony is borne by- some of his most distinguished contemporaries.
The great Franciscan teacher Adam Marsh is never weary of aUuding
to " these most damnable times," " these days of uttermost perdition,"
in which aU but the spiritually blind " see plainly that Satan is either
already loosed or soon to be loosed." Grosseteste, perhaps the greatest
of our medieval bishops, complained before the Pope at Lyons that even
the small fraction of professedly orthodox Christians was " almost whoUy
separated from Christ, and incorporate with the Devil through the seven
deadly sins." St. Francis, at the very end of his hfe, spoke of " these
times of superabundant malice and iniquity " ; and his earhest biographer,
Thomas of Celano, complained that the overwhelming majority of thir
teenth century Italians " had nothing but the mere name of Christians
to boast themselves with." The same despairing cry is echoed by St.
Bonaventura, Vincent of Beauvais, Humbert de Romans, Gerard de
Frachet, Thomas de Chantimpre, Raimondo da Vigna — to name none
but distinguished friars who knew intimately the first few generations
of Franciscan and Dominican influence. " The Church," wrote Gerson
propheticaUy on the eve of the Reformation, " is more moraUy degraded
than was the Synagogue at the moment when it was about to be swept
away " ; " it is consumed by an incurable cancer, and the very remedies
do but make it more sick."
" But," it may be said, " these may be only the rhetorical exaggera
tions of weU-meaning men who were carried away by the vehemence of
their indignation at certain abuses going on under their own eyes. How
utterly false would be an idea of our age gathered by some future his
torian simply from Dr. Barry's article and other obiter dicta of the
same kind."
First, then, I would point out, that all my quotations are from standard
books of European reputation in their time, which have been thought
worthy of print whole centuries after their authors' death ; while some
have the authority of Roger Bacon, Bonaventura, and St. Francis — names
that wiU be great as long as the world lasts. Secondly, the authors whom
I quote had no quarrel, as Dr. Barry has, with the principles of their
time ; they wrote as professing Roman Catholics to professing Roman
Cathohcs, and therefore lacked the most powerful of aU temptations to
darken the picture. Thirdly, their judgments are abundantly borne out
by contemporary evidence.
" First of aU, we shaU find corruption in the Head." The Popes of
the thirteenth century were, on the whole, the best the Church had had
for five hundred years, or was to have for three hundred years to come.
Dr. Barry was wise to end his own popular history of the Papal Monarchy
prematurely at the close of the thirteenth century ; he would have found
it difficult to continue it up to the Reformation. Yet the personal purity

Romanism and Morals. 49
of at least three Popes of the thirteenth century was seriously doubted
by their contemporaries ; and Popes lie in Dante's HeU like sheep.
The Papal court was then, as always until recent times, a notorious den
of corruption. As one of the few really good cardinals complained, it
had turned the city of Lyons into one huge brothel during its few years
of residence there ; and the same evil reputation was enjoyed by Avignon,
Constance, and Rome, during other periods of Papal residence. The
other prelates were just as bad. Gregory X complained, in 1274, that
" they were the ruin of Christendom " ; and only by exerting the whole
¦weight of his authority at a great General Council did he succeed at last
in deposing Henry of Liege, whose episcopal career of nearly thirty years
would be incredible, but for the number of paraUel instances that might
be quoted. Two abbesses and a nun were among his concubines ; and
he boasted of having had fourteen children in twenty- two months. Yet he
was bishop by the special grace of Pope Innocent IV. The inferior clergy
foUowed suit. St. Bonaventura complains of their ignorance, their im
morality, and the dangers of the confessional, in language which would
be treated as bigoted in a modern Protestant's mouth. Sahmbene re
lates that he has " a hundred times " heard Italian parish clergy quoting,
as a text from St. Paul's Epistles, the maxim : "If not chastely, at least
cautiously," to justify their immorahty. Enghsh cathedrals were partly
built out of the fines of incontinent priests. The contemporary register
of Eudes Rigaud of Rouen shows that about 18 per cent, of the parish
clergy in his diocese were known to him by name as black sheep ; yet
only here and there could he get rid of the worst offenders. Similar
registers bear out the bitter complaints of clerical ignorance formulated
by Bacon, Bonaventura, Aquinas, and many others. In 1222, the curates-
in-charge of five out of seventeen SaUsbury Dean-and-Chapter livings
were found, on examination, quite unable to construe a single sentence
of the Mass service which they had mumbled daily for j^ears. Rigaud's
register gives us the results of similar examinations of priests in Nor
mandy. Gerson, again, represents the Church as crying aloud to the
Pope : " Whom wilt thou give, out of the whole body of the priesthood,
who is not ignorant of Christ's law ? " " Ignorance of God," writes Dr.
Barry very truly, " hes at the root of social anarchy." That is why the
Reformation was attended with so much lawlessness, and the French
Revolution with stiU more. If the masses are not taught the real Duties
of Man, they will inevitably misbehave when they tardily inherit the
Rights of Man.
For the masses of the thirteenth century stood, as they stand in all
ages, below the clergy. Thousands did not know even the Lord's Prayer ;
thousands were never confirmed, though throughout England the popu
lation did not average five hundred souls to a parish — the population of
an ordinary modern viUage. The very few who could read were generaUy
discouraged from reading the Bible or similarly " high and sacred "
books — Cardinal Gasquet's specious arguments notwithstanding. The
failure of the Crusades was followed by a general outburst of infidelity.
Sahmbene teUs us how men would refuse charity to the friars, and give
instead to some common tramp, crying : " Take this, in Mahomet's name,

5° ^Medieval Studies.
for he is mightier than Christ now-a-days." With aU the priest's inqui
sitorial and disciplinary rights over his flock, he could not get his par
ishioners to attend at more than a fraction of the Sunday Mass, or to
behave with ordinary decency in church during even those brief minutes.
We have the most varied and curious evidence to this effect. Dr. Barry
speaks of the confusion of modern sects. Is he unaware that the thir
teenth century bred many that were far more absurd and more indecent
than those of the present age ? Does he not know how often even the
orthodox were tortured with deadly doubts, and how (by the confession
of contemporaries), in proportion to their longing for God's presence
they were haunted by visions of the Devil ? Suicide, the one crime of
violence which was rarer then than now, was yet far more common in
monasteries and convents, where crazy fanatics were often persuaded
that this, or homicide, represented the last phase of Rehgious Perfection.
For it must be understood that even the shght tendency of certain
crimes to increase in recent years leaves us stiU out of aU proportion better
than our ancestors of six hundred years ago. I will review briefly all
the crimes of which Dr. Barry complains. By two independent calcu
lations, from coroners' roUs of Oxford and Bedfordshire, I get at the
same result — that the percentage of murders and homicides to the total
population of those days was more than twenty times greater than at present.
With rape, the disproportion is greater still ; for it was a habitual practice
in warfare, and when was Europe without war ? Even nowadays it is
in Romanist countries that gambling is especiaUy rampant ; in the
Middle Ages it was far worse, and rendered even chess a disreputable
game. St. Bernardino complains of the horrible blasphemies and muti
lations of saints' images to which the gambling mania led— far worse
than anything known to modern Protestantism. Drunkenness, even
without the worst modern temptation of distilled liquors, was also ram
pant in the past ; at Oxford, as Dr. RashdaU points out, it was not even
an offence recognized by the University authorities. As to obscenity,
I dare not even summarise the testimony of Thomas of Celano and
Gerson, which points to something far beyond modern France and Italy.
The hfe of St. Catherine of Siena shows us an extreme licence of
manners in ordinaiy middle-class circles. There are few books of
medieval history or fiction, even including the coUections of anecdotes
for preachers' use, which could conveniently be published in an un-
expurgated translation. Many songs and parodies written by medieval
clerics, and preserved to modern times in monastic or cathedral
libraries, are far too licentious to be translated and pubhshed in any
modern community. The beautiful poem from which Neale took Jeru
salem the Golden is in many parts quite untranslatable. It is very strange
that Dr. Barry, a professed medievalist, should not have at least some
inkhng of these things ; and that he should not know how httle the thir
teenth century can be spoken of as a time of pure and ideal family hfe,
untainted by divorce, though space fails me to grapple here with a subject
which is complicated by medieval legal fictions.
But (argues Dr. Barry) crime has only " changed its character from
violence to cunning, and robs where it used to commit murder." Even

Romanism and Morals. 51
that would be something ; for presumably Dr. Barry would readily hand
over his purse in response to a serious request for his money or his life.
But the change is not such as he describes ; the standard of commercial
morality has in fact risen as much as that of general morality. His own
Papal Monarchy shows that he is aware how scandalously and constantly
the medieval Popes embezzled for private purposes the vast sums yearly
coUected from the faithful of Europe for the Crusades. Swindlers not
only wore the Papal tiara in the thirteenth century, but also lived very
comfortably everywhere ; since the Press was non-existent, and the judge
who refused a bribe was extoUed as a miracle of perfection. Study the
story of any rehgious house of which a fuU chronicle survives ; the
chances are that you wiU find very frequent indications of waste and
embezzlement. Preachers and moralists complained, with wearisome
and ineffectual iteration, that " in these evil times " a tradesman
must cheat or starve. What is more, the pious theft was as defi
nitely encouraged by high medieval morahsts as the pious fraud. Dr.
Barry himself has written of the latter, with a touch of his usual tender
ness for the past : " to manipulate ancient writings, to edit history in
one's own favour, did not appear criminal if the end were otherwise just
and good." Sahmbene and Cardinal Jacques de Vitry both describe the
concoction of successful bogus miracles with no less gusto than real
miracles ; and St. Francis himself began his apostohc career with a pious
theft.1 Throughout the course of history, no country in which Roman dogmas
have been accepted can compare in general morahty with the modern
Protestant States ; and I feel sure that Dr. Barry himself knows this
too weU to risk the comparison of original authorities to which I chal
lenge him.
On one point, however, I am glad to agree with Dr. Barry. Neo-
Malthusianism is comparatively modern as a general practice. It is
gaining ground alarmingly in most civilized countries ; and I heartily
endorse his plea that it is contrary both to natural and to Christian
morality. It is a difficult subject to discuss in these pages, though here
again I am quite ready to join issue with Dr. Barry on neutral ground,
and to show by contemporary evidence that no Romanist can afford to
throw stones at modern society on this account. I will only point out
here, that his indictment is one-sided, since it does not sufficiently allow
for the temptations created by the diffusion of medical knowledge and
mechanical inventions, just as he fails to allow for the temptations to
drunkenness created by the cheapness of spirits. Six hundred years ago,
when even educated men imagined the stomach to be a cauldron in which
the food was cooked by the heat of the adjacent liver, Neo-Malthusianism
was primitive in its methods, and by no means unknown (as I will show
Dr. Barry, if he cares to ask publicly for the evidence) to convents. More
over, in an age when war and rapine, famine and plague, thinned off the
j So at least all the earliest accounts imply most definitely ; and the first to deny it,
so far as I know, is Wadding, more than four centuries after the event. Moreover, even
Wadding argues that the theft (if theft there had been) would have been justified by the
Saint's piety. Canon Knox-Little is characteristically inaccurate in sneering at this accu
sation of theft as modern ; it is only the unqualified horror of it that is modern.

52 ^Medieval Studies.
population far more effectuaUy than any modern practices — when the
population of Europe was scarcely one-tenth of the present — a large
family was an obvious source of strength ; and restriction would have
been sheer lunacy, from the most selfish point of view. The very virtues
of modern times — our comparative peace, the cleanhness which kiUs
disease germs instead of allowing them to decimate us, our better medical
knowledge — have thus created new temptations. AU such fresh temp
tations are merely God's ways of proving and improving the human race.
Those who cannot resist alcohol die out, first individuaUy, and then in
their descendants. So also with those who cannot resist Neo-Mal-
thusianism. For Dr. Barry has entirely ignored the one reassuring side
of the problem : that medicine is beginning to preach against the practice-
as emphaticaUy as theology. The habits of which he complains began
in, and have spread to us from, France and Italy. But in France and
Italy, as I know from having seen them, cheap medical books have for
years been sold broadcast, which preach plainly, not the altruistic " you
are ruining the race," but the more direct " Neo-Malthusianism ruins
your own health." We have therefore here only the same story as with
alcohol — first, rapid diffusion and great abuse, then a gradual return to
the normal state of things, as a later generation learns by experience,
locates the enemy clearly, and is armed to fight against it. The human
race wiU always leave the bones of its f aUen along its track through the
wilderness ; but it wiU always march on, in spite of reactionary cries.
For Dr. Barry's article is hopelessly reactionary. He must know very
weU that, six hundred years ago, his own modern Romanism would on
many points have left him open to the Inquisitor's dismal condemnation :
" Recant — or the stake ! " Possibly, however, he does not know that, in
that same age, some of St. Thomas Aquinas's characteristic propositions
were as publicly and solemnly condemned as Darwin's and Huxley's in
ours. In his sneer at the New Decalogue, Dr. Barry shows utter bhndness
to the entirely modern virtue of toleration, under shelter of which he is
able to cry aloud among Protestants, to get fuU credit from both sides
for his real good intentions, and to influence public opinion so far as his
assertions wiU bear the light of criticism. He is equaUy bUnd to the
true significance of the modem faith, not only broader but deeper than
that of Aquinas, which looks upon Romanism as only one of the best
among many creeds, to each of which the wise man must render its due
share of respect. He frankly confesses his own inability to conceive a
religion gradually transcending dogma, just as the Chaldean who was
accustomed to worship God only in His wonderful stars sneered at the
Hebrew fools who believed in an invisible Jehovah ; or as the Jew, with
his ancient Temple and its splendid ritual, sneered at the publicans and
sinners who risked a new religious venture in memory of a crucified
carpenter. He laments a dead and buried world, as the reactionaries of
St. Augustine's time lamented a dying Paganism, and exalted purely
transitory symptoms of liistory into proofs that Christianity was leading
the world to its ruin. Meanwhile, the future belongs, not indeed to the
dummy agnostic whom Dr. Barry sets up to knock down again, but to
the steadily growing majority of thoughtful men who claim the Pauline

Romanism and Morals. 53
right of proving all things, and holding fast that which is good. Such
men chng to all that is best in the past, as St. Augustine clung to his
Virgil and Plato ; but they look forward to a far more exceeding weight
of glory in the future. For their faces are turned resolutely away from
the old Egyptian bondage ; and, through all failures and punishments
for failure, through fears without and fightings within, they have a
steady vision of the City of God.

VI.
The Truth about the Monasteries.1

N this Review for December, 1905, I brought very plain
accusations of historical misrepresentation against a number
of the best-known Roman Cathohc controversialists in
England, laying special stress on Cardinal Gasquet's treat
ment of the monastic question. I offered to print rephes
from these gentlemen at my own expense : while the columns of the
C ntemporary stood open, of course, to any counter article : but they
have aU dechned these opportunities. I have indeed received uncom
plimentary halfpenny postcards from two of the gentlemen named ; and
a third person, writing from Gibraltar and omitting to pay the postage,
has sent me an anonymous letter beginning " Who the d  1 are you ? "
and continuing in the same strain. In addition to this, Mgr. Vaughan
and Canon Courtenay have attacked me in the columns of the Romanist
Tablet, but with gross misstatements which I had no difficulty in exposing :
Father Gerard has again attacked me semi-officially in the same paper,
showing again an ignorance of German, and a readiness to make any
assertion which suited his momentary controversial purpose, beyond what
I had before suspected in him. Indeed, it is not so much their original
inaccuracy which marks off certain Romanist controversialists from most
other men of equal education and social standing, as their attitude in
the face of unwelcome evidence.2 The Editor of the Catholic Times
(though I am glad to say I did him wrong in accusing him of a third
suppression) is still impenitent in the face of an arithmetical blunder
which an intelhgent schoolboy would have realised long ago; and he
can stiU see no harm in those cooked statistics of Mgr. Vaughan's which,
three years ago, fiUed a more plain-spoken Roman Cathohc with " shame
and indignation."
It seems worth while, therefore, to supplement my former article by
laying before the pubhc a few facts about the monasteries during the
last three centuries before the Reformation. This is the more necessary,
as I altogether despair now of bringing the Cardinal to an open comparison
between the statements for which (while refusing references) he asks the
pubhc to trust his unsupported word, and those contrary statements for
1. Contemporary Review. April, 1906.
a. I hope soon to reprint my Tablet letters for the eyes of a wider public. Father Gerard
declines to allow me to publish his replies. [This pamphlet is now out of print ; but, as
Father Gerard consistently refused to meet me on the ground of historical documents, there
was no reason for including it in these Studies.]

The Truth about the Monasteries. 55
which I have already given many references, and am ready to give very
many more. He evidently realises that it is safer to suffer any exposures
from outside than to expose himself by an attempt to answer them.
After all, a commercial bankrupt can Uve very comfortably on the jointure
of his wife ; and a controversial bankrupt (as I pointed out in my former
article) lives in equal comfort with a powerful and united religious de
nomination at his back. Moreover, Cardinal Gasquet has at present more
encouragement than this : for the lamentable lack of original research
in England, of which Professor Firth recently complained, has enabled
his theories to gain considerable currency even in what ought to be the
most trustworthy quarters. The Athenozum, with its just and world-wide
reputation for learned impartiahty, has more than once served as a
stalking-horse to some reviewer who champions monastic innocence,
but from whom I have tried in vain, through the Editor, to extract a
bare reference which would enable me to verify such evidence as he claims
to have found in a certain MS. at Canterbury. The Church Times, again,
published recently a lengthy series of anonymous articles, since re
printed in fuU under the title of " The English Monasteries," and in part
(strange to say !) as a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet ; but still anony
mously. For this modern theory of monastic innocence runs in curious
underground channels ! In the first of the Church Times articles the
author boasts with no uncertain voice of his intimate acquaintance with
out-of-the-way medieval documents : yet a sudden fit of modesty re
strains him from signing his articles, and from permitting the pubhsher
to reveal the authorship of his book. Stranger stiU, he allows one of his
chapters to be used in aid of the Roman Catholic propaganda ; and the
Catholic Truth Society, while introducing him to its readers as an ornament
of the Anglican Church and of the Society of Antiquaries, stiU omits to
mention his name ! Moreover, this Great Unknown fuUy shares the
abhorrence of Cardinal Gasquet and of the Athenceum reviewer for definite
references. Whether on his own ground of the Church Times or else
where, he has consistently declined to produce his vouchers or to face
open criticism ; and the Editor has backed him up by suppressing the
two brief letters in which I exposed his worst misstatements.1 Mean
while the book is of course assiduously puffed, and the author's claims
to special accuracy are swaUowed by those who have no means of checking
his statements and are too candid to suspect his tortuous proceedings.
What, however, wiU probably for a few months add still more to the
popularity of Cardinal Gasquet's theory is that it has been recently em
bodied in a novel. Mgr. Benson's " The King's Achievement " is simply
a romantic paraphrase of the already too romantic " Henry VIII and
the Enghsh Monasteries." Newspaper reviewers, who of course are not
obliged to be historical students, have hailed Mgr. Benson as a serious
1. I had already had a similar experience with the Church Times. Having published a
gross mis-statement of Lord Halifax with regard to confession, the editor suppressed the
second and more conclusive of two brief letters in which I pointed out its glaring incon
sistency with known facts. I have heard this policy of suppression deliberately defended
by counter-accusations against other religious papers : if it be indeed true that religion has
no baneful an effect on journalism, this of itself would go far to explain that decay of clerical
prestige which the Church Times so frequently bemoans.

56 ^Medieval Studies.
student of history : though in fact he has taken aU his points blindly
and uncriticaUy at second hand. This is the more disappointing as Mgr.
Benson is evidently a real novelist, and might perhaps have become a
real historian if he had spent some years in the study of actual historical
documents. As it is, he has simply placed modern Enghsh characters
upon a stage, and among scenery, bearing the merest superficial resem
blance to the England of Henry VIII. One or two of his figures are
charming, though even these plainly owe a great deal to Scott, Thackeray,
George Ehot and a whole body of wholesome modern romance, of which
it would be vain to seek the counterpart in pre-Reformation times.
Whatever Mgr. Benson learnt from childhood upwards in the home of a
distinguished Anglican divine — whatever pure and noble ideas he has
imbibed during his honourable career in this England where the clergy
have hved in temperance and chastity for three hundred years, and where
the laity in turn have graduaUy risen superior to their grosser vices of
the past1 — all these things he puts into the characters he loves, making
them move hke gracious figures of the present amid the coarse society of
three hundred and fifty years ago. He betrays scarcely an inkling of what
Tudor manners were even at their best : the Paston Letters and the
writings of his own Sir Thomas More (to go no further) give the he to half
the implications in his novel. Beatrice Atherton runs about alone, at
her own pleasure, hke any modern American or English girl ; one almost
sees her drive off tandem, and turns to find her card on the haU-table
with Sesame Club in the corner. The book swarms with anachronisms,
aU the more glaring for the cheap profusion of carved oak and stained
glass and Wardour Street accessories with which Mgr. Benson loads his
stage. Yet one feels that it would have been an exceUent novel if he had
dealt frankly with the thoughts and feelings of modern Roman Catholics,
and left the Monasteries alone.
There have of course been many admirable monks and nuns in all
ages : but even as early as the thirteenth century there were many others
who chose monastic life from motives of selfishness and idleness ; and
the majority took their colour from these last rather than from the first.
The evidence of monastic decay, long before the Reformation, is simply
embarrassing in its mass and variety. It wiU be convenient therefore
if I foUow Mgr. Benson's lead, and confine myself mainly to those which
he singles out for our admiration — the Sussex houses and the Cluniac.
Order, in contrast to the viUainy of CromweU's Commissioners. I must,
however, again warn my readers that I hold no brief for CromweU or his
royal master.2 They carried out brutally, recklessly, and often dis
honestly, a clearance for which even orthodox Catholics had long since
clamoured in England. Already in Piers Plowman (1370) the monasteries
1. The thirteenth century visitations of Rouen diocese show us that the Archbishop
knew 18 per cent, of the parishes in his diocese to possess an unchaste priest ; though legal
difficulties, and the worse problem of finding better substitutes, compelled him to leave all
but a few in their cures. In Italy, as St. Bonaventura assures us, things were worse. An
English visitation of 1499 shows fourteen priests of notorious unchastity in ten deaneries
[or scarcely more than half the county) of Norfolk. Many of these were very gross cases
indeed, yet none of the culprits were ejected. Sir Thomas More, even in the stress of his
argument against Tyndall, admitted that clerical unchastity was rife in Wales.
a. Cf. The Monastic Legend, p ro.

The Truth about the Monasteries. 57
are spoken of as deeply decayed and as wasting their great revenues :
and the author breaks out into a remarkable prophecy of their future
disendowment by the king. Gascoigne, the great ChanceUor of Oxford
(1450), complains even more frequently of monastic uselessness and
waste, and pleads even more strongly for disendowment. WycUffe, of
course, had said the same : but I quote these two authors because they
were bitter enemies of WycUffe and the Lollards. Gower, who also hated
Wychffe, complains of monastic immoralities even more strongly than
the Reformer himself. No more glaringly false historical statement
- has ever been made than the assertion that the evil repute of the monks
dates from Henry VIII's time. Saints and sinners (as I have shown
by evidence which has not been questioned) agreed in complaining of the
monks' idleness, extravagance, and immorality : and, so far as I am
aware, even the most determined medieval apologists never venture on
a serious defence against these charges. That paradox has been reserved
for our own days, now that three hundred years of clerical decency have
taught even Protestants to stagger at the sordid facts of the Middle
Ages, and to admit apologetic arguments which no medieval theologian
ever dreamed of pleading.1
Respectable English folk, therefore, had long been accustomed to
serious accusations against monks and nuns at the time when Cromwell
and his agents began to visit. The brutality of those agents is in many
cases indefensible ; but Mgr. Benson has been very badly misled on many
points. First, he represents the plunder of the religious houses as having
been begun by CromweU. On the contrary, the story of the monas
teries, as told by the monks themselves, is frequently a wearisome story
of embezzlement and robbery from generation to generation. I will
iUustrate this here from the real history of Mgr. Benson's own Sussex
houses and the Cluniacs. The great priory of Lewes, the most important
of all the Enghsh Cluniac houses, was almost always in debt, in spite of
its rich revenues.2 From 1259 to I3I7' f°r which years we have frequent
data, the records show us a state of things almost incredible, if it were
not borne out by other Cluniac records and by the financial details of
the Norman monasteries in the thirteenth century. In 1259 Lewes had
raised money illegaUy by pledging three dependent priories, two of which
were now faihng into ruins. In 1279 it owed £33,000 in money, with a
very considerable deficit in farm stock ; and the visitors report, " At
best it wiU take upwards of twenty years to liquidate its debts." In
128,0 they make a general report that the majority of Cluniac houses in
England " are much decayed, both spirituaUy and financiaUy " — as
indeed the details show. In 1290, again, " almost all houses are iU-
managed both spiritually and temporaUy, and are heavily in debt." In
1291 " many properties have been alienated to outsiders " ; the priory
r Here and elsewhere, in arguing from the absence of evidence, I speak of course subject
to correction. I only claim to have sought honestly for such evidence, but hitherto in vain.
2 Even at the Dissolution, after more than three centuries of mismanagement, its twenty-
six monks enjoyed a net corporate revenue of £9,200 a year in modern currency. Here,
and all through this article, I change medieval figures roughly into modern values, multi
plying by fifteen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and by ten in the fifteenth and
sixteenth.

58 Medieval Studies.
" is so heavily in debt that there is no hope of its future recovery, unless
remedy be quickly apphed " : and a similar report is given two years
later, when one of its dependent churches is reported as " on the verge
of ruin." Next year the prior has paid off only £500 of the debt : then
foUow a series of gaps in the visitations owing to the French wars. In
1299 the debts are " very great, and of uncertain extent ; wherefore the
monastic hospitality and alms have been much diminished, and there
are fewer monks than usual," In 1301 the debt has risen (unless there is
a scribe's error) to £220,000 ! In 1306 there were only thirty-three monks :
whereas it was asserted that there had once been sixty. In 1314 the
debt had faUen again to £30,000. In 1317 it was reported as stiU very
heavy : " every effort must be made to diminish it." Presently came the
Hundred Years' War, and the end of Enghsh Cluniac visitations. But
a document which has survived by chance hfts the veil for one moment
about 1330, and shows us a disputed election in the Priory, during which
one of the parties sacked the refectory, carrying off the great gilt cup
bequeathed by Prior FoviUe, with so many other valuables that Lewes
was obliged to beg contributions from aU its sister-houses in England
to make good this deficit. In 1331, a petition to the king stated that the
Enghsh Cluniacs had fallen to a third of their original numbers,1 that
they patched up their financial mismanagement by a system of bribery,
and that for want of proper visitation " the order of Cluny is come to
shame, and none dare speak of religion "—i.e. of the proper regular dis
ciphne. Lastly, in 1489, Pope Innocent VIII issued a buU which shows
that matters had naturally gone from bad to worse : though here the
evils specially complained of are deeper seated than mere mismanage
ment of revenues.
Take Rusper nunnery, again, of which Mgr. Benson draws so touching
a picture, and to which he sends his hero's sister as a nun. It is the
subject of only five recorded episcopal visits. Yet in 1442 the bishop
found that the prioress never accounted for the moneys which passed
through her hands, although successive Popes since 1228 had specially
insisted upon this obvious safeguard of honesty. In 1478 the equaUy
necessary inventory of the convent goods was equaUy non-existent. In
1521 " the house was in great decay," and much " burdened with expenses
by reason of the prioress's friends and relations who constantly stayed
there." In 1527 the house was again " somewhat ruinous " ; and, instead
of the pretty picture of the inmates given us by Mgr. Benson, plain
history shows that the dilapidated convent was inhabited only by a
prioress and two nuns. It wiU be noticed that only one of the five visits
failed to reveal carelessness or dishonesty, and such other materials as
we have for tracing the revenues of this nunnery from 12^1 to the Disso
lution show them in a state of steady decay. Rusper, however, was
orderly compared with the neighbouring nunnery of Easebourne, tp
which, we take it, the sister of Mgr. Benson's hero might just as well
have happened to go. Here again the finances show a steady decline

r. This, like nearly all medieval figures of the kind, is no doubt an exaggeration ; two-
thirds would perhaps be a nearer estimate.

