h I "■' | "■ -:"\ -: :: %■ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES / fl fct#i(Y \6b l THE RUINED ABBEYS OF YORKSHIRE ! I A INs Al THE RUINED ABBEYS OF YORKSHIRE BY W. CHAMBERS LEFROY, F.S.A. WITH MA NY ILLUSTRATIONS BY A. BRUNET-DEBAINES and H. TOUSSAINT New Edition London SEELEY AND CO., LIMITED Essex Street, Strand 1891 TO HEYWOOD SUMNER THIS SKETCH IS INAPPROPRIATELY, BUT AFFECTIONATELY, INSCRIBED 880791 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION In revising these sheets for a second edition I have been, once more, largely indebted to the kindness of antiquarian friends. In particular I have been allowed to anticipate in some points a forthcoming work on Fountains Abbey by Mr. Micklethwaite and Mr. W. S. John Hope. Within the last seven years much fresh light has been thrown on monastic antiquities by minute ex- amination and patient inquiry, and the impossibility of dealing exhaustively with even a section of this subject in anything short of a large and technical work has become proportionately evident. Since, however, the circumstance that our ruined abbeys are not only picturesque features in English landscape but also important historical monuments can no longer be ignored, the humblest contributor to the literature of the subject is bound to deal to \ Preface to Second Hail ion some extent with facts, and in so doing to take pains to be as often right and as seldom wrong as may be. The architectural and antiquarian statements scattered among these pages are doubtless not free from error and will seem to some readers defective in quantity and coherence. I have not, however, been so presumptuous as to write for the learned, and I have tried hard to avoid either misleading or wearying the ignorant. Thus, for example, while a small proportion only of the discoveries made, since the first edition of this book, by Mr. Hope at St. Agatha's has been here referred to, I am not aware that any point in which he has disproved my former statements or conjectures has been left uncorrected. < :hur< ii Crookh \m. . /// -90. PREFACE The history of monasticism planned by Southey yet remains to be written. To that much-needed work Northumbria will supply a long and most import- ant chapter, which I am far from claiming to have anticipated. These papers first appeared in an artistic period- ical, and for such a purpose monasticism is to its buildings somewhat as the cultus of the Virgin to Florentine art. We cannot get from this glorious group of ruins the best and deepest enjoyment, or reveal to others the secret of their charm, without a certain familiarity, and at least an imaginative sym- pathy, with the spirit which wrought in and still lingers near them. The architect, the antiquary, the artist, are not or should not be distinct ; and he who has not in him something of the three is scarcely worthy to travel in regions so lovely and so eloquent. Nor must we be impatient of a certain sadness in our subject — " He that lacks time to mourn, lacks xii Preface time to mend," and sober colouring is not always "loom. For mc the unfruitfulness of my earliest visits to monastic ruins, and the pleasant memory of all I owe to the companions of my latest, bid mc hope that these pages may be to some few the key of an unsuspected door, tempting them to sojourn and search where they were only wont to " glance, and note, and bustle by." The frequent allusion to the plans and notes of Messrs. J. Henry Middleton and J. T. Micklethwaite, Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, are to some extent an acknowledgment of the help I have derived from them, but not of the generous sympathy and congenial intercouse, in which lic> all the charm and half the value of Mich aid. Manx- of the scenes faithfully depicted here by Mr. Brunet-Debaines are associated with personal periences <>f Yorkshire hospitality, which have ed, if they could not banish, regretful thoughts of th( t-hou of tin- monks. And yet, bccan e the unremembered past, like the dim future, stirs within US, we long to lodge for one night with a Benedictine host seeing the old world and the forsaken waj Kei in, December 1SS2. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. St. Mary's, York .... I II. RlEVAULX ..... JO III. Byland ..... 55 IV. Fountains ..... 77 V. Fountains (continued) 99 VI. Kirkstall ..... 123 VII. Kirkstall and Roche 145 VIII. Jervaulx ..... 169 IX. Mount Grace Priory 194 X. St. Agatha's and Eggleston 216 XL Bolton, Guisborough, and Kirkham 246 XII. Whitby ...... 272 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fountains Abbey .... Bootham Bar, York .... Plan of the Benedictine Abbey, Westminster St. Mary's, York .... Ambulatory of St. Leonard's Hospital and Multangular Tower, York Rievaulx Abbey. The Choir and Presbytery, south ..... Rievaulx Abbey. The Presbytery and Choir, north ..... Helmsley Castle .... Rievaulx Abbey. The Transept . Rievaulx Abbey .... Byland Abbey .... Byland Abbey. West End . Byland Abbey. East End . Fountains Abbey. From the South Fountains Abbey. The Nave of the Church Fountains Abbey. The Chapel of Nine Altars The Frater, Fountains Abbey The Cellarium, Fountains Abbey . Roman looking looking Kirkstall Abbey. Kirkstall Abbey. Kirkstall Abbey. From the River Interior of the Church Western Facade of the Church Frontispiece 7 19 25 37 4i 45 49 57 67 7i S7 95 111 115 119 129 135 141 XVI List of Illustrations \\('K TO Ground-plan ro the Greai ro the Chapter-house, Kirkstall Abbey I'i w of mi Cistercian Abbey of Kirkstall, as it was IN THE I2TH < lENTURY ..... Kirkstall Abbey. From the South-east Kirkstall Abbey about 1794. From a Sketch hy Thomas GlR 1 in . Ri miii Abbey .... Jbrvaulx Abbey Jervaulx Abbey Pari i >i i he Ruins of Jera ai i.x Ai HOUSl . PARTLY 171 II ("in I ' RY, AT THE Mouni < .1: \' 1. Priory Carthi man Monastery of Moi \i Gra< e. ni. . if 1 111. Monks' Houses . I >< mi; LEADING I ROM I III". Ol Hi: COI i: I < 'l,< IIS1 BR AT MO< n 1 ( ,i;.v I. PrK »R1 Mm", 1 ( ,r.\< 1 Priory l;n HMOND < !AS1 M". S 1. AGA I HA'S Ami ', . NEAR Rl< HMOND ri \n 01 1111 Abbi 1 "i St. Agatha 1 , near The l ra rsR, St. Ag vi ha's . Tow 1 1 hi 1 in Grey I riars, Richmond n Prk » Kirkham Priory. The Gati hoi i Boi i"N Prk ... Boi 1 on Prk Willi BY Al Wiin by Abbey Whitby Whitby Church, From a Wind w of mz Abbey 'I'm ( HOIR Richmond 147 149 i53 i59 167 i75 '7'' 185 '97 200 203 21 1 221 j j' 1 233 237 241 247 265 277 281 289 THE RUINED ABBEYS OF YORKSHIRE ST. MARY'S, YORK V Some years ago a countryman put to a traveller in the neighbourhood of Furness Abbey the following question : " About those monks, sir — I sometimes wonder, and perhaps you can tell me — were they really black men ? " From this perfectly true story we may learn that there are depths of ignorance on the subject of mon- asticism beneath even our own or our neighbour's. We may reflect, too, if we please, on the fleeting nature of fame and the slender trace that so much power, and wealth, and zeal have left behind. Only let us, at the same time, be careful to seem, at least, to know that, though English monasteries were not inhabited by black men, they were,- in many cases, by B 2 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkshire black monks — so narrow is the boundary between truth and error — and that these dusky antediluvians were called Benedictines. How many of us learn abroad to interest our- selves in that which we have ignored a hundred times at home. In the Vatican, the Pitti Palace, the Brcra, the Louvre, we are familiar, for instance, with a figure, draped now in white and now in black, sometimes bearded and sometimes beardless, here with crosier in hand and mitred head, there rolling, emaciated, in a bed of thorns, but testifying, by this very variety of treatment, to the manifold and dramatic interest which, to the eye of faith, centred in the name of St. Benedict. And yet long ago, at York, it may be, or at Whitby, in the outskirts of Leeds or of Ripon, or in the quiet dales of the Ure and the Rye, we have been face to face with this remarkable man in the intimate expression of his mind and the immedi- ate outcome of his life. For without St. Benedict there had been no St. Mary of York, and without St. Mary of York there had been no St. Mary of Fountains. Yes ; this saint, this mystic, tin's superstitious monk, who seems SO much at home in the pictures of far-off popish i and the gallerii I tar-off popish lands, did actually find foothold in Yorkshire, St. Marys, York 3 making what is now a land of moors and mills a land of moors and monasteries, and leaving among the sportsmen and manufacturers of to-day a mark hitherto indelible. Of nearly twenty monastic ruins of which York- shire has reason to be proud, or ashamed, seven only — those, viz., of Bolton, Kirkham, St. Agatha, Eggle- ston, Guisborough, Mount Grace, and Coverham — belong to non-Benedictine orders. York, Selby, and Fountains, the only mitred abbeys in the county, were Benedictine ; Whitby, " the Westminster of the Northumbrian kings," revived from two hundred years of spoliation and neglect at the touch of Benedictine hands. The monastic ruins of England are the witnesses to an historic fact which is too apt to be forgotten or neglected. We all know there was monasticism in England before the Reformation ; for were there not monasteries to be suppressed by the providential rapacity of Henry VIII ? But we are inclined to relegate their history to the regions of ecclesiology and others equally dusty and obscure ; forgetting, if we ever knew, that they were interwoven with the fibre of our national life — bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And yet our hotels, our workhouses, our refuges, and probably a dozen other familiar modern 4 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire institutions, have been morally, and too often materi- ally, built out of their ruins. 1 In them our parlia- ments met, our annals were composed, our classics copied and preserved : and. what is even more im- portant, in them the very humanity which we inherit once found fit utterance for its superhuman aspirations, and, how blindly and wrongly soever, poured out its 1 "The leasehold tenants of abbey lands wen.', in (act, the most enviable members of the agricultural class in the Middle Ages, and the monks . set an example of agricultural improvement to all other land- I [ospitality and charity were practised on a vast scale, ami some historians regard the regular distribution of alms at the convent door, or the dinner open to all corners in the refectory, as the mediaeval substi- tute for the poor-law system. Considering how unequally the monas- teries \\ a great hall known as the Aula Nova, and supposed to have been the hospitium guest-house) of the paupers. Beyond this again, and in fact outside the precinct, is the almonry for Sf. Marys, York 13 relief of the poor. At Canterbury the cloister-court is on the north side of the church, and the cemetery on the south ; but the above is the more usual arrangement. The cloister, or at least its north wall, is often glazed and supplied with seats for study. A passage under the " dorter" leads to the smaller cloister — that of the infirmary. Here are a separate hall and chapel. The guest-house for strangers of rank includes a dining-hall, bed-rooms (each containing several beds), stables, servants' rooms, kitchen, bakehouse, brew- house, and store-room. Visitors of less distinction had to put up with humbler quarters. Stranger monks are allowed to eat in the <; frater," and therefore only require a sitting-room and dormitory. If we remember that the word " frater," which has sometimes been wrongly translated " common-room," is only another name for the refectory, we shall now be in a position to understand the description given in Piers the Ploughman's Creed, of a monastery of another order — that of " Preaching Friars." *& " Than cam I to that cloystre, and gaped abouten Whough it was pilered and peynt and portreyd well clene, Al tyled with leed, lowe to the stones, And ypaved with poyntll, ich poynt after other, With cundites of clen tyn closed al aboute With lavoures of lattin, loveliche ygreithed. — 14 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkshire — Thane was the chapitre house wrought as a great chirch Corven and covered, ant queytelehe entayled With semliche selure yset on loftc As a parlement house ypeynted aboute, Thanne ferd I into fraytoure^ and fond there a nother An halle for an hygh kynge, an household to holden, With brod bordes abouten, ybenched wel clene, With wyndoves of glass, wrought as a chirche. Then walkede I ferrer, and went all abouten. And seigh halles full heygh, and houses full noble, Chambers with chymneys, and chapel And kychenes for an high kynge, in castels to holden, And her dortoure 1 ydight, with dores full strong Fermerye '-' and fraitur with fele mo houses, And al strong ston wal sterne upon heithe With gave garites and grete, and iche hole glased." Yorkshire, or rather Northumbria, Is said to have been thickly strewn with monasteries in the early days of St. Cuthbert, the missionary of the seventh century. We may certainly trace in various writers the names of something like a dozen, of which no other remains are to be found. Most of these, how- ever, seem, like the original foundation of St Ilild at Whitby, to have belonged to an earlier and ] perfect system than the Benedictine. It was the bishops and monks of Scotland who, after the con- version of the Saxons, did for Northumbria what St. Augustine had done for Kent; and Burton (Monast. Ebor.) mentions that ten monasteries wen- founded 1 •' Dorter," or dormitory. ' " >r infirmary. PLAN OF THE BENEDICTINE ABBEY OF WESTMINSTER K> fut. 57. Marys, York 17 by them in Yorkshire before the Danish invasion of 832. Of these, Lastingham, founded in 648, and Whitby, about eleven years later, were the first. The early foundations were troubled now by the attacks of the Danes, and now by the support given by Saxon kings to the secular party in the Church. While the prayer for deliverance "a furore North- mannorum " is yet upon the lips of the monks, comes the rough hand of an Eadwig to disturb them. For, as William of Malmesbury records, " et Malmesburiense ccenobium, plusquam ducentis septuaginta annis a monachis inhabitatum, clericorum stabulum fecit." But the Danes, after all, were their worst enemies. Burton tells us 2 that after the devastation of North- umbria by Inguar and Hubba — a hundred years before Eadwig, by the bye — " there were few remains of monasteries left, and those generally were pos- sessed by married clergy — clericorum stabula ! " And another old authority goes so far as to say that " Christianity was almost extinct, very few churches (and those only built with hurdles and straw) were rebuilt. But no monasteries were refounded for almost two hundred years. The country people never 1 "He made the monastery of Malmesbury, which had been occupied by monks for more than 270 years, into a stable of secular clergy."— See Preface to Sir Henry Taylor's Edwin the Fair. 2 Monast. Ebor. is The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire heard of the name of a monk, and were frightened at the very habit."' But if monasticism seemed to be rooted out of Northumbria, this was by no means the case in other parts of England. Dunstan gave it new life and reality at Glastonbury, and intro- duced, in fact, the Benedictine system with something of Cluniac strictness. At last, in 1073, there came from Evesham three missionary monks, and guided, the_\- believed, by a divine impulse, established themselves on the Tyne, where the memory of the Venerable Bede still clung about the ruins of Jarrow. From thence after a time, they went their ways, Aldwin to Durham ; Remefried for Reinfred) to Streaneschalch, the modern Whitby ; and Elfwin to Vorl-c, to restore a monastery dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It is remarkable, however, that Stephen, tin: first Abbot of St. Mary's, who has left us a very circum- ntial account of the foundation, makes no mention at all of Elfwill or of any earlier building, except the Church of St. Olave's. lb- simply relates how. being harassed at Whitby by pirates on the one hand, and the caprice of William de iVrci on the other, he moved first to Lastingham and then to York, wh< Alan. Earl of Richmond, gave him and his monks the Church of St. ( )lave's and four acres of ground. ST. MARY S, YORK St. Marys, York 21 St. Olaf, the martyred king of the Northumbrians, had, as Mr. Freeman points out, become, by the middle of the eleventh century, "a favourite object of reverence, especially among men of Scandinavian descent. In his honour Earl Siward had reared a church in a suburb of his capital, called ' Galmanho ' — a church which, after the Norman Conquest, grew into that great Abbey of St. Mary whose ruins form the most truly beautiful ornament of the northern metropolis." " In his own church of Galmanho Siward the Strong, the true relic of old Scandinavian times, was buried with all honour." Sometimes we find the monastery of St. Mary called " Galmanho ; " and Leland tells us it was built outside the walls of York at or near the place where the dirt of the city was deposited and criminals executed. In explanation of the name it has been suggested that " caiman " is *fc>t> v derived from Saxon " galga " — a gallows. 2 The first great event in the history of St. Mary's was the secession of thirteen monks, who desired to adopt the Cistercian reform of the Benedictine rule. Of this we shall have more to say in another place. 1 Freeman's Norman Conquest, 3rd edition, vol. ii. p. 374, and vol. iv. p. 666; and cf. Cott. Tiber, B. i. ("Abingdon Chron- icle") and Cott. Tiber, B. iv. ("Worcester Chronicle"). 2 See a paper by Mr. Well-beloved in the fifth %'olume of the Vetusta Monnmenta of the Society of Antiquaries. 2 2 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire In the time of Abbot Severinus, the second quarter of the twelfth century, St. Mary's is said to have been burnt ; but it seems unlikely that it should have been left in ruins till 1258, when, under Abbot Simon de Warwick, we have the first indications of a renewal of building operations. The monaster)-, meanwhile, had been much troubled by the machinations of one Thomas de \\ arthill, who, wishing to get possession of a slice of the abbey lands, brought a false accusation against the Abbot and his house respecting a certain charter, and induced the king to fine them heavily. The monks were dispersed, and the •"church and offices exposed t<> great danger and ruin." But with Simon de Warwick good times returned, while a just heaven " monoculaverat " the offending Warthill, of w hom it is said that "a monachis Sanctae Maria Eboraci cceno- bialis siccis occulis meruit deplorari" — "from the monks of St. Mary he deserved a dry-eyed lamenta- tion." The Abbey of St. Mary's had diverse im- munities and privileges which seem to have roused the jealousy and wrath of the citizens of York. Frequent collisions, of the nature apparently oi ivated town and gown rows," occurred; and the citi/ens having lately destroyed the earthen rampart by which the precinct was guarded, it was one of the glories of St. Marys, York 23 Abbot Simon to build the stone wall and towers, the remains of which are still to be seen. Yet even he was obliged to absent himself from York for a whole year, on an occasion described by Leland, when " in the year 1262 an attack was made by the citizens of York on the Monastery of St. Mary, which resulted in much loss of life and injury to property." At this time Simon also paid £100 to the citizens as a peace-offering. Selby, York, and Fountains were, as has been said, the only mitred abbeys in the county ; and when we find that at the dissolution there were fifty monks in the latter, we may perhaps accept the computation that in an establishment of so much dignity and im- portance there would not be less than one hundred and fifty servants. 1 The revenue has been variously stated at £15 5° and .£2085 a year. It is certain that the Abbot of St. Mary's had two country seats near York, and a house in London not far from Paul's Wharf, where he lived while attending in his place in Parliament. The Close of St. Mary's, commonly called St. Mary's Shore, contained fifteen acres. On the out- skirts of a city like York this was doubtless, even 1 Pugin {Gothic Arch.) mentions that the household of the Abbot of Glastonbury numbered three hundred, and sometimes as many as five hundred guests were entertained. 24 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire then, a considerable extent, but we shall find at Fountains a precinct six times as large, while Jervaulx reached one hundred acres. The Abbots of St. .Mary's owned a second enclosure on the other side of "Marygate," where the name of " Almonry Garth " * still lingers, and the traces of the Abbot's fish-ponds may be seen. Though this monastery did not pass at the clis- lution into private hands, but was retained by the Crown, it has suffered from the erection on a part of its site of a palace for the lords president of the north ; and the roval grants of stone from the ruins for building the count)' gaol in 1701, and repairing St. Olave's Church and Beverley Minster in 1705 ami 171 7 respectively, have left little or nothing but the nave of the church and the vestibule of the chapter- house. The former ranks with Tintern as an example of the last stage of the transition from Marly English to Decorated ; the latter, with Byland, as a line speci- men of " that early variety of the Early Pointed 1 .1 Early English) of which the characteristic is the square abacus." Sir Gilbert Scott, in his lectures on Mediaeval Architecture, from whirh I quote these 1 It should 1 abered that the almonry oi Benedictine mc ■' . hi an "!: iling out alms i" begg nanent almshouses and 01 "h 5" for children. 3 W O u z < a z o K O St. Marys, York 27 last words, refers several times to this vestibule, always in terms of the highest praise, and gives " restored views " from two positions. 1 The eight north windows of the nave of St. Mary's are among the chief glories of English Gothic. They exhibit a remarkable alternation of two designs, viz. first a single mullion dividing two trefoil-headed lights, with a sexfoil in the head of the arch, and then three trefoil-headed lights divided by two mullions and surmounted by three quatrefoils. Of these eight windows, the three nearest the transept are distin- guished by filleted mouldings. The gardens of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society enclose, besides the nave and chapter-house of St. Mary's, two remarkable ruins, which help to redeem the commonplace trim- ness of the scene. These are the celebrated Roman " multangular tower," and some fragments of the Hospital of St. Leonard. The latter includes a thirteenth-century chapel of great beauty, which is almost certainly the work of John Romanus, the treasurer of the Minster and builder of its northern transept. It is difficult now to picture what must have been the general effect of this chapel, with its adjoining dorter, and many-aisled substructure of 1 A fragment of a palace built by Archbishop Rogers (i 154 to 11S1) on the north side of the Minster should be compared. 28 'Jlic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire cloister or ambulatory. 1 The present picturesque condition of the ruin is shown in the accompanying sketch. For architects and antiquaries, even more than for artists, York is indeed a very paradise, and yet the wild cliff at Whitby, and the stillness of Byland, recall with stronger spell that Benedictine spirit which once swayed the Christian world. 1 It is clear that, a- in the n I Benedictine infirmary, the patients slept in a room directly communicating with their oratory. An analogous arrangement may be seen in Lord Beauchamp's Almshouse at Newland, near Malvern. II RIEVAULX " In the reign of Henry I. flourished St. Barnard, Abbot of Clareval, a man full of devotion, and chief of many monks, some of whom he sent into Eng- land about 1 128, who were honourably received by both king and kingdom ; and particularly by Walter l'Espec, who, about 113 1, allotted to some of them a solitary place in Blakemore, near Hamelac, now Helmesley, surrounded by steep hills and covered with wood and ling, near the angles of the three different vales, with each a rivulet running through them ; that passing by where the Abbey was built being called Rie, whence this vale took its name, and that religious house was thence called Rie-val." A great name and a great event are these which the author of the Yorkshire " Monasticon " recounts so quietly — St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the coming of the Cistercians. The name at least our readers know. 30 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire "There have been other men." says the Archbishop of Dublin, "Augustine and Luther for instance, who by their words and writings have ploughed deeper and more lasting furrows in the great field of the Church, but probably no man during his lifetime ever exer< ised ^personal influence in Christ- endom equal to his; who was the stayer of popular commo- tions, the queller of heresies, the umpire between princes and kings, the counsellor of popes, the founder — for so he may be emed— of an important religious order, the author of a crusade." And Mr. Freeman Norman Conquest, v. 231) calls him "the holy Bernard, the last of the Fathers, the counsellor of popes and kings." The event, it is per- haps just possible. the\- never heard of. The Cister- cians were a strict order of reformed Benedictines". If we had never travelled in Yorkshire we might be inclined to dismiss them with the remark" that they allowed no lofty towers to their churches and no to their vegetables. But when one has seen Rievaulx and Byland, Fountains and Kirk-stall. Jer- vawlx and Roche, one begins to suspect there is more to be said. Our next half-dozen papers will be concerned with the work of these Cistercians, and we an hardly fail to gather, as we go, some knowledge <»f the men ; it will be well, therefore, in this place brief!}' to explain tlnir origin. Towards tin: close of the eleventh century one Rievaulx 3 1 Robert was Abbot of Molesme, in Burgundy. The monks of Molesme, like many other Benedictines of their day, were lax in their discipline ; and Robert, after trying in vain to revive among them in its literal strictness the rule of their founder, retired with a small following to Citeaux — then a wilderness of thorns. Here he founded a monastery in which were contained the germs of the great Cistercian order. Already the English Stephen Harding 1 was there — the future framer of the Cistercian system, and the destined master and instructor of that very " Barnard, Abbot of Clareval," whose brilliant and winning personal qualities were to be the special means of its diffusion. Hugh, Archbishop of Lyons and papal legate, sanctioned the movement in a letter which has been preserved. He solemnly notifies that Robert and certain of his sons — brethren of the mon- astery icccnobium) of Molesme — had come before him and declared themselves anxious to keep more closely and perfectly the rule of the most blessed Benedict, which they had held in lukewarm and careless fashion ; that, for many reasons, this was not possible without their removal, and that he, studying the welfare of both parties, advised the departure of the reformers to such new dwelling as the heavenly 1 " Harding," says Mr. freeman, " was doubtless his baptismal name, and Stephen the name which he took on entering religion. " 32 The Ruined Abbeys of ) r orkshire bounty should provide, and bade them persevere in their intention. In St. Stephen I [arding we recognise, after five hundred years, something of St. Benedict's knowledge of men and power of organisation. But the latter, as has been truly said, " organised for a monastery," the former " for an order." In the ideal of St. Benedict each monaster}- was a kingdom under its Abbot. It is true the bishops were recognised as official visitors, but their jurisdiction was wholly inadequate to correct abuses or maintain discipline. And so it came to pass that in some monasteries " lax- abbots might be found quietly established with their wives and children," and "the tramp of soldiers, the neighing of horses, and baying of hounds, made the cloister more like a knight's castle than a place dedi- cated to God's service." ' The attempt of St. ( )do of Chun- to remedy this state of things was doomed to ultimate failure, because he still left everything dependent on the individual Abbots. Stephen's idea was to create an order which should be self-regulating and self- reforming. With this view he instituted a system of reciprocal visitation among- the Cistercian houses and subordinated thi m all to the parent house of Citeaux. Here every year, on Holy Cross Day [4th September), a general chapter was to be held 1 . 