In accordance with many requests, the following sketch of some of the features of monastic life in England is reprinted from The Church Times , in a somewhat extended and slightly amended form. It has been suggested that it would be helpful to students to give a list of authorities on which these pages are based. A large number of authorities, such as monastic chartularies and customaries, and episcopal registers, only exist in manuscript; but the following are some of the principal printed book

IT is proposed, in the course of a few chapters, to put on record certain facts and statements on the “religious” (using the word in its technical signification) life of England from the seventh century to the sixteenth. Such statements, though based on the original study of a large number of episcopal registers and monastic chartularies, as well as on a variety of old documents at the Public Record Office or in private keeping, will, in many cases, only yield evidence familiar to those well acq

WHEN the religious houses were possessed of manors—and all save the smallest houses held at least one or two and frequently many—it was incumbent upon them to discharge the obligations that rested on manorial lords; nor was there any difficulty about this, for the technical obligations of presiding at courts and fulfilling other like duties were almost invariably discharged, even on secular manors, by the lord’s steward. Still the lord was responsible, and held responsible, in the same fashion a

A CONSIDERABLE educational work was accomplished by the monks and regular canons, quite outside the careful claustral teaching of the novices who were being trained to enter their own ranks. An able work, published a few years ago, on the early schools of England, the writer of which, however, never lost an opportunity of decrying the ‘religious,’ attempted to show that English monasteries had but little, if any, connexion with education outside the actual cloister. But his own pages of document

THE accounts of every monastery show certain definite sums set apart for charitable distribution, either in money, clothing, or food. These sums being charged on real property, came within the cognizance of the Commissioners who drew up the Valor of 1534. The amounts in some cases were considerable, especially when they are compared with the total revenue of the house. Bishop Hobhouse has thus tabulated them for Somersetshire:— For the much smaller county of Warwickshire, the amount of income as

ONE of the commonest and cheapest ways of abusing the religious, and bringing monastic life into contempt, has always been to depict the monk, and sometimes the nun, as usually given up to extravagant living in the satisfying of the appetite for food and drink. The coarse ballad of older times flung such charges broadcast, and today the tenors and basses of high-class concerts continue to sustain popular delusions by songs of “Simon the Cellarer” stamp. Moreover, the modern poster and smaller ad

SEEING that a well-occupied life is always acknowledged to be the least likely to fall into mischief and sin, the rule of St. Benedict—which required a monastery to be, as far as possible, complete in itself, equipped with workmen of every requisite trade and industry, and independent of external supplies—was one of great wisdom. Prayer, labour, and study, with brief occasional pauses for recreation and rest, filled up the entire day. The Austin Canons were not bound to manual labour like the mo

IN accordance with the various Canons and Councils, both general and particular, all English monasteries in pre-Norman times were subject to the Bishop as visitor; but after the Conquest, when special houses gained in power, and new or reformed congregations obtained a lodgment, the diocesan’s right of visiting became materially abridged. Up to their end all the English Benedictine houses of men or women, which numbered about 200, were subject, save for a few exceptions, to the Bishop. In fact,

MOVED, as he chose to assert, with a desire “to purge the Church from the thorns of vices and to sow it with the seeds and plants of virtue,” Henry VIII., the most immoral and covetous king that England has ever known, determined towards the end of 1534 to take active steps to secure the suppression of the religious houses. The Supreme Head Act of that year had conferred visitatorial powers on the Crown. For this purpose Henry appointed Thomas Cromwell as his Vicar-General, suspending meanwhile

ALTOGETHER apart from the outrageously scandalous way in which the suppression of the English monasteries was carried out—a fact that any historian worth his salt is now bound to admit—it is a wholesome sign of the times to find that English Churchmen are gradually coming round to a general acceptance of the religious and social blessings that came to this country through monasticism during the many centuries in which it played so important a part in the national life. This is certainly the esti