The Truth about the Monasteries. 59
during the last two and a half centuries before the Dissolution. We have
the details of six visitations. In 1441 the bishop found that the prioress's
extravagance had run the house into debt to the amount of about £400.
She was constantly out of her convent, feasted sumptuously wherever
she went, and wore a mantle of which the fur trimmings were valued at
£50. She " sweated " the nuns, and gave them no money for their work.1
The bishop therefore took the financial management of the house into his
own hands : yet, even so, the debt increased within the next eight years
from £400 to £650, while the net income had now sunk to £225 a year.
In 1478, it was discovered that the prioress had pledged convent valuables
to the extent of £150 for a very disgraceful purpose. In 1485 and 1489
the house was reported to be miserably poor, though it now supported
only five nuns instead of ten. In 1521 the cloisters were out of repair,
and the prioress never accounted for the revenues : nor had she done
so even at the next visit (1524) : moreover, it was now discovered that
convent goods had again been secretly alienated, under circumstances
as disgraceful as in 1478.2 Mgr. Benson takes us, again, to Durford,
where he claims special pity for the monks. They were indeed in Crom
well's time " far in debt and great decay " : but the nine inmates then
enjoyed an income of £980 ; and, though the abbey had suffered two
hundred years before from the ravages of war, the scanty notices we
possess point here also to mismanagement as the main cause of their
ruin. The rest of the Sussex evidence I must sum up very briefly. In 1518
the bishop pointed out that six different priories " had suffered great
loss and diminished rents " through want of proper custody for the com
mon seal — or, in plain words, through embezzlement : and they are
warned also to discontinue the practice of feeding their hunting dogs
on the broken victuals which should go to the poor. In 1478 the monks
of Mitchelham were found to have sold the convent jewels to pay for a
lawsuit against other monks ; the two priory miUs were in ruins ; the
prior had presented his accounts only once in twenty-eight years ; had
sold books, papers, horses and timber for his own profit, and had em
bezzled certain sums left for the benefit of the donors' souls. At Sele
in 1441 the prior was not accustomed to present his accounts, and had
" wasted and consumed the goods of the house." His successor, during
fourteen years of office, " devoured " (i.e. made away with) " n sheep,
26 draught oxen, 80 young wether beasts, 80 swine ... 2 mazers
(valuable cups) bound with silver uncovered, together with many salt-
ceUars, chalices, and cruets of silver, granges fuU of corn, the household
furniture, carts, etc. : besides running the house into debt for more than
£2,000 and reducing the income to £80 a year." His successor distin
guished himself by forging the convent seal and thus alienating some of
r. As a matter of fact, the nuns were forbidden to receive such private moneys, on peril
of their souls ; and the mere fact of their making this complaint to the bishop speaks volumes
for the degradation of the Benedictine rule.
2 This is not the place to enter into the moral details of the visitations, but any reader
who verifies these references in Vol. ix of the Sussex Archceological Collections, will understand
why the medieval nuns were often spoken of by their contemporaries in language which
fair-minded Protestants would hesitate to use nowadays.

60 ^Medieval Studies.
the endowments to his own profit. The next prior obtained his office
by a bribe of £100, and for eight years " wasted the property of the house
and aUowed the buildings to faU into decay." A dispute over the owner
ship of the priory lands may palliate, though scarcely excuse, the conduct
of these last two priors. The priory of Pynham was sequestrated in 1441
by the Bishop until it should free itself from debt. In 1478 its revenues
were much diminished, and its buildings, vestments and books utterly
dUapidated. In the same year Tortington Priory was also very ruinous.
In 1527 other dilapidations of the property had taken place. At Hardham
in 1478 the buildings were very ruinous, the prior had rendered no account
for more than four years, and the jewels and plate were said to be in the
hands of a neighbouring rector. At Warbleton in 1441 the prior was
neghgent, extravagant, and remiss in rendering accounts : in 1473 one
of the monks was accused of having embezzled two gold cups and played
fast and loose with the common seal : the buildings were ruinous, and
the inmates reduced from five to two. At Boxgrove in 1518 the prior
rendered no accounts. The costly jewels given by Rufus to Battle Abbey
disappeared within about twenty years, many of them " either lost or
fraudulently stolen." The number of the monks there had fallen, between
1100 and 1530, from sixty to seventeen. These seventeen monks, who
even then enjoyed a revenue of £8,800 net, had aUowed their library, one
of the finest in the kingdom, to faU into a miserable state.
This then is what can be gleaned from even such extremely fragmen
tary records as have survived. There were altogether twenty-two houses
of monks and nuns in Sussex1 ; the foregoing details give us a glimpse
of the commercial morality which reigned in twelve of them. I have
been obhged to treat this matter at some length, since there is no other
way of expressing the cumulative force of the evidence, and of enabhng
the reader to judge how far Mgr. Benson is justified in representing
CromweU and his agents as the only spoilers of monastic goods. Ex
aggerated as is the novelist's description of the cartloads of jewels carried
to London, there can be no doubt that the Cromwelhan visitors did
abstract many valuables : but it is equaUy certain that what was lost
in this way bore a very smaU proportion to the sums wasted and em
bezzled by the Rehgious themselves.
But Mgr. Benson misrepresents far more crueUy the measures taken
by Cromwell to keep the monks within due bounds. The accusation
originated (I beheve) with Blunt, who was not bound to know better.
It comes fairly naturaUy, again, from the pen of Mgr. Benson, who is
accustomed to the freedom enjoyed by modern Enghsh monks, and often
sees them wander almost as much abroad as though they had never
taken the vows. But Cardinal Gasquet, as the Head of the English Bene
dictines, might at least have remembered Clause lxvi of that Rule which
even the simplest monk is bound to know almost by heart. The latter
part of this clause runs : " The monastery, if possible, should be so con
structed that all necessary works . . . may be done inside the monas-

r. This is a very liberal estimate, including four or five houses which had probably prac
tically disappeared some time before the Reformation.

The Truth about the Monasteries. 61
tery, that the monks be not compelled to wander outside, which is alto
gether unprofitable to their souls. Moreover, we will that this rule be
often read aloud in the congregation, in order that no monk may excuse him
self on the score of ignorance." Poor St. Benedict ! Little did he dream
that one of his most honoured sons would one day impute to an enemy,
as an unpardonable sin, the strict enforcement of this never-to-be ig
nored clause I1 No incident could better iUustrate the fatal dangers of
arguing, as so many do, from modern Romanism to the Middle Ages.
This clause, of which Cardinal Gasquet seems to know not even the first
word, was treated by medieval commentators with all the respect due
to its strict wording. Some (e.g. St. Gregory) would even forbid the
abbots and priors to take business journeys, except on rare occasions.
Another would refuse to allow any but the maturest and soberest monks
to go out, even to visit a dying parent ! The Commentators enforce these
prohibitions with such explicit warnings, and such plain-spoken citations
of Dinah and other Scriptural instances, as leave no possible doubt of
their meaning. Yet the monastic vagabondage which so scandalised
the laity in Chaucer's time was already rife even in the golden thirteenth
century. The Cluniac visitors complain of it bitterly, and an Archbishop
of York would not even permit healthy field-labour to some monks
because it imphed occasions of sin. After reading Chaucer's Shipman's
Tale side by side with Martene's commentary on Clause lxvi, one might
well wonder whether historical misrepresentation ever went further
than this modern complaint against Cromwell for enforcing upon the
monks one of the most emphatic and necessary provisions of their rule !
The fact that he was able to count with certainty upon their disobedience
on -this point is adequate proof (if such were needed) of their degradation
in Henry VIII's reign.
Space fails me to deal with other gross historical errors in Mgr. Benson's
work, and these pages are not the place for a fuU discussion of the darkest
side of monastic hfe. The whole book is (as I have said above) a string
of twentieth century notions thinly veneered with medievalism. His
description of hfe at Lewes Priory is taken (apparently at second hand)
from the Rule and the Consuetudines, which is very much as if future
historians should try to reconstitute modern English barrack hfe solely
from the Army Regulations and the handbooks of martial law. He knows
nothing of the remarkable thirteen century " Dialogue between a Cis
tercian and a Cluniac," which shows the deep decay of strict observance
even two hundred and fifty years before the Dissolution. Moreover,
even the fragmentary records of the English Cluniacs, though they give
us demonstrably only an extremely smaU fraction of the actual facts — •
probably not one-tenth or even one-twentieth2 — are enough to scatter
his pious fictions to the blast. Our most direct evidence covers a period
i. Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, i. 256, 264.
2. The estimate of the exact value of the evidence is too complicated to attempt here :
I hope to deal with it soon in detail. But I have long been trying in vain to induce monastic
apologists to discuss it with me. [The subject is partly dealt with in my article in the English
Historical Review for January, 1914, on " The Interpretation of Visitation Documents."]

62 Medieval Studies.
of eighty-seven years, from a chance mention by Matthew Paris in 1248
to an equally chance record in Bishop Grandisson's Register of 1334.
The period covered- by these years is one of the most favourable that
could possibly be chosen by a defender of monastic morahty, since on
the one hand the Franciscan reform was still a reaUty, while on the other
the worst decay had not yet set in. The period ends (1) before the Black
Death, which is asserted by apologists to have shaken the monastic
system so badly, and (2) at the very beginning of that long Cluniac
anarchy which was brought on by the French wars — an anarchy which
finaUy provoked the censures and interference of Pope Innocent VIII.
The statistics which I am about to give are therefore extraordinarily
favourable for Mgr. Benson, since they represent a time when Cluniac
discipline was notoriously far purer than in Henry VIII's reign. The
monks who were visited during this period from 1248 to 1334 numbered,
at an extreme estimate, 446, or not one-eighth of the monks and nuns
at present in the United Kingdom. If therefore we multiply the offences
proved against them by eight, in order to bring them into terms of the
monks and nuns at this present moment among us, these Cluniac records
would give us 152 unchaste inmates, mostly priors of monasteries ; forty
murderers who together had been concerned in the death of sixteen
victims and had slain eight of them within the very walls of the church ;
twenty-four forgers ; sixteen convicted of openly embezzhng pubhc
moneys, besides countless other less flagrant dishonesties ; eight drunken
and irreligious priors ; sixteen monks imprisoned by the town authorities
for other offences ; eight who had mutilated monastic servants ; eight
outlawed ruffians lying in wait on the highways to slay their rehgious
superiors. Moreover, even these figures would need to be multiplied by
22| if the monks and nuns were proportionately as numerous in modern
England as in Henry VIII's reign. Suppose then for one moment that
a Parliamentary enquiry were instituted this very year, and that the
Commissioners found records of 4,000 such criminals as these among our
monasteries during the past eighty-seven years. Suppose moreover
that even these records were avowedly extremely fragmentary, and that
the Commission calculated them to represent, at the most, only about
one-tenth of the actual facts. Lastly, suppose that we knew the Orders
to be already on an inclined plane on which they would slide lower and
lower for centuries to come— as even the most determined apologists
acknowledge that the monasteries did decline steadily from the thir
teenth century to the Dissolution.1 How many voices under such cir
cumstances would be raised to defend these Orders in Parhament or
elsewhere ? With what feelings would ordinary respectable folk look
forward to the probabihty that, four centuries hence, plausible Romanist
historians, backed up by enthusiastic and romantic converts, would
spread abroad the belief that those monasteries had been on the whole
seminaries of virtue, and their dissolution an act of unredeemed iniquity ?
For myself, I feel constrained to apologise to the monks and nuns now
1. Bishop Nicke's first visitation of Norwich diocese (i5T4) gives more than six per cent.
accused of incontinence ; this would make, in terms of our present population, 4,000 un
chaste monks and nuns in this year 1906.

The Truth about the Monasteries. 63
among us for even the momentary use of their name in connection with
facts which can be proved to the hilt against their medieval predecessors.
These whom we see in modern England are a smaU minority, living amid
a healthy pubUc opinion, and under a system of law and police such as
no man even dreamt of in the Middle Ages. Catholicism has long since
learned that her only chance of competition with other creeds lies in
real purity of life : so that, although clerical scandals are (I believe)
extremely common in Southern Italy and Spain, the life of the Romanist
clergy in Protestant countries is such on the whole as to command the
respect even of non-Catholics. I would therefore emphatically disclaim
any intention to hint evil against the monasteries now in England, apart
from the danger lest the convents should become sweating-houses of
cheap and insanitary labour, in the absence of such proper supervision
as our law enforces in the case of other workshops. But I hope I have
here written enough to show how little historical justification Mgr.
Benson's book can claim ; since the record of the Sussex houses in general
— and indeed of all the medieval monasteries in general — is quite as bad as
that Cluniac record which I have just quoted as a specimen. The writings
of such disciphnary experts as Busch, Ambrose of Camaldoli, and Trit-
tenheim — all of them distinguished monks and heads of houses — read
in some places like an evil dream. The fact is that, with aU his real
ability and the engaging personality shown in his pages, Mgr. Benson
has written a novel as false to history as the shilling shockers of our youth,
with their diabolical Jesuits and walled-in nuns. Nobody in Henry VIII's
time, orthodox or unorthodox, would have recognized his description of
monastic life as even approximately true to the facts of that day. It
bears, in fact, just about the same semblance of reality as the sentimental
pink-and-white plaster statues in a Roman Catholic religious shop bear
to the actual living aspect of spiritual athletes hke St. Bernard and St.
Francis. Inside and outside the cloister waUs, his monks are as unreal
as his heroine.
But he might possibly plead, with ^Esop's trumpeter, that this role of
historian has only been thrust on him by indolent reviewers : that he
himself is no disciplined unit in the ranks of original research, but simply
a poet whose mission it is to inspire the fighters with his music. Yet,
even so, it is worth while to remonstrate with him seriously for this once.
After all, the average novel has a wider circulation than the average
history : and I cannot believe that Mgr. Benson would willingly propa
gate such strange misconceptions as those which I have here exposed.
[To this Mgr. Benson replied in the Contemporary for June ; but he
has dechned to allow me to repubhsh this reply. The reader must there
fore be left to infer its character from my rejoinder here following, which
was published in the July number.]
I willingly recognise Mgr. Benson's courtesy and honesty at the bottom
of the hard things he feels bound to say about me, of his silence on what
seem to me important points, and of his occasional misapprehensions.
The unfair " stab " which he imputes to me lies, not in my actual words,

64 Medieval Studies.
but in his own paraphrase, coloured necessarily by his own feehngs. Nor
had I any idea of imputing to him the hterary bad faith which I do impute
to some others ; though I own that, if my words conveyed this impression
to other minds than his, the blame must he to some extent with me.
But I do not feel that the three particular phrases which he adduces can
bear that invidious interpretation when considered in their actual context.
Each of them refers plainly not to aUeged concealment of facts, but to
aUeged ignorance. To take his first instance : I speak of him as " crueUy
misrepresenting " CromweU by stigmatising the latter's order for the
enclosure of the Rehgious as a novel and unjustifiable manoeuvre. " It
was pretty evident that a rigorous confinement would breed discontent,"
so writes Mgr. Benson, without one hint that such confinement was in
fact emphatically enjoined by the Rule to which these monks were by
profession pledged ; and that disciplinarians had for centuries protested
against any relaxation as extremely perilous to monastic morahty. I
cannot see how this statement — which he does not attempt to justify —
can be called any less than a cruel misrepresentation of CromweU. Yet
so far was I from hinting dishonesty on Mgr. Benson's part, that I took
pains to explain how he had evidently been misled. He saw (I said)
modern monks wandering about abroad as if the Rule were non-existent ;
he had argued, like others, from modern Romanism to the Middle Ages ;
and he had taken this particular blunder straight from Cardinal Gasquet,
who, however, had not the same excuse for ignorance. Both here and
elsewhere I tried to show (1) how frankly he had used the novelist's right
of taking history at second-hand ; and (2) how sadly his trusted authori
ties had misled him ; so that his very success as an artist resulted in the
further propagation of false history. I looked upon him as an able and
honest counsel whose attorney had primed him with a faulty brief ; and
his reply has but strengthened this conviction. Although the real point
at issue between us is the state of the monasteries under Henry VIII,
he seems to treat it sometimes almost more as a personal than as an
historical question. " It is myself that is in question," he writes ; " we
are not discussing the thirteenth nor even the fifteenth century, but the
sixteenth," and thus he excuses himself for not having studied earher
documents, while accusing me of " almost incredible " perverseness or
" adroitness " in arguing from a complete series of forty reports, of which
only seven referred directly to the sixteenth century. Yet I carefuUy
gave all the dates for my readers to judge ; nor can I understand why,
without vouchsafing further reasons, he dismisses my argument as worth
less. It is admitted by both parties in this discussion that the monas
teries were purer in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries than in
the sixteenth. Inevitably, therefore, after exhausting the direct evidence
for the sixteenth century, we ask, " What evidence have we for earUer
times ? Were the monks even then, as a body, such men as we should
care to have amongst us now ? " I produced statistics from " The Golden
Age of Monasticism " which seemed to me to supply a clear negative ;
but to him this whole argument appears a mockery ; apparently be
cause, his own studies having turned mainly on later times, he therefore
denies my right to travel beyond his book. Yet I had explained that I

The Truth about the Monasteries. 65
criticised this not as a novel, but as an unconscious travesty of historical
fact ; and he has now no possible right to reject valuable witnesses because
they were not of his own calling — to exalt, in short, his own personal
limitations into a canon of historical truth or falsehood. Moreover, his
own mentor, Cardinal Gasquet, goes back a whole century earlier than
I do, appealing for support to those same visitation documents which,
when I quote them, Mgr. Benson dismisses with loathing as " episcopal
police-lists." The real difference here between myself and the Cardinal
is that I give my references, while he steadily declines to give his. Nor
can he now justify this refusal on the score of dignity ; for in the preface
to his new edition he steps down from that pedestal to revile me (in the
French of Stratford atte Bowe), as a literary ragman. It is this refusal
of the commonest guarantees of literary good faith — not, as Mgr. Benson
asserts, our difference of opinion — which has determined me to pursue
this subject so far. Indeed, it would seem almost a counsel of despair
which prompted Mgr. Benson to waste, in an attempt to prejudge this
question, space which would have been more profitably employed in
dealing with my facts. He quotes two living historians as regarding the
Cardinal's work with such " deep respect " that I have no right to attack
it ; as if anything could ever be proved if the consent of two men, how
ever eminent, carried a power of tribunicial veto at the bar of history !
Moreover, one of his pair is very far from bearing a name to conjure with
in this matter ; while the other, Dr. Gairdner, has volunteered to me the
statement that he considers my exposure of the Cardinal " a powerful
indictment ! "L So far, therefore, as Mgr. Benson's argument ever had
any real force, it now turns against himself.
As for his so-caUed paraUel to my statistics, it is painful to deal with
anything so shpshod. With aU his license of choosing a single favourable
fortnight for generalisation, he stiU cannot produce anything remotely
approaching the percentage of immorahties revealed by Nicke's visitation
of 1514 in the Norwich diocese. For a real parallel to my figures he must
show, not four criminous clerks for the whole country during one par
ticular fortnight, but over seventy-five in a single diocese like Norwich,
within a space of three years.2 He knows very well that he would need
not only great diligence, but exceptional good fortune to produce even
one-tenth of this proportion after years of patient study ; and it is a
pity that he did not work out his own figures, instead of satisfying himself
with the most superficial pretence of an argument to throw at me. As
a further radical difference — if such were needed — a criminous clerk is
ignominiously ejected in these days ; before the Reformation, ejections
for unchastity were not only comparatively rare, but practically unknown
for a first offence. As for his claim of imitating my methods in gratuitously
r. This letter, written by Dr. Gairdner to stop the use of his high authority in support
of arguments which have not always his approval, was published, with his permission, in
Church BeUs for May r2th, 1906. [Before his death, Dr. Gairdner went still further, and wrote
to me expressing great surprise at Cardinal Gasquet's attitude towards historical facts ;
see pp. 43-4 of my Medieval Studies, No. X, " Monastic Schools in the Middle Ages."]
2. He generalizes from four cases : I from 20. His figures would work out at only ro4
cases in a year out of 24,000 clergy : mine are twenty in three years out of 332 monks
and nuns. I work this out in my Monastic Legend.

66 Medieval Studies.
multiplying the recorded figures by four, this is an admirable instance
of the misconceptions resulting from those hole-and-corner historical
ideas which prevail in his own communion. I have no mere surmises, but
definite evidence to show that a large proportion of cases have been
omitted from many of the medieval documents by which, in default of
others more complete, I support facts already gleaned from fuller sources.
I have repeatedly chaUenged discussion on this point with Cardinal
Gasquet, Father Gerard, and the anonymous F. S. A. who writes alter
nately for the Church Times and for the Catholic Truth Society ; indeed,
I repeated this chaUenge in a footnote appended to the very statistics
at which Mgr. Benson carps. They persistently refuse this discussion,
finding it safer to throw mud at me from the comparative security of a
preface, a Romanist journal, or an anonymous article ; and meanwhile
their wilful silence enables Mgr. Benson to write as if the reasons which
I have vainly offered to his own champions were as empty as these
mockeries which he flaunts in parody of what he calls " my methods ! "
Wherever else he seems to make a real point against me, it is, I cannot
help thinking, by misunderstanding my words. In one case this was no
doubt partly my fault ; I should either have been more explicit about
his aUeged anachronisms or have left them alone. I never dreamed of
blaming him for not adopting bastard linguistic archaisms, or for keeping
Tudor vermin out of sight. I referred chiefly to his importation of deeper
modern refinements into those times ; to the implication of his whole
book that Tudor Catholicism had aU the virtues and inward quahties of
modern society, with something more. Nobody could guess from his
book how brutaUy girls were often maltreated, and how hard they found
it to escape obscene talk even in the best society — as Sir Thomas More
not only complains, but shows by his own example. Mgr. Benson refuses
to beheve in the word of a man like Layton because he tells CromweU
" some tales [of monastic vice] to make you laugh." Yet More tells, with
great circumstance and most undeniable rehsh, quite unnecessarily, a
monastic story more unsavoury than any of Layton 's ; a story, more
over, sufficient in itself to disprove Cardinal Gasquet's assertions of the
strict discipline exercised by conventual visitors. (More's English Works,
pp. 1035 and 154.) On this, and similar vital points, the novelist ante
dates by centuries the progress of inward civilisation. Moreover, he
spends more than a page in disproving an assertion which I never made.
When I complain of his letting his heroine " run about alone," it is no
answer to confront me with quotations which either ignore the crucial
word here italicised, or definitely show (as two out of his four do) that
the ladies had in fact attendants waiting on them. I know very weU that
Tudor ladies enjoyed more freedom than their ancestresses, or than
Italian ladies ; but I believe such freedom to have been far, at its best,
from the " almost Victorian " liberty which Mgr. Benson asserts them
to have enjoyed ; nor can I believe that a self-respecting girl like Beatrice
would have gone alone to interview her fiance" in his own rooms. But
I am told that I err in supposing her to have been unattended on that
occasion. I have just re-read the chapter (pt. 11, chapter ix) and feel sure
that the author, on re-reading it himself, wiU admit my impression to

The Truth about the Monasteries. 6j
have been pardonable, if not correct. Meanwhile, if he will produce
evidence rebutting my criticism as it stands, I will acknowledge my error
as pubUcly as I asserted it.
Of his other criticisms I can only say that they seem to me to repose,
partly on misreading of my words and partly on his own unfamiliarity
with the facts of history. I did not, for instance,, say that " if Religious
are rich, it must be through oppression or greed," nor can I even guess
at the words which he read in this sense. What he says, again, in excuse
for their failure to keep accounts and inventories, simply proves how
little he has read of papal, conciliar, and episcopal injunctions. I could
point out as many mistakes of this kind as there are pages in his article,
and am wilhng to do so in any paper he chooses, under criticism from him
or from the Cardinal's earlier champion, Father Gerard. He will no
doubt brand me here again with the invidious title of " controversialist,"
yet I am in fact as hard-worked a professional man as himself, and con
troversy has brought me, as probably it will always bring me, pecuniary
loss without any corresponding pubhc gain. For the last ten years I
have been working at a book on medieval life which I hope to publish
now in a few weeks. In this work I have found myself confronted at
every turn by what seem to me the reckless, and sometimes even de
liberate, misrepresentations of Romanist apologists. That is why I have
stepped aside to clear the ground of weeds to which more distinguished
scholars have neither time nor inclination to stoop. I have always offered
to print rephes at my own expense ; and, if I had nothing but contro
versial tricks to help me, I should long ago have been made mincemeat
of by Father Gerard, who has probably written two or three hundred
pages of polemics to one of mine. As it is, Father Gerard has steadily
dechned to face my evidence from pre-Reformation documents, even in
the comparative safety of the Tablet, which could not print some of my
most important proofs.
Moreover, Mgr. Benson seems curiously unable to realise how far his
own book is merely destructive, or how much he and his own friends
depend on " peering through the keyholes " of history, on ferreting out
evil from a king's private love-letters, and on studiously blackening men
and women who are as silent and helpless now, and who once suffered as
crueUy, as any monk or nun. AU this is the nemesis of an old evil tradition
which has allowed men to use tricks for The Cause which would be re
probated in private life, with the result that Church history cannot yet
be written, on either side, with the same judicial calm as other histories.
No judge can sum up from concealed evidence, and the " confidence trick "
has no more place in history than in law. So long, therefore, as one side
dehberately rests on alleged favourable evidence from the episcopal
registers, so long must others emphasize even to weariness the damning
evidence which those books undoubtedly contain. The workaday Present
always cuts a poor figure beside the meretricious fancies of the Past,
and it is only fair to remind Mgr. Benson that nearly one-third of St.
Augustine's City of God is devoted to purely destructive criticism of the
polytheism which many of his contemporaries longed to have back again.
So we also can never reahze fuUy the spiritual possibilities of the age in

68 Medieval Studies.
which we hve, unless we make these periodical clearances of interested
mis-statements which would persuade us to hark back to the past.
P.S. — The above was already in type when I saw in the Guardian
(June 6th, p. 937) a quotation from Newman which cuts one knot that
had hardly seemed worthy of unraveUing at the expense of a couple of
pages. Having no time to verify it at the British Museum, I give it here
simply on the high authority of the Guardian, which quotes it from the
Roman Cathohc Month (January, 1903) : " Nothing could be better
[Newman wrote] than an historical review. But who would bear it ?
Unless one doctored all one's facts, one would be thought a bad Catholic."
Compare the words I have here italicised with Mgr. Benson's complaint
(p. 827) that my attitude shows me to have " already decided that no
Catholic priest could be anything but a falsifier of history." Even if
I had not already exposed Romanist falsifications wholesale, with plain
chapter and verse, and without eliciting any real evidence in their favour,
I should now only need (1) to coUocate Newman's words with the un
deniable fact that Cardinal Gasquet is far from " being thought a bad
Catholic," and (2) to draw the obvious deduction that the very com
pleteness of Mgr. Benson's good faith has helped to make him the un
conscious mouthpiece of that " doctored history " for which he is proud
to own his debt to " the greatest Roman Catholic historian of our day."

VII.

Religious Education before the
Reformation.1

OTH Roman Cathohc and High Church papers have lately
attempted to contrast the present state of religious edu
cation with what they imagine it to have been before the
Reformation. There are few more tempting fallacies than
that which Sterne has good humouredly piUoried for all
time in his " They order this matter better in France." Whatever seems
amiss in the world in which our lot is cast, we are quick to imagine some
golden world in which aU was the opposite of this ungrateful present.
The fitness of things seems to require it, and we feel that there ought to
be — that there must somewhere be — historical evidence for it. It may
therefore be worth while, at this particular moment, to confront this
fond dream with the real facts, especiaUy since plausible attempts have
been made, in the name of serious history, to misrepresent those facts.
The editor of the Catholic Times quotes Cardinal Gasquet as estabhshing
the existence of a pre-reformation England in which education was all
that it should have been, and all that it now, alas ! is not ! One of his
correspondents, bolder stiU, has gathered from the same historian that
there was " an age when there would have been no difficulties over an
Education BiU, a time when the Church had it aU its own way, and yet
the Bible was taught . . . when such immense portions of Scripture
were committed to memory, and that by Catholics." Such grotesque
travesties of the actual facts are current not only among those who have
most temptation to see one side of the question alone, but even among
moderate Anglicans. They have been so often repeated, supported with
such a specious show of serious evidence, and suffered so contemptuously
or so supinely by those who are best qualified to contradict them, that
many weU-read men accept them now almost without question. Yet
this theory that the pre-Reformation times were an age of thorough and
widespread religious instruction not only breaks down under any fairly
wide view of the actual documents, but is contradicted (as I hope to
prove) even by those apologetic writings of Sir Thomas More, on which,
by means of partial quotations, it has been mainly built.
Let me begin with the golden thirteenth century. At the Provincial
Council of Oxford, in 1222, Stephen Langton enjoined, " Let the arch-
i. Contemporary Review, October, rgo6.