'and, edited by I. II. N. . \ -.; RIEVAULX ABBEY THE CHOIR AND PRESBYTERY, LOOKING SOUTH D Rievaulx 35 under the presidency of the " Pater Universalis Ordinis " — the Abbot of Citeaux. The uniformity which enables us, in passing from one Cistercian ruin to another, to predict with cer- tainty what buildings we shall find or trace, and where, is one of the results of that body of statutes, the " Carta Caritatis," as it was called, which Stephen Harding, the Englishman, presented to his assembled abbots in 11 19. And to this uniformity is attributed, with much probability, the remarkably rapid spread of the pointed arch after its first appearance in Eng- land. Two other peculiarities, the one a characteristic quality, the other a noticeable feature, of Cistercian architecture, owe their origin and significance to the founders of the order. The first is their simplicity. All original Cister- cian work is plain and good. A severe self-restraint everywhere forces the loving ardour of these wifeless and childless builders to flow in narrow channels. The zeal of the sacred house is eating them up, but they have to hold their eager hands from lofty tower and lavish decoration, and spend themselves upon the perfect utterance of lowly thoughts. Robert, Alberic, Stephen, and Bernard were monastic Puritans. Not only were their churches and the dresses and diet of their monks plain and 36 The Ruined . Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire humble, but their very eucharistic vessels and priestly vestments were rigidly reformed. The typical Cis- tercian presbytery was without aisles, though the usual chapels east of the transepts were permitted and adopted. In the domestic arrangements the same simplicity prevailed. In place of the lordly dwelling of the Benedictine abbot, the Cistercian had probably but a single private room, and a bed in the common dorter of the monks. The Benedictines, whose original garb had been simply the usual clothing of the peasants, had learnt to be curious in party-coloured silks, in which they paraded upon costly mules; but the " white monk." rejecting all raiment not prescribed by St Benedict, ulined his wardrobe to the tunic, the scanty sleeve- less scapular, and the pointed cowl. When he was "in choir" it is true he threw a cuculla, or la; mantle, over his working dress, and when, in per- mitted boots and spurs he rode abroad, tin"-, garment would be black or gray. The second note of a Cistercian house to which we have referred — the ac- mmodation provided for the conversi or lay brethren is .so much more conspii uous at Fountains than at Kiev. mix that its explanation will be best and most intelligibly given when the former is under discussion. Rievaulx, founded in 1131, was the fii ' I Icrcian t mm mm "IV I - RIEVAULX ABBEY THE PRESBYTERY AND CHOIR, LOOKING NORTH Rievaulx 39 house in Yorkshire, and its abbot was head of the order in England. Walter l'Espec, the brave soldier and skilful leader, who fought in the Battle of the Standard, and founded the castle of Helmsley, was also the founder of three abbeys. These were Kirkham (on the Derwent), Wardon in Bedfordshire, and Rievaulx on the Rie. "An old man and full of days, quick-witted, prudent in counsel, moderate in peace, circumspect in war, a true friend, and a loyal subject. His stature was passing tall, his limbs all of such size as not to exceed their just proportions, and yet to be well matched with his great height. His hair was still black, his beard long and flowing, his forehead wide and noble, his eyes large and bright, his face broad but well-featured, his voice like the sound of a trumpet, setting off his natural eloquence of speech with a certain majesty of sound.'' Such is the portrait left to us by Aelred, x^bbot of Rievaulx, of Walter l'Espec, its founder. Such was the man who eventually became a monk in his own abbey. St. Bernard himself, having left Citeaux to rule his monastery of Clairvaux, sent from thence a body of monks to that Northumbrian land which has been well called " the true English home of the Cis- tercian order."' To his friend, Archbishop Thurstan of York, he commended the mission, and by Thurstan's 4° The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire advice L'Espec settled them on the banks of the Rie. As we look down from Lord Feversham's broad gallery of turf upon the roofs of the quiet village and the roofless walls of the Abbey, it is difficult to realise the wild thicket — the locus vastcB solitudinis et honoris, where William and Waltheof, both personal friends of St. Bernard — prayed and fasted and built, but Rievaulx was, indeed, the ideal site for a Cis- tercian house. To be near a town was forbidden, and would have been alien to the Cistercian spirit. 1 •• The fragrant clouds of dewy steam I'.)- which deep drove and tangled stream Pay for soft rains, in season given, Their tribute t<> the genial heaven " — were everywhere the chosen portion <>l these silent workers. There, as beneath the dark yews by the Skell, or the grim rock near Maltby, they "wrought in a sad sincerity," and, in accordance with their rule, dedicated their work- to "St. Mary, the Queen of Heaven and Earth." Beautiful, indeed, in its decay iA the Abbey which now nestles in the heart of the valley. Tin: church, like the wooded hills and ' " In civitatibus in castellis aut villis, nulla n< istruenda sunt I in loci itione hominum semotis."— Instituta Capit. < i I A.i'. 1134. Quoted by 1. Sharpe, Part . . Xrchitectun 1 magnas Ignatius ur' nardus valles monl Bern amabat." HELMSLEY CASTLE Rievaulx 43 distant purple moor, seems to have been always there. "O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, As on its friends with kindred eye ; For out of thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air, And Nature gladly gave them place, Adopted them into her race, And granted them an equal date With Andes and with Ararat." And yet this is not, after all, the church of Walter l'Espec and of William and Waltheof. If we look closer we shall see that there is more ornament than is consistent with Cistercian simplicity. This noble triforium, so like the work of the unreformed Bene- dictines at Whitby, these stately aisles— it is admir- able, but it is hardly what we expected. The ex- planation is not far to seek. The church has obviously been altered and enlarged within the period of the first pointed style. On this, and the farther fact that its " orientation " is almost north and south instead of east and west, a wild theory was long ago set up that " the body of the old church was made to serve as the transept of the new." It is hardly necessary to say that the arrangement of the cloister and conventual buildings would alone make such a change of plan practically impossible. 44 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire The ritual and architectural east end must always have been, as now, at the south, and the western entrance at the north end of the nave. It is perfectly true that the transept contains all the original round arched work of L'Espec which now remains above ground, but there is no reason for supposing that the nave either required or received any subsequent addition. It was by no means uncommon for the ritual choir to extend over the transept opening and several bays of the architectural nave, and this was, in all probability, the case at Rievaulx. The normal eastern arm of Cistercian churches was originally short, "the choir being placed in and west of the crossing.'' 1 Rievaulx has been altered and enlarged, but it has not been turned round. Its architectural choir, or eastern limb, probably owes its extent and beauty t< > the emulation excited in the minds of the monks by the ambitious and successful work of their neighbours of Byland. At one time it seemed as if the wanderings of that Ulysses of abbeys were to end on the banks of the Rie at a point nearly opposite Rievaulx ; and though the disturbing influence of the bells of Byland ceased with its re- e an admirable paper on "The I n Plan" by Mr. J T. Micklel V., in the Journal of the Yorkshire A gical ami I ation f<>r Decembei 1881. ^n^sv RIEVAULX ABBEY. THE TRANSEPT Rievaidx 47 moval to its next resting-place, an eager rivalry in building and adornment remained to testify to the historical fact of its former proximity. It has been truly said that " the Cistercian Abbeys in Yorkshire, which are the earliest pure Gothic works in this country, seem to have been the works of the monks themselves." x This fact, which has a special bearing upon our present subject, is, for many reasons, well worth remembering. In these abbeys design and execution were constantly and throughout personal, religious, monastic. Theirs is thus " a beauty wrought out from within." It has in it something of the nature of a growth, something of the mysterious charm and unappraisable value of a spontaneous development. " Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest Of leaves and feathers from her breast ? Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, Painting with morn each annual cell ? Or how the sacred pine-tree adds To her old leaves now myriads ? Such and so grew these holy piles Whilst love and terror laid the tiles." But to "love and terror" at Rievaulx was added the less solemn but scarcely less potent motive of emulation. For what do we find there, and what are the facts ? We find a ruined church consisting entirely of an eastern arm and transepts. Where the 1 Stevenson's House Architecture. 4 s The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire nave should be arc grass-grown heaps which cry aloud, and not, it is hoped, in vain, for excavation. The lower part of the transept is clearly Norman, and so, it will probably be found, was the nave. These were part of the older and more truly Cistercian design. But the upper part of the transepts and the whole of the eastern arm are Early English. Some idea of what the old building must have been like may be gathered from the ruins of Kirkstall, where no eastward addition was ever made. The new work at Rievaulx extends to no less than seven bays of rather more than 20 feet each, while the whole church, including transept and nave as well as choir, was not less than 343 feet long. In a word, the Latin cross of the normal Cistercian ground-plan has been entirely lost sight of. Xo doubt the desire for refinements of ritual, which soon showed itself even among the Cistercians, predisposed the monk-builders to such architectural innovations. Probably, als », they were inspired by the fine proportions oi the mi- reformed Benedictine churches, and urged on by the masonic instinct and impulse. All these motives we .shall see at work at Fountains, though with curiously different results. But we can hardly doubt that the temptation which first proved ton strong tor their traditions of I ian Puritanism was the desire {<> > Rievaulx 5 1 equal or surpass the glorious work of their neigh- bours and rivals. The poor homeless and churchless wanderers who, some twelve years after the founda- tion of Rievaulx, had found a temporary resting- place at Old Byland, removed after four or five years to Stocking, and thence to the spot where the ruins of Byland Abbey are still visible. Even here they were only five or six miles from Rievaulx, and their noble church arose almost under the eyes of their old neighbours. Now, Byland is 328 feet long, and the transepts, as well as the presbytery, are aisled. It was founded in 1 177, and probably completed by the end of the twelfth century. Sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century — Mr. Edmund Sharpe thought not earlier than 1240 — the new eastern arm at Rievaulx was completed. Longer than that of Byland, and equally guilty of aisles and a triforium, it is now the great architectural and artistic attraction of a ruin which is perhaps only second in beauty to that of Fountains. Our illustrations show this building in various points of view, and recall the peculiar charm of its situation and surroundings — less trim and artificial than those at Studley, less striking, perhaps, than those of Bolton, but combining a foreground of wooded hill 52 The Ruined . Xbbeys oj Yorkshire with distant heights of russet and purple moor into a picture which need fear comparison with neither. Of the eastern arms of Rievaulx and Fountains it has been said that "it would be difficult to find two examples which more characteristically represent the purity and elegance of the best work of the English lancet period," though "the effect in both cases is due to richness and delicacy of moulded work and excellence of proportion in main features," for "of carved work there is little, and of sculpture none. " We have remarked that the triforium at Rievaulx bears a striking resemblance to that at Whitby. In the latter, however, a circular dripstone moulding surmounts each pair of pointed arches, whereas the former has nothing between the pointed arches and the string-course of the clerestory. A special charac- teristic of Rievaulx is the arrangement of lancets in couples, and this idea is carried out in the clerestory, whereas at Whitby we have -roups of five, the centre only being pierced. The triforium at Whitby is also more lofty than that at Rievaulx, whi< h again is not of the same design in the transept as in the eastern arm. ( )f the domestic buildings, the most conspicuous and interesting is the frater. Its peculiarity in being 1 An hit r .1 nund Shi Rievaulx 53 supported on a vaulted undercroft is perhaps due to the abrupt declivity of the ground, 1 but in connection with this undercroft a question arises which is of considerable interest to antiquaries. The pulpit from which one of the monks must always read to his brethren during dinner is approached, as usual, by a straight staircase inside the frater, but any one who will take the trouble to mount the broken and ivy- covered steps will find the remains of a second flight winding downwards and opening into the vault below. In this respect the arrangement at Rievaulx is believed to be unique in England, though Beaulieu in Hamp- shire has points of resemblance. " A dim light/' says Mr. J. T. Micklethwaite, " is thrown on this curious arrangement by a direction in Consuctudines Ecc. Off. (cvi.) which orders that after the reader has ceased and put back his book into its place — discedat ubi a couventu non videatur — he should go away out of sight of the rest." In accordance with the invariable Cistercian plan, the frater at Rievaulx is at right angles with the cloister, and not parallel, as was the Benedictine custom (see plan, p. 15). It has been suggested that this difference may be accounted for by the fact that 1 The fact that Byland, with no great fall in the ground, had also an undercroft suggests that some other reason, possibly the fear of floods, gave rise to the arrangement. 54 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkskire the Cistercian monks were their own cooks, taking the duty week by week in turn. It was thus almost a necessity that the kitchen as well as buttery should have direct communication with the cloister — the ordinal'}- living-room of the monks. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that the Cluniacs carried out a similar system in buildings of the older Bene- dictine type. In some respects the frater at Rievaulx is not unlike that at Fountains, but as it is not longitudinally divided by pillars, as is the case with the latter, it must have been covered by a wooden in one span. Of the many thoughts and facts which crowd about the memory of Rievaulx Abbey, we must con- tent ourselves with two of special interest. Here, in these blank and broken lancets, is said to have -lowed in the twelfth century some of the earliest English stained glass ; and hence, in the days of Ailred, went forth the colon)- which founded the first Cistercian Abbey in Scotland. To Walter I'Espec, as well to Kin David, are art and poetry indebted for Melrose ; and " when distant Tweed is heard to rave," as well as when the gentler murmur of the Rie is in our ears, we may recall the image of the "old man full of days, whose stature was pa tall and his v<>ice like the sound of a trumpet." Ill BYLAND ABOUT half-way on its northward course to Darling- ton, the York, Newcastle, and Berwick Railway passes within a mile of the market town of Thirsk. It is a sufficiently picturesque little place on the banks of the Colbeck (or Caldbeck), a tributary of the Swale, but its attraction now consists chiefly in its convenient nearness to the Hambledon Hills and its fine perpendicular church. The traditions that this church was built with the ruins of the ancient castle of the Mowbrays, and that its carved oak altar came from Byland Abbey, are about equally improbable ; but the connection of Thirsk with the Mowbrays and of Byland Abbey with both are historical facts. It was in the reign of Stephen, and probably the year of the Battle of the Standard, that a waggon drawn by eight slow-paced oxen lumbered and 56 The Ruined Abbeys oj Yorkshire creaked along the street of Thirsk. As in the familiar scene of Goethe's Herman and Dorothea the waggon conveyed the whole store and possessions of a party of outcast wanderers. But here the resemblance ceases. There were no women, no children, no relics of a home — indeed all things domestic were conspicuously absent. The party consisted of an abbot and twelve monks, the waggon was laden with books and scanty changes of raiment. The seneschal of the Castle of "Thresk" took pity, so runs the story, on the weary travellers, and invited them within the gates. Now at this time Roger de Mowbray — the future Crusader and hero — was a minor under the guardianship of his mother. Gundreda. So the seneschal came to his lady ami told her what he had done. "And when the said lady, in a certain upper chamber, had peeped secretly through a certain window and seen their poverty, for very piety and pity she melted into tears. Y< 1 was she glad at their coming, and edified by their simple aspect and bearing, so she made them all stay with her and ministered to them abundantly in all things needful, forbidding them to depai L From the chronicle of Philip, third Abbot 'I Byland, we learn that these monks went forth in - Id M aa < Q >• ca By land 59 1 134 from Furness Abbey and settled, with one Gerald for their Abbot, at Calder. Here they stayed several years, and were about to begin building when they were driven out by an incursion of the Scots. They fled to Furness, but, finding the gates of the mother Abbey ruthlessly closed against them, determined to apply to Thurstan, Archbishop of York, of whose share in the founding of Fountains Abbey, some five years earlier, they had doubtless heard. To York accordingly they were now making the best of their way. Gundreda and her son arranged at first that the monks should receive for their support a tithe of all things which came into the castle larder, but the practical drawbacks to this plan were soon found to be intolerable. George, the steward or head cook — or whatever may be the best equivalent of the original " dapifer " — became hopelessly confused between the tithe due to the monks and the claims of his master's guests, and was often obliged, in sudden emergencies, to borrow the former's share to supply the necessities of the latter. It became necessary to assign to Gerald and his fellows a more distinct and convenient revenue, and Roger de Mowbray, at his mother's request, granted them his cow pasture at Cambe, with other lands ; and eventually the Lady Gundreda gave 60 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire out of her own (.lower the Vill of By land on the Moor, afterwards known as " Old Byland." Though this estate contained, according to Domesday Book, about seven hundred acres, the actual site available for the monastic buildings was inconveniently small. So when Roger de Mowbray saw that " many had come together to serve God" in a place which for this reason, and also on account of its proximity to Rievaulx, was altogether unsuitable, he gave his favourites in i 147 "two carucates" of waste ground under the hill of Blackhow, near Cox- wold. The name of the new site was Stocking, and here the monks remained thirty years and built themselves a small stone church and cloister. 1 At last, on the eve of the festival of All Saints, in the year 1177, the final move was made to the place which, in memory of their first settlement on the banks of the Rie, they called Bellalanda or Byland. The former, it may be remarked, is just one of those translations from workaday Saxon into devout do Latin in which the monks delighted. From the date of this final settlement to that of the surrender of the Abbey in 154" into tin- hands r, thai the tnonast >ld Byland was nol yel I, for, ^ Walbran has pointed out, the monks \s In > in [150 went out tn found Jervaulx Abbey proceeded fprni Old Byland, " habitant monachis apud Stock) By land 61 of the King's agents, history has little to say of the monks of Byland. Roger de Mowbray, we know, like Walter l'Espec, became an inmate of the monastery he had founded, but whether or not he was buried in the chapter-house is a point on which the chroniclers are not of one mind. "This Roger," says one, "having been signed with the Cross, went into the Holy Land, and was captured there in a great battle by the Saracens. He was redeemed by the Knights of the Temple, and, worn out with military service, he returned to England. On his journey he found a dragon fighting with a lion in a valley called Saranel, whereupon he slew the dragon and the lion followed him to England and to his Castle of Hood. After this he lived fifteen years and died in a good old age, and was buried at Byland under a certain arch in the south wall of the chapter-house." " He died," says another, " in the Holy Land, and was buried in Syria." Equally doubtful is another claim to historical interest which has been put forward on behalf of Byland. On the 14th of October 1322, the Scots under Douglas swept down from the moors, routed the English, took the Earl of Richmond prisoner, and would have captured King Edward himself if he had not hastily fled, under the guidance, it is said, of two monks, in the direction of York. Was the King at Rievaulx, as the chronicler of Lanercost alleges, or in the middle of his dinner at 62 77ic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Byland, as Knighton circumstantially relates ? A historian of the latter Abbey would say at once, and doubtless prove conclusively, that this interrupted meal at Byland was as clear as daylight or the virtues of Mary Queen of Scots, but the impartial critic must leave the public to judge between the conflicting authorities. No one has yet challenged the claim of our monaster)- to have been, soon after its foundation, the penitentiary of that fierce old lion Wymund, the soldier-bishop of Man and the Isles. '• For some tin en quaintly said, "he success- fully led his flock on marauding expeditions against the isles and i oast of S< otland, and battled all the efforts of David, King of that country, ti him. He was at length, howe> defeated by a brother bishop, taken prisoner, and had his eyes put out." I .mi not sure on what authority this 1 ite- ment rests. It has been more generally believed that Wymund, whom Kin David had attempted to bribe to behaviour by a granl of the lordship of Furness, made himself so hateful to his vassals that they seized him, put out his eyes, and sent him to end his days at Byland. It is admitted that this remarkable ecclesiastic began his career as ;i monk at 1 . md the Story Of his la my years al I ind is vouched for by William of Newburgh, who By land 63 both saw him and heard his reiterated boast, that by God alone had he been defeated, and " if he had but so much as a sparrow's eye he would make his enemies repent." Such, let it be remembered, were the men and manners with which medieval monasticism had to do. But it is time to speak of the visible and tangible remains which have come down to us from these dim, remorseful days. There is something very striking in the abrupt descent from the lonely plateau of moor south of Duncombe Park to the sequestered valley of Byland. " Its little hoof-crossed becks and cottage doors ; Tired grandames gazing o'er the shadowy sills, And children basking by the streamlet's shores ; And glass-green waters broad and full and still, Rich with the twinklings of ten thousand leaves ; And gray forsaken ruins, bare and chill." But undoubtedly the most picturesque view of the Abbey is obtained from the low ground to the south, whence the broken outline of the ruin is seen against the leafy background of the rising hill. Time and decay have treated Byland and its greater offspring of Jervaulx with a strange uncon- scious irony. As we approach the latter we see, indeed, huge and imposing masses of ruin, high moss- grown walls, pillars, and pointed window, but we 64 The Ruined Abbeys oj Yorkshire wonder, perhaps, what gives them so confused and disorganised an air. till it strikes us that the great central object, the beginning and end, the cause at once and crown of all, is missing, and we ask, Where is the church?" The answer to that ques- tion belongs to another time and place; but at Byland, meanwhile, our eye rots indeed upon the ruins of a noble church, but seeks in vain for the domestic buildings of a monaster}-. Grassy mounds and low-lying moss-grown stones are there, but the wise and fruitful zeal which has dis- closed at Jervaulx the whole ground-plan of the missing building, has not yet explored the founda- tions which undoubtedly exist in the precinct of the older monaster}-. As it is, however, the normal Cistercian plan may with tolerable certainty be traced, and even the singular and hitherto unexplained passage between the western cloister and the cellarium ' can be iden- tified and compared with the parallel instances .it Kirkstall and Beaulieu. Th'- Abbey Church of St. .Mar}- at Byland is a very noble and instructive example of the earliest llarium "is the I I buildings extending from the church along thi le of thi rably beyond it." rium, miscalled the " domi i joruru," it will be no U i. Byland 65 English Gothic. From the point of view of scientific architecture its design is highly esteemed by special- ists, and the intrinsic beauty of the ruins and of the majestic vision which they suggest appeals, in our day, to a much wider class. In the first place, it is evident that this was the largest original Cistercian church in England. 