7° Medieval Studies.
deacons at their visitations see that ... the priests can rightly pro
nounce at least the formula of consecration (in the Mass), and that of
baptism, and that they clearly understand the meaning of these two
formulas." This injunction (which was repeated in a later Council of
I237) reveals an abyss of clerical ignorance at which we may weU stagger.
In an age when the Bible was in Latin, aU the Church services in Latin,
and only a small fraction even of popular rehgious books could be ob
tained in the vulgar tongue, it was necessary for the Provincial Councils
to take elaborate precautions for ensuring that parish priests knew just
enough Latin to pronounce, and understand, two every-day formulas
of half-a-dozen words each ! Nor are we left to the inferences, however
inevitable, drawn from these injunctions ; for we have on record the
actual examination, in this same year, 1222, of a number of curates who
had long served dean and chapter livings of Salisbury. The Curate of
Sonning, who had been four years in priest's orders, was asked to con
strue the first words of the canon of the mass — Te igitur clementissime
Pater— '"We pray Thee, therefore, most merciful Father," etc. The
report is, " He knew not the case of the word Te, nor by what it was
governed ; and having been bidden to look closely what part of the
sentence could most properly govern Te, he rephed : 'Pater : for He
governeth aU things.' We asked him what clementissime was, or what
case, or how it was declined : he knew not. We asked him what was
clemens : he knew not. Moreover [he knew no music and] knew by heart
no part of the divine service or of the psalter. Moreover, he said that it
seemed to him indecent to be examined by the dean, since he was already
ordained. . . . He is sufficiently iUiterate." The rest tried to concert
a " passive resistance " to the examination, and for a while refused to
answer : but at last their conspiracy broke down, and it is registered
that the Curate of Hurst, six years a priest, " is young, and knows
nothing." The Curate of Erburgefield, four years a priest, was also ex
amined in the canon of the Mass, " and he knew nothing, either of reading
or of singing." The Curate of Sandhurst had been four years there, and
" could give no answers " to the same simple questions. The Curate of
Ruscombe, nearly ten years a priest, "knows nothing." It must be borne
in mind, firstly, that this Latin of which the five curates could not even
stumble through the first hne is the essential and most solemn portion
of the Mass, and could almost be learnt by heart in a single day by one
who reaUy knew Latin : and secondly, that no measures were taken to
get rid of any of these priests. It is possible that for dean and chapter
livings curates were hired in the cheapest .market, as was notoriously
the case with monastic livings : yet even so it is starthng to find five
such incapables in seventeen churches. The contemporary register of
Eudes Rigaud, of Rouen, one of the greatest of medieval prelates, gives
almost equaUy startUng results. One candidate, set to construe and
parse three verses of the Bible (Heb. iv, 13-15) thought aperta (" opened ")
was a noun, imagined that compati (" to be touched with ") had some
thing to do with " opening," and parsed " without " as a causal con
junction. As he was also "ill-famed of quarrelling and incontinence,"
the archbishop decided not to admit him to the coveted benefice. Another

Religious Education before Reformation. 71
cleric, having to construe annuus (" annual ") dimly thought that it
meant " often," and, when asked " how often ? " replied " daily." A
third, whom the archbishop found " unable to read properly or to con
strue," promptly gave notice of appeal to the Pope ! We get similar
evidence again from Germany in the fifteenth century. Johann Busch
(de Ref. Mon. i, xiv) tells us how he held an archidiaconal visitation at
the important town of Halle, and found one incumbent who, even with
a little friendly help and after mature consideration, could not name the
simple words of consecration of the Mass, " This is My Body," or " This
is the Cup of My Blood." He offered, however, to find them in the Missal :
but when a book was brought he pointed to the wrong place : though
he proved able to read through the essential portions of the Mass " after
the fashion," (as Busch puts it), " of feecular priests."1 Busch consulted
with the doctors as to the validity of this man's consecrations ; they
agreed to hope for the best, but took the precaution of exchanging the
holy wafers which he had on hand for a fresh batch consecrated by a
more trustworthy coUeague. Of one other obvious precaution — getting rid
of the ignorant priest — there was no question. As St. Bonaventura had
said two hundred years before, " If we do get rid of them, how shaU we
get any better to fiU their places ? " For, while sinners mocked at the
ignorance of the clergy, saints and philosophers lamented alike the mag
nitude of the evil and the difficulty of reform. Scholars too often went
up to the medieval universities (as Dr. RashdaU points out) without
enough Latin to foUow the lectures properly ; not was there any definite
theological training for the ordinary student.8 Moreover, large numbers
of the parish clergy had never been to a university at aU. The episcopal
registers supply the most curious evidence on this point, showing that
there were two distinct categories of parish clergy. On the one hand were
the beneficed clergy, who generaUy belonged to the rich and influential
classes, and of whom about 75 per cent, had been presented with livings
not only before they had taken holy orders, but even in their youth or
their boyhood. The first act of such clerics, on receiving their benefices,
was often to go to the university. On the other hand were the poor curates,
who might or might not have studied, but who were generaUy doomed
to vegetate on the lowest wages, while the fruits of their parishes were
mainly consumed by absentees.3
In a Church where the rectors were often schoolboys and the first re
quisite for a curate was that he should be cheap and unambitious, it was
unhkely that any high standard could be maintained, even in such
r. It is obvious how far these fragmentary indications from orthodox sources go to cor
roborate Tyndale's " I dare say that there be 20,000 priests, curates, this day in England,
and not so few, that cannot give you the right English unto this text in the Paternoster,
Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and the answer thereto " : and the record of Bishop
Hooper's visitation in r552 which showed " scores of clergy who could not tell who was the
author of the Lord's Prayer, or where it was to he found." — Tyndale's Works, vol. in (Parker
Society), p. 75 and note.
2. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 11,701. Dr. Rashdall adds : " It is necessary
to assert emphatically that the ' religious education ' of a ' bygone Oxford,' in so far as it
ever had any existence, was an inheritance not from the Middle Ages but from the Refor
mation." 3. I hope to explain this in detail, with statistics from the registers, on some future
occasion.

72 Medieval Studies.
learning as was otherwise possible under medieval conditions. " There
are," writes St. Bonaventura, " so many inexperienced clerics that,
even if they be weU taught in grammar and other knowledge, yet where
one hundred or more rectors and vicars are gathered together, there are
scarcely any who have in fact enough knowledge of the Scriptures to
manage either the souls committed to their care, or other things necessary
for salvation." He speaks here speciaUy of Italy, and says that things
were better in France and England. But St. Thomas Aquinas, writing
at Paris, complains of " the inexperience of many priests, who in some
parts are found to be so ignorant that they cannot even speak Latin,
and among whom very few are found who have learnt Holy Scripture."
Roger Bacon, writing about the same time in England, and wishing to
give an instance of mere parrot-leartiing, says " just as boys gabble through
the Psalter which they have learnt, and as clerks and country priests
recite the Church services, of which they know little or nothing, like
brute beasts." -Gerson, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, speaks
equaUy strongly and far more frequently on this subject. He contrasts
what he caUs the restless and iU-digested Scripture studies of the heretics
with the supineness of even " great prelates," who neglect " the wine
of sacred wisdom " and cry, " What is this ye say to us of faith ? It is
enough that we are Christians, in good simphcity : that is enough ;
for he who pries into majesty shaU be oppressed by its glory ; and there
is no need to seek things so lofty for us." Again he asks, " Are aU ecclesias
tics bound to study God's Law ? It would seem so . . . yet on the
other side it may be argued that to assert this is to place by far the
greater part of ecclesiastics outside the way of salvation, and to assert
that they are doomed to damnation." He speaks of the lamentable lack
of rehgious books of any kind among the parish clergy, and complains
that there was no organised attempt to multiply good writings against
the rising tide of infidelity : to this supineness, and to the ignorance of
the beneficed clergy, he attributes a great deal of what he calls the no
torious decay of the Cathohc Church. Finally, complaining somewhat
rhetoricaUy in the person of Holy Church to the Pope, he cries, " What
priest wilt thou give me who knoweth God's Law ! " (Vol. i, p. 349 c.
De Laud Script. Consid. x-xii ; Vol. 1, pp. 204 A, 268 A, 34.9 C. Vol. 11,
552 A ; cf. I 205 F, 208 C, 339 A-C). Nor were the monks better than
the parish clergy in this respect. Popes and prelates alike, when pro
viding that the Monastic Rule or other similar injunctions should be
read aloud, ordained that these should be read not only in Latin but
also in the vulgar tongue : and it was taken as quite natural that the
most pious lay-brethren could not foUow the sense of the Nicene Creed
during mass. The friars did indeed revive the study of the Bible among
the clergy : but they did httle to spread the knowledge of the actual
text among the laity, who were fed almost as much on glosses and pious
embroideries as on the plain facts of Scripture history. Even the famous
Meditations on the Life of Christ, once attributed to St. Bonaventura,
and now traced to one of his disciples, alloy the Gospel story with a
good 20 per cent, of sheer romance, based upon the author's own surmises
of what might have happened, or on revelations vouchsafed to " a holy

Religious Education before Reformation. 73
brother of our Order." These additions, it need hardly be said, mostly
tend to give the Virgin Mary a prominence or an authority which the
Evangelists have neglected to give her. Chaucer's keen eye noted this
habit of the friars, and he shows us too how much more the popular mind
was attracted by these apocryphal legends than by the bare truth. His
clerk, Nicholas, speaking to the carpenter about Noah's flood, has no
doubt that the latter wiU specially remember the least Bibhcal feature
of that event as conceived in the later Middle Ages — the refusal of Noah's
wife to embark, until she has drunk one more pot of ale with her jolly
gossips ashore !
Nor are the instances which I have hitherto quoted rare and excep
tional ; the evidence of clerical ignorance all through the Middle Ages
— and, unfortunately, for a generation or so after the Reformation — is
overwhelming. When Dean Colet, in 1509, complained that aU appli
cants were admitted indiscriminately to Holy Orders, so that the Church
swarmed with " a multitude of unlearned and evil priests," he was only
repeating, almost in so many words, what the Bishop of Mende had said
to the Pope at the Council of Vienne in 1311. Moreover, both Colet and
the Bishop lay stress on the fact that laws had been frequently enacted
against these abuses, and that the Church needed no new legislation, but
simply courage to enforce time-honoured and repeatedly-enacted laws.
For, by a strange perversion of history, one of the plainest proofs of
medieval rehgious ignorance has been distorted by modern apologists
into an argument for religious knowledge. If Council after Council,
thundering against the " dumb dogs that bark not," enjoined that the
clergy should at least be competent to read and speak Latin, and should
give at least a certain minimum of elementary rehgious instruction from
the pulpit, surely common sense would suggest that the very repetition
and emphasis of such injunctions pointed to something wrong in practice.
Yet Mgr. Vaughan in his Faith and Folly (p. 4), undertakes to prove
by " the foUowing indisputable authorities " that the Church has always
fostered learning. He then proceeds to give bare references, without
quotations, to five Church Councils, the references themselves being full
of blunders and evidently copied from some French book. The ingenious
student who manages to verify these references wiU find them of this
foUowing type : " Henceforward let no Bishop be suffered to confer
deacon's or priest's orders on an illiterate man ; and let any such, who
may already have been ordained, be now compeUed to learn. . . .
What doth he in the Church of God if he be not skiUed to read ? " Car
dinal Gasquet, again, in his Eve of the Reformation and his essay on Reli
gious Instruction in England, hardly comes any nearer to the real point.
His references to episcopal registers are not accurate ; and, even if the
facts were as he states them, they prove no more than that medieval
viUagers were generaUy as unwiUing as modern Irish viUagers to bring
formal accusations of ignorance or neglect against their priests. On
the other hand, hke Mgr. Vaughan, he rehes mostly on the repeated in
junctions of Councils, and the repeated attempts of prominent Church
men to encourage systematic teaching on the part of the parish clergy,
without reahsing that the very multiplication of such injunctions, in the

74 Medieval Studies.
absence of direct evidence that they were obeyed, tells heavily against
his own case. Gerson, indeed, twice mentions such injunctions, but
only to imply that they were very imperfectly kept (ii 552 F and De
Laud Script. Consid. xii). And indeed we have the most definite evi
dence that this theoretical system of instruction was even less reahsed
in practice than the average of medieval theories. Bishop Haymo of
Hythe, founding an almshouse in 1337 for the special benefit of men of
good position who had come down in the world, made it a sine qua non
that they should know the Lord's prayer, the Ave, and the Creed ; and
we have many other indications to show how necessary his stipulation
was. Berthold of Ratisbon, a mission-preacher of European fame, com
plains more than once that children reach the age of seven, fourteen,
even twenty, without even learning their Lord's Prayer ; and the same
complaint was made by others, in those ages when the clergy exercised
the most despotic disciplinary powers over their parishioners. Again,
the fifteenth century translation of the Gesta Romanorum, pubhshed by
the Early English Text Society, shows the grossest ignorance of the
Bible ; — texts from the Apocalypse, Ezekiel and Canticles are quoted
as from the Gospels ; two from the Gospels and one from Job are attri
buted to St. Paul ; Genesis is confused with Psalms, Isaiah with St.
James ; scraps of the Fathers are palmed off as Bible texts. The Knight
of La Tour-Landry, though his book was the most popular educational
treatise of the later Middle Ages, and he claims to have written it with
the help of two priests and two clerks whom he had in his castle, shows
a still deeper ignorance of the Bible. His history of Ruth has scarcely
anything but the heroine's name in common with the Scriptural narra
tive ; Boaz is not even alluded to ; the whole story is of Ruth's struggle
with her stepsons for her late husband's property ! A weU-known carol
of the fifteenth century makes Herod execute St. Stephen on the day
after Christ's birth. The Franciscan Sahmbene (a.d. 1280) bears inci-
dentaUy the most damning testimony as to the Biblical ignorance both
of clergy and of laity in the Italy (and perhaps the France) of his day.
He teUs us how he had heard priests quote " a hundred times," as a text
from St. Paul's Epistles, the cynical maxim of sacerdotal conduct, "si
non caste, tamen caute " (" if we hve not chastely, let us at least sin
with caution "). His contemporary Berthold of Ratisbon bears similar
testimony in his complaint that " many thousands," persuaded by in
dulgence-mongers, " falsely believe that they have done penance for all
their sins with a penny or halfpenny . . . and so go straight to heU."
The Oxford Chancellor Gascoigne, two centuries later, is stiU more em
phatic on this last subject.
We may glean from many of the medieval preachers a vivid idea of
the ignorance and carelessness with which they had to wrestle. Let
me quote from Berthold again. Some (he says) have not been seen in
church for a month, or ten weeks, or even six months, though the women
are better than the men. When they do come, " it irks some to stand
decently for a short hour in church, while God is being served with singing
or reading ; they laugh and chatter as if they were at a fair. They talk
in church across from one to the other, and boast and teU what they

Religious Education before Reformation. 75
have seen in foreign lands, so that one may well disturb six or ten others
who would have gladly held their tongues. . . . And ye women, ye
never give your tongues rest from useless talk 1 One tells the other how
glad the maidservant is to sleep, and how loth to work ; another tells
of her husband ; a third complains that her children are troublesome
and sickly ! " At this a cry of expostulation rises from the audience :
" Yea, Brother Berthold, but we understand not the Mass, and therefore
can we not pray as we had need, nor may we feel such devotion as if
we understood the Mass. The sermon indeed we can follow word by word,
but not the Mass ; we know not what is being sung or read, we cannot
comprehend it. If it were so that we understood the Mass, then might
we pray far better to God and beseech His grace, and have greater de
votion in the Mass with prayer and other good things." Sir Thomas
More also (whom Cardinal Gasquet has tried to press into the service of
his theory) teUs us how little the congregation understood the Mass ;
and Busch shows the same in describing how, during an interdict, the
monks obeyed the Pope by suspending their Masses, without offending
the townsfolk who demanded that these should proceed as usual. The
Brethren had only to ring the bells and play their organ in the choir ;
and the citizens in the nave were quite happy in the behef that Mass was
being said behind the screen. It is indeed difficult to reahse how little
the ordinary medieval layman reaUy comprehended of the Church services,
and how perfunctory was even his personal attendance. From very
early times we find complaints that parishioners went in and out pretty
weU as they chose during Mass. As St. Bernardino puts it, " There are
many ignorant folk who, when the priest is celebrating, come drunken
from the taverns or wait outside the church, talking of their oxen and
worldly matters, and even of obscenities ; nor do they enter the church
until the elevation, at which they gaze in utter irreverence, with their
heads partly or wholly covered, and their stiff knees scarcely bowed ;
and thus— after running noisily to see the Body of Christ, half inside and
half outside the Church — suddenly, after the barest glimpse of Him, they
run off again as hastily as if they had seen not Christ but the Devil ! "
The same complaint was made at the Council of Cologne in 1536, and
repeated only five years later. The Knight of La Tour-Landry, writing
for the instruction of his motherless daughters, confesses his own ad
hesion to that rigorous school which " susteineth that none shulde not
speak no manner thing whiles they ben atte masse, and in especial atte
the gospeUe." Members of the third Orders of St. Dominic or St. Francis,
among other very strict rules of conduct, were pledged not to talk during
Mass or sermon. Among the brief and solemn instructions which St.
Louis gave to his sons upon his deathbed, was the warning to " attend
the service of Holy Church devoutly and without jesting talk ; . . . more
especiaUy in the Mass when the consecration is made." Nor was this
irreverence by any means confined to the laity. A bull of Clement V
(131 1) complains that many clergy gabble through or cut short the daily
services, " with frequent intermixture of idle, profane, and unhonest
discourse " ; Gerson asserts that the clergy laugh and chatter during
service " like old women at market." More than one set of Cathedral

76 Medieval Studies.
Statutes forbids conversation between clergy at a distance of more than
three (or in some cases four) stalls from each other ; and in visitations
of great churches both in England and in Normandy it is constantly
noted that those who should be performing divine service are laughing,
talking, or even walking about instead. Moreover, even the most formal
offices of religious education were constantly neglected. Sacchetti speaks
of " a good many " who did not feel certain that they had been bap
tised, and consoles them with the assurance that God would take their
faith as equivalent to the deed. Gascoigne says that many children
died unbaptised through the fault of the monastic clergy. A consti
tution of Archbishop Peckham (1287) complains that there were in
England " numberless people grown old in evil days who had not yet
received the grace of Confirmation " ; and similar evidence has survived
from Germany, Flanders and Austria.
Amid all this negligence and ignorance, rehgious knowledge flourished
only among the unorthodox. We know this on the testimony of their
most determined adversaries. " They know the Apostles' Creed excel
lently in the vulgar tongue," says Etienne de Bourbon in speaking of
thirteenth century heretics ; " they learn by heart the Gospels or the
New Testament in the vulgar tongue, and repeat them aloud to each
other. ... I have seen a young cowherd who had dwelt but one year
in the house of a Waldensian heretic, yet had attended so diligently and
repeated so carefully aU that he heard, as to have learned by heart within
that year forty Sunday Gospels, not counting those for feast-days ; all
which he had learned word for word in his native tongue, apart from other
extracts from sermons and prayers. I have also seen some lay folk who
were so steeped in their doctrine that they could even repeat by heart
a great part of the Evangelists, as Matthew or Luke, and especiaUy all
that is said therein of our Lord's teaching and speeches ; so that they
could repeat them continuously with scarcely a wrong word here and
there. This I say on account of their diligence in evil and the neghgence
of the Cathohcs in good : for many of these latter are so neghgent of their
own and their famihes' salvation as scarce to know their Pater or their
Creed, or to teach the same to their servants." Berthold of Ratisbon
says the same of the Jews, that they knew their Bible better than Christian
laymen, and were therefore dangerous adversaries. Gerson also com
plained that the neglect of rehgious education at Christian Universities
contrasted disgracefully with the careful teaching given among the
Jews (11, 761, 762). At the same time the Church blindly attempted to
right herself by suppressing these unhcensed Scripture studies, instead
of rivalling them by the thoroughness of her own instruction in ortho
doxy : and even the enhghtened and fair-minded Johann Busch, who
would allow the laity some rehgious books in their mother tongue, dis
approved of " such lofty or divine books " as a translation of the Com
munion service : indeed, finding one in the hands of some nuns, he
committed it to the flames (De Ref., p. 731). Compare with this the express
testimony of Busch's elder contemporary Gerson. " We do not say that
all have a right to possess or read holy books — especiaUy books whose
difficulties need explanation through other treatises and glosses of doctors

Religious Education before Reformation. 77
— for the common folk have neither wit not learning to do thus : but
they ought to seek the law from the mouths of the priests. Yet it seemeth
not right to keep them from moral and devout works which have neither
difficulty nor ambiguity nor absurdity in their translation, such as are
the histories or hves or legends of the saints, and holy meditations.
Translations in [the case of] other books are rightly blamed, since they
offer more occasion for arrogant error than for humble devotion or salu
tary learning " (De Laud Script. Consid. xi). When perhaps the greatest
and best Churchman of the fourteenth century wrote like this, we need
not wonder that Tyndale found it easy to persuade men that the clergy
condemned his own translation of the Bible mainly because they feared the
exposure of their own juggleries with Biblical texts. Cardinal Gasquet's
modern apology that only unorthodox translations of Bibles were kept
from the laity is demonstrably false, and is contradicted even by Sir
Thomas More, whom he strangely quotes as the principal witness in its
defence.1 More does indeed give a somewhat qualified denial to such
sweeping accusations as those of Tyndale ; but he admits that, while
heretics spent great sums on the Bible, yet no orthodox printer of his
day dared to print any existing version, lest it should be condemned and
destroyed by the authorities. He thinks that the Bible needs to be mas
ticated by the clergy before it is fit for the stomachs of the laity. He
proposes the most ingenious devices by which the people may read a
little of the Scriptures without learning too much. Let the Bible first
be translated (he says) under proper authority by some good Cathohc.
Let each Bishop be provided with copies to lend in his diocese, but with
infinite precautions, " to such as he perceiveth honest." At the honest
man's death, the Bible must revert to the Bishop, lest it faU into dan
gerous hands. Moreover, even these honest readers may not always be
suffered to study at wiU : some men are fit to read the synoptic Gospels,
to whom the Bishop would yet forbid St. John : to others again he might
permit Ephesians, but by no means Romans. It was a pity, thought
More, that some such scheme of Bible education had not been put into
practice long ago. (English Works, pp. 240 ff.)
Indeed, it was even more regrettable than he could have foreseen,
dying as he did before the great upheaval. If, from the thirteenth cen
tury onwards, the clergy had rivalled or outdone the heretics in Bible
study and Bible teaching, there might perhaps have been no Reforma
tion ; but the Roman Cathohc Church would also have been very different
to what we now know under that name. The Church against which the
Reformers protested was one in which the laity at large had never known
why they believed, and seldom even what they were supposed to believe.
No sooner was fuU Ught thrown upon it than it began to crumble away ;
for the faith of an educated modern Roman Catholic differs in many
essential particulars even from that of the learned and candid More.
r " This absolute denial of any attitude of hostility on the part of the Church to the
translated Bible is reiterated in many parts of Sir Thomas More's English works." " It has
been already pointed out how Sir Thomas More completely disposed of this assertion as to
the hostility of the Clergy to the open Bible." Gasquet. The Eve of the Reformation (1900),
pp. 243, 246.

78 Medieval Studies.
The more violently modern apologists emphasise or exaggerate the un
worthiness of the persons and of the methods by which the Reformation
was brought about, the more they compel us to seek other than personal
causes for a change so sudden and so complete. In proportion as we are
forbidden to explain it by the moral strength of the new doctrines, the
plainest common sense compels us to surmise some fatal weakness in
the old order of things : nor are we left to such surmises alone, for the
impartial study of pre-Reformation records shows us fatal weaknesses
in every direction. The people at large were not " robbed," as some
men would now assure us, of the old faith. That which feU away from
them at the Reformation was a faith which, in the true sense, in the
sense not only of passive assent but of rational assent, they had never
really held.

Appendices.

APPENDIX I.
A Rough List of Misstatements and Blunders
in Cardinal Gasquet's Writings.
See Preface to 2nd Edition. The following list makes no pretence to
completeness in face of the Cardinal's frequent habit of quoting
without the vaguest reference to chapter, page, or even title of
the book to which he professedly appeals. But the text, however
incomplete, is necessarily long and wearisome. For the conve
nience of most readers, who may have no wish to wade all through
so monotonous a record, a classification has been made by means
of typographical indications. The sign D refers to cases where the
real documentary evidence has been suppressed or distorted. Where
such misstatements have further been reprinted in cold blood by
the Cardinal, after their public exposure by responsible critics
whose strictures can hardly have escaped his notice, such a repetition
of the original offence is marked by a DD. Blunders with regard
to the text of the Latin Vulgate Bible, or other blunders in Latin
which throw direct light on his qualifications as a Vulgate critic,
are marked V ; blunders in monastic history are marked M. For
convenience of reference, the paragraphs are numbered consecutively.
Itahcs are mine, unless otherwise stated.

The Old English Bible.
It wiU be best' to begin with this book, since this was the first in which
Cardinal Gasquet's methods were pilloried, not by the present
writer, but by a well-known Anglican clergyman, in the Church
Quarterly for October, 1900, and January, 1901. References in
this place to the Old English Bible are to the first edition (1897),
and to the second (1908).
DD 1. Old English Bible, p. 129 [New Ed., p. in].
" We shall look in vain, in the edition of Wycliffite scriptures pub
lished by ForshaU and Madden, for any trace of these errors " [i.e. the
thirteen erroneous articles condemned by Bishop Fitzjames of London,
in 1514, and printed from his Register by Foxe (ed. Townsend IV, 186)].
The Church Quarterly points out that every one of those thirteen
propositions occurs, almost textuaUy, in ForshaU and Madden's edition
(January, 1901, p. 292). The first occurs as early as p. 3. The Church

80 Medieval Studies.
Quarterly printed the two side by side, showing that Cardinal Gasquet
had made a blunder as gross and as inexplicable as if he had denied
that his own name began with a G. The Cardinal's only answer to this
has been to reprint the falsehood, unaltered, in his second edition, eight
years after the exposure. There was, in fact, only one other alternative,
possible to most scholars, but quite impossible for a Roman Catholic
prelate. Upon this aUeged absence of the thirteen propositions, he
had founded his theory that " it is hardly possible to read the prologue
referred to, without seeing that the author of this translation had a
filial reverence for the teaching of the approved doctors of the Church,
and was most scrupulous in his endeavour to translate the words exactly
in accordance with the prevailing authoritative teaching." To have
admitted that this prologue did really contain the thirteen officially
condemned propositions, and was in fact the very prologue which con
victed Richard Hunne of " gross and manifest heresy," would have
been to knock the bottom out of his own case. The Cardinal had there
fore to choose between (i) withdrawing altogether an integral portion
of his theory, or (2) reprinting not only the theory itself, but the false
assertion upon which it had been based. He chose the latter alternative.

DD 2. 0. E. B., p. 118 [New Ed., p. 101].
Cardinal Gasquet, having quoted a dozen lines from this same pro
logue, adds " it would seem tolerably certain, from the above extract,
that the writer had no knowledge of any previous translation."
The Church Quarterly pointed out that, if the Cardinal had read only
twenty-six lines further, he would have found a passage in which the
writer explicitly refers to the previous translation, using the words : " the
Enghsh Bible late translated." The Cardinal (it appears) had borrowed
this blunder, without acknowledgment, from J. H. Blunt's inaccurate
article in the old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here again,
however, a whole theory had been based upon the falsehood, which is
therefore reprinted without alteration in the 2nd edition.

DD 3. 0. E. B., p. 113 [New Ed., p. 97].
The Cardinal lays stress on " the silence of Wyclif himself " as to
English translations of the Bible. Mr. F. D. Matthew, one of the most
eminent hving editors of Wyclif's texts, answered this in the English
Historical Review for 1895, pp. 93-4. He pointed out that, if the Cardinal
had merely taken the trouble to refer to the word Bible in the indices
to Wyclif's published works, he would have found at least eight or nine
passages contradicting this assertion. The Cardinal met this only by
a furtive insinuation of discourtesy against Mr. Matthew, (who is in
fact one of the most courteous of men), and has twice reprinted the
falsehood without alteration.

DD 4. 0. E. B., p. 129 [New Ed., p. 112].
Cardinal Gasquet argues " from the absolute silence of all records,
both ecclesiastical and lay, as to any Wycliffite version of the Bible."
The Church Quarterly (pp. 286-7) pointed out that this again was false,
since the Episcopal Registers contain much evidence of the kind here
denied. The statement is reprinted without alteration.

^Appendices. 81
DD 5. The Cardinal appeals to Sir E. M. Thompson as saying that
the Old Testament translation " it is tolerably certain, owes nothing to
Wyclif's pen." The Church Quarterly (p. 266) points out that Sir E. M.
Thompson says, on the contrary, " the remaining portion of the Old
Testament may have been finished by Wyclif himself." (0. E. B.,
p. 112 : cf. 113 : New Ed., p. 95).
DD 6. The Church Quarterly, on the same page, piUories a similar
attempt to make Messrs. ForshaU and Madden say the opposite of what
in fact they say. (0. E. B., p. 113 : New Ed., p. 96).
DD 7. Professor Shirley is misquoted as saying that Wyclif's " poor
priests " were really " mere lay preachers." Though corrected by the
Church Quarterly and by Mr. Matthew (E. H. R. 1895, p. 97), Cardinal
Gasquet deliberately reprints this misstatement, to which he has given
the emphasis of italics. (0. E. B., p. 153 : New Ed., p. 132).
DD 8. He misquotes Cranmer as saying that, in pre-Reformation
times, the English Bible was " in daily use," and that such use was
" a weU-known custom of the Church." Cranmer, (as the Church Quarterly
points out (pp. 271-2) says in fact the opposite of this. (0. E. B,, p. 177 :
New Ed., p. 154).
DD 9. A copy of this Enghsh Bible was given to Syon Nunnery by
Lady Danvers in 1517. Therefore, argues the Cardinal, it cannot have
been a Wychffite translation, since " it must appear as nothing less than
the height of absurdity to suppose that any lady would insult its inmates
by offering for their acceptance an heretical version of the Enghsh Bible."
The Church Quarterly points out that the stiU existing catalogue of Syon
shows the nuns to have possessed, in fact, several of Wychf's tracts
(p. 276). (0. E. B., p. 145 : New Ed., p. 125).
DD 10. Another belonged to Bishop Bonner : could " that malleus
haereticorum " (implies the Cardinal) have possessed an heretical Bible ?
The Church Quarterly (p. 276) points out that the same source which names
Bonner as the possessor, specifies not only that this particular Bible was
" translated out of Lalyne in time of Heresy e," but also that another copy
was in the possession of the contemporary Bishop of Lichfield, who
has made a note in the margin which shows that he took its Wycliffian
origin for granted. (0. E. B., p. 143 : New Ed., p. 123).
DD 11. One MS. of the so-called Wycliffite version, still existing.
belonged to the ultra-orthodox Henry VI, and was given by him to the
monks of the Charterhouse. Here again the Cardinal insists upon the
absurdity of supposing that this can reaUy have been any other than
" the perfectly orthodox translation of the English Church." The Church
Quarterly points out that the Cardinal had not actually consulted this
MS. before urging his argument. The medieval copyist, by a slip, has
betrayed himself, and has shown most unquestionably that he copied
Henry VI 's Bible from Wychffite originals (p. 278).. (0. E. B., p. 140 :
New Ed., p. 121).