1 Rie- vaulx, we have seen, eventually surpassed it, and so did Fountains, but they were not built at once and from one design, and before the extension of their choirs they were both shorter than Byland. This pre-eminence in size was attained without sacrificing the proportions of the Latin cross — the design so dear to the early Cistercian builders. The great length of the nave was the first conspicuous feature which contributed to this result, the second was still more noteworthy. "Byland," wrote Mr. Edmund Sharpe, "was the first and only church of the order in which the piers and arches of the ground story were carried round the whole structure." In other words, whereas most Cistercian churches had north and south aisles to the nave, eastern aisles only to the transept, and origin- ally no aisles at all to the presbytery, Byland had, as it were, a continuous aisle, running west as well as 1 Its actual length, as mentioned above (p. 51), was 328 feet. F 66 The Ruined Abbeys of J 'orkslure east of the transept, and cast as well as north and south of the choir. This transverse eastern aisle may very probably have been intended, like the eastern chapel or transept at Fountains, to supply sites for additional altars. At the western end there was, as at Fountains and Rievaulx, a porch or galilee, and the corbels of the "lean-to" roof may still be seen. As late as 1426 one William Tirplady directed by his will that his remains should be buried " in the galilee of St. Mary's Abbey at Byland." ' From the existing west end, north wall of nave, and portions of north transept and choir, we are to conjure up, then, a singularly perfect transitional and Early English abbey church of rather more elaborate design than the normal Cistercian type. For, besides the pecu- liarities already mentioned, there is a triforium at B; land, whereas other great churches of the same order, such as Kirk-stall and Fountains, have no such feature. The arches of this triforium are pointed, and so, presumably, were those of the clerestory. The Abbey, in fact, is remarkable as the first Cis- tercian example of the use of the pointed arch for decorative as distinguished from constructive pur- es. The lower windows were round, but the three 1 /'/./'. an Appendix in Walbran's Fountax v, voL ii. (Surtees I ■ ^- w^ BYLANU ABBEY. WEST END Byland 69 great lancets at the west are pointed, and, what is more remarkable, so are two of the three western doorways. Even in the choir, which may be supposed to have been built before the nave, we do not find, as from the analogy of Ripon we might have expected, any lingering preference for the round arch. Now it has been pointed out by Mr. Micklethwaite that " the period during which the Cistercians were building their abbeys all over Europe was exactly that in which the Gothic style grew from its Roman- esque infancy to the full manhood of the thirteenth century. It was the period during which men learned to value and use the pointed arch." And Mr. Sharpe has said that, dating the corruption and decadence of the Cistercian order from the end of the thirteenth century, there was a period of about 200 years during which 1200 Cistercian abbeys were founded, and he does not know one of these the general plan of which is not in accordance with that of all the rest, nor a single church which does not bear in its details the impress of its Cistercian origin. Some of these char- acteristics may have been, as he suggests, the result of rule, some of habit, but at least it is absolutely in- dispensable to any fruitful study of English monastic architecture that we should constantly remember the " vast and widespread organisation, with the great St. ;o The Ruined Abbeys of ) r orkskire Bernard for its leading spirit," in which those 1200 religious houses were linked and subordinated with almost feudal elaboration. Each house, like an ancient Greek colony, owed obedience to the parent home from which it had been sent forth, and at the head of all was Citcaux — the mother in whose memory every church of the order in all the world was "founded and dedicated in the name of the same saint. Mary the Queen of Heaven and Earth." The history of Byland brings out this system with iccial distinctness. Savigny, the parent house of Furness and Calder, adopted the rule of St. Bernard, or, more correctly speaking, of St. Stephen Harding, for itself and its dependencies. From that moment Byland was a Cistercian monastery. In 1142 our Abbot Gerald had attended a chapter at Savigny, and successfully claimed exemption from filial duty to Furness, which had been to him, as we have seen, unnatural a parent. But, in 1 1 50. the abbots of Ider and Furness again renewed their claim, and this time it was Aldred, Abbot of Rieval, who, by appointment of the Abbot of Savigny, acted asjudj and decided finally in favour of Byland. One result <»f tin's < irganisation, overriding as it did all distinctions of nation and tongue, was certainly to infuse into y 1 II ,^¥ I .; Q z a H < a H - pq < Q Z < >< PQ By land 73 English architecture a continental element. Mr. Street (in a paper in The Church and the World, first series) has not failed to notice the evidences of foreign influence in English monastic architecture. But, taking Fountains as his example, he has sought to explain this by the personal relations of its abbots with Clairvaux. He points out, for instance, that Murdac, Abbot of Fountains, was first a monk at Clairvaux, then Abbot of Vauclair, and was finally sent by St. Bernard to Fountains, while his successor had also been previously Abbot of Vauclair ; and accordingly he says, " We see features of detail which would be perfectly consistent with the architecture which these abbots saw everywhere around them when they were at Clairvaux or Citeaux, but which were new and strange to English art." Mr. Street's opinion on the purely architectural point may, I suppose, be taken as conclusive ; but if so, the fact thus established illustrates, not an accidental feature in the history of one abbey, but a chapter in the archaeology of monasticism which inseparably links it with the study of English art. The remaining features of special interest at Byland are — besides the size of its cloister court — the majestic proportions of its round-headed windows and its remarkable western facade. This part of 74 The Ruined Abbeys of York shire the church was certainly the last to be erected ; and it is even possible, as has been suggested by Mr. Walbran, that it formed no part of the original design. The centre includes a trefoiled door surmounted by three pointed windows, and above these again the remains of a large wheel window said to be twenty-six feet in diameter. The west door of the south aisle is round-arched, with plain capital-; that of the north aisle pointed, with mouldings of the same date as those of the central entrance ; and it is noticeable that the capitals of the shafts of the latter are plain on the south side and sculptured on the north. Within two miles of Inland is a scene which calls up memories and visions as alien from those of medieval monasticism as any that be conceived. In the pretty village of Coxwold are three cottaj which occupy the site of Shandy I bill, where the Sentimental Journey was written and Tristram Shandy finished. I I ere, while a third century of jlect and decay was completing til'- di -"Lite record of the failure of asceticism, Laurence Sterne was day by day sitting down "alone to venison, fish, and wild 1, or a couple of fowls or duck's, with curds, straw- berries and cream, and all the simple plenty which a rich valley under Hambledon Hills can produi By land 75 while " not a parishioner catches a hare or a rabbit, or a trout, but he brings it as an offering to me." " See here, Sterne's roadside home. As clay expires, Within that panneled room behold him sit, With long churchwarden pipe and scribbled quires, Himself scarce smiling at his light-born wit, Or, where the tears should flow, and cheek grow pale, Turning to shift his wig, or froth his ale." 2 Compared with the Canterbury Talcs, the Senti- mental Journey may be called refined ; but when Chaucer, turning from the portraiture of the dissolute monks, painted in simple words his ideal ecclesiastic, he soared into an atmosphere too pure for men like Sterne to breathe. " A good man was ther of religioun, And was a poure Persoun of a toun ; But riche he was of holy thought and werk. He cowde in litel thing han suffisaunce. Wyd was his parische, and houses fer asonder, But he ne lafte not for reyne ne thonder, In siknesse nor in meschief to visite The ferreste in his parrische, moche and lite, Uppon his feet, and in his hond a staf. 1 As regards asceticism, at least, Sterne faithfully practised what he preached, for, in a sermon on Eccles. vii. 2, 3, we find him saying, "'.Sorrow is better than laughter' — for a crack-brained order of Carthusian monks, I grant, but not for men of the world." 2 Lines on " Coxwold near Thirsk," from In Doors and Out, by E. Wordsworth. 76 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkshire This noble ensample to his scheep he yof That first he wroughte, and afterward he taughte." It is true that Chaucer had been in Italy, and his mind and art were tinged with the morning light of the Renaissance, but he was still centuries behind that blessed day, so enlightened at once and so picturesque, in which Gothic architecture was consigned to the same limbo with monasticism, and "Mr. Spectator" himself sought, in the following words, to educate the national taste : " Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how the imagination is filled with something great and amaz- ing ; and at the same time consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other; which can arise from nothing else but v Ltness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other." ' 1 Spectator, vol. t i. N<>. 415. IV FOUNTAINS "We have not lost all while we have the buildings of our forefathers." With some such thought as this in our minds we come to Fountains Abbey, the crown and glory of all that monasticism has left to us in England. The tiny seed from which, century after century, this inimitable beauty grew to perfection, was the same holy discontent, the same "incurable distaste for all that is not God," in which we have traced at Molesme the germ of the Cister- cian order. From the cry which arose among a few monks at York, for a more faithful observance of the Benedictine rule, to the moment when the scaffolding was removed from the great Tudor tower of Fountains, this aspiration was working out its record. But as with Italian art, so was it with monastic architecture — while the language became more ex- 78 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire quisitc the message was forgotten, and when the form reached perfection the spirit fled for ever. Slowly, but surely, as the wilderness became a garden and isolation gave place to fame, the Cister- cian discontent was transformed into complacency ; and when the abbot and his monks beheld with satis- faction their completed work, the feet of those who should drive them out were already at the door. And now the jovial holiday-makers from Harrogate and the cultivated strangers from London or New York come and go with other words on their lips than "The pity of it, [ago! I ago, the pity of it:' for they are too busy to learn, or too thoughtless to remember, that nothing comes of nothing, and " Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought, N<\ er from lips of i unning fell The thrilling I >elphii ora< le ; Out from tin- heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old : The Litanies of nations < ame. Like tin- vol ano's tongue of flame, Up from the burning lore In-low, — The i anti< les of [ove and \ hand that rounded I'etei And groined the .ode. of Christian I Wrought in a s.id sin< erity : 1 [imself from ( ".of the valley, and thatched a sort of hut around its trunk. 1 In the presence of the Archbishop they solemnly elected Prior Richard as their Abbot. "lie had no shelter from the rain, and it was winter," but still "he casts his care upon God, and girds himself against the stress <>f poverty with abundance of faith." And so they began the life they had longed for. From 1 Sosays the chronicle. Local tradition points to some ancient yews on the l>ank as the llr>t sheltei "i the monks. "On the south sidi five or six yew-trees, all yet ' 757, growing except the largest, which was blown down a few years ago. They an- <>( an incredible size, the circumference of the trunk <>( one <>f them is at least 14 feet about a : from the ground, and the branches in proportion t<> the trunk ; they are all nearly of the same lmlk, ami are so nigh together as t ake an excellent <'"\er, almost equal to that of a thatched roof. Under tin ild by tradition, tin- monk iill they built the him 1 : which seems to me to be verj probable if we considei how little in a year and to what a hulk wn. And as the hill covered with wood, which is now almost all rut down except th< is a-, if they win- left standing to perpetuate the memory of the monks' habitation there during the first winter of their resident e. ' BURTON, Mona tic /■• I Fountains 91 time to time Thurstan sent them bread, and they drank the water of the stream. As yet these poor monks can hardly have seen in the gritstone of the sheltering rock the " promise and presage " of an architectural masterpiece. At pre- sent their daily labour is the making of mats and the cutting of faggots for a wattled oratory, while a few of the more skilful take to gardening. " There is no sadness, not a murmur is heard, but with all cheerful- ness they bless the Lord, poor indeed in worldly goods, but strong in faith." When winter was over, Abbot Richard and his monks began to consider under what rule they should live, for hitherto they had only tried to conform, after a fashion of their own, to that of St. Benedict. By this time the Cistercian house of Rievaulx had begun to make its influence felt, and moreover it can- not be doubted that Thurstan had told his friends how a work after their own hearts was being carried on at Clairvaux. To St. Bernard, then, as might have been expected, they sent certain of their number with an intimation that they had chosen him for their spiritual father. Clairvaux thus became the mother house of Fountains, and St. Bernard sent one of his monks, Geoffrey by name, to teach the new rule and direct the building operations in the valley 92 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of the Skell. It must not, however, be forgotten that as Fountains was a daughter of Clairvaux, so was Clairvaux itself of Citeaux ; and the system which Geoffrey introduced at Fountains was in reality that of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding the Englishman. For two years the new monastery, increasing in numbers but not in wealth, endured great hardships ; and when at last, in spite of Thurstan's generosity, they were reduced to a diet of boiled leaves and salt, their resolution gave way, and the Abbot himself went to beg St. Bernard to remove them to one of the granges, or small dependencies, of Clairvaux. The request was granted, but meanwhile the tide had turned. The wealth, which was to be more fatal to Fountains than all its privations, had begun to flow in. Hugh, Dean of York, had joined the brotherhood, and brought with him both money in abundance and a fine collection of books of the 1 loly Scriptures, and Serlo (not the chronicler and Tosti, canons of the me cathedral, soon followed his example. Then came gifts and conveyances of land from ighbouring lords ; and when King Stephen was at York, in 1135, he confirmed the monks in their po m and exempted them from all aids, taxes, Fountains 93 danegelds, assesses, pleas, and scutages, as well as from all customs and land service due to superior lords. The Monastery of Our Lady of Fountains had now fairly taken root. Three years of zeal and devotion had worked their oft-repeated miracle. Henceforth the founding of fresh abbeys and the building of their own were to be the signs of life and vigour among the once persecuted seceders from York : the gifts and bequests of those whose only motives were superstition and selfish fear were to be the seeds of its decay and omens of its fall. It is only positive and vital impulses that can create, and vivify, and mould. The terror that haunts the rich man's deathbed may rob his heirs, but it can raise no lasting memorial of itself. The first colony from Fountains was Newminster. In less than two years followed Kirkstead and Haverholme (afterwards removed to the neighbour- hood of Louth). The latter house was established under Gervase as its first Abbot. Thus the " back- slider" becomes once more visible to us as we gaze into the beryl-stone of history, and we can think of him among the many to whom, for our comfort, victory has been given in spite, as it were, of them- selves. In 1 145 Abbot Murdac supplied monks for De Bolbec, the founder of Woburn ; and the next 94 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire year a visit from Sigward, Bishop of Bergen, led to the settlement of thirteen monks from Fountains at Lysa in Norway. From Fountains, too, went Serlo, the chronicler, and eleven others, under Alexander the Prior, to Bernoldswic, and eventually to Kirkstall, while only five days later Bytham (afterwards Vaudey) was added to the list. Finally, in I 150, the Earl of Albemarle founded Meaux Abbey, with Adam, one of the original scccdcrs from York, as its Abbot. Thus within twenty years Fountains became the mother of seven monasteries. John de Cancia — Kentish John — was pre-emi- nently the builder-abbot of Fountains. After the partial destruction by lire in 1 146 of the then existing conventual buildings and oratory, the work went on, we must conclude, unceasingly for the remainder of the century; but in 1203 the (lunch was not large enough for the multitude of monks, and the Abbot bethought him of building a great choir. It was not, however, till the time of the before-mentioned John d I ancia (1220-1249) that tin'-, vision was full\- realised. We can thus trace the growth of our Abbey through tin- late Norman and transition styles to the definite Early English, to which, un- doubtedly, the work of "Kentish John" belongs. But the architectural and antiquarian features of CTtTTtl MT>i ' fi*»'^-< II W'WV,MiP {| i^F. ! ^3?i Fountains 97 Fountains Abbey are a wide and important subject, and for the purpose of even a slight and hasty discussion of them it will be necessary, and it is hoped not altogether tiresome, to devote a separate chapter to their consideration. At present we may connect with Mr. Brunet-Debaines's drawing of the nave the thought of those earlier years in the history of the foundation during which the severe and lofty Cistercian spirit had its most perfect work, and " the monks sought their daily bread by the sweat of their brows, planting with their life-blood the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts." 1 But the engraving of the exterior, in which the great tower is prominent, speaks chiefly of a day of ominous departure from Cistercian simplicity. In the latter part of the thirteenth century came a period of depression. John le Romaine, Archbishop of York, writing in 1 294 to the monks who had been sent from Clairvaux as visitors of the Cistercian houses in England, mentions the necessitous state of Fountains, and attributes it, in part at least, to mis- conduct and extravagance. Burton {Monasticon Eborac, p. 143) tells us the Archbishop roundly asserted that the monks of 1 This passage from the chronicler of Meaux, describing the monastic life there under Adam — once a monk at Fountains — is borrowed from an interesting pamphlet, entitled, Charters of Roche Abbey, by Sidney Oldall Addy, M.A. H 98 TJic Ruimd d Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire Fountains were become a laughing-: stock to the kingdom, and he does not wonder at it. But, with this exception, they enjoyed a high reputation, and consequent steady increase in their revenues and territory, till at last, in 1535, their estates were certified by the Commissioners to be worth close upon .£1000 a \ear. This income — which, it is needless to say, must not be estimated by our present standard — was produced mainly by a vast extent of landed property, including, amongst other items, an ' ite of 60,000 acres in a ring-fence in Craven. The account of the possessions of the monastery in flocks and herds is, perhaps, even more impressive — 1976" head of cattle, i 1 06 sheep, 86 horses, and 79 swine, were found at the dissolution, besides 117 quarters of wheat, [3 of rye, [34 of oats, and 192 loads of hay in the more distant granges, and 160 loads of hay and 128 quarters of corn in the pari; and granaries of the Abbey. 1 For his interest in all these, Marmaduke Bradley, thirty-third and last Abbot, tin- iK iminee 1 if I .ayt< >n and I .egh, re< en ed an annuity of .£100 a year. Was it for this, we are ipted to ask, that Prior Richard and his brethren had left all and braved the winter in the wilderness? 1 There was also much valuable plate, which, including chalice, . amounted i" Z"°^ : ^ : '»i- Amongsl the domestic part were twenty silver-gill 16 and 4 , : nany ofungill silver. V FOUNTAINS {continued) We have seen by this time something of what the realities of contrition and adoration can effect. They cannot save men from error, they cannot bestow the modern Englishman's cherished attribute of common sense ; but at least they are genuine and unmistak- able, and the angels as they gaze are not perplexed. The pale shadows of these somewhat unmanageable graces, the feeling for a feeling and thought about a thought, are compatible with easy postures in accus- tomed armchairs, but they themselves are goads and scourges, to be prayed for, if at all, with judicious faintness. It remains to examine, in as much detail as our space permits, the buildings of which we have sketched the history. Though the original Cistercian churches conformed with exactness to certain well- known limitations, and were built without exception on one recognisable plan, it is remarkable that, in ioo The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Yorkshire at least, the perfect type is nowhere to be found. W'c know the idea, and can even-where trace its influence, — but where is its full embodi- ment ? " Perhaps," as Plato would say, " it is stored up in heaven." Wherever it may be, we can assert with confidence that it is in the form of a Latin cross, severe in detail and spavin- of ornament, with a short and aislclcss presbytery, and at most a humble and unobtrusive central tower, rising just one square above the crossing of the nave and transept. It is, in fact, just such an abbey as we are all familiar with, and yet most likely have never seen. For it is not at Rievaulx, where the eastern arm is long; it is not at Byland, where it is aisled ; it is not at Roche, where there arc such scant}- remains of the church ; ' it is not at Jervaulx, where there are practically none; it is not even at Kirkstall, where a normal church is surmounted by the ruins of a lofty tower ; and least of all is it at Foun tains. The world, "lest one good custom should rrupt" it, made haste t" corrupt t! id custom <.f Cistercian Puritanism — and it must be confessed that the "nine altars" and the real to rman. We have thus the round-arched work at Durham going on side by side with the partially pointed at Byland, and distinctly later than that at Fountains. In faet, the pointed arch often occurs in transition work, and is, of course, invariably found in even the earliest pure Gothic, but it i^ by no means rare in the most undisputed Norman, and does not spread in proportion to thi lopment of the transition. The particular combination of the two construe- Fountains 103 tions at Fountains is worth noticing. The eleven, or rather twenty -two, pointed arches of the nave rest on columns 23 feet high and 16 feet in circum- ference, and the transverse vaulting of the aisles is pointed ; but the bays are divided by semicircular arches, and the windows are round-headed and with- out shafts or mouldings. The absence of a triforium seems in character with the solemn simplicity of this part of the church, while the warm colour of the stone and the soft turf under foot redeem its chill unroofed severity. But the fine unbroken vista which we now admire had no existence for those who kept the sacred hours day and night within these walls. " The whole church," says Mr. Micklethwaite, " was divided into parts in a manner which is, I believe, quite peculiar to the Cistercians. The aisles were cut off from the nave by solid stone walls, built flush with the pillars on the nave side. The transepts and choir aisles, where there were any, were also cut off by stone screens ; but they were lower and not so thick as those to the nave, and may possibly have been pierced. The transverse divisions seem to have resembled those of Benedict- ine and collegiate churches, but I have found full evidence of them only at Fountains. There was a *■ pulpit um ' of stone taking up the space of one bay at the entrance of the choir ; a bay west of it was the rood screen, with its central altar and two doors ; and one bay west again was a wood screen forming the fence of the rood altar. All these screens were continued 104 The Ruined . Xbbeys of Yorkshire across the aisles, and accommodation for minor altars seems to havi found against them. At Fountains, also, two bays of the south aisle wen ted off to form a chapel. II and elsewhere the pulpitum was placed considerably to the west of the eastern arm and transept."' J The inmates of the infirmary, including old and feeble monks as well as the sick, had a special place allotted to them, called the retro-chorus, between the pulpitum and the rood screen. Another part of the church' - ' was assigned to tin- couversi t or lay brothers ; a third to the' fami/iares, or honorary associates; a fourth to the mercenarily or hired servants ; and yet another to ;.aie>ts from the Iiospitiiim. All these subdivisions itated numerous entrances, as each was accessible from the outside. Fountains Abbey, like Durham Cathedral, had both an eastern and a western annex. Not Ion;.;, it would seem, after the completion of the west front, a narthex or galilee, i '- feet wide, was added. This was in effect a porch, with open arcade extending the whole width of the western front, and used, thoii'di with what restrictions is not clear, as a burial- 1,1,11/ Plan, by J. 'I'. Micklethw 1 .--.A. Repi ui'- d from the V • Mr. W. H. S. [ohn ll: II that the pari : the choii <•( the ing cut off from the aisles in the- manner • ] by Mi Mi. kl< thwa Fountains 105 place. Through the thirteenth-century presbytery, begun by Abbot John of York, and continued and completed by his successors and namesakes, John Pherd and John of Kent, we pass to the beautiful and striking eastern transept — the Lady Chapel or Chapel of Nine Altars. This was mainly, if not altogether, the work of the indefatigable John of Kent. Its facade, 150 feet in length, is the first part of the church to become visible when the more distant glimpses of the tower have been lost in the winding approaches of the valley. The great east window, 60 feet by 23 feet 4 inches, is obviously a late fifteenth-century addition. The nine lights and elaborate tracery of this window seem to have re- placed three original lancets, such as may still be seen in the corresponding position at Durham. With the exception of this and two other windows of the same date in the gables, the Chapel of Nine Altars is pure Early English, and may be compared with the work of Bishop Poore at Salisbury, as well as with the Nine Altars at Durham. John Darnton, Abbot of Fountains from 1479 to 1494, has not left us in doubt as to the date and authorship of the later parts of the work. On a key- stone inserted to hide a settlement in one of the original lancets has been carved the bust of an angel 106 The Ruined . Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire holding a tun and bearing on his breast the word ' Dern." Above is an eagle, and a scroll with the words " b'n'd'fontes DNO " Benedicite fontes Domino), and on the inside of the same stone an angel holding a blank shield, a mitred head, and a figure of St. James of Compostella, standing on two fishes. Then- is also on the keystone o\ another Early English window, at the north-east of the chapel, a human head entwined with |eav< and on the inside an angel with a scroll on which the date " Anno Domini [4! The lower wall this chapel, as well as of the presbytery, arc' adorned Fountains 107 with a beautiful trifoliated arcadinsr, the design of which was repeated in the reredos of the high altar and the screen walls in the arcades. Of the upper walls of the aisle I cannot speak with equal admira- tion. The lancets are here placed each under an arcade of one pointed arch between two round- headed ones. The latter rest on one side on single columns from which spring the pointed arches over the lancet windows, while on the other they descend much lower to meet the clustered shafts which carried the vaulting ribs. It is perhaps difficult in the present state of the building to judge of the original effect of this arrangement, but it must surely have ics The Ruined . Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire been more striking than beautiful. At present, indeed, the presbytery is at best but a seemly antechamber to the glories of the Lady Chapel, but in justice to Abbot John de Cancia we should remember that such was neither the intention nor the original effect of his design- At the end of the north transept, rising to a height of nearly I 70 feet, is Abbot lluby's tower. In the inscriptions above and below its belfry windows, this majestic structure seems to plead humbly for its own right to existence : — " To the King eternal, immortal, invisible" ; "To God alone be honour and glory for ewer and ever. Amen." " ( >nly to the praise of God, and not for any pride or extravagance of men," it in- to say, "was the old Puritanism forgotten. Times have changed, and what was seemly in the twelfth century and suitable to the poverty of a new order is unworthy now of the greatness and prosperity of this famous Cistercian hou What St Bernard would have said to this "doctrine of development" may be open to question, but there can be little tubt that Abbot lluby's best apology is not in the humility of his inscription, but in the triumphant auty of his work-. He musl indeed 1"- an uncom- promising hater of perpendicular architecture who • •' imple charm of such perfect proportion. Fountains 109 As we, not seldom, wear the semblance of our own past selves, and preserve in a look or turn of speech some grace long lost out of our lives, so the old tradition seems to have lurked and lingered among these innovators, the old severity to have haunted and subdued their thoughts. It is time to say a few words about the domestic buildings which at Fountains are so well preserved and so interesting. Instead of attempting a general description, it will be best to confine ourselves mainly to that which is here most distinctive. In speaking of Rievaulx Abbey, I referred to the Cistercian frater, and its pulpit ; and I shall there- fore only mention here that the great size of the frater at Fountains, viz. 109 feet by 46, prevented its being roofed in a single span, and it was conse- quently vaulted on a row of four marble columns, of which, however, little or nothing now remains. The hall is a fine specimen of Early English domestic architecture, but it is in fact less remarkable than the kitchen. In accordance with the invariable Cistercian plan, the latter is placed immediately on one side of the frater, and, with its yard or garth, corresponds to the warming-house and its woodyard on the other. 1 1 Under the frater and through, or close by, both these yards, may usually be traced the main drain of the monastery. 1 IO The Ruined . Xbbeys oj Yorkshire The warming-house at Fountains belongs to the twelfth century^. Its vaulting rested upon a single pillar, and it contains two noble chimneys, each be- tween I 6 and l J feet wide and over 6 feet deep. The "heads" of these "are straight, and formed of huge atones dovetailed together on the principle of an arch." On the infirmary alone, which it has been the fashion to call the Abbot's house, a chapter might be written, but we must reserve this subject till we can compare the ruins at Kirkstall with those now before us. Meanwhile it is time to pass to that huge, mys- terious building west of the cloisters, to which Mr. Sharpe has given the name oiDomns Conversorum. It is with regret, and even with trepidation, that one rejects this august misnomer. "Who," it must be asked, "were the ' conversV At Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, where the influence of Dunstan had anticipated by 1 \0 years the Cister- cian revival, was passed the boyhood of him who, as phen Harding, Abbot of Citeaux, was to promul- the reformed Benedictine rule. [*o him and to Alberic is due the development, though not the in- tion, of lay- brotherhood. Manual labour, tin half-forgotten command of St. Benedict, was made an important part of the monastic discipline of the The monks must till the ground with - m FOUNTAINS ABBEY. THE CHAPEL OF THE NINE ALTARS Fountains IT 3 their own hands, but they must also be in their places in choir at the canonical hours. These duties were soon found to be incompatible, for even the command of his Abbot could not enable a monk to be in two places at once. But it had long been the custom to admit to Benedictine monasteries humble, illiterate, and needy applicants in the capacity of lay brethren. Life was not made smooth for these men within the sacred enclosure ; but then, neither had the outer world been too gracious to them. They had no turn for mystic contemplation, no voice for service in the choir, no skill in copying or illumination, but in offering their labour in exchange for a safe and un- varying subsistence, they had doubtless a dim comfort and uplifting from the thought that they were giving to God the little with which He had provided them. In the modern labour-yard and casual ward such fancies do not harbour — there is more cleanliness, but perhaps less self-respect. The result of the multi- plication of the conversi was that in every Cistercian abbey, as has been well pointed out, there were two monasteries — one, viz. of " lay brethren," and one of " choir brethren." The rules for the former were very strict, and, according to our notions, somewhat vexatious. No convei'sus is to possess a book, or learn anything but 1 14 The Ruined Abbeys of ) r orkshire his " Pater noster," his "Credo,'' and his " Miserere" and ■ Ave Maria," etc., which he is to know by heart. If a conversus is disobedient to such overseer or master of the works as may from time to time be set over him, he is to be flogged in the chapter-house, and to cat Ins food for three days, seated on the floor in the presence of the other conversi, and without a tablecloth. Wherever the monks observed silence there the conversi must also be speechless, and they are to go nowhere without leave. In their own dorter and frater the}- are to observe perpetual silence, and indeed even where else ; unless the Abbot or Prior, or, in cases where he is entrusted with this authority, the cellarer, happens to have ordered them to speak. The same rule applies to all the craftsmen of the monaster)' — the weavers, the miller^, the tanners. Only the smiths arc permitted to speak, "because tiny can hardly labour in silence without detriment to their work." The shepherds and ploughmen may speak to their underlings (juniors), and vice versd, while at work. They are to return the salutations of strangers ; and if a traveller asks the way, they an- to tell him without unnecessary words. If, however, In- addresses them on other ub they are to answer that the}- may not con- tinue the conversation* A short service of responses ~-^~. • .. THE FRATER. FOUNTAINS ABBEY Fountains 1 1 7 is prescribed for their grace before meat in their frater. " And then the Prior, making the sign (of the cross) with his hand, shall say, ' In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' the rest answering ' Amen.' And so let them sit down to table in order and eat." But if any one should miss his response three times, his due portion of wine is to be taken from him and he is to begin eating after all the others. Then when " refection " is over, the Prior rises and begins the " Miserere," which is recited by him and the convcrsi verse by verse antiphonally ; and so, passing into the church, they there say softly to themselves the " Pater noster," and the Prior having made the sign of the cross, they too sign themselves and bow and go their ways. But those whose turn it is to wait at table finish their response in the frater, and altogether omit the final " Pater noster." By these and many more such minute regulations was the life, and work, and worship, of the lay- brothers fenced about. In St. Bernard's own church at Clairvaux, stalls were provided for 177 monks and 351 convcrsi; and it is at least certain that a Cistercian monaster)' had to provide places for the eating, sleeping, and working, as well as for the worship, of a very large 1 18 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire proportion of laymen, in addition to the accommoda- tion required for the clerics. When archaeologists became aware of these facts, and remembered the large two-storied buildings, so pecially conspicuous at Jervaulx and at Fountains, which had hitherto for sheer want of a better name been called "ambulatories," they not unnaturally con i ncctcd them with the conversi. The connection is real; but the name " Domus Conversorum" errone- ously assumes that the whole range was given up to the conversi. It is also said by those best con- versant with monastic terminology to lack authority. This building, which we shall most safely call the tl cellar turn" was in fact not one, but two. It is to the hand of Time, or perhaps of some bold admirer of the picturesque, that we owe the impressive vista which Mr. Brunet-Debaines has sketch' Here, as in the church, the monks had other and more practical notions. At Beaulieu Abbey, in Hampshire, the distinction between the two ran i 3 of the cellarium is very marked ; and at Fountains the place where the}- were divided is sufficiently obvious. Above was the dorter of the verst, communicating in all ca e by a private staircase with the church. The southern half was their fratcr, and had a hatch from the kitchen. w e ca < s D Fountains 121 Strange, indeed, and, as it were, prophetic, must have been the dumbness of the busy fields and workshops by the Skell. The sound of distant voices from peopled valleys comes to us upon the hillside with an unthought-of thrill of sympathy and consciousness of kind ; but in the lonely chapel on "Michael-How" only the bells of the parent church broke the stillness, while at that sound shepherds would kneel among their sheep, and ploughmen by their resting oxen, to join in spirit with their brethren chanting the office in the Abbey choir. With a last and very different thought we must turn from this memory -haunted scene. On the south side of the stream is a well that still bears the name of Robin Hood, in memory, it is said, of the outlaw's famous fight with " the curtail friar of Fountains." 1 " Robin he took a solemn oath — It was by Mary free — That he would neither eat nor drink Till that friar he did see." 1 "Tradition," says Mr. Walbran, " points to the figures of a large bow and arrow and hound, graven on the north-east angle of the Lady Chapel, as a record of this dire affray. They bear no affinity to the symbols used by the masons ; but have, I fancy, induced the report, mentioned by Ritson, that Robin's bow and arrow were preserved at Fountains Abbey." [22 77ic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire So Robin and the friar met and fought, till at last the friar had the best of it, and threw Robin into the Skcll. Then Robin wound his horn, and brought fifty of his followers to his aid ; and, in his turn, "The fryar he sit hi-, list to his mouth, And whuted him whutes three ; I [alf a hundred good bay dogs < ame running over the lea." So that, if "Little John" had not "shot with might and main," it would still have -one hard with Robin. Mr. Walbran tells us that when Sir Walter >tt visited Fountains, he was much struck with this legend; and not only induced Mrs. Lawrence, the then owner of the Abbey, to build an arch over the spring, but also presented her with the followil Inscription tor Robin Hood's Well": ■■ Beside tin- i rj stal font of <>1<1 Cooled his flushed brow an outlaw hold. Ili- how was slackened while he drank, I li- quiver rested <>n tin- hank. Giving brief pause of doubt and t I i feudal lords and foresl deer. Long sin. c tin- date- hut \ i! Still sin- h b) ( hn-tii: And still <)lil England's free-bom mood Stirs at the name Robin I lood. VI KIRKSTALL In the middle of the twelfth century a small town in Airedale was struggling into importance. The devastations of the Danes, which had almost swept away the " Loidis " of Bede, had long been forgotten, and the losses and miseries of the Norman Conquest were fast sinking into oblivion. But the Conqueror's feudal system still had its grip relentlessly upon the country, and the vills and towns were working out their own deliverance by humble steps, thankful the while for mercies which to modern Leeds would sound but small. Half a century or so before Ilbert di Laci had granted his vill of Leeds — a mere drop in the ocean of his vast estates — to Ralph Paganel, and the Paganels had since built themselves a castle and made a park which survives only in the names of Park Place, Park Row, Park Square, and Park Lane. To the protection of this castle and the [24 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire comparative security enjoyed by burgesses in times of turbulence and rapine the town of Leeds is thought to have owed its carl}- prosperity. Already there is evidence of the exportation of grain and other com- modities, and the Aire must have been navigable, at least for small vessels, and under favourable circum- stances. And so, when in 1207 Maurice Paganel granted a charter to his burgage tenants at Leeds, creating a local court of justice, and conferring other valuable privileges and immunities, the town had evidently attained considerable importance, and the Domesday estimate of something under 1 000 for the number of its inhabitants, and about ;£ I 1 5 for its total value, must have been left far behind. Yet in this charter we arc still face to face with serfdom and even slavery, for women sold into slavery are exempted from paying custom in the borough ; and though Yorkshire wool was now being sent from Leeds to Flanders, to return to England in the form of doth, there is still the Paganel oven, in which the burgesses aforesaid "shall continue to bake as they have been ac< u tomed," and the King's mill at which they unit grind their corn. .Meanwhile the De Lacys had granted their neighbouring manor of Newsham to the Templars and founded and built the monastery of Kirk-stall. Kirkstall 125 For the oven and the mill, and even for the Templars, we may search Airedale in vain, but the solid masonry of the Cistercians still survives- — a huge and not unwelcome anachronism by the darkened and polluted stream. " Since the day when Henry de Lacy brought the Cistercians to this sweet retreat, how changed are the scenes which the river looks upon. Then from the high rocks of Malham and the pastures of Craven, to Loidis in Elmete, the deer, wild boar, and white bull, were wandering in unfrequented woods, or wading in untainted waters, or roaming over boundless heaths. Now, hundreds of thousands of men of many races have ex- tirpated the wood, dyed the waters with tints derived from other lands, turned the heaths into fertile fields, and filled the valley with mills and looms, water-wheels, and engine- chimneys." 1 Like the sound of brave words or fine music in dreary scenes and moments of depression is the sight of Kirkstall Abbey in the purlieus of dim, laborious Leeds. We are absorbed in business and harassed with care, our concern is with the practical needs of a workaday world, competition and progress- — the present and the future— demand and exhaust our energies, we feel, and delight to feel, within and about us, the ceaseless vibration of the great industrial world. And yet — 1 Phillips's Rivers, Mountains, and Sea Coast of Yorkshire, p. 94. i26 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire as angels in some brighter dreams Speak to the soul while man cloth sle< p, So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes And into glory peep." And so we welcome the words or the music to the making of which have gone such high desire and prescient assurance of triumph ; and even for us who, it may be, " lack time to mourn," there is a charm in the record of that strange mood of asceticism which enshrined its self-abasement in so much majesty. It must, however, be confessed, at the outset, that the carl)- history of Kirkstall does not so well accord with our notions of saintliness as that of the parent house of Fountains. The very origin of the former has in it an ignoble element. The founding of Rievaulx was due to the effect of bereavement upon a brave and manly heart, that of Byland to the spontaneous piety of the Mowbrays, that of Fountains to the reforming zeal <>f the monks of York ; but Kirkstall was generated in the terror and despondency of 1 )e Lacy's sickroom. It is true his purpose held and gathered strength with time ; it is not less true that his monaster)- outlived its early faults and grew to ripeness before it fell into decay. When De Lacy was sufficiently recovered to set about performing his vow he consulted the Abbot of Kirk stall 127 Fountains, and, by his advice, decided to found a Cistercian monastery at Bernoldswic in Craven. The land and money were to be the offering of the feudal lord ; the Abbot was to find the men and direct the work. On the 19th May 1147, Alexander, Prior of Fountains, with twelve monks and ten lay brethren, took possession of the buildings which had been provided for them, and the Monastery of Mount St. Mary came into existence. Little can the new colony have imagined that, five years later, the anni- versary of the Festival of St. Potentiana would find them forsaking the vill of Bernoldswic and the very name of Mount St. Mary. Whether the woody slope in Airedale which so took the fancy of Abbot Alexander was, as the legend runs, 1 already known by the prophetic name of Kirkstall, or whether we are to believe the statement of the chronicler that it was first so named by the Abbot himself, must, for all the light I can throw on the question, remain a mystery. For the leading facts of the migration there is sufficient evidence : the details may be taken or left as the reader is minded. Alexander and his brethren lost no time in con- verting the vill of Bernoldswic into a hornets' nest. 1 The legend is from a MS. in the Bodleian, G. 9, fol. 129a. [28 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire From Serlo we only learn that they suffered much from cold and hunger, both because of the climate, and because, in the disturbed state of the kingdom, their goods were repeatedly plundered by robbers; and that at last, wearied out with these losses and privations, the)- obtained the consent of their founder to turn Mount St. Mary into a grange and remove t<> kirk-stall. But the venerable monk seems to have omitted from his narrative a somewhat important incident. There was at Bernoldswic an ancient and perhaps dilapidated parish church — antiqua nitnis ct ah dim fundata — to which were attached five parochial vills, viz. Bernoldswic, the two Mertons, Bracewell, and Stoke. From Bernoldswic, and its appurtenant members of Elwinsthorp and Brodene, the inhabitants were removed to make room for the monks. This departure from the Cistercian custom of appropriating solitary and uncultivated tracts, and becoming the pioneers of agriculture as well as i of religion, proved most disastrous. The parishioners assembled as of old to celebrate the feasts of the church ; and they were of course a panied by their priest and his secular clergy, we are not surprised to learn that " they were troublesome t" the monaster}- and to the monks who abode in the same." KIRKSTALL ABBEY, FROM THE RIVER K Kirk stall 131 Abbot Alexander was no mere dreamer. With a view to securing peace and quietness for his monks, he promptly levelled the church with the ground, amid the loud remonstrances of clergy and people. Even in the twelfth century such a high-handed proceeding could not pass unchallenged. One of the secular clergy, who was rector and parson {rector ct persona ecclesice), cited the Abbot and monks before the Metropolitan ; but, eventually, the case went up to the supreme court — the " sedes apostolica" — where the parson and parishioners of a Yorkshire parish had but little chance against the great Cis- tercian order. The monks, in short, prevailed, and their opponents were not only defeated but put to silence. " For it seemed holy and laudable that a church should fall, if so an Abbey might be built ; that of two goods the less should give place to the greater, and that the party which was most rich in fruits of devotion should prevail. And so, peace being restored, and the controversy set at rest, the brethren proceeded to promote by gentler measures the objects of their foundation." For five or six years the Monastery of St. Mary's continued its troubled and unprofitable existence ; but at last the Abbot, travelling on the business of the house, found, as it were by chance, the solution of his difficulties. In the deep shadow of a wooded 132 The Ruined Abbeys of ) r orkshire vale, he came upon certain men in a quasi-religious habit, and he soon found that they were living as devout men might have lived before the days of St. Benedict : a fraternity of hermits, if the expression may be tolerated, without organisation and without rule. The beaut}- of the place charmed the Abbot, and he turned aside to converse with the recluses. The story told by their spokesman, Seleth, was as f( 'Hows : lie had come from the south of England, alone, and guided only by a heavenly voice. "Arise, Seleth," it had seemed to say, "and go into the province of York, and seek diligently in the valley which is called Airedale for a place known as Kirk- wall, for there shalt thou prepare for a brotherhood a home where they may serve my Son." "And who," he asked, "is thy Son whom we must serve ? " "I am Mar_\-," was the answer; "and my Son is called Jesus of Nazareth, the Saviour of the world." So Seleth woke, and having pondered the vision, ■ his hope on the' Lord, and without delay left his hearth and home. The plan- was easily found, and when hi' had lived there alone for some days, eating only r< ' and herbs, he was joined by others, and the\- adopted the way of life of the brethren of Serath, Kirks tall 133 having all things in common and supporting them- selves by their toil. As the Abbot listened, he considered the attrac- tions and advantages of the valley — its flowing river and abundant timber for workshops. It seemed to him an altogether desirable place, and he accordingly began to gently admonish the brethren. Had they no fears for the safety and sanctification of their souls, poor masterless disciples and priestless laymen as they were ? He set before them a more perfect way and a higher type of the religious life, and so departed to his patron. De Lacy approved the plan, and persuaded William de Poictou to grant the lands in Airedale to the monks in perpetuity at the rent of five marks annually. Then the Abbot, having made sure of a more suitable place for his monastery, built a church in honour of the ever Virgin Mother of God, and such humble offices as were needful, and adopted for his monastery the name of Kirkstall from that day 1 forward. For thirty- five years did the abbacy of this most practical ascetic last, and in that time he began and finished the church and monastic build- ings. " Kirkstall Abbey," says Whitaker, " is a monument of the skill, the taste, and the perseverance 1 19th May 1 1 52. 134 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of a single man." Mr. Walbran discovered, from an instrument of Archbishop Murdac in the treasury of the Dean and Chapter of York, that, at the request of Abbot Alexander and the monks of Kirkstall, the two chapels of Bracewell and Mar ton were raised by the Archbishop to their present dignity of mother churches, each with its own parish. 1 This instrument is unfortunately not dated, but we ma>- hope it is the record of a really generous and disinterested reparation, made when the i^ood will of their old neighbours was no longer necessary to the peace and comfort of the monks. Alexander was succeeded by Ralph Hageth, of Fountains, a good monk but bad manager, in whose time the valuable Grange of Micklethwaite was lost to Kirkstall. The monaster} - seems to have sought to enforce its appeal to King Henry by actually, for a time, breaking up and dispersing ; and the Abbot hoped to soften the royal heart bj gifts of a golden chalice and a cop}' of the Gospels. But all was in vain ; and there was nothing for it but to return to Kirkstall and practise economy. Alexander, " true abbot in de< well as in name" though he w will hardly compare in saintliness either with the un- 1 " Statuimus qu de Bi ycewell et Marton sint flc in ,\i.i parochia." ■_VS\ XM mil usA^y-* 'iiPS' 1 / , , ^ : flflS Us H Wm >'''... ®» ; '^ i ~. k ■ it,,; u a H fa O « O 3 H Z w S3 CQ < < jt"' . Kirk stall 137 practical Hageth or with one or two of his successors, of whom brief mention must now be made. The fourth Abbot, for instance, Turgesius by name, was an ascetic of the true medieval type. Not only did he abjure shoes in the bitterest weather and clothe himself continually in hair-cloth, but, with that rare logic of the emotions which is so unanswerable in theory and so self- refuting in practice, he wept continually for his own and other men's sins and miseries, and refused to be comforted. " Through levity of heart and small care for our failings," says the author of the Imitatio, " we become insensible of the real sorrows of our souls ; and so oftentimes we vainly laugh when we have just cause to weep." Into this error Turgesius was not likely to fall. " In common conversation he could scarcely refrain from weeping. At the altar, he never celebrated without such a profusion of tears, that his eyes might be said rather to rain than to weep, and scarcely any other person could use the sacerdotal vestments after him." He was thus an early example of the class of Christians who will not or cannot realise that goodness is, after all, on the winning side ; and who miss the strain of subdued triumph which sounds through all the Bible, till it breaks into the rapture of the Apocalypse, the dim but not uncertain herald- 138 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire light of dawn, which, falling upon saintly brows, reveals them to us "as sorrowful vet alway rejoicing." For nine years Turgesius governed Kirkstall, and then retired to weep away his remaining years at Fountains. Two of his successors, Helias (1209) and Grim- stone (12S4 ), seem to have revived the businesslike traditions of Alexander ; and there remains an ex- cellent letter written by Grimstone from St. Sever in Gascony, whither he had gone to beg the inter- vention of King Edward I. between the monastery and its hungry creditors. Unfortunately the letter, which has been translated by Dr. Whitaker in his History of Craven, is too long for insertion in this place; and for the same reason we must conti ourselves with a few brief extracts from that which Grimstone's successor, John de Bridsall, addressed to the convent while en 1 on a similar mission. The latter savours less of the bursar and moo the priest, and in its wisdom and devout tone theo is certainly nothing to remind us that we are clo upon the date of Piers Plowman's Vision and The < anterbury Tales. •• B< loved," he begins, " we have written this letter in h from Canterbury, knowing that an a< 1 ounl of the success of journey will be pl< In the first p ur dear Kirks tall 139 brother who was present will inform you, that on the morrow of St. Lawrence we were met by letters from the King in a very threatening style, that we were apprised of robbers who laid wait for us in the woods, under a rock, and that we were bound, under penalty of forfeiting all our goods, to abide the King's pleasure. However, having been at length dismissed from his presence with honour, we proceeded on our way ; and notwithstanding the delay in London, arrived at Canterbury on Monday evening, ourselves, our servants and horses, being all well. We are not without hope, therefore, that our feeble beginnings may be followed by better fortune," etc. " For the time we commend you, dear brethren, to God, and our bodily safety to your prayers. But especially pray for the salvation of our soul, for we are not greatly solicitous if this earthly part of us be delivered into the hand of the wicked one, so that the spirit be saved in the day of the Lord, which we hope for through your intercession ; yet we should wish, if it be the will of God, to be committed to the earth by your hands, wherever you shall dispose. But know assuredly that if we return, who- ever appears to have been most humble in convei'sation and active in business during our absence, shall receive an ample measure of grace and recompense from God, and shall every hour be most affectionately regarded by us. " Ye know, dearly beloved, that worldly occupations such as we have long been entangled in for your sakes, are not without danger to the soul. But we derive great hopes from your compassion, seeing that we aim at no earthly advantage, nor consume the revenues of the monastery without cause. We commend you again to God and the Blessed Virgin." John Ripeley, twenty-seventh and last Abbot of Kirkstall, to whom fell, in November 1540, the detested task of surrendering his monastery to the Crown, is said to have been unable to tear himself 140 T/ic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire from the scene, and to have lingered out his remain- ing days in the Gatehou The room in which, according to this tradition, his last moments must have been spent now forms part of a private house, and the arches of the actual gateway have been closed, that its vaulted roof and massive walls may be available for the purposes of an entrance-hall and dining-room. On the whole, however, we may be thankful that the church and monastic buildings of Kirkstall have been left to the gentle iconoclasm of time and the natural beauty of decay. Wych-elms and ashes, self-sown, and sheltered by the mouldering walls, now soften and vary the general effect. Inside the church itself, and tin- Abbot's house, they rise unbidden and unreproved ; but above their tops and between their branches — cast, west, and south — are n the chimneys and smoke-wreaths of Leeds, and the air about them is darkened and tainted with strange fume-.' To the north rises the hill, and across its face winds the old approach to the Abbey, now intersected at right angles by a hard and it now road. The names of Vesper Gate and Vespers Lane are '-till remembered ; but in the 1 A ndei ill-- direction <>( Mr. S. John i rvat ion of the buildings. M - €te - ■• i ■'VfJ-:k:'i-,-4hi-> '.,■ •".'