82 Medieval Studies.
DD 12. The Cardinal, (arguing that Archbishop Arundel's prohibitory
constitution concerns not the whole Bible, or whole books of the Bible,
but simply detached " passages "), refers to Lyndwood's Provinciate
in proof of this assertion. The Church Quarterly (p. 281) points out that
Lyndwood, in fact, says the exact opposite of this, explaining that the
words in dispute refer to " a book containing the whole Bible." To the
page of Lyndwood thus quoted, the Reviewer might in fact have added
another, where Lyndwood goes out of his way to remind the reader, by a
marginal note, that Arundel's constitution rehearses the perils of " trans
lating the Bible into another tongue " (Ed. 1679. Append. II, p. 66).
The Cardinal, as usual, reprints his assertion unaltered. (0. E. B., p.
170 : New Ed., p. 148).
V 13. One even more interesting point, however, the Reviewer has
failed to note. Cardinal Gasquet, apart from his appeal to Lyndwood,
bases his argument upon a point of Latin scholarship. He asks us to
take it, on his own authority, that " ali quis textus " can only mean " any
passage," and cannot signify a complete volume. Yet, in the ecclesias
tical language of the Middle Ages, textus was the consecrated word for
the whole volume containing the four Gospels ; it is so common in this
sense that Maigne d'Arnis does not trouble to specify any separate
authority, but characterizes it as used "passim." The sense of "de
tached passage," which the Cardinal asserts to be the only possible
sense, is comparatively rare — except, of course, in the sense of text
as opposed to gloss, which lies quite outside his argument.
14. With regard to this tedious list of republished falsehoods, and the
stiU more tedious hst to foUow, it must be remarked that the Cardinal
has not even the partial excuse of reprinting from stereotyped plates,
which might have been expensive to alter. Only the later editions of
his Henry VIII, from 1899 onwards, are printed from such plates. In
all other cases, the printers have been instructed, in cold blood, to set
up the falsehoods a second time in type.
M 15. Moreover, this is emphasized by the rare cases in which the
Cardinal has actuaUy made alterations in a later edition : his exceptional
repentances are almost as significant as his habitual impenitence. For
instance, on p. 238 of his English Monastic Life, he made the extraordinary
assertion that St. Clare was St. Francis's sister. Even the Athenaum,
usuaUy so indulgent to him, permitted itself a mild sarcasm on this point.
This blunder stood by itself ; it could be silently corrected without in
any way affecting the rest of the book ; it was therefore silently cor
rected in the 2nd edition. I know of no case in which the Cardinal has
corrected any misstatement, however gross, which involved the slightest
reconstruction of his theories, or any retraction whatever of an opinion
once emphaticaUy expressed.

Henry vTH and the English Monasteries.
have already pointed out that this book constantly -confuses two en
tirely separate issues, the question of Henry's guilt and the question
of the real state of the monasteries. This second question is the
only one which seriously interests the modern pubhc, yet Cardinal
Gasquet scarcely devotes a tenth of his book to its direct discussion ;

^Appendices. 83
he constantly tries to smuggle in a verdict for monastic innocence,
under cover of our condemnation for the frequent injustices com
mitted at the Suppression. Yet there is no lack of materials : the
mass of monastic chronicles and official records is simply over
whelming ; our knowledge of life in court or in camp during the
Middle Ages is vague and insignificant compared to what we may
learn of monastic life by studying the printed records alone. He
avoids in his book all serious consideration of fourteenth and fifteenth
century records ; he has since refused the most direct chaUenges
to discuss those records ; and the late Father Gerard, who came
forward as his champion, refused with equal obstinacy to discuss
them.1 The foUowing corrections, therefore, deal only with those
small portions of Cardinal Gasquet's book which reaUy concern
me ; of Henry's injustice I have already spoken sufficiently plainly.
Quotations are from the 3rd edition, 1888. From the latest edition
(1898) passages have been omitted which described too correctly,
from orthodox sources, the decay of church life in the later Middle
Ages : e.g. episcopal non-residence — Bellarmine's confession that
" weU-nigh there was no rehgion " — the insufficiency of preaching —
and Colet's famous Convocation sermon of 1511, warning the clergy
that nothing but reform could avert a catastrophe (pp. 18-31).
AU these omissions, of course, aggravate the one-sidedness of the
evidence put before the reader in this latest edition. Moreover,
even in the early editions, Cardinal Gasquet ignores the strong
evidence which may be gathered against the monasteries from
Colet's hfe. Erasmus states that Colet " had very little hking for
the monasteries, of which many in these days are false to their
name3 . . . not that he disliked Rehgious Orders, but because
the men did not act up to their profession " : Erasmus goes on to
say that Colet himself would gladly have retired to a monastery
"if he could find anywhere a community really determined to live
the evangeUcal life," and that he had some hopes of finding one
such in Italy or in Germany. He did in fact take rooms later on
among the Carthusians of Sheen, but not as a monk. (Erasmus,
Ep. 435, Ed. 1703, vol. Ill, col. 458-9, quoted in Lupton 's " Life of
Dean Colet," p. 216).
D 16. In his third chapter, Cardinal Gasquet attempts to deprecia
the moral significance of Wolsey's monastic reforms, and to represent
them mainly as a pohtical job. For this purpose (vol. I, p. 71) he sup
presses a sentence from a letter in which the Bishop of Worcester, appro
ving of Wolsey's reforms from the moralist's point of view, anticipates
that " many faults would be found " when it came to the turn of the
Enghsh nunneries to be visited.*
1. See my article in the Contemporary Review for December, 1905, on Catholic Truth
and Historical Truth, and the resulting correspondence in the Tablet from December 9th,
1905, to February roth, 1906. I published my own share of this in a pamphlet now out of
print ; Father Gerard refused to let me print his letters side by side with mine.
2. [Quae nunc falso nomine pleraque sic vocantur.] In Italy and Germany, while the
general average of monasticism was lower than in England, a certain number of houses had
been very vigorously reformed since the Council of Bale.
V 3. Brewer, to whose Calendar the Cardinal refers as his authority, renders " many
errors will be found in them (the nunneries)." The context (which I give below) shows that
errores is here used in its not uncommon sense of faults. It may be noted that, in the previous

84 Medieval Studies.
D i6a. The same bias, and even greater inaccuracy, may be found a
few pages earlier in his account of Fisher's similar measures for the
suppression of Heigham nunnery. The Cardinal writes (p. 65) " At the
time of Bishop Fisher's proceedings, which were very regular, the convent
bore a bad character and one at least of the nuns had been accused of
serious immorality ten years before. No charge of later date was
apparently brought against any of the three nuns, and, as is remarked
in the ' Monasticon,' it seems to be probable that the fewness of the
numbers had as much to do with the dissolution as the life." These
sentences which I have italicized falsify both (a) Fisher's report and
(b) the Monasticon text.
(a) The Bishop's commissary, after reporting that the numbers of
nuns had fallen from sixteen to three because the convent " was much
frequented by wanton persons, especiaUy clergy, by reason of whom
the nuns therein dweUing were grievously iU-famed of incontinence,"
proceeds as follows : " after that your Paternity . . . had raised the
number of the nuns in this convent to five, not only were several (plures)
of the aforesaid nuns debauched by a priest, and some of them gotten
with child, whereof they were convicted in due form of law before your
Paternity, but also, etc., etc."
(b) The comment attributed to the Monasticon is certainly not any
where on the page cited by Cardinal Gasquet, and seems to be a pure
figment ; so at least I am forced to conclude, after ascertaining by a
double search on my own account, and a third search undertaken by
a friend, that no words even remotely resembhng these can be found
in the whole Monasticon article on Heigham. Moreover, it is difficult
to understand how anyone, in the face of the actual evidence given to
Bishop Fisher, could surmise that " the fewness of the numbers had as
much to do with the dissolution as the hfe."
M 17. Vol. I, p. 256. I have already pointed out that the order for
the strict claustration of monks and nuns, which is here made a sin
against CromweU, is really a prominent provision of the Benedictine
Rule itself (p. 60). In order to prejudice CromweU still further, Cardinal
Gasquet quotes a letter from Ap Rice to the effect that the monks
cannot be expected to keep this strict seclusion. But he carefully
omits from Ap Rice's letter the further remark, that he considered
it equally difficult, in the then condition of English monasticism, to
enforce another stiU more essential clause of disciphne which CromweU
had revived at the same time — that no women should be admitted
within the monastery precincts. The full text of Ap Rice's letter
shows that the monks of the sixteenth century had, (as orthodox
disciplinarians had long before complained) grown to consider in
discipline as their estabhshed right.

sentence, Brewer's text exactly reverses the sense of the word morigera (not complaining,
but obedient) ; and that Cardinal Gasquet, while arranging Brewer's text in other ways to
suit his thesis, copies this blunder. Did not Brewer really write compliant, and is not complain
a printer's error, which the Cardinal has unsuspectingly adopted ? The text runs (British
Museum, Vit. B. Ill, f. 282b : old foliation 231b) : " Verum enimvero, quantum per multos
annos, in quibus diversis vicibus istuc [animum] contuli, conspicere possum, magna mihi
reformandi monasteria necessitas visa [es]t : quod nunc D. V. Rmam facturam haud vereor ;
quae res ipsi apud Deum [m]agno merito et ingenti penes istud inclytum regnum laudi
certissime [fu]tura est. Meae diocesis eidem, quoad possum, commendo monasteria, [qjuae
ut spero morigera reperientur. Monialium vero monasteriis magna [adjhibenda est cura
in ipsis enim multi invenientur errores."

^Appendices. 85
D 18. Vol. I, p. 266. Cardinal Gasquet quotes a story of the wicked
ness of Henry's Visitors in 1535 on the authority of " Sanders, almost
a contemporary." Sanders, a bitter partisan, was in fact five years old
in 1535. To take a parallel instance, what decent modern historian
would venture to blacken Queen Mary's character on similar hearsay
evidence from a bitter Protestant, born only five years before the alleged
occurrence, and recording it without further corroboration fifty-five
years later ?
The Cardinal then quotes a similar rumour on Thomas FuUer's
authority. FuUer, who was born seventy-three years after the alleged
occurrence, warns the reader that he quotes it as a partisan rumour. But
the Cardinal attempts to weaken the force of this warning by adding
" he [Fuller] then goes on to relate a story which bears out what he has
said." Yet, on reference to this second story, we find that Fuller
records it with an even more emphatic caveat than the first. After warning
the reader that it comes, at second-hand, from " Sir William Stanley,
Kt., afterwards employed in the Low Countries," Fuller adds : " All
I wiU say to this story is this, that if this Sir WiUiam Stanley was he
who, contrary to his solemn oath to the earl of Leicester and the United
States, betrayed the strong city of Deventer to the Spaniards, and hved
many years after in a neglected, forlorn condition, one so faithless in
his deeds may be presumed false in his words, and the whole credit of
the relation may justly at least be suspected " (Book VI, sect, in, p. 8).
AU this Cardinal Gasquet carefully suppresses ; and, under cover of this
suppression, he writes later on, " It is evident that the blood of the old
Puritan [FuUer] was stirred within him, and he must have felt that
the disgraceful relations made to him were only too true." (Vol. II,
p. 225, note).
DD 19. To the equaUy glaring suppression of the crucial points in
Thorold Rogers's verdict, I called the Cardinal's attention in 1906, in
a registered letter (see Monastic Legend, p. 11). The passage is reprinted
without correction in the latest edition ; Rogers is stiU represented as
testifying to the exact opposite of his real convictions ; in short, the
only notice which the Cardinal takes of the correction is to abuse me
in his preface. (Ed. 1906, pp. vii-ix).
20. Vol. I, p. 278. The Cardinal, in order to discredit the hostile
evidence of a monk, quotes from Brewer's Calendar (Vol. IX, no. 231-2),
to stigmatize him as a lazy and self-indulgent member of the convent.
Though there is nothing to warn us that this is not a verbal quotation,
a reference to the actual Calendar wiU show that the Cardinal (1) has
suppressed the fact that the monk had been excused Matins "con
sidering my infirmity," (an indulgence very frequently granted in the most
orthodox times), and (2) that, where the Cardinal represents him as
writing " I do not like " the full burdens of monastic observance, he does
in fact write " He [my Abbot] knows that I cannot endure (i.e. support)
them."M zi. In the same letter, Cardinal Gasquet thus glosses the word
frayter : " i.e. the community recreations." Frayter or Frater is a very
common word in medieval monastic documents, and means exactly
the opposite of this ; viz. the refectory and its regular diet, which monks

86 Medieval Studies.
very commonly avoided by exchanging it for more generous meals out
side the refectory ; such meals being often caUed recreations.
D 22. Vol. I, p. 279. He deals equaUy unjustly with another witness,
John Musard the monk of Worcester. The very authority on which he
relies (Calendar, vol. IX, no. 497) shows Musard claiming that " many
of our convent " had formally accused the Prior of incontinence before
the Visitors, a claim which Cardinal Gasquet conceals partly by calcu
lated omissions and partly by actual distortions of fact. A fuller reference
to Noake's Monastery and Cathedral of Worcester (pp. 198, 202) shows
that Musard's other accusations against his superior receive considerable
corroboration from official documents, and that the Bishop himself, as
early as 1522, had been compelled to subject this same Prior to much
the same disciphnary measures which Cardinal Gasquet abuses Cromwell
for using.
Moreover, while dealing at length with this subject of complaints
from different monks to Cromwell, the Cardinal omits aU reference to
the Bodmin and Pershore cases in the same coUection, which would have
been far more difficult to explain away (Wright's Suppression, pp. 130,
132). The Prior of Bodmin complains that his own flock " of long con
tinuance have hved unthriftily and against the good order of religion,
to the great slander of the same, as aU the country can teU," and that
the Bishop's recent attempts to bring them back to the Rule has simply
roused them to revolt. At Pershore, a monk complains of the nightly
compotations of his fellows in words which are borne out by visitation
records and other unexceptionable medieval sources.
M 23. Vol. I, p. 307. The Act of Suppression of 1536 is based upon
the vices aUeged to be common in monasteries where the inmates number
less than twelve. To this Cardinal Gasquet objects " on the face of it,
it is absurd. . . . Such a hmit ... is made ridiculous, when it is set
as the hne of demarcation between virtue and vice." To this he adds
in a note " The number 12 was probably introduced ad captandum."
On the contrary, it had long been a commonplace among medieval
monastic disciplinarians that houses of less than twelve were difficult
to keep in moral health. Hugh, of St. Victor, four centuries before this,
aUudes to it as a fixed principle among the Benedictines. The Cistercians,
Dominicans, and Franciscans, always tried to ensure that no community
should fall below twelve. There was even a technical word, conventualis,
sometimes apphed to monasteries which came up to this necessary
standard. It is true that disciplinarians constantly failed here, and
that large numbers of convents feU below the " conventual " standard ;
but the failure was often deplored as disastrous. St. Bernard wrote to
a feUow-abbot " it is by God's inspiration . . . that thou art destroying
the synagogues of Satan ; that is, ceUs apart from the parent abbey,
wherein dweU three or four monks with no order and with no disciphne ;,
that thou keepest women away from the monastery," etc., etc. A Bene
dictine reformer of 1503 lends his support to the same accusation, re
peating St. Bernard's words (Bernard, Ep. 254 ; Guido Juvenalis
Reformationis Monastice Vindicie, Paris, 1503, fol. 17a). CromweU,.
who fixed this number of twelve, is thus held up to the scorn of the
modern reader, simply because he was f amihar with an important monastic
principle which the Abbot President of the Enghsh Benedictines happens
never to have met with in his studies.

Appendices. 87
M 24. Vol. I, p. 333-4. Cardinal Gasquet's description of an ordinary
monastic visitation, purporting to be taken from Nicke's Norwich Visi
tations as a typical example, is grossly misleading all through, and in
some cases flagrantly inaccurate. I have already pointed out the false
hood of the assertion that the Bishop always meted out stern punishnfent
to serious faults against good morals (Monastic Legend, p. 3, cf. p. 96,
here below) ; and here is another assertion which can be met equaUy
briefly. " The monk of generally anxious temperament " (writes the
Cardinal in describing Nicke's reports) " eases his conscience by the
declaration that in his opinion everything is going to the dogs (omnia
patiuntur ruinam)." My notes on Nicke's Visitations enable me to test,
by comparison with actual fact, this attempt to put a jesting construction
upon serious and responsible testimony. This actual phrase occurs only
once in Nicke's Visitations (Westacre, p. 104), where Richard Anger
first testifies that " omnia edificia dicti prioratus patiuntur ruinam,"
and Richard Cobbe, foUowing him, repeats " omnia patiuntur ruinam."
On more than fifty other occasions monks apply the word ruinam to
their monasteries : in every case the context shows the reference to be
to actual dilapidation of buildings or possessions. To take the first two
instances : " aedificia patiuntur ruinam magnam " (St. Faith's, p. 19),
and " propter ruinam et destructionem in domibus " (St. Benet's, p. 63).
In many cases the witnesses give further details, e.g. 75 (Norwich
Cathedral) " monasterium in nonnulhs locis (viz. ecclesia, domitorio,
domo capitulari) patitur ruinam in tectura plumbea." Nobody who
had read these Visitations with the least care, could fail to see that the
word ruina is there used literally, and that these records testify to wide
spread mismanagement and dilapidation in the monasteries, long before
the Dissolution. It must be remembered that the preamble to Henry's
Act of Suppression lays almost as much stress on this waste and dilapi
dation, as on the accusations of immorality brought against the monks.
V 25. Vol. I, p. 344. The Cardinal translates fatentur " they are
reported," apparently taking it for some part of fari. If this blunder
on the part of the President of the Vulgate Revision Commission seems
intrinsicaUy incredible, let it be compared with Nos. 34, 36, 60, 61, 64,
69, 71, 89, 90, 109, no, 122, 166, here below. These, again, should be
compared with similar ignorances of the Vulgate text, (though not of
the Latin language) which are quoted from a distinguished Jesuit pro-
lessor in my " From St. Francis to Dante," 2nd ed., p. 356, note 7. Few
priests know their Vulgate so weU as a capable Sunday-school teacher
knows the English version ; and these lapses on the part of distinguished
Roman Catholics would cause far less surprise to their own coUeagues
than to the general public.
DD 26. Vol. I, p. 344. (Bury St. Edmunds.) Cardinal Gasquet, pro
fessing as usual to quote literally from Dr. Gairdner's Calendar (Vol. X,
no. 364), makes Cromwell's visitor write " There is a grave suspicion
that the abbot and convent had agreed together not to teU anything
about themselves, for though report says the monks here hve licentiously,
stiU there never was less confessed to " [italics his]. The reader who
verifies his reference will find that he has here garbled his extract ; Dr.
Gairdner's words run : " though no monks are more notorious for licentious
living, yet there was never less confessed." And Dr. Gairdner is true
to the original, which runs " nam, ut nusquam alias licentiosius aut

88 Medieval Studies.
insolentiosius vivunt monachi quam ilhc, ex communi fama, ita nusquam
minus confessum quam ibi." Dr. Gairdner, (who, as a Scotchman, knew
something of Roman law), was aware of the legal signification of communis
fama, which is defined by medieval canonists as " the general testimony
of credible people in the neighbourhood." The Cardinal (who, as will
presently be seen, is sometimes extraordinarily ignorant of canon law)
mistranslates this phrase communis fama into report, italicizes the word,
and thus transforms the correct legal phrase of the Visitor into the com
plaint of a baffled scoundrel. Yet it is a very common complaint among
orthodox Visitors of the Middle Ages that the monks conspired together
to conceal the truth ; ecclesiastical authorities legislated frequently
against this, but with smaU success. A distinguished medieval abbot
actually boasts in his chronicle, how he and his fellows thus successfuUy
shielded their grossly immoral superior against the Bishop.1 The most
orthodox of visitors, in cases where the monks' silence was inconsistent
with the communis fama, drew exactly the same inferences which Cardinal
Gasquet abuses Cromwell's agents for drawing at Bury St. Edmunds.
D. 27. Vol. I, p. 369. A monk of Wigmore, John Lee, accused his
abbot to Cromwell of various offences. Froude prints his letter in full,
and (as is often the case) goes decidedly too far in the inferences he draws
from it.
After correcting Froude's inaccuracies, Cardinal Gasquet undertakes
to justify the Abbot, from the injunctions given by the Bishop's com
missary appointed to visit and enquire into the case. Of these in
junctions, he gives his own version fromthe MS. register at Hereford. Let
me here translate five paragraphs from these injunctions (Reg. Fox, Heref.,
fol. 21a), which Cardinal Gasquet manipulates to support his thesis.
It must be premised that he suppresses No. 2 altogether : how he deals
with the rest, can only be understood by a comparison of the Cardinal's
" summaries " on p. 369 of Vol. I, with these foUowing translations :
(a) " First, considering that the hves of prelates ought to provide
a model of living to their subordinates (since a prelate cannot, with any
free face, rebuke in others that which he approves in himself), we strictly
enjoin and command thee, beloved brother and Suffragan,2 in virtue of
holy obedience, (that so thou mayest hve as an example of good, rehgious
and. laudable life to thy brethren the canons), that thou be careful to
avoid the companionship of any suspected women whatsoever, and of
those in especial (if any there be) with whom thou art iU-famed [notatus]
of incontinent intercourse, under the penalties lately proclaimed against
incontinent [clerics] ; and know that, if in this matter thou obey not
our injunctions, thou wilt forthwith incur these said penalties, without
further warning from us."
(b) " Item, we command thee not to dissipate, waste, or consume
the lands, chattels, possessions or other goods of the monastery, but
rather to employ them to the uses of the monastery ; nor to farm out
or alienate the same without the consent of the Chapter."
1. This is the well-known Evesham Chronicle in the Rolls Series ; I have given full references
on this point in the English Historical Review for January, 1914, p. 37.
2. The Abbot was also a Bishop Suffragan ; Bishop Fox is therefore bound to address
him with all consideration. Cardinal Gasquet deduces from the phrase " if any there be,"
presently following, " that no case had been proved against him, appears tolerably certain."
It is scarcely necessary to observe that this phrase is a piece of " common form," frequent
in medieval documents, like the cautious " be they more or less," of our own lawyers.

^Appendices. 89
(c) " Item, that thou inform thy brethren whether thou hast redeemed
the jewels pawned by thee in times past ; and, if not, that thou redeem
them now and restore them to thy monastery, under the penalty decreed
against embezzlement." (Then follow what Cardinal Gasquet calls
" the usual regulations for the yearly accounts and for the custody of
the monastic deeds " ; the fact being, that such regulations are found
in medieval visitatorial injunctions only where suspicions of mismanage
ment or dishonesty have been excited by the visitation.)
(d) (Addressed to the Canons) " Item, seeing that it is most indecent
that a man polluted with the stains of lechery should offer sacrifices
(hostias) in the House of God, therefore We, wishing that chastity, as
the gem of all other virtues, may shine in the Religious who dwell under
Our care, do decree, command and enjoin upon you Canons aforesaid,
all and severaUy, that ye keep your chastity in all things, and that each
one of you do keep it, avoiding utterly the company of all women what
soever, except in the cases permitted to men of Religion, under the penalty
above rehearsed."
(e) " Item, since that part is base which agreeth not with the whole
[whereof it is part], we solemnly command that Richard Cubley1 do
bear himself religiously in morals, in monastic uses, in dress, in conver
sation, and in honesty ; that he be present in choir at the day and night
services together with the other brethren; moreover, that he abstain
from hawking, hunting, quarreUing, fighting \j>ugnis], and all suchlike
unlawful occupations."
Cardinal Gasquet, after giving a version of these injunctions so garbled
as to rob them of all real significance, adds triumphantly " Thus, after
a careful examination, httle appears against the character of Wigmore
and its abbot, John Smarte. The visitation reaUy discredits the charges
and base insinuations of John Lee." It is only by carefully comparing
his version with these actual translations, (as I have said above), that
the reader can realize his methods of dealing with unpubhshed evidence.
28. Vol. I, p. 470. Cardinal Gasquet ends this volume, and his
review of the very doubtful characters whom CromweU employed to
report on the Monasteries in 1535, by asserting that " no other evidence
is forthcoming " beyond the untrustworthy word of these men.
This is simply " the thing that is not." The orthodox Gascoigne, in
1450, had written of the monasteries in words quite consistent with
Henry's accusations in the Suppression BiU. Pecock, set up speciaUy
to defend the monks among other clergy, could do so only half-heartedly :
even Sir Thomas More's words would often seem half-hearted to a modern
apologist ; and More's friend, Colet, " had but very little hking for
monasteries," because " those who took [religious orders] did not come
up to their profession."
But let us accept the Cardinal's own limitation, and take official docu
ments of the sixteenth century only. Nicke's visitation of 15 14 reveals
a state of things which no modern government would tolerate (Monastic
Legend, p. ). It wiU presently be seen that Archbishop Lee's York
visitations, if the Cardinal had left them ungarbled, would have told
much the same tale. Others of his omissions, as the reader has seen,
are simply caused by his anxiety to conceal similar evidence. Lastly,
r. The Abbot's chaplain, whose misdeeds Lee had accused the Abbot of abetting or
overlooking.

90 Medieval Studies.
the Cistercian abbot of Combe, somewhere about 1515, appealed to the
General Chapter to reform the Enghsh houses. Let them decree, (he
said) " under the strictest censures and pains, that, before the year be
past, the entering and frequenting of women within the monasteries of
our Order be shut off ; for otherwise the honesty of Rehgion and the
monks' observance of their Rule wiU never be weU thought-of, seeing
that this thing causeth, and hath caused, the ruin of many ; for, as we
think, this abuse hath grown more inveterate among us than in any
other nation."1
Cardinal Gasquet may reasonably excuse himself for never having
met with this important letter ; but he would find it difficult to justify
his ignorance — or rather, his ehmination — of the other evidence un
favourable to sixteenth century monasticism.
M 29. Vol. II, pp. 95-6, 221-4, 500. I deal with these almost in
credible blunders about Monastic Schools in the tenth of my Medieval
Studies, notes 5, 9, 10, 11, 34.
D 30. Vol. II, p. 220. I have already pointed out how the Bishop
of Worcester's letter was so garbled in Vol. I, as to suppress his prophecy
that, when the time came for visiting the nunneries, " many faults will
be found in them." In the sixth chapter of Vol. II, Cardinal Gasquet
developes his case in favour of the nuns. In order, as he says, to give
" an insight into the conventual life " of a typical convent just before
the Suppression, he quotes the injunctions of Archbishop Lee to the
nuns of Sinningthwaite in 1534. He prints four and a half pages of this
document, from the MS. register, implying again on p. 219 that this
extract is typical, and fairly illustrative of convent hfe in general at
that time. Now, these injunctions, together with the Bishop's other
visitations of that year, have since been very carefuUy printed by Mr.
W. Brown for the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal (1902, 440 ff.). This
publication now shows that (to take no notice of frequent small blunders
in transcription and minor omissions, of which some, at least, seem to
be dictated by " economy " of truth,) the Cardinal has taken the foUowing
liberties with his documents :
(a) Gasquet. " The dormitory door is to be fastened ' until service
time,' and the key kept by the prioress."
Original. " That the prioress there, every night, provide that the
door of the dorter be surely and fast locked, that none of the sisters may
get out until service-time, nor yet any person get into the dorter to
them, and that the key thereof be in the custody of the prioress." In
the simultaneous and parallel injunctions for the convent of Esholt,
(to which the Cardinal himself refers in general terms on p. 219) this
injunction is stiU more significant, for it is foUowed by the warning
" that she suffer not any manner person, of what degree soever he be,
secular or rehgious, to he or be lodged in the cloister, or in any chamber
opening into the cloister."
(b) Gasquet. " From henceforth the prioress shaU dihgently provide
that no secular or religious persons have any resort or recourse at any
time to her or any of her said sisters, on any occasion, unless it be their
fathers or mothers, or other near kinsfolk." . . . Here the Cardinal
breaks off, but the
1. The original may be found in Eng. Hist. Review, January, 1914, p. 39 (note).