■. '.',;■ ill *o .< SR' : M %,&*'. 2»L-- r m mi*.* 0S9HT Hjti i ^ i3 fto£ - i S3 U En O < < z Ed H W 2= Ed CQ pq < 9s$f ■■■■ t 4 «-.» If - /■ v.- Kirkstall 143 trains which shriek and roar on both sides of the river no traveller needs to ask his way, or draw from old inhabitants the fading traditions of the place. We long, in vain, to be left alone with the ruin, if only for a silent half-hour, and we picture to our- selves how at night, when commerce sleeps and the pulse of industry beats feebly, the past must assert itself once more, and Kirkstall be as real as Leeds. Externally the Abbey is a singularly pure and perfect specimen of genuine Cistercian, and also of early transitional architecture. The round arch pre- vails throughout except where, as in the east window, later work has been substituted ; the small aisleless presbytery projects but little beyond the divided chapels of the transepts ; and the very ruins of the too ambitious tower, which fell a hundred years ago, proclaim that the foundations of the massive central pillars were never intended for so proud a burden. Neither western porch nor eastern chapel disguise the simple proportions of the original Latin cross, and the lanterns and turrets are the only additions which practically diminish the severity of the outline. On entering we find, of course, pointed arches in the nave and transepts ; but there is little beside the east windows of the presbytery and chapels that may not well have been the work of Abbot Alexander. 144 The Ruined < Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire In the second bay of the nave — both north and south — arc late and somewhat elaborate windows, inserted, doubtless, for the purpose of throwing additional light upon the altars placed against the "pulpitum," the position of which they thus serve to mark ; and here at Kirkstall, as in so many other churches, the roof has obviously been lowered, parti}- for economy of lead, and partly for the not unusual reason that when the ends of the rafters became rotten there was still enough sound wood for a lower pitch. The beautiful and remarkable western facade and the north-west doorway are the remaining features of special and obvious interest in tin- church, but th< are some points of exceptional importance- in the domestic buildings, particularly the chapter-house and infirmary, on which it will hereafter be necessary to make some remark VII KIRKSTALL AND ROCHE Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford in the time of Henry II, was a wit, and, like others of the secular clergy, a bitter enemy of all regulars, and of the Cistercians in particular. Both the wit and the bitterness may be seen in the following story : " One day, after the King had slept in a Cistercian house, the Abbot, in the morning, showed him all its costly glories, Walter Map being in attendance. When they came to the chapter-house, ' Sire,' said the Abbot, ' there is no place the devil hates so much as this. Here souls are reconciled, here our penances are performed, our offences punished.' ' No wonder,' said Map, ' that the devil hates the place where so many of his friends are whipped.' " x The position of the capitulum, or chapter-house, of a Cistercian monastery 2 is indicated usually by 1 Professor M orley's English Writers before Chancer. - The accompanying plan shows the Abbey buildings, not as they are now, but as they were first laid out in conformity with the unrelaxed L 146 The Ruined . Xbbeys of ) orkshire three — but at Kirkstall only by two — arches, in the east walk of the cloister. It was regarded almost as a part of the chinch ; and therein were buried, in early days, the abbots, patrons, and benefactors of the monastery. Here, too, elections were held, and processions begun ; and here, lastly, it is certain that a very summary discipline was performed. "I am chalenged and chiden in chapter-house, as I a child were" — this, and worse than this, is the complaint of Piers Plowman's briar, and the monks were no better off "After lauds we all came to receive discipline," says Jocelyn of Brakelond in his chronicle. The chapter-house of Kirkstall, though neither so large nor so beautiful as thai of Fountains, has a strange and somewhat weird interest of its own. The eastern half — including the whole projection beyond the east walls of the vestry, parlour, etc. — is an earl)- fourteenth-century addition to the original work of Abbot Alexander. The difference in the filling-in of the vaulting would alone suggest this to the most careless observer, but the masonry of the walls of the latter part is still more noteworthy. 1 rule. 'Ill'- (rater is shown as ii was before it- enlarge- it, and the original kitchen in the usual | 1 tin (rater, and 1 tin.- cloister. The infirmary, too, i- indicated a- ii lly built, with . . before the 1 ili\ ision into many small r<>": J") Ml iV 1 ^ < a ' *f ■••-- w — *i< "ill HI - -^vi -1^ s w H— ■} Kirkstall and Roche 149 These are literally built, to a great extent, of stone coffins, some of which have been filled up, while others are proved by various holes and fractures to be hollow. It is by no means surprising to find here and there in buildings of this period a sculp- I SAJfliSTT ANPSTAJflSTO PCfvTcr,. OOK CLOSCT S PARXOuRAnp SLYPE V STAl[\£ "TO Oon-Tcn.. 5* T^SSAGC TO INF^MAflY. b LAVATORV. 7 WARMIimC HOUSE 8 NEC ESSARluri HALL WITH SOLAR OVETA (O KITCHEN &<■■ WITH tHATR OVER tk£ Cistercian Abbeiy of Kirkstall, AS IT WAS iri THE. XII th CENTURY. Abbots' Hoi'SC . ,jutr tured coffin-lid unceremoniously worked in, but this wholesale and unblushing confiscation of the property of the dead is surely without parallel. The present solid and windowless eastern wall is an obviously late substitution for one pierced by two apertures, set in deeply recessed arches. 150 T/ic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire The changes and additions which have meta- morphosed the frater arc somewhat more obscure. But it may be safely affirmed that the original hall cannot, as has been sometimes stated, have run cast and west, because this would have been an intoler- able breach of Cistercian uniformity. Neither can the calcfactorium, or common wanning- house, have been west of the frater — the obvious situation for the kitchen. What has happened to the frater is in reality this. Originally it was perfectly normal. Then it was divided into two stories, of which the lower was used as a miscricordc. 1 The new kitchen to the south of the open yard, or garth, was the natural accompaniment of this alteration. Between the cellarium and the west walk of the cloister was a wide passage communicating directly with the church, and used, no doubt, by the cotwersi, whose intercourse with the outer world was neces- sarily more frequent than that of the fratres clerici. Similar passages exist at Beaulieu and Byland. 9 The arrangement seems to have been adapted from the original houses of Citeairx and Clairvaux. ee Mr. S. John II ope 1 " Report," which 1 ifirmed by • avation. - Mr. Hope has also found evidence of the original existence oi intains. Kirkstall and Roche 151 But it is time to say a few words about the infirmary, or, to use the monk's own name for it, " farmery." This was the building which it was the habit of the Cistercians to erect last of all ; and it was also the one in respect of which their usage underwent the most important change. The infirm- ary was not only the temporary refuge of the sick, but the permanent home of the old and feeble. The Cistercians differed from the unreformed Benedictines in demanding that the infirm should, as long as possible, continue to attend the services in the church, and they naturally attached less importance to the Infirmary Chapel ; but we should have ex- pected to find it, as in the Benedictine plan, under the same roof, and in direct communication with the main building, if only for the sake of those who were absolutely disabled. This, however, was not the case, and hence, probably, the failure of antiquaries, until very lately, to identify the infirmary at all. But at Kirkstall, as well as at Fountains, there is evidence of a process of change and development in the building at the extreme east so long known as the Abbot's Hall, precisely analogous to that which is known to have taken place in many Benedictine infirmaries. In both cases we start with a large hall, divided by columns into the semblance of a nave and i5- The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire aisles, 1 and in both there seems to have been, as cart- as the fourteenth century, an effort to make things more comfortable by partitioning off these aisles and dividing them into separate living rooms. At fountains, not only this hall, but the chapel and kitchen to the east of it, can be clearly traced, as well as a smaller hall communicating by a private staircase with the chapel, and very probably inhabited by the " Pater Abbas," on his visitations, when he is known to have lodged in the Infirmary. This system of visitation was, as has been ex- plained in a former chapter, a special feature of the Cistercian " Carta Caritatis," promulgated by Stephen Harding in 1119. Not the more, but perhaps all the less, on this account docs it escape the pitiless mocker\- of Walter Ma] "When the 'Pater Abba-,'" he says, in one of his poems, "proposes to visit hi- daughter i.e. a daughter-house of the order , he takes care to give ample notice, and then there is a running to meet him with bread and wine and fish, lie i- conducted into a building strewn with rushes and flowers, the (loth is laid, and, having washed his hand-, he recline- at the table. It is a day of no small expert I hen. to begin his inspec- tion he ride- to the Abbey, he enters the infirmary, 1 Vide plan. I ' i : W/r„>i i I „***jf ^gj-v i - 1 i ' ■ r own continuity ; and the fact that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future, ha- burst upon the minds of some mod thinkers with the for. <■ of a religion. It is good, indeed, for men and nations to sober the days of sunshine and cheer the nights of gloom by the Kirkstall and Roche 163 powers of retrospect and forecast, and to recognise, in much that to them is smooth and easy, and full of rest and peace, the outcome of another's conflict and reaping of his toil. " So we inherit that sweet purity For which they struggled, groaned, and agonised/' Scanty as are the ruins which now nestle in the green and flower-strewn valley at Roche, they still plead the cause of the past and protest against oblivion. " The wayfarer from Sheffield," says a recent writer, " cannot fail to remark that, as he approaches the Abbey, the face of the country is entirely changed. The red-tiled cottages, the roses with which they are entwined, the rich pastures and the marks of high cultivation which meet the eye on every side, bear witness, not only to the excellence of the soil and the care of a noble landlord, but also to the work and taste of those untiring men who, in the early periods of our history, were the pioneers of all the peaceful arts, and who have left the impress of their refinement on the places where they dwelt." x To destroy this continuity and obliterate this record, was the special function of the landscape- gardening of the eighteenth century. The traveller of to-day will not expect to find the '• very fair builded house all of freestone and every 1 Charters of Roche Abbey. By Sidney Oldall Addy, M.A. Shef- field, 1S78. 164 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire house vaulted with freestone and covered with lead," described by one Cuthbcrt Sherebrook ; but even the "venerable chasm and solemn thicket" visited by Walpole in [772, and pronounced by him "so overgrown that when one finds the spot one can scarce find the ruins," must have been preferable to the wholesale pulling down and covering up which, under the auspices of "Capability Brown," almost immediately followed. It is plain that the rock was no mere excuse for a name, but a feature of real importance in the site . for a little consideration will show that it must have almost touched, and very considerably darkened, the north transept of the church. Yet the winding valley, with its gentler southern slopes, its woods and running stream, was doubtless soon converted into a pleasant seclusion ; and the natural features of the scene are, in themselves, little inferior to those of fountains. But, alas for the antiquary who dreams of finding here rich treasures of monastii ruin ! A gatehouse of comparatively late date, and parts of the choir and transepts of the church, are all, or nearly all, that remain, where once was a (lunch at least 200 feet long by I OO feet broad (at the transepts), and a cloister-court, [80 feet by 125 feet, surrounded with stately halls and buildings of stone. Kirkstall and Roche 165 Here, as at Kirkstall, the nave had eight bays ; but the total length of the latter was greater by 20 feet, and its width by 1 8 feet at the transept; though in breadth of nave and aisles there is only a difference of a few feet. The transepts at Roche had each two eastern chapels in place of the three which we have seen at Kirkstall ; but in one respect it is probable that Roche was the more magnificent of the two. Neither the nave nor, it is supposed, the tower or transepts of Kirkstall were vaulted ; but at Roche the tower and transepts were, and the nave may well have been. On the south side of the presbytery, which was only $7 feet long, are three sedilia under canopies of later date, and on the north are the remains of a rich and lofty decorated canopy. The windows of the presbytery were round-headed ; and on the south side of the south chapel a round-arched window still exists, and beneath it a piscina, also round-arched ; but at the east of the chapels larger windows were substituted in the fourteenth century. The arches of the triforium were pointed, but those of the clerestory round, according to the usage of the Cistercian Transition. Whether the apportion- ment of round and pointed arches was strictly and exclusively guided by structural considerations, or 166 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire whether there was any theoretical objection to the adoption, for external use, of the newer style, seems to me a little uncertain. Perhaps, while the builder's needs and instincts were driving the Cistercian to adopt, for vaulting and other internal purposes, the more scientific construction, his conservatism as an ecclesiastical architect made it hard to shake himself free from the tradition of external symmetry and seemliness. The monastic buildings at Roche seemed to have crossed or overhung the stream at three points at least, and in this respect, among others, the situation may he compared with that of Fountains. Some distance due east of the kitchen-garth the stream, which here takes a north or north-east direc- i, has been diverted through a long range of buildings, of the end of which, commonly called the mill, considerable remains still exist. There i reason to think that we have here the ruins of the infirmary. Not, however, till the "covering up" of the landscape-gardener is cancelled by the spade 01 the e\ • -r, ' can we hope fully to repair, even in imagination, the " pulling down " for which, alas ! no il remedy is to be found. Then, and not till then, may we realise the work that, thank- t<> the monks 1 It is satisfactory to learn that tin- i 1890) being done. Kirkstall and Roche 167 of Newminster and the lords of Maltby and Hooton, was done in this valley in the " troublous times of ROCHE ABBEY anguish and rebuke," and dream that we see beneath the shadow of the venerated rock the majestic neighbour with which for centuries Maltby was i6S The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkshire familiar. Meanwhile, though there is neither speech nor language, the past is not silent, but along the ages, in a continuity that refuses to be broken, one day tcllcth another and one night certifieth another, and even here, from the grave of " lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties," there rises among common things and modern men a presence as of Lazarus, solemn with memories of death, and dazed with glimpses of eternity. VIII JERVAULX At the head of Wensleydale, and eastward of the little town of Hawes, rises the Yore. The torrents from the neighbouring fells are the nursing-mothers of the infant stream in whose breast is to be mirrored so much of romance, of history, and of religion. Changeful and petulant — a rill in the drought, a river after rain — it passes from the broad-based hills and quiet moors to a richer and a tamer land, till at last it is mated with the Swale at Borobridge, and in the dignified importance of the Ouse we forget the wild wanderings of the unwedded Yore. But mean- while many a lonely force has lashed and swelled the stream, and many an unforgotten scene has been enacted on its bank. At Bolton Castle the tears of Mary Queen of Scots have fed it, and at Middleham it has quenched the thirst of the King- maker. I TO 77/f Ruined Abbeys oj Yorkshire Below this " middle " dwelling, between Aysgarth and Masham, there has come in from Coverdale the little stream that gave its name to Coverham Abbey and to Miles Coverdale, the forerunner of our modern " Revisers." And again, a little lower, at the point where Wensleydale proper is said to end, the monks of Jervaulx watered their famous horses at the Yore and pastured them in the rich meadows at its side Thenceforth the valley widens and the hills sub- side, but still the wooded banks of Clifton and the purple of the more distant Swinton Moors lend fresh beauties to its course, and far away beyond Masham, and Tanfield, and Norton -Conyers, our interest is revived by the ancient town and minster of Ripon. To-day, however, it is neither at Bolton nor at Ripon that we must pause, but at Jervaulx. There we shall find yet one more of the Cistercian houses of Yorkshire — one more witness to the vast wealth, and toil, and skill that Yorkshiremen once lavished on efforts and ideals which even history has alm< learnt to forget. There is a curious book published at Dijon, under the title of Lei Monuments Primitifs de la A'- Cistercienne. These Monuments consist, in fact, ol Jervatilx 1 7 1 the " Regula" of St. Benedict and the "Carta Cari- tatis," " Consuetudines," and " Kalendarium " of the Cistercian order. Like those other Monuments which, with the help of Mr. Brunet-Debaines, we have been considering, they have little meaning for the passing stranger ; but, like them, they hold the key to a long- locked past, and will yield to seeing eyes and hearing ears true glimpses and a living voice. In book and building, in life and architecture, we shall be struck by the close linking of the domestic and the ecclesi- astical ; but here the resemblance ceases. The religious life — so taught the monks — demands the whole man and all his steps and phases to the grave and beyond it. Of a common and daily eating and drinking, and doing all to the glory of God ; of a religion of the body which can ennoble even the " base necessities " of flesh and blood, they could not conceive ; nor could they reach to the full meaning of a labour which is prayer, and a suffering which is better still ; but they knew that a jealous God would have all or nothing, and they patiently made rules for those incidents of mortality from which they could not escape, minutely stamping with repression and contempt so much of man as there was no room for in their philosophy. In monastic architecture, on the contrary, all is seemly and noble. The mingling I 72 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of rules for vigils, or for vespers, with those for cook- in- and dining ; of instructions for periodical shaving and blood-letting with orders for extreme unction and masses for the dead— all this has its counterpart in the imperceptible transition from church and chapter-house to hall and lavatory, and the common use of the cloister as at once the vestibule to the church and the home of the monks. Between massive pillars and through dcep-splaycd doors we catch glimpses of stairs, of aumbreys, of the book- case, or "armarium commune" — the signs and symbols of the life of man ; and the solemn vaulting ■ >! aisle and cloister becomes half domestic as it leads on the sight to passages and nooks, and gleamings of a bold, intruding sun. But the contrast which is so marked in the book is altogether absent from the building. We do not pass from vaulted aisles to sheds and hovels. In stone halls, as seemly as the builders' art could make them, were the poor, hungry bodies fed and the wear)' limbs laid to sleep; the vrvy kitchens were massive and pi< turesque, and wise design and honest work were nol thought out of place in even humbler offii And this, which adds so greatly to the beauty and interest of monastic ruins, might easily lead lis into hopelessly wrong imaginings of monkish life it' Jervaulx 173 we had not other records to check and guide us. From these we learn what coarse and humble fare was served from the vast kitchen to the noble hall, and what scanty and comfortless sleep was permitted in the imposing length of the well-built dormitory. Of the sleeping accommodation of the unreformed Benedictines we have the following description in the Rites of Durham : "A faire large house, where all the monnks and the novices did lye, every monncke having a little chamber of wainscott, verie close, severall by themselves, and the wyndowes towardes the cloyster, every wyndowe serving for one chambere, by reasonne the particion betwixt every chamber was close wains- cotted one from another, and in every of there wyndowes a deske to supporte there bookes for there studdie. In the west syde of the said dorter was the like chambers, and in like sort placed with their wyndowes and desks towards the Fermery and the water, the chambers being all well boarded under foute. The novices had theire chambers severall by himselfe in the south end of the said dorter, adjoyning to the foresaid cham- bers, having eight chambers on either side, every novice his chamber severall to himself, not so close nor so warme as the other chambers, nor having any light but what came in at the foreside of their chambers, being all close both above and on either side. In either end of the said Dorter was a foursquare stone, wherein was a dozen cressets wrought in either stone, being ever filled and supplied by the cooke as they needed to give light to the moncks and novices when they rose to their mattins at midnight and for there other necessarye uses." But from this type the Cistercian dormitory must in many respects have diverged. In the first place, i;4 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire they were not a literary order, and the special ar- rangements for books and desk may well have been dispensed with. But from No. 72 of the " Con- suetudines " other differences may with certainty be inferred. The partitions of " wainscott," for instance, cannot have existed, since it is ordered that, " in dressing and undressing, they are to be careful and seemly, lest they should appear naked;" and there is a further curious direction as to the precise manner in which they are to get into bed. 1 As we stand thus among the ruins of Jervaulx, with the Dijon book in our hands for reference and 1 omment, the abbot, prior, cellarius, portarius, sacrista, monks, lay brothers, hired servants, all become real to us: the white procession forms in the chapter- house, or streams at night from the dimly-lighted dormitory into the solemn church, or in the cloisters we see brother washing tin- feet of brother or shaving his beard and tonsure,' or all together sit and wait for the welcome knocking by which the prior or his deputy summons them to the refectory. 