Appendices. 91
Original goes on, " in whom no suspicion of any ill can be thought.
In hke manner we command and enjoin the said prioress, under pain
of privation, that she admits no person, secular nor religious, to her
company suspectly, or be in familiar communication with her in her
chamber or any other secret place."
(c) Shortly afterwards, without any mark of omission, Cardinal Gasquet
suppresses the Archbishop's command " that all sisters sleep in the
dorter, under pains and penalties due on this behalf."
(d) Again without warning, he suppresses the foUowing paragraph :
•" item, we command and enjoin the said prioress and convent, that
she nor they admit nor take any person, secular or rehgious, to be her
or their ghostly father, to hear her or the nuns' confessions, without
special hcence obtained of us or our successors under our seal."
(e) Gasquet. " Also that no one shall be blamed or rebuked for any
injunction made at visitation." The word I have italicized must be
noted ; it necessarily fixes the reader's thoughts upon the Archbishop
or his commissaries, who alone did or could make injunctions in this case.
Original. " Also we enjoin and command, under pain of the great
curse, that the prioress shall not rebuke or worse intreat her sisters for
anything said or done in this our visitation, or shall make any rehearsal
thereof, but shall lovingly and charitably intreat them. And in like
manner, under the same pain, we command the nuns, that none of them
grudge or murmur at the prioress, nor any of their sisters, for anything
said or done at this visitation, or make any rehearsal thereof to any
sister's rebuke."
Here we have not a word about archi episcopal injunctions, but, on
the contrary, the very great risk (for which medieval authorities legis
lated with a desperate frequency which suggests their impotence), that
witnesses who spoke plainly at a visitation might be persecuted after
wards by their superiors or feUows.
(/) After thus garbling the Sinningthwaite records, Cardinal Gasquet
refers vaguely and' generaUy to the contemporary visitations recorded
in the same portion of Lee's register, and quotes four paragraphs from
the Nunappleton injunctions, giving us to understand that aU the evidence
is of this same character.
Yet the fact is that the Archbishop was able to visit only five nun
neries on this occasion. To four of the five, he gave injunctions identical
with, or similar to, those which Cardinal Gasquet has suppressed in the
Sinningthwaite case, with all their significant implications. At Esholt,
moreover, he found that an ale-house had been set up on the convent
premises, and that one of the nuns had lately borne a child. In two
letters of the same date as the Sinningthwaite visitation, the Archbishop
deals with a prioress of Basedale, who had left her convent and lived
" indecenter et irreligiose " among secular folk, then had professed
repentance, but finally had returned " fragiUtati antiquae." Why does
Cardinal Gasquet, while professing to deal so fully with the s abject,
give no hint whatever of aU this ? Is it not because, even on his own
chosen ground, he cannot afford to put the full evidence before his readers ?
Even if, under his guidance, we turn our faces away from the whole mass
of damning evidence contained in official documents of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries — even if we arbitrarily confine aU serious con
sideration to the first few decades of the sixteenth — even so, he cannot
allow his readers to face the actual recorded facts.

92 Medieval Studies.
31. Vol. II, p. 329. " The learned antiquary, Hearne," is quoted
as voucher for the educational activities of the Glastonbury monks.
The words are not Hearne's at aU, but those of a weU-intentioned and
very ignorant Roman Cathohc antiquary, whose words are clearly dis
tinguished from Hearne's in the book referred to by Cardinal Gasquet,
and who produces no evidence whatever for his assertion.
M 32. Vol. II, p. 492. " It is remarkable," writes Cardinal Gasquet,
speaking of seventeenth century hterature, " that the evil repute of
monks and nuns dates from this period." He supports himself merely
on a remark of Macaulay's, which wiU not bear the stress he lays upon
it. This has been dealt with in Monastic Legend (p. ) ; but, as readers
might feel that this simply leaves them to weigh the Cardinal's judgment
against mine, let me here quote the verdict of a modern scholar whose
orthodoxy is as unimpeachable as the Cardinal's, and who is attempting
to estimate the value of those accusations of vice and mismanagement
against the Templars which gave the excuse for their suppression by
the King of France and the Pope in 131 1. " The literature of the Middle
Ages," writes the Abbe MoUat, " whether rightly or wrongly, censures
monastic morals crudely and indiscriminately."1

COLLECTANEA ANGLO-PRAEMONSTRATENSIA.
(Royal Historical Society, 1904-6.)
These foregoing corrections, confined to a small portion of his book,
may show how little the "Cardinal's statements can be trusted, even
on points where his profession ought to give him most authority,
or where he claims to rest upon most definite documents. This
weakness comes out even more clearly in these three volumes of his
Collectanea Anglo-Premonstratensia, because the necessity of editing
and commenting a definite text gives him less opportunities of vague
subterfuge, and enables the reader more definitely to check him at
every point.
The text of this work is printed from two MSS. : one at the
Bodleian, original, and another, since lost, but transcribed by the
antiquary Peck about 1750.
33. In deahng with Peck's transcript, the Cardinal corrects some
obvious mistakes, but faUs himself into others hardly less obvious. On
pp. 11, 13, 14 of Vol. I, and in half a dozen other places, he corrects
Peck for what he caUs (pref., p. XIII) " the not inconsiderable error "
of transcribing testimonium where the sense demands witness. This
testimonium, therefore, Cardinal Gasquet everywhere alters to testis,
in evident ignorance of the fact that medieval writers often used testi
monium in that sense (as indeed the modern French word temoin might
have sufficed to suggest).
V 34. Vol. I, p. 17. He is puzzled by the phrase in praeseniiarum, and
hints at some mistake of Peck's. The phrase is quite common in
medieval Latin, and occurs even in the first book of the Vulgate
(Genesis 1, 20).
1. Les Papes ff Avignon. Paris, Lecoffre, 1912, p. 234. I am not, of course, quoting
the author as agreeing with me about monastic morality, but as simply bearing out my
assertion of the notorious fact that attacks on monastic morality are among the common
places of pre-Reformation hterature.

Appendices. 93
35. Vol. I, p. 129. He criticizes Peck for transcribing capiciorum
instead of caputiorum ; but the former spelling is very common in fifteenth
century documents, and there is not the least reason to doubt that Peck
found it exactly as he has written it.
V 36. Vol. I, p. 183. He shares Peck's bewilderment at efferbuit, though
it occurs, e.g. in Job xx, 27, and Ezekiel xxiv, 5.
37. Vol. I, p. 238. Se. This, though unclassical, is the normal
medieval usage ; and it is astounding that the Cardinal should here
suggest a mistranscription of Peck's.
38. Vol. I, 239. Repentes errores is perfectly comprehensible ; it
means " grovelling (or " furtive ") heresies," as Horace speaks of sermones
repentes. The Cardinal, unable to construe this, is driven to suggest
that Peck ought to have written recentes.
39. Vol. I, p. 258. He alters Peck's rubendo to loquendo, where both
paleography and sense should have suggested ridendo.

40. Nor is he much more fortunate with his own MS., the original
register in the Bodleian. On Vol. I, p. 78, he proposes to change nostrum
into vestrum, where the next sentence shows clearly the correctness of
the MS. reading : vestrum would spoil the whole sense.
41. Next page, the MS. has " ea que vestre sedant utilitati " ; i.e.
cedant, a common medieval licence of spelling and a common medieval
phrase. The Cardinal would change this to spectant.
42. Vol. I, p. 820. He alters indebitater to indubitanter, where in-
debitate gives the exact sense required.
43. Vol. I, p. 83. He turns the passage from donali sunt to opponat
into nonsense, by two false stops and the running of two words into one.
V 44. Vol. I, p. 85. He amends vobis into nobis, which renders the-
sentence frankly ungrammatical ; the obvious sense is obtained by
reading vos.
V 45. Vol. I, p. 121 (note 3). He is unable to construe a perfectly
clear sentence, and suggests adding a word which again does violence
to the grammar.
46. Vol. I, p. 136 (note 3). He amends a sentence which reads quite
correctly as it stands, in order to obtain a different sense which, in fact,
would be at plain variance with Canon Law. How could a General
Chapter in 1459 decree that no succeeding General Chapter should
licence any Premonstratensian to serve in a parish church ? A General
Chapter can no more bind the decisions of future General Chapters,
than a Parliament of future Parliaments. The decree was aimed at the
Commissaries of the General Chapter, as its plain words declare.

94 Medieval Studies.
47. Vol. I, p. 143 (note 1). He first mispunctuates, and then suggests
a gratuitous emendation to correct the nonsense thus produced.
V 48. Vol. I, p. 159. Fueret is altered to fuerit, which makes bad
grammar ; foret is the obvious correction.
49. Vol. I, p. 221. The change of absolutum to absolutos shows
that Cardinal Gasquet has never realized the not unusual medieval
concord of a participle when vos refers to one person only. Here, again,
modern French might have suggested the facts to him.
M 50. Vol. II, p. 23. Traditoris inde makes sheer nonsense of the
sentence : it is of course a blunder of the Cardinal's for traditoris Jude,
In a later document this is correctly given : but the original error would
have been quite impossible to any scholar really famihar with medieval
visitation literature, in which this comparison of a " proprietary " monk
to Judas is a stock formula.
51. Vol. II, p. 133 (note 2). The alteration is quite unnecessary ;
the text construed weU enough.
V 52. Vol. II, p. 149. Innotescimus, though here employed in a sense
used by St. Augustine, and of which Ducange says " utuntur passim
scriptores," proves so incomprehensible to the Cardinal that he again
makes a very unhappy emendation.
53. Vol. Ill, p. 3. Et non solum, etc. These three hnes are so punc
tuated, apparently deliberately, as to make nonsense.
54. Vol. Ill, p. 4. The suggested emendation makes worse sense
than the text. The Cardinal seems not to have realized that hoc may
be a neuter ablative of comparison.
55. Vol. Ill, p. 65. Utendo is here in its common medieval sense
of a present participle ; there was not the least need to alter it ; nor
the sub of p. 98 to ad ; nor again p. 105, note 2.
56. Vol. Ill, p. 148. The MS. reads cera (or, we may probably con
jecture, ceram). Here again we have a common medieval licence of
speUing for seram, which makes the sense required. Cardinal Gasquet
alters this to arcam.
57. Vol. Ill, p. 206. Infra festum Beate Marie. This is a quite
common and intelligible medieval phrase ; but the Cardinal changes
it to ante festum, etc.

58. On the other hand, while emending texts which are comprehen
sible enough, he leaves not a few obvious blunders uncorrected. In
Vol. II, p. 60, line 11, exharando should evidently be exhonerando. On
the penultimate hne of Vol. II, p. 62, brachi makes nonsense ; it seems
plainly intended for bracei, " malt." On the twentieth line of the next
page, a non is required before nisi to make sense. Vol. I, p. 200, hne 17,
et equo makes untranslatable nonsense, further aggravated by the Car-

Appendices. 95
dinal's punctuation ; et e contrario is not only paleographically probable,
but would, with a comma after ecclesia, give the required sense.
M 59. Again, Vol. II, pp. 114, 123, 146, the Cardinal thrice prints
gravator as the title of a monastic office ; it would be interesting to
know what sense he attaches to the word. It is an obvious blunder for
granator, (or, more probably granatorius, as it is correctly printed on
p. 125) ; this and granatarius are quite common monastic terms.
V 60. Take, again, Vol. II, p. 66, where a certain Robert Wolfet,
" a nobis impetitus, premissorum [criminum] aliquid negare non valuit,
sed misericordiam anxius imploravit, cui tamen pro rebeUione prout
infertur xl'a dierum gravioris culpe penitencia sibi injuncta, et emissione
per triennium ad monasterium de Tore. Necnon eciam pro incontinencia
sua injunximus xlta dierum gravioris culpe et emissionem per triennium
ad prefatum monasterium de Tore duximus subiturum," etc. It is difficult
to understand how such a hash as this can be printed without any attempt
at emendation, or how the Cardinal would propose to construe it, though
of course its general sense is obvious enough.
V 61. Vol. Ill, p. 200. The text nins " eidem Ricardo purgatione
criminis supradicti manum confratrum nostrum induximus." Here,
again, it would be interesting to know how the Cardinal proposed to
construe this. The obvious sense seems to require purgationem, manu,
nostrorum, and indiximus.
62. Vol. Ill, p. 3. In tantum to peractis is so punctuated as to make
nonsense : so again p. 56, hne 25. Vol. Ill, p. 23, line 1, again makes
nonsense ; for ultima et read ulterius.
63. To turn now to minor errors : Vol. II, p. 68, line 6, voce should
obviously be vocem ; p. 74, line 4, maxima ruina should be maximam
ruinam ; p. 127, 1. 26, for verei read viridis ; p. 131, line 22, for indignus
read indignos ; p. 180, hne 16, for extinguetur and reticetur, extinguatur
and reticeatur. Vol. Ill, p. 139, hne 4 from end, for perdantur, perduntur ;
p. 184, hne 5 from end, for providentia, improvidentia ; p. 54, line 2,
for sustinuit, sustinuerit ; other words needing correction may be found in
vol. II, p. 122, hne 15, and p. 127, hne 8. No doubt the large majority
of these are errors of the medieval scribe, to whose carelessness the
Cardinal bears witness in his preface ; but the Editor might well have
apphed to these passages a little of the ingenuity which he wasted on
amending what was already correct. Moreover, I am informed that
in some cases the reading which makes nonsense is not even in the MS.,
e.g. Vol. II, p. 76, indie is misread for inde ; and p. 127, line 26, the
MS. has not verei, but via.
V 64. Most unhappy of aU, however, is his effort to supply a list of
the Biblical references in a letter of Peter of Blois which happens to be
copied into the Register (Vol. I, p. 256 ff). In the first eight lines, he
fails to recognize two Bible texts (quos elegit, hos predestinavit, and novum
indueris hominem), and only succeeds with the third, 1 Cor. xiii, ir.
In the succeeding pages he fails to identify the following texts : producat
de thesauro suo nova et vetera (Matt, xiii, 52) — Deus non irridetur

96 Medieval Studies.
(Gal. vi, 7) — usque ad novissimum quadrantem (Matt, v, 26) — ut reddas
populum acceptabilem Domino sectatorem bonorum operum (Titus ii, 14)
— latere sub modio (Matt, v, 15) — oleo caput peccatoris impinguant1 —
non sumus mehores quam patres nostri (2 Chron. xix, 4).
If it be pleaded that one or two of these are rather allusions than
exact quotations, it must be replied that the Cardinal has, in some in
stances, identified even vaguer aUusions than these ; e.g. p. 258, note 3,
p. 260, note 1, and 259, note 5, where he ascribes the proverb " Vox
popuh, vox Dei " to Isaiah lxvi, 6.a

Let us now turn from mere blunders to questions of literary conscience.
The Cardinal, when he edited this book, knew that he had been
publicly accused of gross and palpable misstatements as to the
proportion of inculpated Religious recorded by official Visitors,
and as to the regularity with which they were punished (Monastic
Legend, pp. 4-10). He knew that this accusation had been sup
ported by an array of documentary evidence which constituted,
in the words of his own former supporter, Dr. Gairdner, " a powerful
indictment " (see above, p. 65). He was therefore, in this Collectanea
Praemonstratensia, doubly on his honour (1) not again to minimize
the proportion of inculpated Religious, and (2) not to exaggerate
again the regularity or severity of their punishment. Yet in fact his
assertions are here even farther than before, if possible, from the
facts which actually stared him in the face while he was writing.
For fuU proof of this, any reader speciaUy interested in monastic
evidence may refer to Appendix III, here below. For the present
puipose, it is sufficient to summarize that evidence briefly here.

D 65. Proportion of offenders. The Cardinal only calculates this for
Vol. II (i.e. for the monasteries taken alphabetically from A to H), while
implying that this arbitrary division is typical of the rest. As a matter
of fact, these houses from A to H happen to present a distinctly better
record than the houses from L to W, which are thus omitted from the
calculation. In his calculation itself, he counts each Canon afresh at each separate
Visitation, thus bringing the total of Canons to 1,806, and the proportion
accused of incontinence to one per cent. Yet there were in fact only
about 470 Canons visited in these houses ; this brings the real proportion
up to nearly five per cent., or considerably more than the percentage
which, under CromweU's visitation, the Cardinal dismisses as incredible.
Again, he speaks as if these figures which he quotes formed an ex
haustive record of all that the Visitors discovered " in the quarter of
the century." Yet in another place, he is perfectly weU aware that a
large proportion of the Visitation records of these twenty-five years are
1. Psalm xxii, 5 Vulgate. So utterly is the Cardinal baffled by this quotation, that he
prints impingant, which makes sheer nonsense.
2. This verse of Isaiah runs " Vox populi de civitate, vox de templo, vox Domini red-
dentis retributionem inimicis suis." A reference to the text of Peter of Blois will show
that he is simply quoting the common proverb ; it is his introductory phrase " scriptum
est " which seems to have misled the Cardinal into the idea that this must be some Biblical
text : he, therefore, looks up vox in the Concordance and gives the nearest text that he can
find.

Appendices. 97
missing ; and the documents printed in his first volume (of which he
here takes no notice) prove that these lost Visitations produced a heavy
crop of discovered offences. Lastly, he takes no heed of the fifty-one
apostates recorded, many of whom were pretty certainly leading far
from model lives outside the convent walls. The real facts of these
Visitations, if the Editor had honestly faced them, are amply sufficient
to justify Dr. Gairdner's significant palinode : " I fear that there is
much to be said about the state of matters in a considerable number
of monasteries, to show that they were no good schools of delicacy or
chastity." (Nineteenth Century and After, July, 1909, p. 55).
D 66. Coming to the question of punishment, the Cardinal writes :
" Those found guilty were punished with exemplary severity . . .
generally the culprit was actuaUy sent at once to some other monastery."
This statement is false even on the face of his documents ; in the large
majority of cases, the words recording this sentence are foUowed by a
second formula clearly recording that execution was deferred. More
over, even where the sentence was pronounced unconditionally, a little
patience would have enabled the Cardinal to see that it was often dis
obeyed. The documents themselves prove pretty conclusively that
the punishment which the Abbot describes as general, was actually
inflicted in less than twenty-five per cent, of the cases. Moreover, there
were numerous offences which passed quite or almost unpunished ; e.g.
a canon who " had lived in an abominable and disorderly fashion," yet
escaped with a warning (Vol. Ill, p. 196) ; another who had illegaUy
pawned three of the conventual books, and was let off with the recitation
of seven psalms, which he could have done in a quarter of an hour, even
if his conscience had forced him to do it at all (Vol. II, p. 212). In short,
there was as httle strictness of punishment among these Praemonstra-
tensians as (to quote one instance out of many) among the Ripon clergy
whose doings are analysed in my eighth Study (p. 16). The cases
given below in Appendix B are far from exhaustive : to represent the
real facts with any fulness, one would have to edit the whole book
over again.
D 67. Again, the Cardinal insists that these sentences of banishment
entailed a complete loss of rights as members of the community. Here,
again, the contrary facts lie on the very surface of his own documents.
The first two cases recorded are those of canons who, though sentenced
to banishment for incontinence, were actually promoted to higher offices
during the term of their sentence, and of whom one became Abbot of
the same house which had witnessed his sin.
D 68. These falsifications — for it is impossible to use a milder word —
are often cloaked under a similar manipulation of facts in the Enghsh
summaries which, as Editor, the Cardinal prefixes to each Visitation
report printed. It is notorious that the large majority of readers — even
of competent scholars — find no time to study the actual text of a book
of this kind, but simply follow the preface and the summaries. In a
large number of cases where the Cardinal writes that the culprit " is
sent " away, the text itself shows that he was not sent ; and many
other similar misstatements, which can scarcely be accidental, are pointed
out in Appendix III. H

98 Medieval Studies,
RULE OF ST. BENEDICT.
(King's Classics, 1909.)
The Cardinal's preface explains that he has based his translation upon
an older one of 1638, " although it must be confessed that I have
found it necessary to take considerable liberties with the text of
the seventeenth century translators." The version thus revised
is now styled among the faithful " Abbot Gasquet's translation."
(cf. the Abbot of Downside, in Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I,
p. 540, note).
V 69. The Cardinal's worst treachery to St. Benedict is in Chapter XL
(p. 74). Here the saint's infirmorum imbecillitatem is translated " the
weak state of the sick," thus suggesting that St. Benedict aUowed wine
to his monks only in the infirmary. Even though Cardinal Gasquet has
obviously failed to recognize the phrase as a quotation from Romans xv, 1,
which would at once have set him straight, yet a reference to Martene's
classical Commentarius in Regulam would have shown him that the
medieval commentators understood the Saint's words not of bodily, but
of spiritual weakness.
D 70. A few lines lower, the Cardinal takes the liberty of suppressing
altogether the last two sentences of this chapter, in which St. Benedict
forbids the monks to murmur if they cannot get .their daily pint of wine,
V 71. Another curious Bibhcal blunder occurs in Chapter II (p. 14).
Cardinal Gasquet, while shghtly altering the seventeenth - century
translator's earher words, quotes St. Matthew as writing " Seek first
the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all things shaU be given unto
you." Yet St. Benedict himself writes quite correctly haec omnia ; and
it is very difficult to imagine an Anglican prelate printing such a mis
quotation from the Bible.
V 72. Again, in the last chapter (p. 122) the Cardinal fails to recognize
that zelus amaritudinis is as directly taken from James iii, 14, as (for
instance) other references to St. Matthew and 1 Corinthians which he
identifies successfully in notes 19 and 20.
V 73. Finally, he mistranslates St. Benedict's prayer in the last
sentence, rendering " Christ, Who can bring us into eternal hfe." The
Saint's words are : " Christo omnino nihil praeponant, qui nos pariter
ad vitam aeternam perducat." Even without the Amen, which foUows
in many MSS. and editions, the obvious grammatical sense of perducat
in this passage is that of a prayer.

THE GREAT PESTILENCE.
References to ist Edition, 1893. All these following blunders and mis
statements are, I beheve, textuaUy reproduced in the 2nd Edition
(1908), though I had exposed many of the worst, a year before,
in the Contemporary Review (since reprinted as No. 8 of Medieval
Studies; Simpkin, MarshaU & Co., 1/- net).

Appendices. 99
In this book his main thesis is twofold : (a) that the clergy in
general clung faithfuUy to their posts throughout the plague, and
(b) that the Pestilence struck the Church a blow from which she
was stiU reeling when Luther attacked her ; in other words, that
medieval civilization and morals before 1348 were far purer and
better than they were between 1348 and 1518. It will be well,
therefore, to arrange the distortions of the evidence under these
divisions.
A. Faithfulness of Clergy.
The Cardinal, writing as a partisan, very naturaUy emphasizes cases
which seem to lend themselves to his interpretation, while passing
lightly over evidence to the contrary. But he also goes far beyond
the limits of honest partisanship, by actuaUy suppressing the most
definite evidence against his contention, even while he quotes from
its immediate context. The four foUowing exphcit assertions of
chronicles, for instance, are entirely suppressed by him.
DD 74. G. P., p. 26 (Chron. Padua, p. 626). " Many were buried for
money by vile persons, without priests and without candles."
DD 75. p. 27 (Di Tura, p. 123). AU fled from the sick : at burial
" neither priest nor friar went with them, nor was funeral service said."
DD 76. p. 28 (Parma. Murat. XII, p. 746). "And the sick were
abandoned by servants, doctors, notaries, priests, and friars, so that the
plague-stricken wretches were neither tended nor healed, nor could they
make their wiUs nor die confessed or absolved."
DD 77. p. 34 (Matt. Nuewenburgensis, p. 261). " Men died without
sacraments." In addition to these, there are several who declare, in general terms,
that all men, or almost all men, avoided the sick, who were thus left
helpless.
DD 78. p. 37. Again, quoting from Martin's Histoire de France, he
omits the whole passage describing how, in many places, " the priests
retired through fear, leaving the administration of the Sacraments to
a few Rehgious who were more bold." And on p. 47, having to quote
in fuU from the contemporary chronicler from whom Martin takes this
passage, he omits the words I have italicized, puts a comma after Rehgious,
and so distorts the whole sense.
D 79. p. 53- His two quotations from GiUes li Muisis are not only
so translated as to exaggerate the chronicler's vague evidence for the
numbers of clergy who died in doing their duty, but entirely omits the
chronicler's remark that " parsons and chaplains, clerks and sextons,
complained of not getting sufficient money " for their duties (hnes 407 ff,
P- 373)-

ioo Medieval Studies.
DD 80. p. 84. The Cardinal, in a long passage designed to show the
devotion of the clergy, quotes from the Register of Bath and Wells, but
omits the Editor's note pointing out that the Bishop fled to his manor
during the plague.
D 81. p. 81. He does indeed let his readers see the Bishop's complaint.
that " priests cannot be found . . . perchance for dread of infection or
contagion " : but, two pages later, he quotes this as proving that the
clergy were dying too rapidly for the work to be performed. Now, there
was probably one priest to about 145 souls in England before the Black
Death ; and statistics tend to prove that priests and people died in
fairly equal proportions. There is therefore no apparent reason why
the Sacraments should not have been administered, so long as the bulk
of the priests stuck to their work. On this subject, the chroniclers,
Birchington and Dene, bear most exphcit testimony which the Cardinal
has taken care not to give in fuU. " In this pestilence," says Dene,
" many (plures) chaplains and curates would not serve without an ex
cessive salary ..." plures beneficed clergy also, since their parishioners
were so diminished by the plague that they could not hve on such
oblations as were left, deserted their benefices " [deserverunt prints
Wharton ungrammaticaUy : we must, of course, read deseruerunt].
Birchington writes " Then also priests were so dear and so few [tanta
caritas presbyterorum et paucitas erat] that parish churches remained
altogether unserved, and beneficed parsons had departed from the
cure of their parishes for fear of death, not knowing where they might
dweU." Let the reader compare this with Cardinal Gasquet's words on
p. 105, where the evidence of the two chroniclers is not only given very
incompletely, but also spoken of as exceptional : these are, " perhaps,
the only cases in England." Yet his own documents might have shown
him that the Archbishop's encyclical letter was sent to aU the dioceses
of the Province of Canterbury, with its bitter complaint that the greed
of the clergy, who " care not ... for the cure of souls " unless they
can get higher salaries " is giving an evil and pernicious example even
to lay workmen." (e.g. Ralph of Shrewsbury's Register, p. 639).
D 82. On p. 204, again, he writes " It is certain that [the Bishops]
did not shrink from their duty, but according to positive evidence re
mained at their posts." To this, let us oppose the actual evidence,
supphed by the Cardinal's own documents. The Pope " shut himself
up in his own chamber, with great fires continuaUy lighted, and gave
access to no man " (Matt. Nuewenburgensis, p. 261). The Bishop of Bath
and WeUs, as we have seen, fled to one of his manors. The Bishop of
Rochester remained at two of his manors, never visiting his cathedral
city. Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury " after perfunctorily visiting
the dioceses of Rochester and Chichester, then dwelt in his own manors,
wearying his flock by numerous citations " (Birchington, in Anglia Sacra,
vol. I, p. 43). From aU these chroniclers the Cardinal has quoted passages
in the immediate context of this unfavourable evidence which he so de
liberately bhnks in this place.
DD 83. p. 206. G. " It is interesting to note that in normal times
very few were ordained after their appointment as incumbents." He
supports this astounding misstatement by an argument based upon

Appendices. 101
only forty-four cases, taken from a single town : compare this with the
statistics of about 1,200 cases from four different dioceses, which I have
given on pp. 19, 20, of my " Priests and People Before the Reformation "
(Medieval Studies, No. 8). The wider generahzation shows that the
Cardinal's crude generalization from forty-four cases is wrong by some
1,600 per cent. Indeed, (considering that he confessedly quotes from
MS. records which his readers cannot verify,) it seems extremely probable
that he has blundered over his figures ; if we reversed those figures,
putting each under the opposite category to which he attributes it,
this would give a fairly normal result.
B. Civilization shattered by Black Death.
D 84. p. 37. Cardinal Gasquet quotes from a chronicler who speaks of
the deterioration after 1348 ; but he omits the passage in which this
deterioration is described as only transitory.
D 85. p. 54. He paints social hfe before 1348 in glowing terms, pro
fessedly quoting aU the while from Simeon Luce. It would be tedious
to quote aU his distortions of Luce's evidence ; but here are two examples :
G. " The general population of France . . . was equal to what it
is in the present century," This starthng assertion omits Luce's all-
important qualification " en exceptant les grandes agglomerations
urbaines " — which, in Normandy alone, (of which Luce is especially
speaking), amount to nearly two millions and a half of people : i.e. about
half the total population.
G. " Numerous villages were scattered over the face of the country,
every trace of which has now disappeared." Luce, " nous y voyons [avant
1348] des -villages nombreux, plus nombreux meme qu' actueUement
sur certains points."
D 86. p. 106. The Cardinal attributes the poverty of two particular
nunneries to the Black Death. His reference to his own chosen authority
shows that this chronicler traces their poverty, on the contrary, to
" longstanding mismanagement " — malam diutinam custodian. (Dene,
P- 377)-
D 87. p. 179. He quotes the poverty of Canterbury Cathedral as
solely due to the Black Death. Yet the contemporary Dene of Rochester,
who is more than once cited in this book, attributes this mainly to Papal
extortions, simony, and the mismanagement of the monks themselves.
(Wharton, Anglia Sacra, vol. I, p. 367).
D 88. Again, there are many cases where the Cardinal's own authori
ties expressly attribute the plague to God's vengeance for the wickedness
already prevalent in the world before 1348. The most briefly emphatic,
perhaps, is the Rimini chronicler, p. 285 (Gasquet, p. 27) . " Man's iniquity,
and sins of every kind, had so multiphed upon earth, that their stench
and the cry thereof came to the just ears of the Almighty." Abbot
GiUes h Muisis of Tournay writes equally strongly, but far more diffusely,
pp. 334-364. Other witnesses are Knighton (ed. Twysden, col. 2,600) ;
Magnum Chronicon Belgicum, p. 328 ; Boccaccio, Decameron, Giorn. I ;

102 Medieval Studies.
De Mussi (Haeser, p. 54) ; Paduan Chronicler (Murat, vol. XII, p. 626).
To aU this inconvenient evidence the Cardinal pays no attention, though
he quotes from its immediate context.
C. Mere blunders, with no intention of bolstering up any thesis.
(Italics, as usual, are mine).
V 89. p. 20. The Cardinal translates " no prayer was said, nor solemn
office sung, nor beU toUed." The original runs " non preco, non tuba,
non campana." Praeco occurs seven times in the Vulgate, and is regularly
spelt preco, of course, in medieval documents.
V 90. p. 120. G. " The world is placed in the midst of evils."
He is here translating from a chronicler who, quoting from 1 John v, 19,
writes correctly " mundum totum quasi in maligno positum." It becomes
stiU more evident that Cardinal Gasquet has failed to recognize this
Bibhcal quotation, if we compare his words with the Douay version :
" the whole world is seated in wickedness."
91. p. 20. G. " The father or the wife would not touch the corpse
of child or husband." The chronicler says the contrary, that others
would not touch the corpse, so that parents and spouses were obliged
to put it in the coffin themselves.
92. Ibid. G. " Without rite or ceremony." Original : " brevi
ecclesiastico officio."
93. p. 26. G. " Appealed in vain." The original chronicle says
the contrary, that, whether for love or for money, all succeeded.
94. Ibid. G. " Hardly a third of the population was left." Original :
" forsan in comitatu tertia pars defecit " = " perhaps a third died."
95. p. 28. G. " By rote." Original : " pro consuetudine."
96. p. 46. G. " It never entered a city or town without carrying
off the greater part of the inhabitants." Original : " a paines s'en partit
sans emporter toute la viUe."
97. p. 48. G. " Villages." Original : " castris," i.e. towns.
98. p. 106. G. "As is thought, from the present age to the Day of
Judgment they can never recover." Original : " quod, durante isto
seculo, usque ad diem judicii creditur ea non posse reparari. Seculum
is of course here in the common medieval sense of world : "so long as
this world lasts."
99. p. 120. G. " I add parchment to continue [my chronicle]."
His original has " dimitto pergamenam pro opere continuando, si forte,"
etc., i.e. " I leave some parchment blank."