1 •• Nullus ii. nda be performed without special invitation. The ml- rious thai [ am tempted to quote it. (" Consuetudim I ' I : "Infra di nati\ itatem domini, quinquagesimam, pascha, pentecosten, festum beat Jervaulx 177 And so beneath the veil of seeming uniformity the human forms and individual hearts begin to assert themselves ; and one cowled figure is known as a repentant libertine, another as an innocent and childlike dreamer, and a third as a fierce old warrior with battered body and bloodstained soul. Yet for all there is one system, one garb, one standard, one relentless round of discipline and prayer. " It is good for us to be here," said St. Bernard, " for here a man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more quickly, walks more needfully, rests more safely, dies more happily, is cleansed (in Purgatory) more speedily, is rewarded more abundantly." And what St. Bernard said must surely be true, whether for soldier, libertine, or saint. But there came a time when the voice of the " Doctor Mellifluus " ceased to charm, and another spirit had the mastery in England. On the 8th of June 1537 one Arthur Darcy wrote as follows: nativitatem sancte marie solemnitatem omnium sanctorum, tondencli et radendi sunt fratres. Coci calefaciant et deferant aquam in claustrum. Pectines, forcipes, rasoria et affilatorias custos eorum acuet et preparet. Fratres tondeant quibus jusserit Abbas. Tonsi alterutrum radant, et in claustro, proeter infirmos qui infirmitorio sunt. Rasura corone fiat non exigua tonsura per desuper aures. Nullus nisi iiruitatus aliquem radere presn?nat, vel se velle facere signet. Nullus vero invitatus audeat refutare. Sigaum autem radendi alter alteri non faciat, nisi post tabulam pulsatam." N 178 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire " Ytt shall like your honorable lordship to be advertysed, ytt I was wt my lord lewtenant at ye suppression of Gervaix ; wch howse wtin the gate is covered holly wt leadds, and her is one of the fayrest chyrches yt I have seen, fayre medowe, and ye ryver running by ytt, and a great demayn. The Kyng's hyenes is att great charge with his stoods of mares at Thornbury anil other places, whych are fyne grounds, and I thinke yt at Gervaix and the graynges incident, with the help of ther gret hardy commons, ye Kyn's hyenes, by good ouer- seers, shold have ther the most best race that shold be in England, hard and sownd of kynd, for surely the breed of Gervaix for hors was the trydd breed in the north. Ye stallyons and mares well sortyd, I thinke in no realme shold be found the lyke to them : for ther is hardy and good hye grounds foi the summer and in wynter woodes and lowe grownds to fire them. My lord, by my lord lewtenant, I have restitutyon off rett part of my goods at Coverham. From Gervaix I w< to Sallay," etc. etc. It was in the "hardy ami live grownds" at Fors, near Murbcck, that the monks of Jervaulx were first established, and they had then no "w< and lowe ground-," for the winter. The place was afterwards known as the "Dale Grange" and the "Grange;" and the historian of Richmondshirc tells ns that, me recent alterations having been made in a barn, he discovered "one round-headed light, a genuine remnant of the original building," and that there still remained in the wall a single trefoil window, from which he inferred that the monks of Jervaulx. out of erence for the place of their Origin, maintained a JERVAULX ABBEY Jcrvaulx 181 small cell on the site long after their removal to more fertile and more sheltered scenes. How and whence the monks arrived at Fors is recorded at somewhat tedious length in the Byland Register. The story is briefly as follows : In the reign of Stephen one Akar Fitz-Bardolph, a feudatory of Alan, Count of Brittany and Earl of Richmond, of whom he held vast estates in York- shire, gave to one Peter de Ouincy, serving God as a monk and being withal a skilful leech, and to certain other monks from Savigny, a parcel of land in Wandesleydale. Farther back than this we cannot go. No one seems to be able to tell us how Peter de Quincy and his brethren came to be in England at all, or how they became acquainted with Akar Fitz-Bardolph, or whether the said Peter had earned the gratitude of his patron, like a hero of TJic Arabian Nights, by his skill in medicine. At any rate we first come upon the monks as they are engaged in raising a simple and unpretentious building, which they call first the Fors Abbey, then Wandesleydale, then the Abbey of Charity, and finally, " appropriately to the running waters and the situation," Joreval — the Abbey of the Vale of lire or Yore. Two things, . however, hampered and distressed the monks in their 1 82 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire new settlement. First, there was the difficulty of securing for themselves a recognised status in the Cistercian system ; and secondly, there were serious drawbacks to the site. " The situation," says Whitaker, " was unpromis- ing, high in the valley, cold and exposed to fogs, and, therefore, though not unfit for pasturage, ill adapted to the ripening even of barley and oats, for wheat was then rarely cultivated even in the low districts north of the Trent." This latter evil was ultimately remedied by Alan, Count of Richmond, and his son Conan, who, besides confirming the original grants of Fitz-Bardolph, bestowed on the monks of Jcrvaulx, first, "a great pasture of W'an- dcslcydale," and then a " vast uncultivated tract." Both father and son, in fact, took a warm interest in the monastery, and the former expressly commanded Brother Peter to let him know when he was about to begin building operations, that he might himself be there t Accordingly, when all was ready, Peter made his way to the ( lount, who, coming to the scene of action, called by name upon four or five of the knights who accompanied him, and said with a pleasant smile, as one in sport, " We have all wide lands and great pos- sessions ; now, therefore, let us with our own hands fe?'va?ilx 183 be helpers and builders of this house in the name of our Lord, and let each of us contribute land or rent for the permanent endowment l and support of the part which he has built." To which hint some of them responded well enough, while others insisted upon terms and con- ditions. So it came to pass that the first wooden makeshift and apology for a church was run up, to wit, in the year 1 1 4 5 ; of which, when Roger de Mowbray, the devout founder of Byland, heard, he could not be happy without a share in the prayers and spiritual benefactions of these monks of Savigny, but, with great devotion and generosity, gave the said Brother Peter, by charter, some land belonging to his domain of Masham. Not long afterwards, Count Alan went to visit his estates in Brittany, and, coming to Savigny, told the Abbot how Peter and his companions had started a monastery near his castle of Richmond in England. The Abbot of Savigny was far from receiving this intelligence with unmixed satisfaction, and when the Count courteously made over to him the new founda- tion, he accepted it with undisguised reluctance and 1 It is perhaps worth noticing that the word " eleemosyna," which I have here rather freely translated " endowment," is simply the original form of our English word "alms." [84 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire a resolve, apparently, to be rid of it at the earliest opportunity. But Peter's heart was in the matter, and he wrote again and again to entreat the Abbot to send "a convent" from Savigny, with no better result, however, than a sharp letter calling him a fool for his pains, because he had begun an abbey without the advice of the house of Savigny. For the " Pater Abb bethought him of the dangers, toils, and failures which had befallen his monks in different parts of England, and how he was often urged to recall them; and so he openly swore a great oath that nothing should induce him to send a convent to Jervaulx, and he wished he were well rid of Count Alan's gift. This letter vexed and discouraged Peter and his companions, but did not shake their holj purpose. At last, in the tenth or twelfth year oi King Stephen — as some affirm — it happened that the Abbot of Byland went to Savigny to attend a neral chapter. Peter, hearing of his intended journey, begged him to be the bearer of a letter, and to intercede personally with the Abbol of Savigny on behalf of the "new plantation." To make a L • iry short, the result of this appeal was that the Abb ' [uarera or Quarr, in the I le ol V, ij lit | was ordered to visit Fors and ascertain whether the place was really capable of supporting a monastery. < X B Jervaulx 187 If his report was satisfactory, the new foundation was to be made over to Savigny's "younger daughter" of Byland ; if otherwise, Peter was to hold it as a sort of agent or trustee for the parent house. When Peter, in the presence of his friends, Brother Conan and Brother Himbert, and of Matthew, a monk of Savigny, opened the sealed letter which the Abbot of Ouarera brought, and read these proposals, there was a brief consultation. Matthew advised that the estate was not sufficient for a monastery, and had better be handed over to Savigny, but Peter and his friends, after all they had gone through, would not hear of this. So the end of it was that they all came to the Abbots of Ouarera and Byland in the church, and Peter said : " Blessed be God, within a few years from our first establishment we have now five carucates under the plough, forty cows with their followers, sixteen mares with their foals, the gift of Earl Conan, five sows with their litters, three hundred sheep, about thirty hides in the tannery, wax and oil which will supply our lights for two years ; and I am very certain that we shall be able to raise a competent supply of ale, cheese, bread, and butter, and to sustain a regular convent out of such beginnings, until it shall please God to provide better for them." Fuller remarks somewhere in his Church History that the Cistercians were rather farmers than monks. The accusation is certainly too sweeping, but it is i nx The Ruined . Xbbeys of Yorkshire plain that if Peter de Quincy had not been a thrifty and practical man, Jervaulx Abbey would never have existed. Though Peter and his two brethren and one conversus at once "made profession" in the church, it was not till St. Bernard himself had interposed and the decree of the Chapter of Savigny had been confirmed by a council of the order at Citeaux that the arrangement was absolutely and irrevocably clenched. Roger, Abbot of Byland, did his part by summoning a chapter, and, "with a long and deep sigh," nominating John of Kinstan as abbot of the new house; whereupon the monk's raised him in their arms and carried him to the high altar, saying, "Thou art Abbot of Joreval." Soon afterward, Abbot John, having been solemnly bl after the vigilia nocturnce, set forth with twelve monks for Joreval. Of the manner of his journey, and how he " had Christ Himself lor a guide," we have lift ourselves but little space to discourse. As the new abbot ted tin- first night in a certain village, he had a dream. lie thought he was once more Starting »m Ib'land, and as he Kit the cloister In- saw in the mid I ol it a very noble woman in seemly raiment. In her left hand she led a beautiful boy, whose face shone like the moonlight. And the boy Jervaulx 189 gathered a fair branch from a tree in the cloister, and so vanished with the lady. By and by John and his monks found themselves in a place where they were altogether shut in with thorns and great rocks, and could neither go forward nor back. Just as they were beginning to despair, and each to call on the other for help, John said, " Let us repeat the Hours and the Gospel " ; and as they finished, suddenly the lady and the boy appeared to them. And John said, " O fair lady, tender and sweet, what do you with your son here in the desert ? " And she answering that she was often in desert places, after some further speech, John begged her to be a guide to him and his monks. But the lady, saying she must not then stay, commended them to her son. So the boy guided them cheerfully, having in his hand the branch he had gathered at Byland ; and the monks followed him through rough and toilsome ways, and felt it not. And countless numbers of small white birds, no larger than sparrows, hovered round the branch and sang, over and over again, the hymn, " O all ye works of the Lord ! " At last they came to a very rough and neglected place, and the boy went into the midst, and, planting there the branch round which the birds were singing, said, " Here, after a certain time, 190 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire shall God be worshipped and invoked." And so he vanished. And when Abbot John awoke, the monks went on their way and passed at dawn through the midst of another village. And as the people began to peer at them from their lattices, John hid himself in the shadow to listen to their talk. And one looked at the moon and the stars, and the signs and aspects of the heavens, and said : "In a happy time do these good men make their move, for in thirty or forty years they shall be so established that they shall not afterwards be shaken, but go on growing and in- creasing." Thus, in the mirror of their dreams and belli may we trace some faint and shadowy reflections the men who built for a foredoomed system such imperishable home At Jervaulx, indeed, the church, the great central thought and dominant feature of the whole, has been levelled with the { ; . As the children of tho who slew the prophets were forward to adorn their ton a later generation has come with flowers to brighten and fences to surround the limb- and remnants of a murdered art. The cloister-court of vanlx is now a tennis-ground, and the precinct t" the north and west a garden, but the park which Jervaulx 1 9 1 spreads along the valley of the Ure still witnesses to the silent toil which cleared and cultivated the tangled wilderness. The ground-plan of the church has been carefully excavated and well preserved, and a single altar in the north transept and a fine door- way at the south-west of the nave remain in situ and fairly perfect. The south wall of the cloister, clearly a modern substitution, has no signs of lavatory or entrance to frater and offices. The frater has utterly vanished, the building wrongly so called being perhaps the common warming-house. East of this is another room with two large fireplaces. A kitchen, with one fireplace, is south of the yard, as at Kirkstall and Roche. There are indications of a large hospitium west of the cellarium, and ample materials for study in the infirmary and so-called Abbot's house, as well as in the chapter- house. In fact, a careful and accurate plan of this abbey, made in the full light of recent research, is sorely needed. From the dreamer, John of Kinstan (or De Kyngeston), to Adam of Sedburgh, hanged in 1537 for complicity in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a long array of abbots maintained, in uneventful succession, the dignity of the house and the reputation of its horses and its cheese. The wooden structures at "i: The Ruimd Abbeys of Yorkshire which Peter de Quincy laboured and Count Alan jested with his friends gave way to the more solid buildings which Abbot Roger of Byland planned and set a-going between Christmas and the Purification, but thenceforth no great architect seems to have arisen at Jervaulx. The end of the twelfth or beginning of the thir- teenth century must have seen the completion of the "fair church," which Darcy so eagerly destroyed, and the chapter-house with its pillars of gray marble from Nidderdale. And here, too, ends that which may be almost called the Cistercian episode in archi- tecture. "The Gothic architecture" says Mr. Kuskin, " arose in massy and mountainous strength, axe-hewn and iron-bound, block heaved upon block by the monk's enthusiasm and the soldier's force; and cramped and stanchioned into such weight of grisly wall as might bury the anchoret in darkness and Lt back the utmost storm of battle." It is with this ' '■ that we arc concerned rather than with that later one in which "gradually as that monkish enthusiasm le more thoughtful, and as the ind of war became more and more intermittent beyond the gates of the convent or the keep, the ne pillar grew slender and the vaulted roof grew Jervaulx 193 light, till they had wreathed themselves into the resemblance of the summer woods at their fairest ; and of the dead field-flowers, long trodden down in blood, sweet monumental statues were set to bloom for ever beneath the porch of the temple or the canopy of the tomb." O IX MOUNT GRACE PRIORY PROBABLY the least known, but certainly not the least interesting, of the monastic ruins of Yorkshire is the Carthusian Prion-, which stands a mile or so north of the " Beck," between the Ilamblcton and Cleveland Hills. "The Priory of Mount Grao says the local guide, "is situated about eight miles E.N.E. of Northallerton. The nearest railway stations are Welbury and Trcnholmc Bar, which are respectively about four miles distant, but no convey- ances can be obtained at either." At one time a sportsman, at another a countrywoman, will come and go, but the few tourists who make their way to the Priory arrive mostly by road from Northallerton. Indeed, the e -mall stations on the wild moor seem to feel the spell of older and more stagnant days, and perhaps no one who has not wailed at Pilmore for a train has fully realised how powerless a railway Mount Grace Priory 195 and even a junction, may be to enliven such an utter desolation, or disturb so deep a peace. But far more strange and impressive than the stillness which now reigns beneath the shadow of " Black Hamble- ton " must have been the forced and painful silence of the peopled cloister and the clustered cells which at the end of the fourteenth century testified to the devotion and liberality of Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent. Three hundred years had elapsed since Bruno promulgated in the desert of the Chartreuse a monastic reform more thorough and relentless even than that of Robert, Bernard, and Stephen Harding. The extreme austerity of the Carthusian rule had, we must suppose, left the field to the more popular Cistercians, and Witham and Henton, both in Somersetshire, were long the only houses of the order in England. But between 1344 and 14 14 no less than seven Carthusian priories were founded, and among them, in 1397, "The House of Mount Grace of Ingleby," dedicated to St. Mary and St. Nicholas. Thomas Holland was then Duke of Surrey, and the favoured and trusted nephew of the King. But when, only two years later, Richard II was deposed, the Duke became once more Earl of Kent, and the rich and powerful patron of the Carthusians was tq^ The Ruined * Xbbeys of Yorkshire transformed into an impotent rebel, and finally suffered as a traitor. So the " Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady of Mount Grace," as it seems to have been mostly called, was left unfinished, and the monks uncertain as to their title to those far-off midland and southern lands at Hinchley, Warham, and Carisbrookc, which the deposed monarch had granted to his favourite. At last, however, in 1440, Henry VI confirmed the original grants, and building operations were resumed and soon completed. " Sancta et singulares" — saintly and singular, in- deed, were the observances which had won the admiration of the luckless Duke of Surrey. Not in the fast of eight months out of twelve, the refusal of meat even to the sick, the substitution of flannel for linen in bedding as well as clothes, lies the peculiar hardship of the Carthusian rule, but rather in that which the ruins now before us so vividly recall — the ilation of each monk in his own little hut and walled garden, the silence enjoined even on the ' ted festivals when the common refectory was used, the ingenuity of self-torture which turned at a sharp angle the aperture in the wall lest the hands or face of the bringer of the daily pittance should cheer the solitary by touch or look. Did not even o a u o z o o H U O Z < K H Z < « H Z W u H 0< O Mount Grace Priory 199 Elijah see the ravens in his " eremus " ? Yet it was for this rule, in all its stern integrity, that the inmates of our London Charterhouse were ready to die. It is instructive to see how their extirpation by Crom- well and his master strikes a very modern historian. "In the general relaxation of the religious life the charity and devotion of the brethren of the Charterhouse had won the reverence even of those who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn resistance, they had acknowledged the Royal Supremacy, and taken the oath of submission prescribed by the Act. But by an infamous construction of the statute, which made the denial of the Supremacy treason, the refusal of satisfactory answers to official questions as to a conscien- tious belief in it was held to be equivalent to open denial. The aim of the new measure was well known, and the brethren prepared to die. In the agony of waiting, enthusiasm brought its imaginative consolations : ' When the Host was lifted up there came, as it were, a whisper of air which breathed upon our faces as we knelt ; and there came a sweet, soft sound of music' They had not long, however, to wait. Their refusal to answer was the signal for their doom. Seven swung from the gallows ; the rest were flung into Newgate, chained to posts, in a noisome dungeon, where, ' tied and not able to stir,' they were left to perish of gaol-fever and starvation. In a fortnight five were dead, and the rest at the point of death, 'almost dispatched,' Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, 'by the hand of God, of which, considering their behaviour, I am not sorry.'" 1 So perished, without a thought of yielding, the champions of English Carthusianism. 1 Green's English People. 200 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Let us see what these ruins can tcacli us of their brethren in Cleveland. Leaving the road at right angles, we make straight for the base of the woocUd hills, till our track brings us up short before a highly picturesque but rather desolate farmhouse, In the construction of which, though an inscription over the ir gives the date of 1654, the fifteenth and seven- nth centurie tn to have gone shares. Right and left stretches a long range of buildings, through which we pass by a gate-house into a large irregular- Mount Grace Priory 201 shaped garth with some appearance of a cloister-court. On the north are the ruins of a by no means imposing church, and north of this again a doorway in a wall reveals glimpses of an inner court. This, indeed, is the normal Carthusian plan. A church, simple and aisleless, with transepts, short nave, and more considerable choir, and on either side an enclosure ; the larger, and in this case the southern, given up in part or altogether to the guest- houses and more public offices and buildings of the monastery, the smaller constituting the cloister of the monks, and surrounded with tiny two-storied houses and gardens, in front of which is a continuous " pentice." Turning to the left on entering the outer court, and passing along the back of the range of buildings already referred to as a farmhouse, we find, in the north-west corner, an unmistakable kitchen, beyond which again are two massive buttresses against a blank wall. Eastward, and beyond the doorway to the inner cloister, we come to the nave of the church. This is so short that it forms, with the transepts and choir, a reversed Latin cross — the choir, instead of the nave, being the long arm. Immediately east of the transept are the remains of the tower, through which, by a rather narrow passage under lofty arches, 2o: The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire the choir is readied. The entire absence of aisles is significant of the simplicity of ritual which admitted no processions. Only the north wall of the choir remains, though there arc sufficient indications of masonry on the south. East and south of the church, at a short distance, there seem to be traces of cells and gardens like those which surround the inner cloister. They were apparently four in number, two on the cast, where the cells must have been, so to speak, " semi-detached," and two on the south, where the garden intervened in the more normal way. The rest of the eastern side of the court was screened from the stream and the rising hill by a wall and passage communicating with the southern hospitium. At the north-east corner of the church was, perhaps, the chapter-house ; and abutting against the north walls of the transept and nave arc re- mains of what may, with more certainty, be called the prior's hou e. But the mo I interesting part of the monastery has yet to be noticed. On the outer ide of the north wall of the prior's house is an undeniable lavatory, which, though not situ- ated like those of the Cistercians close to the en- trance of a refe< tory, does yet mark the fact that we arc now in the cloister of the monks — the scene oi their daily life and occasional ablutions. Standing X DOOR LEADING FROM THE OUTER COURT TO THE GREAT CLOISTER AT MOUNT GRACE PRIORY Mount Grace Priory 205 with our backs to this lavatory and looking north, we shall have, right and left, as well as in front of us, the ruins of the fourteen separate cells in each of which a monk, more eremite than coenobite, once sought to train his soul to look only towards heaven. The minuteness with which the scheme of these remarkable dwellings can be discerned is, after all, the feature of primary interest in the ruin. With the help of a very careful drawing, and some more than probable conjectures of Mr. Middleton's, we may reconstruct, almost in detail, the strange shell which the Carthusian law formed around the individuals of its species. At Burgos we may see the survivors of the race, at Grenoble we may brood over its cradle ; but neither Miraflores nor the Grande Chartreuse will wholly supersede the study of this Yorkshire ruin, where no later day has endeavoured with self- conscious art to simulate or to embalm the past. Let us take at random a single cell. We shall find that the allowance of space to each monk is tolerably liberal. The actual building measures, on the outside, about 25 feet by 28 feet ; and occupies, roughly speaking, a fourth part of an enclosed square, the remainder of which is devoted to garden, the house being in a corner with a frontage to the cloister, and having the garden on 20G The Ruined . Xbbeys of ) 'orkshire two sides of it in the shape of an L. Along the remaining part of the cloister frontage there runs, inside the high wall of the garden, a passage covered with a pentice ; and a similar structure connects a door at the back of the building with an aperture in the corner of the garden wall — away from the cloister and towards the stream. This aperture was once wrongly supposed to be an exit to the running water and the open country ; but it is now clear that it was only a recess, con- nected by quite other relations with the drainage of the stream. In its two garden frontages the house has alto- gether four low windows, and a door communicates with each of the above-mentioned covered passagi and another — strictly closed —with the cloister. In the corner between this last door and the return wall of the house is the hatch through which the recluse was {a\. Starting in a straight line from the outer for cloister) wall, this ingenious aperture shortly turns at right angles, and debouches in the splay of tin- neighbouring doorway. Towards the ; it is still obviously rebated as for a shutter. Immediately on the right, as you enter from the cloi ter, are the newel and other indications of e; but, unfortunately, nothing remains to Mount Grace Priory 207 indicate the plan of the upper floor. To the left was probably a passage leading to the front-garden door and covered way. In the latter is a niche, as if for a lamp. The inner part of the house seems to have been divided, by wooden partitions, into three rooms — perhaps bedroom, 1 day room, and a sort of pantry. One only — the supposed day room — contains a fireplace. This room also communicates with the second covered passage and the " recess." Such, with but little variation, are the fifteen cells and gardens which surround the monks' cloister at Mount Grace. The enclosure is by no means rect- angular, and not even an exact parallelogram. The gardens consequently differ slightly in size and shape ; that at the north-east corner, for instance, beinsr lone and having its outer angle acute. The branches of the same stream which partially surrounds the outer court, flow round three sides of the inner ; and beyond the water, to the east, rises the steep and thickly- wooded hill. It should be observed for the benefit of genuine antiquaries that on each side of the doors 1 The analogies of Pavia and, I am told, of S. Maria degli Angeli at Rome are in favour of the upper floor being the sleeping-room of the monks. There must, however, one would think, have been more space than could be needed for this purpose. At Miraflores Mr. Street speaks of two rooms upstairs. Unless the lay-brothers acted as housemaids, these monks must have found themselves rather over-housed. 