Appendices. 103
RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN ENGLAND DURING THE
14th AND 15th CENTURIES
(Cath. Truth Society Pamphlet.)
In this essay, one of Cardinal Gasquet's main arguments is that the
people must have been weU taught from the pulpit, because the pre
lates, in their provincial or diocesan synods, repeatedly enjoined that
the priests should thus regularly teach the people (pp. 8 ff). Yet it is
a well-known canon of historical evidence that this wearisome
reiteration on the part of lawgivers is usually an indication not of
general obedience, but of general disobedience to the command so
reiterated. As Cardinal Gasquet himself says in another book,
where his argument requires it, " the constant repetition of the
royal commands, addressed to all parts of the country, as well as
the frequent complaints of non-compliance with the regulations
are evidence, even if none other existed, of the futility of the legis
lation." (Great Pestilence, p. 197).
But, it may be said, in this particular matter we lack the second
factor which would conclusively prove the futility of the legislation ;
we have indeed some " constant repetition," but no " frequent
complaints of non-compliance." This is, indeed, the impression
carefully conveyed by the Cardinal's treatise ; but only because,
while quoting from the immediate context, he has deliberately and re
peatedly suppressed the evidence of non-compliance.
D 100. His first quotation, for instance, is from Archbishop Peckham 's
celebrated constitution of 1281. This runs : " The ignorance of priests
casteth the people into the ditch of error ; and the folly or unlearning
of the clergy, who are bidden to instruct the faithful in the catholic
faith, sometimes tendeth rather to error than to sound doctrine. For
some bUnd ones search not always those places which are most known
to need the light of truth, as the Prophet saith : " The httle ones have
asked for bread, and there was none to break it unto them," and as
another Prophet crieth : " The needy and the poor seek for waters,
and there are none ; their tongue hath been dry with thirst " (Lam. iv,
4; Is. xii, 17). Wherefore, in remedy of these dangers, we order that
every priest having charge of a flock do, four times in each year, . . . instruct
the people," etc., etc. Incredible as it may seem, Cardinal Gasquet
begins his quotation only at the words here itahcized, wthout the least
warning of omission. He not only suppresses, but silently suppresses,
the more important half of his own witness's testimony ; the evidence
which, by itself, would suffice to knock the bottom out of his whole
argument. Nor can he plead that these despairing words of Peckham
are isolated or pecuhar. Other prelates had publicly said or implied
the same thing before 1281, though Cardinal Gasquet takes no notice
of their evidence. Stephen Langton's constitutions of 1222 imply that
some of the parish clergy could not even read the Canon of the Mass,
and that others were " dumb dogs " (Wilkins, vol. I, pp. 586, 589).
Cantilupe of Worcester, in 1240, published an injunction with impli
cations almost as damaging (ibid., 669 ff.) ; so did St. Richard of
Chichester in 1246 (ibid., 693) and Bishop Walter of Durham in 1255
,(ibid., 704). In 1287, Bishop Qui vii of Exeter, following out Peckham 's

104 Medieval Studies.
pohcy in somewhat fuUer detail, gave as his reason " lest both pastor and
people faU into the ditch " (ibid., vol. II, p. 144). Moreover, nearly all
these wearily reiterated injunctions about pulpit-teaching, throughout the
Middle Ages, repeat also (exphcitly or implicitly) the famous accusation
brought by Peckham against his clergy in 1281.
For this legislation of 1281 was that on which succeeding medieval
injunctions were based ; Cardinal Gasquet himself points out that " the
constitutions of Peckham are referred to constantly in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries as the foundation of the existing practices in the
Enghsh Church." But he takes good care not to point out that Peckham 's
damning preamble, Ignorantia Sacerdotum, was echoed also down the
centuries to the very Reformation period. Even in 1518, we find Cardinal
Wolsey proclaiming in fuU synod to his Province of York " the ignorance
of the priests casteth people into the ditch," etc., etc., down to the last
word of Peckham 's arraignment. Wolsey, in short, takes care to emphasize
aU those facts which the Cardinal now so laboriously conceals from his
readers ; all those facts which would compel us to amend his phrase
" existing practices " into " existing theories." For Wolsey, in his own
individual preamble, specially excuses himself for now repubhshing so
many time-worn constitutions, on the ground that they had not been kept
in the past (Wilkins, vol. Ill, p. 662). It is difficult to understand the
mentality of an author who, carefully omitting this, can go on to write
on p. 8 : " But, was this law faithfuUy carried out by the clergy, and
rigorously enforced by the Bishops in the succeeding centuries ? That
is the real question. I think that there is ample evidence that it was." It
is only by the most systematic garbling of his own authorities, that he
has managed to excape from his own canon of criticism laid down in
the Great Pestilence. (1) He garbles the question of " constant repetition "
by showing his readers only just enough to colour the contention that
medieval prelates always kept religious instruction in view ; while at
the same time conceahng the wearisome frequency with which they were
compeUed to reiterate their predecessors' injunctions. (2) " Frequent
complaints of non-compliance," again, though conspicuously absent
from the Cardinal's quotations, are conspicuously present in the docu
ments upon which he professedly bases himself. Here, therefore, we
have " evidence, if none other existed, of the futihty of the legislation."
The theory that priests should teach their flocks from the pulpit, at
least four times a year, was as partiaUy reaUzed as most other medieval
theories.
D 101. Nor are these the Cardinal's only falsifications in this brief
treatise. On p. 9, stiU bent on proving how weU the priests taught their
flocks from the pulpit, he quotes from Archbishop Thoresby's little
catechism drawn up for the province of York in 1357. Here, again, he
suppresses the principal and most direct evidence, beginning for that
purpose inthe middle of a sentence, and garbling the opening words in order
to disguise this liberty he has taken with the text. The words he has omitted
run thus. The Archbishop begins : " Seeing that some of those Christians
over whom we are set, however unworthily, are not instructed (whereat
we ¦ grieve) even in the rudimentary [grossis] and necessary points of
Christian doctrine, which [defect] is said to be caused not only by our
neglect (not to say ignorance) but also by the neglect of ignorance of
rectors, vicars, and parish priests, who ought to instruct them according
to that duty of the cure of souls which we have taken upon us ; by

Appendices. 105
reason whereof (though God forbid !) a way may easily be opened for
errors and for grievous peril of souls : We therefore, wilhng (as is our
bounden duty) to bring some healing remedy thereunto, through the
counsel of our clergy,1 have thought fit thus to ordain : That each rector,
vicar, parish chaplain, or other curate, do openly," etc., etc. ; the rest
foUowing pretty nearly as in Cardinal Gasquet's version." After this
suppression, the Cardinal has no difficulty in convincing unsuspecting
readers " that this duty of giving plain instruction to the people was not
neglected up to the era of the Reformation itself " (p. ii).
102. For the above-cited contention he then undertakes to produce
" ample evidence," which amounts to no more than this, that in the
later Middle Ages many manuals were drawn up to assist parish priests
in their teaching work. He attempts no critical examination of these
books ; and some of those which he ghbly quotes (e.g. the Liber Festivalis)
would, in fact, give results by no means flattering to medieval rehgious
education. The very unfavourable evidence as to preachers which he
has suppressed from his Dives and Pauper quotations, wiU be shown in
the examination of his Eve of the Reformation.

THE EVE OP THE REFORMATION (1900).
In this, and in some later books, the Cardinal professes to quote a good
deal from early printed books of very difficult access ; and many
of his soi-disant quotations show an appalling lack of literary con
science, which is emphasized by his habit of withholding adequate
references. I have pointed out how, on the subject of " the Open
Bible," the Cardinal makes Sir Thomas More say the opposite of
what that great man says in fact (Medieval Studies, No. 7, p. 77) .
Again, in quoting from Dives and Pauper, a rare fifteenth-century
printed book, he never once gives any reference ; but leaves his readers
to search through the whole folio volume. With kind help from a
feUow-student, I have, however, run all his quotations to earth.
Quite apart from his habit of modernizing whole words and phrases
(including some perfectly famihar to all Bible readers), only one of
these quotations (p. 300) is unmarred by omissions from the im
mediate context, or by actual (though unacknowledged) suppressions,
some merely careless, but others with evident intention.
D 103. G. p. 284 (D. and P., Com. V, chap. 10). The Cardinal, who
is striving to prove how well the duties of teaching and preaching were
fulfiUed by the pre-Reformation clergy, omits one of the opening sentences
of this passage, which runs as follows, " also men of holy church slay
men and women ghostly of God's word and of good teaching " — i.e. kill
men's souls by withholding due religious instruction.
j. So writes the fourteenth-century paraphraser; the Latin original shows the Arch
bishop to have intended " with the approval of our Provincial Synod." There is no ground
for Cardinal Gasquet's implication, perhaps unintentional, that the original suggestion
came from the parish clergy themselves, and not from the Archbishop.
2. The original is printed in Lay Folks' Catechism, E.E.T.S., igor, pp. 3 ff. A comparison
of this text with Cardinal Gasquet's reveals several obvious errors of transcription in the
latter.

106 Medieval Studies.
104. G. p. 297 ff. What the Cardinal presents to us as a fairly
continuous passage is in fact taken from different " parts of the book.
The first two fragments are from Com. Ill, chap. 19. Then comes a
quotation of which the Cardinal only teUs us that it occurs " later on,
under the same heading." It comes in fact twenty- three pages lower
down, under quite a different heading (Com. IV, chap. 11-12) ; and
even within the passage actually quoted, the Cardinal makes two separ
ate omissions, unacknowledged to the reader, though of no great im
portance in themselves.
D 105. p. 355. This brief quotation, professing to be single and
homogeneous, is reaUy an extraordinarily garbled version of fragments
from two different chapters, not even put together in their proper order
(Com. VII, chaps. 12 and 14). It would be impossible to represent the
carelessness with which the thing has been done without reprinting too
much of the original text for any reader's patience. Moreover, while
seeking hither and thither in these two chapters for words which seem
favourable to the Church as a charitable institution, the Cardinal care
fully omits more than one passage in which the author speaks most
bitterly of the riches and uncharitableness of many clergy. Dives, for
instance, asks on the second page of Chapter 12 "it seemeth by thy
words that men of Holy Church which spend the goods of Holy Church
in wicked use (as in pomp, pride, gluttony, lechery and in other vanities)
be thieves." To which Pauper (who represents the official teacher in
this dialogue) replies " That is sooth . . . Men of Rehgion, monks and
canOns and such other that use great riches of silver and gold ... .
more pompously than lords, be strong thieves and do great sacrilege,
so spending the goods of Holy Church in vanity and pride, in lust of the
flesh, by which goods the poor folk should hve. A lady of a thousand
mark by year can pin her hood against the wind with a smaU pin of
latten, seven for a penny. But a monk, that is bounden to poverty by
his profession, will have an ouch or a brooch of gold and silver, in value
of a noble or much more." With the help of this and similar omissions,
the Cardinal succeeds in making his author testify quite favourably for
the medieval church.
D 106. Moreover, apart from this treatment of the context, even
in the passage actuaUy quoted, he makes the foUowing unacknowledged
alteration, which decidedly softens the author's accusations against
neglectful clergy :
G. " Therefore they prefer to leave their own sins openly reproved
generally, among other men's sins."
Original (in modern spelling). " And therefore Hever they have to
lose the souls that Christ so dear bought, than to hear their own sins openly
reproved generaUy among other men's sins." This case may be a mere
blunder, like his substitution of St. Anselm for St. Austen in the same
passage, and his translation of " charged " (i.e. valued) as " discharged,"
which makes nonsense: but the Cardinal's similar omissions in other
cases can scarcely be merely accidental.
D 107. He shows as httle conscience with the Sermo Exhortatorius
of W. de Melton, on which he lays great stress, but, as usual, without
vouchsafing adequate references (pp. 149-153). This very rare little

Appendices. 107
treatise, read as a whole, strongly corroborates Wolsey's and Colet's
complaints as to the prevalent ignorance and carelessness of the early
sixteenth century clergy. Yet the Cardinal, by picking out the preacher's
pious exhortations to his ordinands, and suppressing most of his im
plications that such exhortations were foreign to the majority of the
actual clergy, completely misrepresents his testimony. Here, for in
stance, are some omitted passages. " Ye wiU not, I trust, come up
promiscuously, according to the usual practice [ut solet fieri], or insolently
or waywardly or wantonly, as claiming admission [to holy orders] from
the examiners, by some unlawful law " (fol. i b). If you find yourself
ploughed, " beware of [uttering] any insolent, opprobrious, or con
tumelious word " (fol. 2b). Do not rely upon external pressure exercised
upon the examiner, since such illegal pressure "is so pestilent that,
unless it be altogether extinguished, the church will never be freed from
its multitude of uncultured and foolish clergy " (ibid.). Later on, he
speaks of ordination by bribery of examiners or their clerks, and by
false representations as to age (fol. 5a, b), remarking that this last at
least was common (saepe). Finally, he exhorts the ordinands with
great earnestness to avoid " that ravening and pernicious plague of
covetousness, whereof almost all priests are much accused and noted
among the people " (fol. 6b). It is obvious how vital these points are
to any true estimate of the pre-Reformation clergy.
D 108. Moreover, the Cardinal's crooked methods become even more
obvious at the point where his summary becomes so full as almost to
equal the original in bulk : e.g.
Original (sig. A, iiij r°). "Everywhere, throughout towns and country
places, rude and rustic priests abound ; partly busying themselves with
servile and sordid labours, partly giving themselves up to taverns, swilling
[ingurgitationibus], and drunkenness ; some cannot get on without
women1 ; others spend their whole day playing at dice and hazard and
suchhke pastimes ; others spend their time in the vanities of hunting
and hawking ; and thus they spend a whole hfe of utter idleness and
irreligion [vitam irreligiosam], even to extreme old age."
G. p. 151. " Both in towns and country places there are priests
who occupy themselves, some in mean and servile work, some who give
themselves up to tavern drinking ; the former can hardly help mixing
themselves up with women, the latter employ their time in games of
dice, etc. Thus do they spend their whole lives to extreme old age in
idleness and non-religious occupations."
We have here, of course, a virtual translation, complete in every par
ticular except the one essential of fidelity to the original.
V 109. And the blunders are as remarkable as the infidelities ; e.g.
Original (fol. 3a). " Qui, grammaticalium htterarum expertes et
mopes," etc., etc.
G. p. 150. " Who, though skilful in grammar," etc., etc. Expertes,
it may be noted, is here in the nominative, so there can be no excuse of
confusion with expertos. Not only is expers a regular catch for fifth-
form boys, but the word also occurs in an important verse of the Vulgate
1. " Hii mulierculis carere non possunt ; isti," etc., etc. Muliercula, by this time, had
at least as uncomplimentary a connotation as wench : nor will the words hi and isti bear
the special limitations which the Cardinal tries to impose upon them.

108 Medieval Studies.
(Heb. v, 13). The translation of the whole passage is far from scholarly ;_
but I confine myself in this record to the more conspicuous blunders.
V no. Original (fol. 6b). " Contra hunc indignum torporem et
fastidiosam desidiam."
G. p. 152. " Against unworthy sloth and foolish desires." Though
desidia does not occur in the Vulgate, desiderium occurs more than
fifty times.
D in. On p. 438, the Cardinal quotes from a rare little book by-
Bishop Gardiner. Here he does, indeed, vouchsafe a reference, but it
is wrong ; the actual words occur not on fol. 2 but on fol. 5a. And,
after the word trumpery, the Cardinal has taken his usual hberty of
suppressing a dozen lines of the original without any mark of warning,
and altering the next sentence in order to disguise his omission. The
omitted hnes would have revealed Gardiner's inconvenient assertion
that the friars' traffic in indulgences had amounted " to thus buy and
seU heaven," with the result that " both the merchandise is abhorred,
and the ministers also ; we cannot away with the friars, nor can abide
the name [of friar ?]." Under cover of this suppression, the Cardinal
writes " In the literature of the period, it must be remembered, there
is nothing to show that the true nature of a ' pardon ' or indulgence was-
not fuUy and commonly understood. There is no evidence that it was
in any way interpreted as a remission of sin, still less that any one was
foolish enough to regard it as permission to commit this or that offence
against God " (p. 437).
D 112. In order to write the foregoing sentences, the Cardinal is com
peUed not only thus to garble his own documents, but to turn his face
altogether away from the Oxford Chancellor, Thomas Gascoigne, "whose
Liber Veritatum is one of the most important original authorities for
The eve of the Reformation. Gascoigne's evidence is quoted fully in
the eighth of my Studies, p. 8 ; one sentence may suffice in this place.
" Sinners say nowadays [i.e. about 1450 a.d.] ' I care not what or how-
many evils I do before God ; for I can get at once, without the least
difficulty, plenary remission of any guilt or sin whatsoever through an
Indulgence granted me by the Pope, whose written grant I have bought
for fourpence.' " Gascoigne, it must be noted, was as unimpeachably
orthodox as Gardiner, and hated Wychffe as bitterly as Gardiner hated
Luther. D 113. p. 145. Sir Thos. More is quoted as " categoricaUy denying a
charge made by Tyndale against the clergy in general, and against the
Popes for permitting so deplorable a state of things in regard to clerical
morals." In the passage from which the Cardinal proceeds to bring
a very partial quotation, More does not categorically deny Tyndale's
accusations against the clergy in general. He tacitly admits (what other
orthodox medieval writers confess in so many words) that it was not
uncommon for bishops and archdeacons to wink at clerical incontinence
for the sake of the revenues which they themselves derived from the
sin ; this he tacitly admits, and only pleads that the universality of
Tyndale's accusation " falsely belieth many " bishops and archdeacons,
and that the " evil demeanour " of others must not be imputed to the

Appendices. 109
law, but to the frailty of human nature (p. 619). In an earlier passage
(p. 224 ff), his defence of clerical morals in general is even less " cate
gorical." Not only does he write generally : " I wot well the whole world
is so wretched that spiritual and temporal everywhere aU be bad enough ;
God make us all better 1 " but he also expressly admits one of the heaviest
counts in Tyndale's accusation, the prevalence of clerical incontinence
in Wales, saying : " but truth it is that incontinence is there in some
places httle looked unto, whereof much harm groweth in the country "
{English Works, p. 231). If the Cardinal had ventured to print More's
words in full, the admissions of that distinguished apologist would
be found far more destructive of the thesis maintained in The Eve of the
Reformation, than anything which can be quoted from him in support
of it.
Moreover, Tyndale's accusation of habitual incontinence against the
Welsh clergy is directly supported by Gascoigne, who asserts that the
contemporary Bishop of St. David's positively refused to countenance
the reform of clerical morals in his diocese, because the fines levied from
erring priests brought him a yearly sum which, in modern money, would
amount to more than two thousand pounds. (Liber Veritatum, ed.
Rogers, pp. 35-6).
D 114. p. 148. The Cardinal asserts, with Dr. Brewer, that a certain
document published on p. 470 of Vol. II of the Letters and State Papers
of Henry VIII constitutes a testimonial to London morals in the year
1519. The reader who troubles to hunt this reference down, not stopping
at Brewer's interpretation but reading the actual document for himself,
will find that it shows the Bishop of Winchester to be harbouring, in
his " hberty of Southwark," more prostitutes than were to be found in
aU the rest of the city and the suburbs together.
D 115. p. 43. The Cardinal, in pursuance of his thesis that the
Rehgious Orders kept up their interest in learning to the last, argues
that " the Visitations of the Norwich Diocese, (1492-1532), edited by
Dr. Jessopp for the Camden Society, contain many references to the
monastic students at the university." He quotes two instances which
he leaves us to take as typical, but without giving any page-references ;
the student can check him only at the expense of great waste of time.
And the net result is this, that Westacre, which the Cardinal represents
as typical with its three monks at the university in 1520, is (I beheve)
the only monastery which is reported at any time to have so many : even
the great Cathedral Priory at Norwich had sometimes none at all, although
it was bound by statute to maintain two (e.g. pp. 7, 266). Westacre
was bound to pay for one of its brethren at the university ; but this
duty was not performed in 15 14 ; and only one of the five recorded
visitations is free from the complaint that studies are being neglected
within the monastery itself (pp. 50, 104-5, J^5> 25x)- The other case
which the Cardinal quotes as an instance of monastic love of learning
is that of Butley. This house, in 15 14, allowed one of its monks to go
to the university at his own friends' expense ; so far the Cardinal quotes
correctly ; but there he stops. A reference to the other visitations of
Butley will show that, on every other occasion, it is complained of for its
neglect of due monastic education. On four of these occasions it had neg
lected to send a single monk to the university ; and on two it had not

no Medieval Studies.
even a single person within its waUs who was able or willing to instruct
the younger brethren in Latin (pp. 54, 132, 178, 217, 289). The Cardinal's
assertion that, later on, the house itself paid for a scholar at the university,
seems to be a pure figment, hke some other assertions for which he gives
no chapter or verse. Moreover, it may safely be said that, of aU the
references to the university throughout these Norwich visitations, at
least two-thirds are cases in which the monasteries are recorded not as
fulfilling, but as neglecting, even their statutory obhgations to send one
or two monks to study. I have pointed out how strong is the visitatorial
evidence on this point, from many sources, in the tenth of my Studies,
p. 32 : the facts he on the very surface of the documents. It is most
significant that the Cardinal's inaccuracies are most flagrant where he
is professedly quoting from rare books, or where, by withholding
references, he has rendered the task of verification extremely laborious.

PARISH LD7E IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (1906).
116. Here, again, are many quotations from Dives and Pauper, but
without a single indication to guide the student through the whole foho
volume. Of the fourteen quotations, only three are free from blunders
or infidelities. In more than a dozen places, the Cardinal prints thing
instead of the ymage of his original, evidently mistaking the y for a th,
and reading the rest carelessly. In another place, he prints things again
for the tithes of his original. There are a few omissions which seem
merely careless, but others which are evidently dictated by convenience ;
not understanding his original, he has simply left out the puzzhng phrases
without warning.
117. For example, " as they come to honde without chose " (G. 12 ;
Dives and Pauper, Com. VII, c. 13). where chose = choice. On p. 161,
erynge is quietly omitted twice, and motynge once, evidently for the
same reason (Dives and Pauper, Com. Ill, c. 7). On the same page,
the for heuenly mede of the original becomes for heaven made in the Car
dinal's transcript, and makes sheer nonsense. On p. 180, another silent
omission is evidently due to the puzzhng word skyl (i.e. skill, reason)
(Dives and Pauper, Com. I, c. 4). Finally, he prints spectacles for the
curious steracles of his text, though the next three hnes make it plain
that this is a misprint for miracles (G. 249 ; Dives and Pauper, Com. Ill,
c. 17).
D 118. Other omissions, however, equaUy furtive and disguised, are
evidently dictated by " economy " of truth. On p. 32, passages are
omitted which show that a good deal of medieval church building and
ornamentation was not only " perhaps," (as the Cardinal puts it), but
actually done rather in a spirit of vain glory and worldly rivalry than out
of pure devotion. " For the people nowadays," writes the author of
Dives and Pauper, " is full undevout to God and to Holy Church,
and they love but little men of Holy Church, and they be loth
to come in Holy Church when they be bound to come thither,
and full loth to hear God's service. Late they come, and soon they go
away. If they be there a httle while, them thinketh fuU long. They
have hever to go to the tavern than to Holy Church ; liever to hear a
song of Robin Hood or of some ribaldry than to hear mass or matins

Appendices. in
or any other of God's service or any word of God. And, sithen that the
people hath so httle devotion to God and to Holy Church, I cannot see
that they do such cost in Holy Church for devotion nor for the love of
God. For they despise God day and night with their evil and wicked
hving and their wicked thewys " (i.e. manners : Com. I, c. 51). What
an " economy " hes in the omission of this passage, and the Cardinal's
introduction of that delicate " perhaps " into his own summary from
Dives and Pauper I
D 119. The same motive, apparently, has dictated certain omissions
(partly unnoted) on p. 247. The original (Com. IV, c. n) asserts " But
now men say that there should no lewd folk entermit them of God's
law [i.e. presume to busy themselves with the Bible], nor of the Gospel
nor of Holy Writ, neither to con it nor to teach it." This would be
very difficult to reconcile with the Cardinal's theory as to the free use
of the vernacular Bible among the laity before the Reformation.
D 120. p. 249. Several lines are here omitted without warning and
the text is garbled to disguise the omission. They show that the miracle
plays, for which the Cardinal in his text has nothing but admiration,
were sometimes, in the judgment of his author, " medled with ribaldry
or leasings." (Com. Ill, c. 17).
V 122. p. 179. Dives and Pauper quotes the well-known Passion
Sunday hymn quite correctly as " O crux ave, spes unica." The Cardinal,
with equal violence to his text and to Latin metre, prints it as " ave
crux, spes unica." (Com. I, c. 4).

In the appendix to the eighth of my Medieval Studies (Priests and People
before the Reformation) I have exposed a good many further mis
statements in Cardinal Gasquet's Parish Life; these need there
fore only be mentioned briefly here.

D 123. p. 238. Peacock, a careful antiquary, is cited as authority
for the absurd contention that the ale drunk at Church Ales was " hardly
an intoxicant." In fact, he says precisely the contrary.
124. p. 159. Thoresby's Constitution of 1367, far from being " the
first order " of its kind, was one of the last : it had been preceded by
eleven others, (from 1229 onwards), and was succeeded by only one.
This vitally affects the Cardinal's argument.
125. p. 17. Speaking of the appropriation of parish churches by
monasteries, he writes, " The grievance of which so much has been made
is an academic rather than a real one, and one of modern invention
rather than one existing in the Middle Ages." The grievance is, in fact,
exposed in language of extreme bitterness by church councils of the
Middle Ages, stares us in the face from the episcopal registers, and is
described in 1450 by the Oxford ChanceUor, Gascoigne, in language
which few, if any, modern writers have equalled in vehemence.

ii2 Medieval Studies.
D 126. p. 84. He describes the hospitality exercised by the clergy
in words which are contradicted by the very documents on which he
professedly relies. Moreover, where Lyndwood says " ought to be better
endowed " the Cardinal translates this into the tense of fact, " were
better endowed " ; and on p. 85 he translates " divitibus et pauperibus "
as " sick and poor " with equal advantage to his thesis.
D 127. p. 62. In quoting from Bishop Quivil's Constitutions he
omits, without warning, a sentence which throws a lurid light on the
irreverent behaviour of medieval worshippers in church : " whereby
grievous scandal is generated in the church, and divine service is often
impeded."
D 128. p. 207. He quotes Quivil's Synod of Exeter as " laying down
the law of the Cathohc Church on the point [of marriage] ; no espousal
or marriage was to be held valid unless the contract was made in the
presence of the parish priest and three witnesses." This is not only
directly contrary to the words of the document from which it is pro
fessedly taken, but also betrays an astounding ignorance of Canon Law,
and even of so common a phenomenon as the Gretna Green marriages
of comparatively recent times. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve
might, in the Middle Ages, contract a valid marriage wherever they hked,
without help of church or priest or witnesses.
129. p. 20. " That on the whole [the duty of paying tithes] was
cheerfuUy compUed with in the Middle Ages, would appear to be certain."
The contrary of this is the constant theme of medieval clergy on the
one hand, and medieval satirists on the other. In Church Synods of all
centuries, the irregularities and unpopularity of tithe-paying are among
the most frequent subjects of complaint.
Further misstatements, for which I had no room in the above-cited
Study, are as foUows :
130. p. 7. " To ' Holy Mother Church ' all were the same, and within
God's house the tenant, the villain, and the serf stood side by side with
the overlord and master." This is false. The squire or the " advocatus "
had many rights within the church which others lacked ; and pews were
often hired for money, as in our own day.
131. p. 47. Nothing but extreme archaeological ignorance could
attribute this picture of a church interior to the " fourteenth century."
Didron's Annates, from which it is taken, date it correctly as sixteenth
century. 132. p. 67. He derives porch " from the Latin porta." It is of course
from porticus.
I33- p. 68. A quotation from Myrc is limited to children. This
is wrong : Myrc here speaks expressly of aU the parishioners, which puts
a very different face on the evidence.
134. p. 72. " In the diocesan registers, also, episcopal dispensations
de defectu natalium are frequent, and show that a not inconsiderable

Appendices. 113
number of the Enghsh clergy sprang from the class of ' natives ' of the
soil, or serfs, upon whom the lord of the manor had a claim." This
assertion, though there is no acknowledgment, is evidently borrowed
from E. L. Cutts, Parish Priests and their People, p. 130. Both fact and
inference are false.
(a) The phrase de defectu natalium does not refer to serfs, but to ille
gitimates ; not only is it thus glossed by Van Espen (Jus. Eccles, index,
s.v. natales) and regularly used in this sense in the Episcopal Registers,
but two Papal Bulls to Bishop Grandisson, of Exeter, place the matter
beyond a doubt. In 1349, Clement VI granted to Grandisson the right
to dispense with fifty clerks or scholars defectum natalium patientibus
and in 1353 Innocent VI gave the right of dispensing with twenty more
(Register, ed. Hingeston-Randolph, pp. 147, 150). The popes do not
contemplate the possibility that any of these seventy persons will be of
servile origin : the bulls clearly explain that the dispensations are all
for illegitimates, and the first buU even divides them into categories ;
thirty are to be sons of unmarried folk, ten of married folk in adultery,
and ten sons of priests ; a most significant apportionment considering
that the priests did not form anything hke one-fifth of the total adult
male population of the diocese — poll-tax returns show them about one
in forty, at the most liberal computation.
(b) Moreover, the Cardinal's Canon Law is here altogether at fault ;
no ecclesiastical dispensation was needed to ordain a serf ; it was simply
a question between the serf and his master. If the man had not been
manumitted, no ecclesiastic could ordain him without injustice to his
master ; if, on the other hand, he was already a freedman when he came
up for ordination, then no further dispensation was needed ; a freedman
had as much right to seek ordination as a man born free ; in other words,
the ordination question with the serf was no question of birth, strictly
speaking, but of present status : the law is put very clearly in the Summa
Angelica, s.v. Servitus, sect. 3, 4. Episcopal Registers do sometimes
record the manumission of serfs (which misled Cutts) : but these events
are very rare in comparison with the others. For instance, Stapeldon's
Register (a.d. 1307-1326) records only one such manumission (p. 163),
while it records fifty-three dispensations for illegitimates, of whom
eight were sons of priests. Stapeldon's successor, Grandisson, amid
his very numerous dispensations for illegitimates, manumitted only
six serfs in aU his forty- two years (1327-1369). Facts like this are all
the more important, because the Cardinal owed much of his authority
among scholars, until a few years ago, to his implicit claims of great
famiUarity with the Episcopal Registers.
D 135. p. 73. The Cardinal, while conveying two other passages
from Cutts without acknowledgment (pp. 132-3 : cf. 278) faUs into the
blunder of ascribing Piers Plowman's Creed to the author of the Vision,
and takes the liberty of omitting some inconvenient lines from his
quotation. 136. p. 76. This quotation again is conveyed without acknow
ledgment from Cutts (p. 133), reproducing its peculiarities of spelling
and the blundering omission of two words.
137. p. 77. " The ordinary course [at the Universities] was lengthy " :
on the next page Cardinal Gasquet computes it at eleven years. Dr.

114 Medieval Studies.
RashdaU, on the contrary, points out that " large numbers of students —
probably the majority — never proceeded even to the lowest degree " ;
i.e. to the Baccalaureate which could be obtained in three years (Univ.
of Europe, Vol. II, pp. 595 : cf. 584). Dr. Rashdall, to whom I pointed
out this and the foUowing page of the Cardinal's book, has no hesitation
in characterizing them as " very misleading." We may work out the
proportion statisticaUy from the Episcopal Registers. The Mastership
of Arts required only seven years of study ; yet in early registers M.A.'s
were only a very smaU proportion to the rest of the parish clergy. To
take the diocese of Exeter ; Bishop Stapeldon's Register (1307-1326)
records only seven masters in 232 livings. Even a century later, Bishop
Lacy (1420-1455) records only 237 masters among the 2,733 institutions
to benefices ; and eighty-one of these were deans or canons of great
churches ; the remaining 156 amount only to about one master for every
seventeen clergy. The Hereford diocese gives a far lower percentage :
TriUek (1344-1361) records only thirty-eight masters among 7,032
ordinations ; (or, to take the priests alone, four masters among 1,741
ordained priests).
D 138. p. 78. " They would have to prove themselves to be
sufficiently lettered and of good life before they would be accepted for
ordination." We have seen that the Sermo Exhortatorius ascribed the
" multitude of uncultured and foohsh clergy " to the neglect of proper
strictness in examination (No. 106 here above). Colet, in his famous
sermon before Convocation, spoke even more plainly : " there is the
weU of evils, that, the broad gate of Holy Orders opened, everyman
that offereth himself is ail-where admitted without puUing back. Thereof
springeth and cometh out the people that are in the church both of un
learned and evil priests " (Lupton's Life of Colet, p. 300 : the word
people, of course, means " multitude "). It is noteworthy that the
Cardinal, who quotes from or aUudes to Colet nine times in his Eve of
the Reformation, completely ignores this famous sermon, which contra
dicts all his main contentions throughout the book.
I39- PP- 77> 83- The imphcations that benefices were rarely given
to clerks in lower orders, and that rectors were priestedat least within
a year of their presentation, are false to the plainest evidence from the
Episcopal Registers. From an analysis of more than 700 institutions,
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it transpires that more than
30 per cent, were presented to hvings before they had even reached the
subdiaconate.D 140. p. 84. The Cardinal appeals to a MS. Visitation of Exeter
diocese in 1340 as containing " many references to the hospitality kept
by the clergy." This visitation has since been printed (Eng. Hist. Review,
1911, p. 108). It contains only two notices of hospitality among the
ninety churches visited — i.e. just those two cases which the Cardinal selects
as " instances " of the " many " which might be cited — and, even in
one of these two cases, the visitors report that the former hospitality has
now ceased. There are two other minor blunders in the half-dozen lines
which he devotes to this subject : the date is wrong, and " divitibus "
is rendered " sick."

Appendices. 115
141. p. 88. The matrix ecclesia of Wilkins's Concilia (Vol. II, p. 160)
is translated parish church. It means, of course, cathedral.
142. p. 92. " The assistant priests, known as Curates (curati)."
This is a patent anachronism ; curatus, by itself, is equivalent not to
the modern Enghsh curate but to the French cure, (i.e. incumbent), in
medieval Latin.
143. p. 112. " The office [of parish clerk] was often held by a married
layman." No quotation or reference is vouchsafed, and it is extremely
doubtful whether one could be given. The Cardinal is pretty evidently
misled by the fact that the parish clerk, being only in minor orders,
was sometimes a married man.
144. p. 146. The Cardinal has blundered over his quotation from
Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: he takes ho for a masculine pronoun,
and so transfers line 1308 of that poem from the lady to the knight.
The hne reaUy runs " Ho dos hit forth," etc. The Cardinal similarly
makes nonsense of a hne of Piers Plowman, on p. 153, by printing mate
for mete, and much worse nonsense of another on p. 184 by repeated
misspeUings, transpositions, and omissions.
145. p. 167. His summary of the Sarum statute of 1319 omits the
fact that the disorders at Boy Bishop processions had resulted in " grievous
damage both to persons and to the church " ; and on p. 180 his summary
from Lyndwood disguises the fact that Lyndwood speaks of " tumultuous
talking in church or outside." (Ed. 1679, p. 99).
146. p. 198. " AU, rich and poor, noble and simple, on coming to
the Sacrament of Penance, were treated alike." On the contrary, church
synods constantly speak of the abuse of seUing absolution in the sacra
ment of penance for money. Quivil's Exeter synod, from which the
Cardinal has quoted half-a-dozen lines before, shows that the evil was
serious enough to need vigorous repressive measures : and the almost
contemporary Winchester synod bears the same testimony (Wilkins,
Vol. II, p. 294). Again, in Piers Plowman, from which the Cardinal
quotes almost as freely as from Quivil, there are constant references to
the extortion of money for absolution ; and Chaucer refers to it more
than once.
147. p. 201. This professed verbal quotation from the Synod of
Exeter degenerates, in the fourth and sixth lines, into a paraphrase
which shortens the original by something hke two lines, and which
disguises a second clear implication that priests were accustomed to sell
the sacrament of Extreme Unction for money (see No. 146, here above) .
Moreover, it stops short just at the point where the Bishop describes
the curious semi-pagan superstitions which impelled some parishioners
to refuse Extreme Unction altogether. (Wilkins, Vol. II, p. 135 : cf. 295).
148. p. 203. " It was, moreover, a positive law of the church that
every priest should go at once on being caUed to a sick person, no matter
what time of the day or night the summons might come." Not only
does the actual text of the Exeter synod, thus garbled by the Cardinal,
suggest that this law was imperfectly obeyed ; but in the almost con-

n6 Medieval Studies.
temporary Chichester synod we find the Bishop fulminating against
transgressors who " as some [priests] have hitherto presumed to do, send
their deacons to the sick with the Holy Eucharist, while they themselves
are busied with potations or with other dehghts of the flesh." (Wilkins,
Vol. II, p. 170, sect. 16 : see also No. 151, here below).
149. p. 205. " What this [' cyphus pro infirmis '] may have been
is not quite clear, but probably it was the dish in which the priest purified
his fingers." The same Exeter synod which prescribes this cyphus de
scribes its use clearly also ; it was for giving the sick, at their last com
munion, a draught of unconsecrated wine, in place of the consecrated
wine which Catholic practice now denied to the laity.
150. p. 204. The references to " two lanterns instead of the one "
shows equal ignorance of this Exeter synod, which clearly prescribes
two lanterns.
D 151. p. 206. Bishop Grandisson " had heard that some carelessness
had been noticed " in carrying the viaticum to the sick. Compare these
words underlined with the tone of Grandisson 's actual letter (Reg., p. 787).
He writes " we are shaken with pain of heart, and fuled with bitterness
of horror ; . . . many (plerique) rectors ... as we are made aware
by daily scandals . . . bear themselves with the extremest irreverence "
(nimis irrereventer se exhibent ultra modum). We must never, of course,
fail to aUow for medieval vehemence of speech ; but it requires some
courage to claim this letter of Grandisson's as proving the care ordinarily
bestowed upon this sacrament in the Middle Ages. (See No. 148, above).
152. p. 245. " Labour was hghtened and the burdens of life eased
by co-operation on an extensive scale. A common miU ground the corn,
and the flour was baked into bread at a common oven." The ignorance
which can plead the common mill and oven as instances of beneficent
popular co-operation, is simply astounding. They spelt not popular
co-operation, but capitalist monopoly ; mill and oven were not the
people's, but the lord's, who too often used his monopoly to grind the
faces of the poor. Among aU the grievances which the French peasantry
enumerated before the Revolution, this of the common miU and common
oven came quite in the front rank.

English Monastic Life (1904).
The whole book is vitiated by the author's habit of describing the theory
rather than the ascertainable facts. Quotations from disciplinarians
who describe what monastic hfe should be, are too often substituted
for the evidence of chronicles and visitations which teU us what
it actuaUy was. And here, as in his Parish Life, the Cardinal scarcely
vouchsafes a single reference from beginning to end, even where
he could have actually economized space by referring to a definite
page of a definite book, instead of tantalizing us with " according
to one Enghsh Custumal," " says a writer in a late number of the
National Review," " one sixteenth-century authority states," etc.,
etc.

Appendices. 1 1 7
M 153. p. 23. " A smaUer hall, called ... the ' spane,' at Peter
borough." This word spane is simply a blunder adopted from earlier
writers ; the haU was, in fact, called le seyny : see Lincoln and York
Arch. Soc. Reports, Vol. XXXII, p. 92, note 300.
M 154. p. 24. " The soup or pottage, which formed the foundation
of the monastic dinner." This is wrong ; the generate, and not the
potagium, formed the piece de resistance of monastic dinners.
D 155. p. 70. " The sacrist, as one of the English Custumals has
it, ' should be . . . careful in keeping the brethren to traditions.' "
The original has revocatione, 'recalling ' (Chron. Abendon, Vol. II, p. 374),
a word of very different significance ; and the difference is fully borne
out by such monastic records as have come down to us.
156. p. 75. "' The pudding- wife ' on great days to make the pastry."
The medieval pudding had nothing to do with pastry, as a reference
to the N. E. Dictionary wiU show. The institution of " pudding-wife "
was in fact one of the channels through which monasteries utihzed even
the refuse of their kitchens, instead of giving it to the poor. Just as
the very bones were sometimes sold and accounted for, so the entrails
were made up into puddings, for home consumption or for sale, by these
women. The Cardinal seems dimly aware of this, however, on p. 211,
where he quotes a case from St. Edmundsbury but gives no reference.
D 157. p. 79. " A caritas, or extra glass of wine." The Caritas, like
the pittance, was only occasionally an extra aUowance of wine ; and,
even then, the quantity was not such as could fairly be described as
" an extra glass." So far as the Cardinal's shpshod want of references
permits us to judge, he is speaking on this page of the Abingdon customs.
At Abingdon, we are expressly informed, the caritas measured nearly
three quarts ; and on high festival days each monk had half this amount
of wine (nearly three pints) for dinner, and the same amount of mead
for supper. At Evesham, the caritas was of exactly the same capacity.
(Chron. Abendon, Vol. I, p. 346 ; Vol. II, p. 399 : Dugdale-Caley, Vol. II,
p. 30, col. 2).
V M 158. p. 146. " The monk, it must be remembered, was in no
sense ' a gloomy person.' ... In fact, the true Religious was told to
try and possess angelica hilaritas cum monastica simplicitas." Apart
from this startling Latin, the whole implication conveyed by these
sentences shows an equaUy startling ignorance of the writings of monastic
disciplinarians. See Chap. VI of my From St. Francis to Dante (2nd ed.,
p. 63), and the quotations from medieval sources in the eleventh of my
Studies. (Book II, chap. vi).
159. p. 148. " Of course manual labour, that is, the working in
the gardens, or fields, or workshops of the estabhshment, always occupied
at least a part of the working hours of every monastery, and frequently
a large part." This is quite false, except at exceptional times of fervour
and discipline. It is idle to quote the ancient Cluny constitutions, when
we have the direct evidence of Peter the Venerable that they had fallen
into desuetude even before 1150 (Migne, P. L. torn., 189, col. 1036-7), and
when even Peter's reforming energy contented itself with reviving them

118 Medieval Studies.
" to a certain extent." It is very rare, indeed, to find evidence for Bene
dictines or Austin Canons working in the fields after the twelfth century ;
yet these (with the Friars, who never pretended to do manual work after
the first few years of Franciscan fervour) formed the overwhelming
majority of medieval Rehgious. A frequent entry in monastic accounts is
" to John So and So for mowing the cloister-garth " ; or " wages to the
hired gardeners " ; and monastic apologists of the later Middle Ages
are sometimes found arguing away the rule of manual labour altogether ;
cf . my eleventh Study, Book II, chap. 2 ; or Thomas Waldensis, Doctrinale
Fidei, hb. IV, art. ii, cc. 24, 31.
D 160. p. 156. The next twenty pages profess to sum up the evidence
derived from a nunnery account-book — Grace Dieu, a.d. 1414-1418.
Without references, it is almost impossible to trace aU his assertions ;
but the foUowing cases seem certainly wrong :
p. 171. " Made under good sound cloth by their own hands, or at
least under their own direction." None of the entries which I have
found in the MS. bear this out (P.R.O. Ministers' Accounts, 1257-10) ;
and certainly the more definite repetition of the same imphcation on p. 175
is false : " they grew the wool and spun it and made it into cloth."
In the third year the nuns pay for spinning, just as anyone else might
do ; in the fourth they buy sackcloth ready-made ; in the fifth, they
pay for the weaving of cloth, and buy some, at any rate, of their spun
thread. Indeed, it would be starthng, if we had not other evidence of
the kind, to note how httle manual work these nuns of Grace Dieu did.
They hired women for their harvesting (first year), hired a clerk to write
their accounts (fourth), bought, instead of making, purses and gloves
(second and third) ; had a man to make their taUow-dips. The Cardinal
even copies down some of these items, but sums up in the teeth of the
genera] evidence. The cope which they sold for £10 probably was made
by some at least of the fifteen nuns ; but we cannot assume this for
certain, in the face of frequent records which teU of valuables sold to
relieve financial straits.
D 161. p. 175. " They hved, too, within their income." This is
flatly contradicted by more than one passage of the account-book,
referring exphcitly to their debts (e.g. third, fourth, and fifth years).
Between the first and second years, comes a long list of debts stiU owing,
some of it " ancient " (de veteri debito).
M 162. p. 175. The corrodies which they paid are spoken of as a
work of charity. Yet the Cardinal can hardly be ignorant that the
majority of corrodies, in the later Middle Ages at any rate, were frankly
pecuniary transactions, the monastery receiving a lump sum or some
similar consideration, in return for which it granted to the corrodian
a pension in kind, or even in money. There is similar economy of truth
in his remarks on p. 170 about the " clothes-money," (or " salaries "
as the accountant caUs it in another place) of the nuns. This covert
form of pocket-money was expressly forbidden by Benedict XII ; but
the abuse flourished notwithstanding.
163. There are also several blunders of transcription or translation
in the few direct quotations printed by the Cardinal. The ten lines on
pp. 165-6 contain three mistakes in the sums of money, and an omission

Appendices. 119
of three hnes ; one of the two proper names is misread ; di. last albi
allecis is translated " house food " ; and in feryncicis aquis " at the
sluice." The Cardinal was evidently nonplussed by this spelling of
forinsecis, which, however, is not so very uncommon. On p. 169, again,
what the Cardinal transcribes as "woofing and warping" cloth stands
quite plainly in the MS. as weyfyng and walkyng — i.e. " weaving and
fulling." 164. p. 177. " John Aubrey, too, writes almost as an eye-witness
of the Wiltshire convent." John Aubrey was born in 1626 and wrote
in 1659 at the earhest ; that is, his book is as far removed from the
actual facts which he professes to describe as Cardinal Gasquet's is
from the younger Pitt's first ministry in 1784. The whole of this legend
about the Wiltshire nunnery is fuUy discussed in the tenth of my Studies,
pp. 16-17.
D 165. p. 187. The abbot did not claim exemption " on the ground
that he had been appointed by the Holy See." The actual letter (Gran-
disson's Register, p. 395) shows that he made a claim far more damaging
to the Bishop's disciplinary authority : " quod consuevit esse nostrum
monasterium totahter exemptum et ab omni jurisdictione episcopali
fuisse immune." Again, compare the Cardinal's whole version of this
Tavistock case, which he gives as an example to prove that " the episcopal
powers were very great and were freely exercised," with the extracts and
references to the actual documents which I have already given above
in the first of these Studies (p. 5, 6). A comparison of his account of
the Bodmin visitation on p. 188 with Grandisson 's Register (pp. 980 ff)
wiU be equaUy instructive. It must be borne in mind that no references
are given by our author, so that it is not easy for a student to check
these cases unless he knows the registers fairly weU.
M 166. p. 194. "Not only did the monks furnish the ranks of the
secular priesthood with youths who had received their early education
at the Cloister School or at the almonry " —
Very few children were educated in these almonry schools, (which did
not usuaUy contain more than a dozen scholars,) or at the choir schools,
which were still smaUer and less numerous. " Cloister schools " for
outsiders, (as so high a Roman Catholic authority as Pere Mandonnet
admits,) were " rare and short-hved " at aU times, and " no trace of
them remains " in the later Middle Ages (see his testimony in the tenth
of my Studies, p. 36). Against this handful of pupils who thus owed
their education to the monks, we must set the complaints of the Oxford
ChanceUor, Gascoigne, in 1450. It is (he says) the appropriation of so
many parish churches to the monks, who render no services proportionate
to the income thus absorbed, which lies at the root of " the destruction
... of learning, and good counsel, and good example, and hospitality,
and providing poor youths with the means to go to the university."
(Liber Veritatum, p. 3). The same complaints are repeated with equal em
phasis on pp. 106, 195, and Gascoigne ends up : " thus perisheth learning
and true clergy ! " It must be remembered that Gascoigne is one of the
best and most accessible authorities for fifteenth-century church life,
and that his statements are borne out by official documents, which the
Cardinal altogether ignores in this context.

120 Medieval Studies.
M 167. Ibid. " But the churches and vicarages of places impro
priated were the special care of the rehgious." On the contrary Gascoigne
(p. 114) asserts that, through the appropriation of parish churches to
monasteries, " the churches are ruined, the cures are ruined, and the
value of the hving is ruined." The author of Piers Plowman speaks with
bitter scorn of " Rehgious, that have no ruth though it rain on their
altars " (B. X. 313). In that visitation of parishes in Exeter diocese,
to which Cardinal Gasquet appeals as saying what in fact it does not
say (Parish Life, p. 84 ; see here, above, No. 137), the appropriated
churches reported on by the Bishop's visitors show just twice as many
dilapidations as the non- appropriated churches ; and, in two cases,
it is actually reported that rain faUs on the altars of these churches from
which aU the great tithes went to the monks (Eng. Hist. Review, Jan.,
1911, pp. 112 and 120, nos. 8 and 52). Mr. A. Hamilton Thompson
has arrived at a similar result from an independent study of the existing
church fabrics. He writes : " It is noteworthy that, of the numerous
beautiful chancels of the early fourteenth century which are to be found
in Lincolnshire, Notts, Derbyshire, and the adjacent counties, not one is
to be found in a church which, during this period, was appropriated to a
monastery." (Lincoln and York Arch. Soc. Reports, Vol. XXXII, p. 65).
M 168. p. 212. " All these [women servants for monks] were selected
with care." Here, again, the Cardinal only indicates the theory as
expressed in the Custumals, without making any attempt to estimate
the practice, as indicated in the records of official visitations. These
records show that the women-servants frequently gave occasion for
scandal. They crept into the monastic system when the monks gave
up their earher ideal of handiwork — that is, at least as early as the thir
teenth century. From that time forward we find laundresses and other
women-servants within the precincts, until at last even the Cistercian
houses found it almost hopeless to struggle against this " ingressus et
frequentia muherum " (Eng. Hist. Review, Jan, 1914, p. 39, note 62).
M 169. p. 242. " [The Pied Friars] had but one house in England,
at Norwich." They certainly had one in London also ; see Stapeldon's
Register, introduction, pp. xxx and xxxi ; cf. Piers Plowman's Crede,
hne 65. Abbot Wallingford. (1913)
An attempt to clear Walhngford and the monks of St. Albans from the
accusations rehearsed against them by Cardinal Morton in 1490 ;
accusations which may be found fuUy and correctly translated,
(except that the weary catalogue is abridged towards the end,) in
Froude's Henry VIII, chap. x.
170. pp. 2, 3. The Cardinal asks us to stand before the great altar-
screen of St. Albans and think of " the man who built it, Abbot Walling
ford," and take it as our " leading principle " " that art is a finer and
more subtle expression of the inmost soul even than words." Yet very
little knowledge of the Middle Ages is needed to remind us that Walhng
ford " built " that screen only in the sense that he ordered it and paid for
it. The latter part of the argument would, to St. Bernard or St. Francis,
have seemed frankly pagan ; if we are to canonize Walhngford on the

Appendices. 121
strength of the altar-screen, we must attribute still greater sanctity to
nearly all the petty tyrants of the Renaissance, who did incalculably
more for art than he.
D 171. p. 3. " Quite recently we have been asked to change our
estimate of WiUiam of Wallingford." This is flatly false. Some years
before 1490, a fellow-monk deliberately handed him down to posterity
as a liar, perjurer, and thief. The Cardinal tries to prove that this accuser
was not reaUy Abbot Whethamstede, though the document not only
bears his name but is also marked with his very peculiar mannerisms ;
and, here, he can plead the authority of Riley, no great scholar. But
this cannot touch the main point ; the fact remains that Walhngford
was (rightly or wrongly) written down a rascal four centuries before
any of us were born.
172. These instances, just cited from the first few pages, give a
measure of the whole book : it is written for a particular public, which
looks no farther than whatever the Cardinal chooses to say. We are
twice referred pedantically to " MS. Cotton. Nero. D. VII " for weU-
known documents which have often been printed, and which the Cardinal
quotes elsewhere from those printed sources (pp. 14, 17). Giraldus
Cambrensis is referred to by page without the volume (p. 3) ; three
notes on pp. 15 and 24 refer us to the wrong books altogether.
V 173. The Cardinal twice mistranslates a very easy sentence, giving
the MS. source as his reference, though he has evidently been misled by
the mispunctuation of the printed copy (pp. 56, 65). Riley prints " lam
vero hie dicam, palamque monstrabo, quonam, scilicet, pacto per Spiritus
Sancti viam in Abbatem postea electus fuerit." The Cardinal, deceived
by this punctuation into separating the well-known phrase quonam pacto,
translates the former word as that, and connects the second with the
latter half of the sentence. Walhngford, he writes, was elected abbot
" by unanimous agreement (pacto, per Spiritus Sancti viam) " and
again " elected as abbot by acclamation (of the Community, pacto per
viam Spiritus) " (pp. 56, 65). For Latin scholarship, this is almost as
great a curiosity as the expertes of No. 109 above.
D 174. But, as usual, his worst offences are in suppressions of facts.
While professing to summarize the evidence against WaUingford, he
omits altogether the damning accusations contained in Innocent VIII's
Bull, which accompanied Cardinal Morton's monition to St. Albans.
In this BuU the Pope recites how the monks, " in certain [monasteries
of the Province of Canterbury] giving themselves over to a reprobate
mind, and putting the fear of God behind their backs, are leading a
wanton and exceedingly dissolute hfe ... to the evil example and
scandal of very many folk." (Wilkins's Concilia, Vol. Ill, p. 630).
D 175. pp. 42 ff. Moreover, in deahng with Cardinal Morton's
monition itself, he prefaces and foUows it by gross misrepresentations.
The document is not a mere " warning to Abbot Wallingford of his
[Morton's] intention to apply this [visitatorial] authority to the case
of St. Albans." StiU less is it true that the accusations contained in the
monition are " suggestive of . . . common form " (p. 45) ; " rather
reports " than " charges " (ibid.), or that " their face value is, at the

122 Medieval Studies.
worst, that they remain to this day ' not proven ' by any evidence
whatsoever " (p. 48). AU these statements are as false in canon law as
the instances which I have already given in Nos. 26 and 128 above.
A monitio, such as this of Cardinal Morton's, was a regular method of
intimating to any cleric that the outcry against him was so strong and
considerable as to create a legal presumption of his guilt ; and that it
now lay upon him to bring sufficient evidence to clear his character
(cf. Lyndwood's Provinciate, ed. 1679, p. 127, f and r). That is why
Morton, in this present monition, speaks of the scandalum plurimorum ;
that is why he interlards it with the legal expressions notorie, diffamatus,
publica fama, (words which, as wiU be presently seen, are consistently
omitted or distorted by Cardinal Gasquet). In canon law, a man
solemnly stigmatized by his superior as diffamatus or infamatus of any
offence was a man who had already been condemned by pubhc opinion.
He was offered a very lenient process of establishing his innocence by
" compurgation " ; if he refused, judgment went against him by default.
For these sufficiently weU-known facts the reader may consult President
Tanon's Tribunaux de ITnquisition (pp. 270 ff and 285 ff) or the weU-
known medieval manual of canon law called Summa Angelica, s.v.
Infamia, sect. 2. As this Summa puts it, " Fama, in the proper sense,
is when the whole city or neighbourhood, or the greater part thereof,
agrees as to a certain fact ... It is necessary, in the first place, that
it should be founded upon probable conjectures ; for otherwise it is
not fama in the effective legal sense, but mere popular gossip " [vanae
voces populi]. Let us take a concrete instance from one of the earhest
pages of a series of records published (with numerous textual errors in
the earlier volumes, it may be noted) by a society of which Cardinal
Gasquet is a prominent official — the Canterbury and York Society.
On p. 97 of the Register of Bishop Hugh of WeUs, occurs the foUowing
entry, dated between 1215 and 1220. " Roger the Chaplain, presented
by the Abbot and convent of Leicester to the church of Eastwell, after
an inquisition held by the Archdeacon . . . was admitted and insti
tuted to the same church, on condition that he should serve the said
church personaUy, and that henceforth he should not keep the concubine
of whom he hath been hitherto diffamatus, or any other concubine."
This was in exact accordance with canon law. Fama, in the legal sense —
not vanae voces populi, but the sober judgment of responsible men —
had condemned Roger ; and the accused had not even ventured to
throw himself upon the notoriously over-lenient methods of purgation
allowed by the Church. He was, therefore, enregistered to all time as
diffamatus, and consequently (in default of legal purgation) as condemned :
but the offence was pardoned for this one occasion. Medieval records
swarm with such passages ; they are especiaUy common in those episcopal
registers to which Cardinal Gasquet appeals so frequently and em
phatically, yet for which he dechnes to give specific references when
chaUenged. Wallingford also was notorie diffamatus, WaUingford also
made no attempt to establish his innocence from these very definite
charges ; therefore, in canon law, he was a condemned man.
D 176. pp. 42 ff. But Canon Law is not history ; however certain
it may be that Wallingford was, in the legal sense, a condemned criminal,
we are bound also to consider his case on its own merits ; and the Cardinal
professes to pass onto this consideration. He gives a summary of Morton's
monition far briefer and less accurate than what Froude gave long ago ;

Appendices. 123
the comparison is easy to any reader, and will prove most instructive.
At the very outset, he garbles Morton's words in a fashion which no
ignorance of canon law can excuse. In the first sixteen lines, which
profess to be an actual translation, he omits altogether, without the
least warning, the decisive legal term diffamatus, the strengthening
adjective multorum, and again, on two separate occasions, reinforcing
sentences of nearly two lines each. In other words, he has taken the
liberty of silently omitting ten per cent, of his text, and in many ways
the most significant percentage ; moreover, he softens down enormibus
into great. The rest, which only professes to summarize, proceeds after
the same fashion. He writes "... Then follow a series of the gravest
charges against the moral character of one of the nuns of Pray," where
the words I have italicized stand for " monialiw-w stupro " ; "ad earn
et alias ibidem et alibi, tanquam ad pubhca prostibula." At SopweU
the Cardinal summarizes only the financial, omitting aU mention of the
graver moral mismanagement recorded by Morton : " whilst thou [Abbot
WaUingford] dost depose good and religious women in both convents [of
Pray and Sopwell], and dost therein promote the evil and sometimes the
corrupted (viliatas) to the highest dignities, Rehgion is cast aside, virtue is
neglected ... so that those convents, once very1 religious, are now
rendered and reputed as it were profane and infamous."
D 177. Moreover, he pays no attention whatever to those words
of Morton's which most clearly contradict the theory that the charges
rehearsed in this monition were " common form." Once again Morton
uses the technical term diffamatus ; thrice he uses the almost equaUy
damning word notorie ; but of this the Cardinal gives us no hint. And
he even omits the sentence in which Morton complains of the terrible
scandal which these things are causing among the general public, so
that " we are daily besieged and distracted by fresh clamours for the
reformation of these things." Lastly, his summary obscures the fact
that Morton caUed on the abbot to give him, within thirty days, a detailed
account of such amends as the abbot might have made : of " what
thou hast meanwhile bent thyself and striven to effect for the reformation
of thine own person, and the persons and morals of thy feUow-monks,
and of the priories of Pray and SopweU and other dependent houses,
and for restoring them to the true pattern and rule of thine Order, in
accordance with the laudable ordinances and institutions thereof."
As if this were not definite enough, let us remember the extreme pre
cision of some of Morton's charges— the very name of the adulteress,
with a stiU living husband, who had been made first nun and then prioress
of Pray — the very value (8,000 marks) of the woods cut down and sold,
so that " the worldly possessions [of St. Albans], both in real property
and in moveables, are notoriously tending to desolation ... to the
scandal of very many people ; wherefore thou [0 Abbot] art clearly seen
[dignosceris] to stand in the greatest need of my office of correction and
reform . . . and so are many of your brethren the monks therein
dwelling." And, bearing this in mind, let us pass on to the words in
which Cardinal Gasquet sums up his own brief and garbled version :
" This is the monitio, or warning ; and on the face of the document it
1. Satis religiosa. This is often a puzzling word ; we canftot always distinguish between
its classical meaning and the frequent later medieval signification which survives in the
Italian assai.