208 '/Vic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of the cells arc, or were, escutcheons, those on the cast wall being larger than those on the others. Among these larger escutcheons arc the arms of Gascoigne and of Scroopc, Archbishop of York. This Archbishop was of the old type of political and warlike Churchmen. Three years after the defeat and death of Hotspur, he conspired with the elder Percy against King Henry, and paid the penalty of unsuccessful rebellion. It must not be supposed cither that the cells are all in equally good preserva- tion, or that any one of them is so perfect as to exhibit every detail that has been described. It is with them as with the abbeys among which we have been travelling — what is lacking in one must be supplied from another. This, indeed, is the true secret of the antiquary's joy, and the key to his mystery. He is one of those " sad friends of truth " of whom Milton spoke, who, " imitating the careful search that [sis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them." lie knows, too, that he "has not found them all, nor ever shall do ;" but, because no living impulse or creative thought can wholly die, he still strives to register in the vast museum of human history that which has helped to mould and make us as we arc. Mount Grace Prioiy 209 One curious attribute or accident of the Carthusian was his devotion to gardening. A recent traveller in Spain sums up his impressions of Miraflores, with somewhat contemptuous brevity, in these words : " Every monk has a cell, a bedroom, and a garden to himself, for silence and solitary confinement are the rule of the order, instead of sociability and use- fulness to their fellow- creatures. 'Mais il faut cultiver son jardin.'" 1 Yes, they were the first and greatest gardeners, but they could produce great architects and bishops too, for was not St. Hugh of Lincoln a Carthusian ? And while we wonder at the fruitless austerity of the cloister of the monks, it is but fair to remember that larger cloister through which we have so lately passed. Here, in the ample accommodation for the wayfarer, the poor, the fugitive, the sick, is the great link between the two elements of worship and service, which, from age to age in varying proportions, have been and will remain essen- tial to religion. Still it is only too true that in the original conception of the Carthusian rule there was something of that morbid desire of isolation which was the really grave blemish of medieval monasticism. In the early anchorites this tendency was probably at its worst, in the Dominican and Franciscan ideal 1 Holidays in Spain, by F. R. M'Clintock. P 210 TJic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire it was almost wholly absent. Between the two comes the ordinary monasticism of which the Benedictines are the type. But the Carthusians were not Bene- dictines, though they are often spoken of as if they were, and they have in them, as we have seen, more of the hermit than of the coenobite. Thus the salva- tion of their own souls was declared to be the object of their retreat, and they seem to have at first dis- couraged poor strangers ; spending their so-called superfluities by preference on the needy of their own neighbourhood. In the same spirit they recited the minor canon- ical hours each in his own cell at the sound of the chapel bell, assembling only for matins and vespers, except on feast-days, when all their services were in the church. All the more remarkable is the appearance in politics and art of the one English Carthusian whose name still lingers in the Calendar of our Church. In that neglected and patiently protesting docu- ment the name of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, stands, blacklettered against the 17th November, to be read by those who never heard of Bruno or asked the meaning of the Charterhouse. From the midst of these silent worshippers, with their one silver chalice and silver tube for cucharistic z Mount Grace Priory 213 wine, their aisleless church and meagre ritual, comes forth the great Gothic builder whose monument is Lincoln Cathedral. From the midst of the petty and vexatious rules, the weekly flagellations, the system of signs — "rustic and not facetious or wanton" — in place of speech, comes the opponent of King Richard I. on behalf of the constitution and liberties of England. And the same man who said to his monks, " Eyes on your plates, hands on the table, ears to the reader, and heart to God," said to Hubert, who demanded in the King's name contributions for foreign wars, " Within the realm we of Lincoln will pay your soldiers, as we are bound ; but without it, no." Thus, as Mr. Freeman says, " as Thomas of London had withstood the demands of the father, Hugh of Avalon withstood the demands of the son ; " and " the Saint of Lincoln, grown into an Englishman on English ground, spoke up for the laws and rights of Englishmen, as Anselm had done before him, and as Simon did after him." For, alas ! we cannot claim St. Hugh as an Englishman by birth. It was " the saint whom the Imperial Burgundy gave to England " who spoke out in this manly English fashion, and who fixed for us the true type of English Pointed architecture. His effigy may still be seen in 214 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Westminster Abbey, with the swan, the symbol of Carthusian loneliness. 1 The high opinion in which the Order was held by Churchmen of the twelfth century may be gathered from a letter of Peter, the venerable Abbot of Cluny, to Pope Eugcnius. " I thought," he says, "and I do not believe I was wrong, that theirs was the best of all the Latin systems, and that they were not of those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. For they do not consider the kingdom of God as consisting principally in meats and drinks, in garments and labours, and the like, though these, wisely managed, may do that kingdom of God good service, but in that godliness of which the Apostle says, ' Bodily exercise is profitable to little, but godliness is profitable unto all things, having the promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come.' These holy men feast at the table of wisdom, they are entertained at the banquet of the true Solomon, not in superstitions, not in hypocrisy, not in the leaven of malice and wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'' To Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose noble poem of the Grand Chartreuse has perhaps been often in the reader's mind, it is all but one more misdirected effort, one more blind aspiration, one more fruitless rebellion against "the common." Yet for him the silence, which to many seems so monstrous and so morbid, is full of solemn meaning and eloquent with pathetic suggestion : 1 So says Mr-. Jameson, but there i^ little doubt he had a real pet swan, as mentioned in the Latin Metrical Life f>f St. I high. Motint Grace Priory 215 " Silent, while years engrave the brow ; Silent — the best are silent now." The Carthusians were right, at least, to hold their peace. He sees in their isolation not the fatal flaw, but the crowning excellence, of their system. It is with them, he would perhaps say, as with the stars — " self-poised they live, nor pine with noting. All the fever of some different soul." But surely the more availing plea is that they were never conscious traitors to their kind, but rather, in the mysterious oneness of our race and the strange fashion of its develop- ment, it was for us they tried that dark and dreadful path of silence that we, whose courage would perhaps have failed, might know, by proof of their experience, that not so is reached the land of our desire. Who shall say that these men bore in vain all the agonies of self-repression, and the maddening con- sciousness of powers unemployed ; or that without them St. Vincent de Paul would have been able to write to his sisterhood in after days, " Let your mon- asteries be the homes of the sick, your cell a hired chamber, your chapel the parish church, your cloister the streets of the town and the wards of the hospitals, your rule obedience, your grating the fear of God, your veil a strict and holy modesty"? X ST. AGATHA'S AND EGGLESTON FROM a town of singular beauty, gathered round the walls of a rock-hewn fortress that frowns above a swift and shallow stream, we wander pleasantly through a mile or two of wood and meadow to the ruins of a 1 louse of Prcmonstratcnsian Canons. So much have St. .Agatha's and Eggleston in common that our description thus far may stand as well for one as for the other. Yet the foundations arc in reality quite unlike enough to be instructive comments on each other, and even a hast)- and careless observer will find in them more of contrast than of sameness. Before entering into details it will be will t<> attach some meaning to the words we have already used. Briefly, very briefly, what arc Premonstra- ian Canons? There is a rule enunciated by a synod of about the year 10X3 that no abbot or monk shall recall any one from the profession of canon to St. Agatha s and Eggleston 2 1 7 that of monk as long as such canon can find a church of his own order. And Pope Urban II — mandavit et iinivcrsaliter interdixit — made a general prohibitory order against the conversion of a canon, unless under certain circumstances, 1 into a monk. Then were not St. Agatha's and Eggleston mon- asteries, and inhabited by monks ? Certainly not. There is, indeed, evidence that in quite early times the houses of canons were sometimes spoken of as " monasteria " ; but it was to them also that the monks applied the strong language quoted in an earlier chapter — " clericorum stabula " — the stalls of the secular clergy. Here, however, it must be observed that, as among monks, so among canons, there were manifold varieties, some of which — as, notably, the Premonstratensians — approached very nearly to the monastic ideal. The origin and development of the system seem to have been pretty much as follows. Small and active groups of missionaries lived together in monastic simplicity, but without rule or vow. Such centres of spiritual energy naturally became bishoprics, and then the customs hardened into some- thing like a rule, and the " canonici " — distinguished thus, perhaps, from isolated parish priests — fell more and more into the position of appendages of the see ; 1 Nisi pjtblice lapsus f iter it. 21S The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire while, at the same time, other like bodies were formed, which, in the absence of a bishop, became, in the ecclesiastical sense, collegiate rather than cathedral. There is no doubt that the words " canon " and " regular," and " secular," were almost from the first used with some degree of looseness, but the above is, I think, a fair account of the earliest, the secular variety, of canon. Hut this " monster without a precedent," this " regular irregular," this " canonless canon," had not, for those troublous times, the elements of stability-. We arc accustomed, perhaps, to consider the monastic orders as self-refuting failures, but it is certain that they served their purpose better, and showed more vitality, than the apparently rational system of secular canons. 1 The attempted reform of Nicholas II in the Council of 1059 indicates the decay of the canonical life. Official revenues, accord- ing to his plan, were to be held in common, while rights of private property were respected. The real < m ration, however, came from within, and was already begun. At the Church of St. Rufus, at Avignon, a body of clergy, renouncing all separate 1 From the days of Chrodegangus, Bishop of Metz, in the middle of the eighth century, there was clearly something nol very unlike a "urle" fox the 1 ■ ; and in Si 7 we find certain changes introduced, especi- ally in a" curious point as to inheritance by canons of their bishop's " movabl St. Agatha s and Eggleston 219 property and reviving the rule which they found in the 109th Epistle of St. Augustine of Hippo, became in 1 138 the first "Regular" or "Austin" Canons. 1 We have thus advanced one step farther, to a point from which we are able to understand that a " Regular Canon " is, in reality, a mere tautology. He is a regular regular — a cleric bound by a rule milder, it is true, than even that of the unreformed Benedictine monks, but still strict enough for many, and for some even too exacting. To Guyot de Provins — a writer of the thirteenth century who had rejected in turn the Cluniac, Cister- cian, and Carthusian orders — the Austin Canons seem to have been especially congenial. " Among these," we find him saying, " one is well shod, well clothed, well fed." The date and place of the introduction of this order into England has been much disputed. The editor of the Monasticon inclines to Bishop Tanner's theory that the first foundation of Regular or Augustinian Canons was at Colchester, and gives 1 105 as the probable date. But Mr. Freeman and Professor Stubbs tell us that Lanfranc introduced the order at Canterbury ; and Lanfranc died in 1 At the Lateran Council, A. D. 1 139, Pope Innocent II ordained that all Regular Canons should submit to the rule of St. Austin in his 109th Epistle. From this order afterwards proceeded both Peter Martyr and Martin Luther. 220 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire 1089. Mr. Freeman's quotation from William of Malmesbury seems to be conclusive in favour of this view. 1 I have alluded in the first paper of this series to the jealous antagonism which, even before the Con- quest, existed between the monks and the secular clergy. It may, therefore, be interesting to notice that Lan franc, the first to bring regular canons to England, was at the same time the constant champion of the monks against those who would have handed over all our cathedrals to the seculars. The see of Carlisle, founded by Henry I, seems to have been the first, and indeed the only, instance of the establish- ment in England of Regular Canons as a cathedral body ; though the Scotch, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, set the example in not a few instances. Meanwhile the war between monks and seculars ended in a partition of territory — Canterbury, Win- chester, Durham, Coventry, Norwich, Rochester, Worcester, Ely, and Bath, falling to the monks ; York, London, Exeter, Lichfield, Wells, lien lord, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Chichester, to the canons. 9 1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. vol. i. ]>. 527 ; Freeman, Norman Cortaui \ Vol. iv. p. (I [{ ii remembered that Oxford, P< igh, Chester, and r were 1 into bishoprics till Henry VIII. West- minster, which is Benedictine, was made cathedral by I loir)-, and " collegiate " by Elizabeth. RICHMOND CASTLE St. Agatha s and Eggleston 223 It still remains to say a few words about the Premonstratensians — the particular variety of Regular Canons with which we are now more immediately concerned. The Order of Premonstratensians, or White Canons, was the result of the reforming zeal of St. Norbert, and it seems to have represented the utmost height of self-mortification to which a non-monastic college or cathedral could aspire. Thus there is evidence that the Priory of Twinham, or Christchurch, in Hampshire, was before and after the Norman Conquest occupied by a dean and twenty-four secular canons. Then, about 1 1 50, the rule of St. Augustine appears to have been adopted by them, and finally, in the charter of 22 Edward I. this house is included in those of the Premonstratensian Order. Norbert, born of noble family on the lower Rhine towards the close of the eleventh century, was a man not inclined to take too serious a view of life and its responsibilities, till sudden conviction and conversion fell upon him in the course of a violent thunder- storm. Unable, like many another, to overcome the jealousy and blindness of which it comes that in his own country none may be a prophet, St. Norbert sold all he possessed, abandoned his benefices, and, 2 24 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire with two companions, set forth to preach the Gospel. Resisting the offers of Pope Gelasius, refusing the bishopric of Cambray, and all other preferment, praying successfully for the gift of tongues, he struggled on towards his appointed but as yet unknown goal. At last Bartholomew, Bishop of Laon, found for him a damp and lonesome hollow in the forest of Coucy. He was to have his choice, it seems, of temple or chapel, desert or garden, but had rejected one after another as suitable enough for a religious foundation but not intended by God for him. Here, however, in a little chapel of St. John the Baptist, Norbert betook him to prayer, and so continuing with Hugo, his comrade,, far into the night, was at last rewarded by a vision of the Blessed Virgin herself, encircled by angels and radiant with light. She told the future saint to fix his abode on another part of that very hill, and at the same time prescribed the distinguishin ture for the new order — the cloak and birctta were to be white, the sock alone black. And Norbert saw in the very hands of the Virgin Mother the white woollen garb — the Candida vestis — from which the name of "White Canons" was to be derived. There, at Premontre, or I'ratnonstratum, he St. Agatha s and Eggleston 225 gathered first thirteen, and then a larger company of brethren, and founded a house which was to the Premonstratensian Order what Citeaux was to the Cistercians. Even the aristocratic element in the constitution of the latter was reproduced by Norbert; and the three houses next in dignity to Premontre emulated the dignity of the chief daughters of Citeaux. At length the Archbishopric of Magde- burg was forced upon the acceptance of the saint, and in 11 29 he resigned the headship of the now prosperous order in favour of his old companion Hugh. St. Norbert died in 1 134, and was canonised (1582) by Gregory XIII. And so, in the womb of time, began the potential existence of St. Agatha's, Eggleston, and Coverham. The remains of the last-named are too scanty to compete in the limits of these pages with the fame and beauty of the others ; but, from the view given in Ellis's Dugdale, it would seem that in the earlier part of the century considerable parts of the choir, transepts, and perhaps even of the nave of the church, were standing. And, still, as we descend from the high ground behind Middleham upon the garden and outbuildings which now surround and mask its remnants, or as we gaze from the breezy height of Witton Fell upon the windings of the Q 226 The Ruined Abbeys oj Yorkshire Cover, we may give a passing thought to Ranulph dc Glanville, Justiciary of Henry II. as well as to Miles Coverdale, and note that this quiet nook pro duccd at different times the authors of the first digest of our laws and the first revision of our Scripture On the 5 th of February we arc, or might be. reminded of the martyrdom of St. Agatha, who suffered 251 A.D., in the Decian persecution. To the wretch who was sent by Quinctianus to assail her virtue and her faith, she answered. " My mind is firmly settled .and grounded in Christ ; your words arc winds, your promises are rains, your terrors are floods, which however hardly they may beat upon the foundation of my house, it cannot ever fall, for it is founded upon a firm rock." It is much to be regretted that Roald of Rich- mond and Lord Scrope did not lay these noble words to heart when the former founded and the latter enli 5t Agatha's Abbe)- of White Cam on the banks of the Swale. The roofless walls which now threaten to slide into the riv ht then, perhaps, have been more worthy monuments of the adfa*stness of her in who,- name and memory they were raised. The scant}- remains of massive trai tion Norman, and the contrasted grace of the later St. Agatha s and Eggleston 227 work, present, in this wooded vale, a picture which we would gladly guard against the hand of Time. The relation of masonry to landscape, lost, alas ! as an instinct, and not yet regained as an art, is the key to the special charm of nearly every ruin. The gulf between the finished and laborious product of human skill and the lavished beauties of spontaneous nature, is just perceptibly narrowed by the blurring of angles and the clinging growth of ivy, and the memory of the aching hands and bleeding feet, and the burden and the heat of the long day, is blended with the fancied presence of that spirit whose song is said to be — " There is no effort on my brow ; I do not strive, I do not weep. I rush with the swift spheres, and glow In joy ; and when I will I sleep. Yet that severe, that earnest air I saw, I felt it once, but where ? " Some parts of St. Agatha's, noticeably the range containing the frater and some interlaced arcading in a very puzzling position farther west, are of great intrinsic beauty, and the early work done in the middle of the twelfth century by Constable Roaldus is well represented by the doorway in the western cloister, with its now half- obliterated cats'-head 228 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire mouldings. The Scropes, into whose hands the possessions of Roald passed, in the reign of Edward II, almost entirely rebuilt the Abbey on a more magnificent scale, and the claim of the latter to the title of founder having been ignored by Leland, has since been disputed. The Abbots of St. Agatha were not, as far as is known, very eminent men, and the only one, I believe, who appears on the page of our national history is found in the scarcely con- genial company of Geoffrey Chaucer. These two, the ecclesiastic and the satirist of ecclesiastics, were both sworn and examined as witnesses on behalf of Richard le Scropc in the famous fourteenth-century case of Scrope and Grosvenor. The suit was insti- tuted by the Scropes in defence of their right to the arms " azure a bend or" against the assumption of them by Sir Robert Grosvenor, and when "Sir Simon Parson " of Wensley had produced in court an alb, the apparels to which were i mbroidered with the Scropc arms "azure t that r\vr mote be." The fruitless efforts of the od Franciscans to bring this " beest of pryce " alive to Richmond have been long familiar to readers of Whitaker's famous History of Craven. "Her walk," we are told, " was endlang Greta side," and in this, while deprecating her invincible contumacy, and shuddering at her insensibility to the best medieval Latin, we must now imitate the heroine of the " Felon Sowe of Rokeby." h |3» 3&, : « Ctjsgftu i& St. Agatha s and Eggleston 239 Among the eleven water-colour drawings by Turner which Messrs. Christie sold in July 1 882 for Mr. Ruskin was the sketch of Eggleston Abbey, engraved by Higham for Whitaker's History of Richmondshire. In Mr. Ruskin's 1878 catalogue this sketch, under the head of Fourth Group — Reality — England at Rest, is described as " one of the finest of the series in its foliage ; notable also for intense truth to the spot." And he has spoken elsewhere of " the quiet sincerity of transcript with which Turner's younger spirit reverenced the streams of Greta and Tees." The colours are, as was even then pointed out, a good deal faded, but, having seen the picture first and then the place, I can at least testify that, unlike some of the most beautiful of the master's works, it is easily recognisable. My efforts to discover the precise point of view, which must have been some- where in the bed of the stream, were not successful, but the engraving in " Whitaker " will enable any one who is so disposed to renew the by no means arduous attempt. So much has been said and written about the ro- mantic beauty of the Tees and the country about Barnard Castle, that it is something to be able to say that the glamour is really there. The descriptions with which Rokeby abounds are not perhaps among 240 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire the highest efforts of the genius of Sir Walter Scott ; but somehow, in the familiar ring of Edmund of Winfson's song, it is all gathered as true poetry alone can gather and preserve the very odour and aspect of natural beauty. ■• < ». Brignal banks arc wild and fair And Greta woods are green ; And you may gather garlands there Would -race a summer queen." Eggleston Abbey stands higher than St. Agatha's, and looks down upon the junction of the Thorsgill Beck and the Tee-. The remains of the sacrist}, 1 etc., and dormitory above, have been so much dis- guised bv conversion to other uses that they are now more picturesque than instructive. Farm imple- ments lie here and there in the cloister-COUlt, and from the ruins emerge, in place of white-robed canons, a mild-eyed mare and foal. But the church itself — up which dashed Bertram of Risingham, on a some- what different steed — has nnich interest and not a little beaut)-. It was never a very grand or elaborate building, but it grew in the usual fashion. The north side of the very short nave or perhaps w< I wai'd extension of the ritual choir) has windows, round inside and widely splayed, but externally 1 The chapter-h rial and stood clear of this range. t?S^'^i-.i&';Ai^ -• ^~" mm Vs.v TOWER OF THE GREY FRIARS, RICHMOND R SL Agatha s and Eggleston 243 66 pointed and narrow. Then comes an oddly patched and altered west end, with one decorated window high up and by no means in the centre ; while the south wall shows a row of four, also decorated and very good. The canons were evidently at one time dissatisfied with the height of their church, and the exterior effect has been much interfered with by an extension above the corbel-table of the original roof. The transept windows — to which we next come — are more elab- orate than those of the nave, and the choir has lancets grouped on the north side in three and two, and on the south in twos only. There was no aisle, even as a later addition, and the windows in the north wall of the nave are high up so as to clear the level of the cloister, which had a wooden pentice roof. The east window is usually called Perpendicular, but its details correspond with the lancets, and there is good reason to consider it late Early English, though that is not the period which we should expect to find represented in this precise situation. The old door to the "dorter" is 1 visible in the north transept, and high above it is a window evidently so placed to clear the roof of that apartment. The cloister has extended farther westward than the nave of the church, by which means, in spite 1 Or rather was when these words were written. 244 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of its unusual northern site, it may have caught some southern warmth and light. Eggleston must have been a humbler place than St. Agatha's, and when we come in our next chapter to trace the almost invariable addition of an aisle or a part of an aisle to the churches of the canons, we shall sec how modest was the ambition which con- tented itself with raising the roof of this short and aisleless nave. At the Cistercian Abbey of Saw ley. in Ribblesdale, there is a parallel instance of the extension of the cloister westward of the church ; but there the so-called nave is so minute as to leave little doubt that no more of the church was ever completed than was needed for the purpose of a choir. For it must never be forgotten that many a ritual choir extended beyond the transepl and far exceeded the dimensions of the architectural presbytery. At the Premonstratensian Abbey of Bayham in Sussex the position of the cloisters is still more strange, for tiny begin at the extreme west of a long nave, and do not extend far enough eastwards to meet tin- transept. 