124 Medieval Studies.
professes to be merely the statement of reports, of the gravest nature
it is true, but merely of unproved reports against the good name of the
Abbot and Convent."
M 178. p. 62. The Cardinal argues " If the condition of the Abbey
was really as bad as these rumours would have us believe, the blame
must faU quite as much upon Ramridge [the prior] as upon Walhngford
[the abbot]." This is contradicted not only by St. Benedict's own Rule,
which clearly treats the abbot as the primarily responsible person, but
also by frequent records of monastic visitors. For instance — to quote
almost at random from a book which the Cardinal ought to remember
something about — two of the earher visitations in his own Collectanea
Anglo-Praemonstratensia might have taught him better (Vol. II, pp. 70,
77). And, strangest of aU, this very monition of Morton's, which he is
professedly discussing aU the time, supplies even plainer evidence. It
is from the abbot, says Morton, that God will require at the Last Day
the blood of these monks who are sinning with his connivance ; there
is no word in this context of the prior.
M 179. Equal ignorance, or equal bad faith, underhes the Cardinal's
desperate plea that the whole story is too bad to be true. " They [the
accusations] are so sweeping and terrible that the whole is suggestive
of the equaUy sweeping common form in which the ' pardons ' previously
referred to are couched," etc., etc. (p. 45). He goes on to argue from
similar premisses on pp. 46, 59, etc. ; and these assumptions are so
important and so demonstrably false that I wiU deal briefly with them
here. Next to Jocelin of Brakelonde, the Evesham chronicle is perhaps the
best-known of Enghsh records, unquestionably authentic, deahng with
the more intimate side of monastic hfe. It was written in an age of
comparative fervour (early thirteenth century) and by a model abbot,
Thomas Marleberge, who had himself played the principal part in bringing
to justice the criminous abbot Norreys. The value of his chronicle for
our present purpose is increased by the facts that Evesham, like St.
Albans, claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, and that the
main visitor in both cases was a Papal Legate. Let us, therefore,
enumerate the points which Cardinal Gasquet would put aside as scarcely
credible, and paraUel them from the solemn record' which Abbot Marle
berge has left to posterity.
(1) Walhngford is defamed of having systematicaUy wasted and
embezzled the Abbey property. But Norreys had done so even more
thoroughly and openly for twenty-two years, and might have gone on
for as long again if he had not quarreUed with his monks. (2) Walling
ford is possibly accused of adultery, and certainly of conniving at un
chastity in his brethren. Norreys had had children by two married and
six unmarried women whom Marleberge Was able to specify by name,
from among a far longer list of persons unknown ; he also (we are told)
would have been glad to see his monks imitate his example. (3) We
are asked to discredit Morton's monitio because it merely calls upon the
accused Wallingford to reform his own abbey, instead of calling in
an outsider to interfere. Yet the Legate had done just the same to
Norreys ; and the very book from which Cardinal Gasquet most fre
quently quotes, the so-called Whethamstede Register, teUs us how
Brother John Langton, disgraced and removed from Tynemouth by

Appendices. 125

Walhngford in 1478, was by that same abbot appointed Visitor in 1480,
to correct the shortcomings of the Tynemouth monks ! (4) But WaUing-
ford (it is argued) received a testimonial from his brother-monks, who
supported him in his resistance to Morton. The document quoted in
support of this argument contains at least one plain misstatement and
one self-contradiction, and leaves its main purpose a matter of pure
conjecture ; moreover, it is astonishing how Cardinal Gasquet can
describe it as " a categorical denial of many of the evil reports " (p. 58),
in face of the fact that it scarcely touches Morton's accusations at any
important point. Yet, even if it had been all that he describes and all
that he conjectures, it would stiU be insufficient for his argument. Few
pages in medieval history are more startling than that page 121 of this
most unexceptionable Evesham chronicle, wherein the model Marleberge
coolly relates how he and his fellow-monks swore to stand stoutly by
the octogamous villain Norreys, and to hold their tongues even under
the Bishop's threat of excommunicating them for their silence, if only
Norreys would stand as stoutly by them in resisting the Bishop's authority.
If Norreys had kept his part of the bargain ; if he had merely possessed
the proverbial measure of a thief's honesty, he might have gone down
to posterity with scarcely a spot upon his reputation ; and other visi
tatorial documents of the Middle Ages simply swarm with similar evidence
of deliberate conspiracies to conceal the facts from a visitor. The
Cardinal's argument ab incredibili, like his suppressions and falsifications
of documents, can only help him with readers ignorant of medieval
conditions and content to enquire no further than the Cardinal chooses
to take them. The real question is, not what modern monks and modern
visitors would do, or what modern dilettantism would expect them to
do, but what medieval documents of unexceptionable authority record
them to have done in the Middle Ages. Certain psychological riddles
suggested by the Cardinal's habitual treatment of medieval documents
need not concern us here ; but the fact that he does habitually garble
these documents must very closely concern every student of that period.
We may successfuUy misrepresent even the plainest documentary evidence
to certain readers, and for a certain period of time ; but, in the long
run, a cause which relies upon such misrepresentations must become
a cause which appeals only to the thoughtless or the ignorant.

England under the Old Religion. 1912.
A coUection of old essays, of which only the first and the last deal
with the Middle Ages. " We have fortunately ample material," writes
the Cardinal in the first ; and presently wanders off into a series of
unvouched quotations, of which less than half are from the "ample
material" of actual pre-Reformation documents, the rest being from
modern writers often of dubious authority. But the last essay is
most interesting, in view of the fact that the Duke of Norfolk has
lately claimed as one of the Cardinal's main characteristics " a distaste
for controversy " (The Times, June 27, 1914). That last essay was
pubhshed in 1902, and dehberately repubhshed in 1912. It is, from
first to last, a gratuitous and savage attack on certain authors who
were in no sense professed medievalists, and of whom the Cardinal
might be pretty certain that they would never reply. The Spectator
reviewer, in an obsequiously favourable notice of the book, confesses

i.26 Medieval Studies.
that " most of the essays included are of a strongly controversial
nature," and that this final essay, especially, makes the reviewer
" take up his pen and his parable in fear and trembhng " (April 26, 1913).
The Cardinal has in fact never shown any great dislike to controversy
where he had no reason to fear retort and exposure. Readers, therefore,
must now judge for themselves why he was so voluble in 1902 against two
amateur editors who had never attacked him, and why he has remained
so silent in the face of repeated accusations of ignorance or bad faith
at other times, from critics who have rested their attacks upon plain
documentary evidence.

APPENDIX II.
(From the Catholic Times, May 29th, 1914.)
" The Ceremony of the Biglietto. Address by Cardinal Gasquet.
Immediately after the Secret Consistory, says a Reuter's telegram,
a smaU ceremony took place which is called ' II Biglietto,' or Notice
of Appointment. . . . This committee of three handed to each of the
new Cardinals in Rome his biglietto, the recipient, in accordance with
tradition, appearing much surprised.
Amidst great attention, Cardinal Gasquet delivered a briUiant address
in reply, in which he said that he had received the ' immense honour,'
as Cardinal Newman called it, without having held the usual positions
leading to it, and remarked that he understood that the Pontiff con
ferred the dignity because of his (the Cardinal's) lowliness. He then
continued :  'To judge from
the letters and telegrams that have poured in upon me during the
past few days, my election has been received with pleasure in all
English-speaking countries ; and it has been a source of the greatest
satisfaction to find that this feehng is not confined to the Cathohc body.
My old friends at the British Museum and the London Record Office —
non-Cathohcs, I think, to a man — and some of the societies like the
Royal Historical and the Bibhographical, have expressed their pleasure
at an honour given to one whom they regard, so they kindly say, " as
one of themselves." From a professor of history in one of the German
universities, a Lutheran Protestant, I have heard that in that country
they have regarded my elevation as an honour to the historians of the
world.' "

APPENDIX III.
Proportion of Criminals and their Punishments in
" CoUectanea Anglo-Praemonstratensia."
The Cardinal deals with both questions in his Preface to Vol. II,
pp. xxii ff. He there professes to sum up fuUy the Visitors' records of
incontinent Rehgious, and writes : " In all, then, during the last five-
and-twenty years of the fifteenth century over which these visitations
extend, the records show some sixteen cases of admitted or proved
incontinency, and possibly two more doubtful cases. In this period'

Appendices. 127
no fewer than 1,806 canons presented themselves, including, of course,
several occasions of different visitations, and were examined and in
terrogated by the visitor during his visitation. Of these 1,806, in the
quarter of the century, eighteen at most — that is, barely one per cent. —
were charged with any crime whatsoever against morality."
That is, of sexual morality. Yet, even so, the words which I have
italicized give a very false presentation of the facts. The records are far
from complete for the whole " five-and-twenty years," as the Cardinal
himself knows : he has noted in another context (p. viii) that a large
proportion of the visitations are altogether missing ; and, indeed, this is
one of the first facts that must strike any careful student. Moreover,
the lists of banished canons published by the Provincial Chapters — frag
mentary as these confessedly are — are sufficient to indicate that the
missing visitation records were as unfavourable as those which have
survived ; or, if anything, more unfavourable.1 Again, it is palpably
absurd to count each canon afresh, every third year, as a different man,
when the records enable us to estimate their numbers almost exactly.
In the houses visited in this second volume (to which the Cardinal arbi
trarily confines his calculations), about 470 canons were domiciled at
different times during these twenty-five years : therefore not one per
cent, but four per cent, of these men were formally accused of incontinence.
But, instead of thus confining ourselves arbitrarily to the first half
of the houses taken alphabeticaUy, let us take a survey of the whole.
Twenty-nine monasteries were visited in the twenty-five years, con
taining at any given time about 420 inmates, but, during the whole
twenty-five years, about 950.1 Out of these persons, forty-eight at least
were seriously accused of incontinence. The guilt of twenty-nine of
these is placed beyond doubt ; the large majority were formally con
victed, and in the five remaining cases the Visitor treats the evidence
as conclusive without further formalities. In twelve other cases, though
the records convey a very strong implication of guilt, the Visitor does
not press the case to its legal issue, but punishes the accused, or solemnly
warns him, as he feels inclined. Only seven of the forty-eight were able
to " purge " themselves by those very lenient canonical processes which
(as the Oxford ChanceUor, Gascoigne, was publicly complaining at this
very time) afforded " an occasion of intolerable wickedness " at Oxford,
and often resulted in the acquittal of the most notorious culprits.3
Moreover, this hst necessarily omits such a significant case as Vol. II,
p. 211, where the Visitor forbids that, in future, " women suspected of
incontinence or of theft should frequent the cloister or other parts [of
r. e.g. the Visitation record of Newbo in r478 is imperfect, but the Chapter of 1479 sen
tenced two canons of that house to banishment (Vol. I, p. 148). Of the twenty-six serious
cases thus mentioned in these Chapter records, twelve are unrecorded in any other part of
the surviving documents ; this shows how many accusations recorded by the Visitors must
have perished among the records which have not come down to us.
2. Talley, in Wales, was never actually visited : the Abbot was simply summoned on
one occasion to come and give his own report. The number of inmates may be counted
from the Index, with allowance for cases where the indexer has made a single canon into two.
3. Munimenta Academica, Vol. II, p. 536. The cases are as follows :
Condemned, Vol. II, pp. 36, 66, 76, 78, 97, 117 (two cases), i2r, 130, 182 (two cases), 24r,
258 (abortion) ; Vol. Ill, pp. 7, 16, r8, 38, 112, 115 (the same offender again), 113, 143, r85,
r87, 200, 207.
Assumed to be guilty, Vol. Ill, pp. 30 (two or more), 41 (cf. 39), 162 (two or more).
Not pressed further, Vol. II, pp. 254, 259 ; Vol. Ill, pp. 68 (five cases), 104, 115, 185 (two
cases). Purged, Vol. II, pp. 7, 19, 131, 242 ; Vol. Ill, pp. 35, 41, I5°-

128 Medieval Studies.
the monastery], or have speech or association (concursum) with the canons,
especially those from the town of Barnard Castle." Again, I have taken
no notice of the half-dozen cases where the Visitor accuses a canon of
"multa enormia" or " abominabilia," without specifying their exact
nature. FinaUy, a large number of other canons are recorded as
" apostates " ; and there is reason to beheve that a considerable proportion
of these were hving an entirely unmonastic life.1 Altogether, considering-
the fact that so many of the visitations of these twenty-five years have
perished, it would be utterly unhistorical to treat the forty-eight cited cases
as even a remotely exhaustive record ; yet, even if we confine ourselves to-
these, we get a proportion of nearly five per cent, accused of incontinence,
instead of the Cardinal's one per cent. It is important, in this context,
to remember that Cardinal Gasquet represents Cromwell's Visitors as
accusing only 3.1 per cent, of the ReUgious, and that he refuses to accept
even this as a possible proportion. I have pointed out elsewhere that
the records of Nicke's first visitation of Norwich diocese give an unim
peachable record of 6.1 per cent. (Monastic Legend, p. 3). If we add
to the forty-eight cases actually recorded by the Visitors those twelve
other cases of banishment which, in defect of visitatorial records, we
happeri to know of only through the chapter records, we shaU get sixty
cases, or rather over six per cent. And when we remember further that
chapter records fail us altogether, and visitatorial records to a very great
extent, for the periods from 1475 to 1479 and again from 1497 to 1500,
it wiU be difficult to conclude that these Praemonstratensian houses
were in a much better state than the monasteries of Norwich diocese.
Again, let us take the question of the punishment of detected offenders.
To the historian, this is even more important than the question of the
numbers detected, since it enables us to take a measure of the Visitor's
energy and authority. If we find him treating the convicted offender
with reasonable severity, we shall have some right to infer that he has
previously showed a similar spirit in discovering the offender ; if, on
the other hand, he shows himself embarrassed in his dealings with de
tected crime, we may rightly suspect him of equal weakness in the pre
liminary work of bringing hidden crimes to light. There can be no
stronger evidence against any system than the record of its helplessness
in the face of wickedness and open indisciphne. Bishop Redman, the
Visitor in this case, was certainly above the average of his feUows during
the years immediately preceding the Reformation ; we have, therefore,
in these records, a favourable picture of the visitation system. How„
then, did Redman deal with his black sheep ?
" On the face of the documents " (writes the Cardinal, p. xviii) " which
are the official records of the results, it is impossible for the most pre
judiced mind not to admit that wrongdoing was never tolerated by the
authorities, and that the punishments meted out were sufficiently drastic
at least to prove their honesty of purpose." And again (p. xxiii) " those
found guilty were punished with exemplary severity . . . generaUy the
culprit was actually sent at once to some other monastery for three, seven,
or ten years, to hve there without any of the rights belonging to a member
of the community. ... In the face of these documents, then, it is im-
, r. No less than fifty-one are at different times so noted, excluding about twenty more
who are accused of " apostasy " in the narrower sense, i.e. of having illegally broken bounds.
for a more or less brief period. Moreover, a large number of these canons spent their lives
in country cures away from the monastery, and were therefore considerably more free from
direct visitatorial observation than the rest. It is significant that some of the worst offenders,
drifted into such country cures.

Appendices. 12^
possible to suggest that the Superiors did in any way tolerate serious
abuses." It would, indeed, be difficult to suggest this, if the crucial words which
I have italicized were true. Dr. Gairdner, in the days before he had
learned the habit of verifying the Cardinal's references, took for granted
the truth of these italicized words, coming as they did from an editor
who claimed to be dealing with facts so easily verifiable ; and, trusting
implicitly to this assertion, Dr. Gairdner (as I happen to know) was
much impressed by this part of the Preface. Yet the Cardinal's asser
tions are grotesquely, and almost incredibly, false.
I. " Punished with exemplary severity." The total list of grave faults
dealt with is about seventy-five ; this includes not only incontinence,
but such offences as theft, embezzlement, assaults with murderous
weapons, apostasy,1 rebeUion, etc. In at least eighteen cases, the punish
ments inflicted are almost childish : e.g. a single recitation of the Psalter
is inflicted (a) upon three canons who got out at night to haunt taverns,
and " returned as dogs to their vomit " instead of amending their ways ;
and (b) upon a far worse offence to the medieval mind — actual dabbling
in witchcraft. A canon who had illegally pawned three books (which
would probably represent a serious embezzlement) was let off with the
recital of seven penitential psalms (Vol. Ill, p. 79, 117 ; Vol. II, p. 212).
Another who was " always intent upon consorting and talking with women
at recreation-time " had to recite the psalter seven times during the
ensuing year (Vol. Ill, p. 190). An abbot, convicted of incontinence
and malversation, was indeed deposed from his office, but at the same
time handsomely pensioned for the rest of his life (Vol. Ill, p. 18).
Another even worse abbot was deposed, but no further punishment
is recorded (Vol. Ill, p. 185). Of the third, John Newynton, worst of
aU, we do not even know that he was deposed, though his canons
(apparently without exception) accused him of wholesale malversation
of property, drinking and filthy speech in taverns on Sundays and holy
days, and " great incontinence with divers harlots and suspected women "
(Vol. Ill, p. 105). For one case of simple embezzlement, no punishment
was inflicted (Vol. Ill, p. 115) ; none again for persistently consorting,
after solemn warning, with a suspected and forbidden woman (Vol. Ill,
p. 115) ; none again upon a canon who, after a bad record for six years
past, is now acting as vicar of a parish, where " the common report
spreads and proclaims on all hands that he has lived in an abominable
and disorderly fashion, and has run into debt with many persons ; from
which accusations, when we brought them more fully against him, he
was unable to clear himself " (Vol. Ill, p. 196). In consequence of a
fatal brawl, the Visitor forbade the canons of Eggleston to wear daggers
at their girdles, as Church law had long since forbidden it. Three years
later, he found some still wearing their daggers, but there is no hint of
punishment (Vol. II, p. 218, 220). Finally (to omit other examples which
might be cited) a whole batch of apostates and incontinents are, on one
occasion, left by the Visitor to the Abbot's correction (Vol. Ill, p. 162).
II. " Actually sent at once." This statement is, if possible, even
more false than the first. In aU, about thirty-eight persons were sen
tenced to different terms of banishment to other abbeys ; but in twenty-
1. Only a fraction of the apostates were actually available for punishment ; the majority
were evidently beyond the Visitor's reach, and are therefore not counted here.

130 Medieval Studies.
eight cases, or nearly 75 per cent., these sentences were mitigated on the
spot, the Visitor himself (a) adding the proviso "unless, byway of mercy
he be dispensed from this," or, (b), more frequently, yielding to the tears
of the culprit and his friends, and following up his sentence with a " con-
tinuavimus " ; i.e. holding over the punishment a year, or perhaps for
three years, in the hope of amendment. Moreover, the hsts of canons
given at each visitation enable us to trace their movements fairly accu
rately ; and these hsts prove that the Visitor's sentence was often not
carried out, even when he had not previously suspended it himself.
For instance, the first of these unconditional sentences is that passed
on W. Bentham, of Cockersand, who was convicted of " multiple " in
continence, and sentenced to Croxton for three years. This was December
13th, 1489 ; yet on April 26th, 1491, he is not only still at Cockersand,
but has actuaUy risen to the post of sub-prior ! The next recorded in
stance is James Skipton, also of Cockersand, sentenced for incontinence
to seven years at Sulby. Yet he also is still at Cockersand in 1491, and
promoted to ceUarer ; in 1494 he is still there, and in an equally respon
sible office ; and in 1502 he became abbot of Cockersand ! (Vol. II,
pp. 117 ff : Vict. County Hist., Lanes., Vol. II, p. 156). A few minutes*
search would have convinced Cardinal Gasquet that these offenders were
not actuaUy banished ; yet he serenely takes his biU and writes down as
a summary of this very record : " two canons found guilty of incontinence
and punished severely." It is true that the Visitor also sentenced them
to forty days of penance ; but what reason have we for supposing that
this part of the sentence was not privately disobeyed, when we know
that the major part was so unblushingly neglected ? After going through
aU these hsts myself, with something of the thoroughness with which
the actual Editor should in conscience have gone through them, I can
testify that the evidence points strongly towards the escape of at least
threequarters of these culprits from the banishment to which they were
sentenced. Things went a little better with the Provincial Chapter
sentences (which the Cardinal, by the bye, does not notice). Out of the
eleven sentences of banishment which we hear of only through these
Chapter Decrees, five seem to have been actually carried out.
Not only has the Cardinal blinked this, which would have been re
vealed by a few days of careful comparison between his different docu
ments, but he repeatedly falsifies even the facts which lie on the very
surface of each separate record. He prefaces each Report with a summary
of its contents in English. To take these again in order from the be
ginning. W. Hymmers, of Alnwick, is condemned to Dale pro perpetuo,
but with the usual mitigation nisi alias. The Cardinal quietly omits
this nisi alias, and records " is severely punished," though in fact the
documents show that Hymmers remained at home (Vol. II, pp. 19 ff).
So with the next case (Vol. II, p. 36), where the nisi alias is again blinked.
In the next (Vol. II, p. 36) the bulk of the punishment was remitted on
the spot, and even the remaining twenty days of penance were left to
the Abbot's discretion ; yet here again the Cardinal summarizes " is
severely punished." In the next (Vol. II, p. 66) an unmitigated rascal
was sentenced to six years of banishment ; execution, however, was at
once formally deferred, and in fact the documents show that he never
went. The Cardinal summarizes " is punished severely, and removed
to another house." In the next again (Vol. II, p. 76) sentence was deferred,
as usual, in the same breath in which it was pronounced ; but the summary
runs " is sent to another monastery." Nor can this be explained by

Appendices. 131
ignorance of the technical term continuavimus ; for the Cardinal occasion
ally lapses into a correct and conscientious translation of this word.
III. Thirdly, it can be proved that some even of the worst offenders
did not " lose their rights belonging to a member ofthe community." Here,
again, even the most cursory study of the actual documents reveals an
enormous gap between theory and practice. We have already seen how
the two Cockersand criminals, instead of being degraded, were actually
promoted. Let us take another instance from the monastery of Sulby
(Vol. Ill, pp. 112-116 ; Vol. I, p. 176). In 1491, Robert Bredon, sub-
prior, was found guilty of very gross immoralities, and sentenced to
forty days of penance, and banishment to Alnwick for seven years ;
but, in consideration of his tears and promises, the punishment was
deferred, to give him a further chance. In 1494 we find him still at
Sulby, not only sub-prior but also sacrist, and stiU wallowing in his sins.
Again, Richard Ralston, of Welbeck, confessed, in 1488, to " multiple
incontinence." He was sentenced to forty days on bread and water
and three years' banishment ; but there is no trace of his name on the
hsts of any other monastery. He was not at Welbeck in 1491, but he may
well have been wandering about outside in apostasy, as so many others
were. When next he appears, in 1504, he is Abbot of Wendling ! (Vol. Ill,
p. 197). Finally, John Newynton, of St. Radegund's, was excommu
nicated once again, at the visitation of 1488, as an apostate who had
been " frequently " excommunicated already. In 1491 we find this
John Newynton actually Abbot of St. Radegund's ; in 1497 " the whole
monastery aUeges the greatest enormities against him," but in 1500 he
is stiU abbot, and the convent again accuses him of the adulteries and
other crimes already detailed above (Vol. Ill, p. 105). It is useless to
put forward any psychological theory which might explain how, in the
face of these facts, Cardinal Gasquet can write as he does, even under
cover of his imperfect system of references. The facts stare us in the
face from the original documents ; but what percentage of readers ever
travels beyond an Editor's preface and summaries ?

False Summaries.
The foUowing instances will give an idea of the liberties which the Cardinal
has permitted himself in these summaries.
Vol. II, p. 26. " Publica aures nostras propulsavit fama, eo quod
fratres dicti monasterii frequentius usque villam de Alnewik vadunt,
et presertim ad loca suspecta." This the Cardinal renders " There was
a report that the Canons frequented the town of Alnwick too much."
Yet the words I have underlined and which he has omitted are the stock
legal phrases used in visitation documents ; fama publica means legally
" the general consent of trustworthy witnesses in the district " and
suspectus means " disreputable " : cf. Vol. II, p. 78, " ad loca suspecta
et ad muherem suspectam."
Vol. II, p. 55. " Item, in noctibus, post Completorium, fratres exeunt
claustrum, et tandiu vigilant et potationibus utuntur, quod in mediis
noctibus, tempore matutinarum, vigilare non possunt."
G. " The canons sometimes give themselves to potations at night."

132 Medieval Studies.
Vol. II, p. 76. G. " A canon, accused of incontinence ... is sent
to another monastery for punishment and threatened with perpetual
imprisonment." As a matter of fact, the canon was not only accused,
but convicted ; he failed in his attempted compurgation. The banish
ment was not inflicted, but suspended, continuavimus, a word which
the Cardinal translates quite correctly in other places.
Vol. II, p. 107, no. This summary entirely suppresses the fact that
the Abbot of Cockersand had been accused "by the Visitor of things
which, propter suorum (sic) enormitatem, had been reserved for the General
Chapter to deal with ; and that the Abbot, dissimulatione exquisita,
had managed to suppress this part of the report. This may be added
to the cases already cited in which grave offences are not recorded to
have been punished.
Vol. II, p. 177 (Dale). G. " One canon found guilty of disobedience."
Text. " De vicio inobediencie . . . . et multis enormibus aliis et
excessibus, impetitus."
Vol. Ill, p. 25 (Langley). G. " Bishop Redman, on strictest enquiry,
finds the reports of incontinence against the Abbot to be untrue." Yet
the summary omits to add that there is " maxima infamia . . . per
circuitum diffusa," and that the Bishop commanded the Abbot, under
pain of excommunication, never again to admit the suspected woman
to the monastery, or permit her to dwell in any place thereunto apper
taining. Vol. Ill, p. 80. The summary mentions that one canon had thrice
apostatized, but omits that another canon and a nun were also in apostasy.
Similarly, Vol. II, p. 35, though three are named in the text as apostates,
the Cardinal only sees one.
Vol. Ill, p. 104. G. " The suggested offences." Compare the word
which I have here itahcized with the actual text on p. 103 and the two
paragraphs at the top of p. 105, where it is recorded that the whole monas
tery joined in accusing the Abbot of these offences. Compare similarly,
the summary on p. 68 with the actual text.
Vol. Ill, p. 146. G. " One canon convicted of apostasy, rebelhon
and theft."
Text. " Super apostasia, incontinentia, furto, et manifesta rebellione
multipliciter diffamatum et convictum."
This list is far from exhaustive, but it wiU suffice.

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