1 There, too, a parate pa which do< duty for a north aisle, 1 Mi. II . I believe, explains ilii^ as the result of a fourteenth century enlargement ■ Is by thi new presbytery and ept. St. Agatha s and Eggleston 245 runs only part of the way from the transept towards the west, and leaves the end of the nave in its original narrow simplicity. As we turn again towards Barnard Castle, though the new and well-intentioned Bowes Museum haunts and torments our sight, the views that inspired Sir Walter Scott, and Creswick, and Turner, still follow one another in delightful succession. We see the warmish stone of the town and its roofs of slate and brightest tile, the glittering white of the distant farms and cottages, the purple and russet of the moor, and, for foreground, the green and flowery meadows, and the wooded rocks that half conceal the rush and sparkle of the Tees. XI BOLTON, GUISBOROUGH, AND KIRKHAM The Priories of Bolton in the West Riding, Kirkham in the East, and Guisborough in the North, arc grouped here in virtue of the fact that all three are houses of ordinary Canons Regular of Saint August- ine. They will each, therefore, help, if only a little, t<> Illustrate that connection between religious orders and religious architecture which has been the central thought of the present scries of papers. The most important thing to remember in study- ing the remains of Augustinian houses, whether Pre- monstratensian or otherwise, is their close connection with parish churches. In other orders the same, or an analogous connection, was occasional : with the canons alone it was normal. The ordinary monastic church, which had no Ction whatever with the church of a parish — except where, a- at Bernoldswic, it swallowed up GUISBOROUGH PRIORY Bolton, Guisborough, and Kirkham 249 and superseded one already existing — was from the first a large cruciform building with aisles ; and some at least of the secular cathedrals adopted this type. But where the canons were collegiate and their church therefore not cathedral, we always have one of two alternatives — either the college was founded in connection with a previously existing parish church, or the new church was built for parish and canons to share. Now our early parish churches have no aisles and no western towers. They were sometimes cruci- form and sometimes not (the symbolism in the latter case being preserved in the threefold division into nave, chancel, and sanctuary) ; sometimes, too, there was a tower, but if so it was always central. And with the cruciform variety of this type the original work in all canons' churches will be found to conform. As time went on and ritual developed, the canons became almost everywhere enamoured of aisles, but meanwhile they had built their cloisters against their naves — here and there, as at Eggles- ton, on the north, but more frequently on the south. How was it possible under these circumstances to add aisles ? The ground-plan of Bolton shows to what extent and how this difficulty was overcome. The canons built north aisles because on that side 250 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkshire their space was free, and the)' sometimes comforted themselves for the defect on the south side by enlarging and beautifying the windows of the nave. This is precisely what has been done at Bolton. Here, as elsewhere, the building began with the choir, in the lower part of which is still to be found the oldest work in the church. On and beyond this old work, a practically new choir was afterwards erected ; but even this preserved the original aisle- less type. Proceeding in order t<> the north and west of the nave, the canons concluded with the nth and the cloister, where pointed arches and transition work arc visible. Hardly were these finished when the fashion for aisles set in, and the north wall had t<> be disturbed. At Ripon, where there was no cloister, a south aisle, as well a- a north, was addi Bayham, which is rightly re- ferred to as a noticeable instance of the survival ol the aisleless type, has an arrangement of | -.cs, which, though not adapted for processions, must have considerably modified the external effect of the unbroken length of nave. It is remarkable that the cl of Kirkham and Guisfo . as well as of Bolton, show a very high order of architectural beauty. The' east end of Guisborough, in fact, is as fine as anything of the Bolton, Guisborougk, and Kirkham 2^1 kind in England. Though the tracery of the great centre window is gone, its majestic proportions and much of its rich moulding remain to appeal to the unlearned, while the trained eye and educated imagination of the architect can restore, almost at a glance, the vast web of Early Decorated work which once made it a chief glory of its date. The return walls, alas ! are gone, and the only remnant of the church now visible above ground is the bare and un- supported curtain of this glorious facade. In its width of 70 feet were included two aisles, each with a window of three lights. The mouldings of these windows, as of the centre, are very rich — oak- leaves predominating in the former and vines in the latter. The whole is supported by four deep and massive buttresses, of which the corner ones are grouped each with two others in a cluster of three. All the buttresses have crockets and finials ; but whereas the one at the north is plain, that at the south is elaborate with trefoil and quatrefoil panel- ling. Each of the intermediate buttresses has a now tenantless niche with crocketed canopy, the bases being level with that of the great window. Above each buttress there rises from the main wall a crocketed octagonal spire. Over the centre window, and also above the indications of the vaulting, is 2H2 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire another window of five lights, viz. one quatrefoil headed with two trefoil on either side of it. 1 he west end of the church has been revealed by digging, and in the well-kept garden there still re- mains a bit of the cellar under the " fratcr." This, however, probably did not, as was supposed, com- municate with the cloister. There is every indication that the arch in that direction was merely a cup- board, and a groove for a shelf is very apparent. Opposite is a .square-headed opening which has been blocked up in later times. But neither was this a doorway, as a careful observation of the chamfer will show. There is little doubt that it was in reality a " frater-hole," or hatch, for service of provisions, and a corresponding one is visible among the ivy at a higher elevation, and related to it much as the corresponding apertures arc related at St. Agatha's. '1 he gateway and part of the gate-house remain — they are transition Norman. Parts of the Bras tomb, now exhibited in slices in the porch of the parish church, arc interesting relics of the founder's family. Though the town of Guisborough has of late relinquished its claim to be considered beautiful, and the high-flown compliment which Camden paid it would, but for Murray's Guide, be as clean for- a O Bolton, Guisborougli, and Kirkham 255 gotten as " ould Doctor Len of Yorke," who " usually sent his patients to lye there to recover their health," yet the neighbourhood of Rhosbery Topping and the vision of distant moors give it an advantage over the tamer region where Kirkham nestles in the green valley of the Derwent. Sometimes, indeed, on a day of mist, and rain, and rare cold gleams, the town of Guisborough — in spite of the new houses run up to meet the needs of the ironworkers — has a pictur- esque beauty worth the notice of an artist. In the foreground, near the church, are stone houses with green and dark-brown shutters and shop-fronts, con- trasting with cream-coloured neighbours ; while be- yond, as the hill slopes downward, bright, red-tiled roofs come into view, and here and there a patch of pale-green grass in the disused width of the road. But Kirkham Priory lies on the border of the great plain of York, and has neither town nor moor for setting, but only the green beauty of a woody vale and the pleasant winding of a Yorkshire stream. It was founded in 1 1 2 1 by Walter l'Espec, of whom some account was given in the chapter on Rievaulx Abbey, and Kirkham was a manor of the L'Especs. Lady Milton and Mr. Foljambe have set an ex- cellent example by sanctioning and encouraging the explorations of so zealous and careful an antiquary 256 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkskire as Mr. \V. II. S. John Hope. Of the church itself there only remains a fragment of an east end, less perfect and majestic, but of scarcely less exquisite design and workmanship, than Guisborough. For the following details of the dimensions of the church and the disposition of the other buildings, I am indebted to Mr. Hope, whose excavations have reached their most instructive stage since I have had an opportunity of personally inspecting them. The choir was 120 feet long by 28 feet G inches wide, and of Early English date. The central east window was a triplet, while that of each aisle was a single lancet. The transept was 125 feet aero Its southern arm, which has been excavated, was of later date than the choir, and shows two eastern chapels measuring 1 1 feet by 8 feet There- arc signs of the existence of a central tower, westward of which we find an aisleless nave not less than 1 20 feet long. South of the nave were the cloisters, 95 feet by 1 10, communicating by doors with both nave and transept. In the north-west corner is an unusual flight of stairs leading down to a slype, and intruding awkwardly into the cloister alley. Mr. 1 points out that both the cellarium and fratcr were raised on an undercroft ; and he has noted in the south-west angle of the cloister a stair to the latter, close to Bolton, Guisborougk, and Kirkham 257 which is a recess or almery below the cloister level. The chapter-house was 74 feet by 30 feet 6 inches, and had arcaded walls with twenty-six stalls on each side. The east cloister seems to have been irregular from the setting back of the chapter-house about the depth of one of its own bays. South of the " com- mon-house," which was normal, there ran a long cellar, or undercroft, with an eastward inclination, the connection of which with the very large " neces- sarium " points to the extension above it of the dorter of the canons. Eastward again, are remains of a large infirmary hall. The frater (98 feet 6 inches long by 28 feet 6 inches wide) was entered by a very beautiful late Norman doorway, which has been engraved in Parker's Glossary of Architecture. In the west cloister is a fine geometrical lavatory, and the kitchen occupied a position at the south-west corner of the frater. The west door of the church was approached by a flight of steps as wide as the nave ; and, indeed, the level, or levels, of the ground must have been to a great extent the cause of the peculiar form which the vague Augustinian pattern here assumed. The rigid uniformity of the Cister- cians must not be looked for among the canons, and hence there is little safety in arguing from one house of the latter order to another. S 258 The Ruined Abbeys of J 'orks/iire But it is time to pass to a more famous and fre- quented scene — a place so beautiful and so romantic that the antiquary and the architect may well be hushed into mute, unreasoning rapture. Dear to Turner and to Girtin, to Wordsworth and to Charlotte Bronte, the Valley of the Wharfe is haunted by the spirits of painters and of poets, fain to meet at Bolton the thronging shades of undistinguished priors and the brave and quiet presence of that lover of obscurity who gazed from Bardcn Tower upon the stars — Clifford, " the Shepherd Lord." The very bridge from which we catch our first glimpse of this enchanted realm has its associations ; for the last work ever sent to the Academy by Girtin was a view (in oils) of Bolton Bridge^ Yorkshire} But to most the predominating influence will be that of Wordsworth. " The White Doe of Rylstone" perhaps invites, and has certainly encountered, com- parison with the narrative poems of Scott ; but the interest of sueh comparison lies, not in the award- ing of preference to either, but in the realisation of the vast chasm which separates the inspirations of the two. Word -.worth has disclaimed all rivalry and asserted 1 [n the Kensington Museum is an interesting water-colour view of Rievaulx (1798) by this painter. |3 V! l'"' % V BOLTON PRIORY Bolton, Gziisborough, and Kirkham 261 for himself an independent sphere ; but the contrast, as worked out, for instance, in Professor Shairp's Aspects of Modern Poetry, is by no means uninstruct- ive. Wordsworth's stern father, steadfast son, and sweet, ill-fated maiden, are almost allegorical person- ages, and the lovely vision of the snow-white doe is hardly less human than they. For in Words- worth the action and the characters, which in Scott would have been all in all, are but the vesture of a thought, spell -bound by him among the Bolton woods. The virtues of the preservers of ancient monu- ments and of open spaces for the people happily meet in the Duke of Devonshire, who steadfastly resists the temptation to let railways and villas con- vert into a mine of wealth what is now a treasury of beauty and romance. Thousands of tourists in a summer day may bring their share of sandwich- papers and vulgarity — for all men are hungry, and most are more or less vulgar — but neither the ruins nor the rocks are the worse for these visits, while many busy lives are brightened, and a few — nay, who can tell how many ? — spirits lifted up. For miles the wood-walks wander beneath " the oak, and the ash, and the bonny ivy-tree," where the tall fox- glove and the blue campanula sprinkle the rich beds 262 The Ruined Abbeys of 3 'orkshire of moss, or the countless blossoms of the earlier year border the brown and dappled stream. "Valle sub umbrosa locus est aspergine mult.'i Uvidus ex alto desilientis aquae. Tot fuerant illic quot habet natura colores Pictaque dissimili flore nitcbat humus." Long ago and far away as these words were written, they are recalled to-day by the little glen which beguiles us to stray into the so-called "Valley of Desolation." Following the stream, which, with its abrupt de- scent, forms the chief feature of this glen, we rejoin the Wharfe not far from the famous Strid, the deep and narrow cleft in the rocks well known through Wordsworth's smaller Wharfedale ballad of "The Force of Prayer." It may be observed, in passing, that the really valuable Yorkshire " Murray " is a little misleading in its suggestion that the scene here- is especially impress- ive after rain. The headlong rush of the swollen stream is doubtless good to sec, but it entirely dis- guises the peculiar features of the place on which poetry and local tradition have laid so firm a grasp. The contrast is between the narrow cleft in the rocks, over which not men alone, but even ladies, spring with case, and the hitherto unfathomed depth of the Bolton, Guisborough, and Kirkham 263 dark and almost foamless water. In flood-time, both features are lost — the famous rocks are covered, and the dark thread is merged in a wide swirl of eddying foam. To this treacherous chasm tradition attributes the untimely end of the young Romilly — the " boy of Egremont," and the founding of Bolton Priory. The legend cannot be more briefly told than in Words- worth's well-known lines : "Young Romilly through Barden Woods Is ranging high and low, And holds a greyhound in a leash, To let slip upon buck or doe. " The pair have reached that fearful chasm, How tempting to bestride ! For lordly Wharfe is there pent in With rocks on either side. " The striding-place is called the Strid, 1 — A name which it took of yore : A thousand years hath it borne that name, And shall a thousand more. " And hither is young Romilly come, And what may now forbid That he, perhaps for the hundredth time, Shall bound across the Strid ? 1 Not, however, by way of derivation. We know better nowadays, and talk of Anglo-Saxon " stryth " = tumult. 264 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire "He sprang in glee, — for what cared he That the river was strong and the rocks were steep? I '.ut the greyhound in the leash hung back, And checked him in his leap." The foresters bring the news to the boy's mother, Alice de Romille, and she, after an interval of speech- less sorrow, decrees the founding of a priory "in Bolton, on the field of Wharfe." Neither the tra- dition, nor the poem founded on it, will be much the worse for being shown to conflict materially with ascertained facts. The priory now at Bolton was founded first at Embsay, by William de Mcschincs and Cecilia, his wife. In 1 151 Alice de Romille, or Rumeli, their daughter, granted to the canons her manor of Bolton in exchange for those of Skipton and Stretton, and the priory was at once removed. This grant of Bolton, and the consequent removal of the canons, is connected by the legend with the death of the boy of Egremont, but Dr. Whitaker ruthlessly announced, in his History of Craven, that the "boy" was him- self a party to the Charter of Translation. I tl • who cannot enjoy a tradition without a due ad- mixture of truth, it may be some comfort to reflect that Cecilia de Rumeli, the mother of Alice, and original foundress of the priory at Embsay, may BOLTON' PRIORY Bolton, Guisborough, and Kirkham 267 quite possibly have lost a son in the way described by Wordsworth. A "compotus" of the priory, from 1290 to 1325, gives many graphic details of its condition and his- tory. Between 13 16 and 1320 the invading Scots appear in very grim reality, and the accounts show the damages which their inroads left to be repaired. But meanwhile the prior is attending Parliament at York, twice in one year and once in another, and Bolton, in spite of everything, becomes an important place, with "armigeri," or dependent gentlemen, clothed, boarded, and lodged ; free servants, indoor and out — the former including master carpenter, master cook and assistant, brewer, baker, master smith, " hokarius," " fagotarius," and " ductor sacco- rum ; " while John de Lambhird (Magister Bercarius), and from seventy to one hundred and eight more, worked out-of-doors on the farms and granges. Be- sides these, there were " villeins " in gross who were practically domestic slaves. 1 The prior has a separ- ate lodging, chapel, and stables, built by one De Land, who seems to have been a great dignitary, and to have attended two sovereigns (Edward I and II), entertained two Metropolitans, and made two journeys to Rome. 1 See, however, Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, part ii. sonnet iv. 268 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire It is to be regretted that no really accurate ground-plan of Bolton has yet been produced. The best is that which was given in the Manual of the York sJi ire Archaeological Association, on the occasion of their visit to the ruins in 1877. In this the dimensions of the original church are approximately shown, and the existing foundations of the octagonal chapter-house and some of the domestic buildings clearly, if somewhat hastily, outlined. It has been conjectured that the central tower, which certainly formed part of the original design and as certainly no longer exists, may have fallen with such dis- astrous effects as to necessitate the rebuilding o\ the choir and transepts in the fourteenth century. However this may be, the western tower was begun in 1 520, after the fashion so often traceable in parish churches. That is to say, the building of towers being a long process, the nave was left intact mean- while ; and as in this particular case the work was never finished, we have the instructive spectacle of a thirteenth-century west front standing close to the tall arch of a sixteenth-century tower, which rises only to the height of the nave. The usual monastic arrangement of screens, which seems to have been adopted by the canons, was especially suitable when, as was so often the case, part of the building was Bolton, Guisborougk, and Kirkham 269 used as a parish church and part as the chapel of the priory. The choir, it must be remembered, was separated from the nave by two very solid screens. 1 Of these, the eastern, called the " pulpitum," was capable of supporting a broad gallery from which parts of the service were sung, and which still survives as the organ-loft in some of our cathedrals. West- wards was the rood-screen, equally solid, and having an altar in the middle, with a small door on each side. This, which was known as the " Jesus Altar," or " Altar of St. Cross," served, in such cases as the one before us, for the parish ; and here, at Bolton, where the nave is still used as a parish church, the altar stands precisely in this position, and the piscina may be seen close at hand in the south wall. At Marrick, a convent of Benedictine nuns near Richmond, and strangely near the Cistercian nunnery of Ellerton, the nave of the church has been rebuilt and is still used by the parish, while the choir has fallen into decay. It may well have been that here, as at Bolton, the western arm was always the parish church, and thus, at the dissolution, it was easy to wall it off completely and leave the rest to its fate. 2 1 See on this subject Chap. V. "Fountains." 2 Leland, however, has a curious theory that at Marrick the parish originally occupied the eastern arm. If this is true, they must have migrated westwards at the dissolution. 270 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Happily the choir at Bolton has yielded but slowly to decay, and some of the fourteenth-century ornament and wall arcading retains its beaut)- al- most unimpaired. The practical leaden roof which protects the nave and shelters the Sunday wor- shippers, goes far to spoil the picturesque effect of the church from many points of view, but docs not help us to forgive the spoilers who unroofed the choir. Strange as it is to think of Clifford, the Shepherd Lord, 1 frequenting the company of these cloistered ecclesiastics, it is stranger to pass in imagination to the wild, half-brutal, and yet sterling " Protestant dis- senters " who afterwards peopled the remote hamlets and homesteads ; strangest perhaps of all, to recall — and who can help recalling? — ■ Mrs. (iaskcll's de- scription of another Wharfedale group — the six little Bronte children who "used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors which in 1 Confided in infancy to hepherds who concealed him among the aberland Fells, he was restored to his estates by Henry VII when he was twenty-five. " Love hail he seen in huts where 1 >< >< >r nan lie : His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry si The sleep that is among the lonely hills." Wordsworth. Bolton, Guisborough, and Kirk ham 271 after days they loved so passionately ; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things." Surely somewhere on the misty moor they are wandering now — still six still hand in hand. XII WHITBY In our first chapter we turned away from the busy streets of York, with all their crowd of present interests and associations of the past, to linger among the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. Since then, as we have wandered in desert places brooding over an obscure but not unreal episode, in many a bright pasture and solemn shade, our feet have brushed the dew and our eyes and hearts found rest, while even the half-scornful contemplation of a purely spiritual conflict has soothed the frctfulness of our souls. Not for to-day or to-morrow, but for ever, did these monks design their building or mould their disposi- tions, confiding, with deliberate faith, to future gener- ations the completing of the one, and to God the perfecting of the other. At Whitby we once more enter a thronged and busy town, and once more only to turn our backs *f^%^-: rag ;t Ml T&* k Whitby 275 upon its life. There is a climb, a sense of effort, a freshening breeze, strange prelude to the stale pedantry of archaeology, and the mouldering presence of a long dead past ; for here, almost on the edge of the dark laminated cliffs, rises the last but not least famous of our Yorkshire Abbeys. Two centuries of wasting and destruction divide the history of this Abbey as by a deluge ; we must cast a glance on both sides of the flood. About the middle of the seventh century, Penda, the pagan King of Mercia, having successively defeated and slain Edward the Converted, and Oswald the sainted King of Northumbria, met his match in Oswiu, the brother of the latter. It was on the banks of the Aire, probably not more than two or three miles from the modern Leeds, that the decisive battle of Winwidfield was fought and won, and the royal vow recorded which issued in the founding of Streoneschalch or Whitby Abbey. Oswiu had the guilt of Oswine's murder on his soul, and he knew that his own life had reached a crisis, so he swore to build a monastery, and con- secrate to the service of religion his infant daughter, if the God of whom he had learnt in his exile among the Picts and Scots would give him victory over his heathen foe. 2j<3 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire In that bloody fight King Penda fell, and the little princess was sealed an innocent and uncon- scious thank-offering. It was to Hilda, the royal saint, that Elfleda and the destinies of Whitby were committed. Hilda was then at Hartlepool, but she soon brought her new charge to Strconeschalch ; and in or about the year 656 was begun the monastery, described by William of Malmcsbury as the largest of those founded by Oswiu's bounty. If we cannot believe all that we arc told about Hilda, even on the authority of the Venerable Bede, it by no means follows that the story of her life and death is beneath our notice. Hilda was thirty-three when she took the veil and exactly half her life was, in the technical sense, " religious." Guided and advised by the good Aidan, she spent the first year at ("ale with her sister Ilcrcsuit, after which she became Abbess of the recently founded convent of Ilcrutcu or Hartlepool, where the baby princess was committed to her care. The foundation at Whitby was for monks as well as nun-, and over both presided as Superior "this servant of Christ, Abbess Hilda, whom all that knew her called ' Mother ' for her singular piety and grace." The story of her turning the snakes into stones is too well known through the reference in Marmion, to < a z o o < ®#i Whitby 279 bear repeating. Bede's account of Lady Hilda's death is perhaps less trite and not less marvellous. " When she had governed this monastery many years, it pleased Him who has made such merciful provision for our salvation, to give her holy soul the trial of a long sickness, to the end that, according to the Apostle's example, her virtue might be perfected in infirmity." For six long years, we are told, this sickness lasted, and in the seventh, having received the viaticum, she called together the servants of God that were in the same monastery, and, while exhort- ing them to peace among themselves and universal goodwill, " passed from death to life." " That same night it pleased Almighty God, by a manifest vision to make known her death in another monastery at a distance from hers, which she had built that same year, and is called Hakenes. 1 There was in that monastery a certain nun called Begu, who had served God upwards of thirty years in monastic conversation. This nun, being then in the dormitory of the sisters, on a sudden heard the well-known sound of a bell in the air, which used to awake and call them to prayers when any one of them was taken out of this world, and opening her eyes, as she thought, she saw the top of the house open and a strong light pour in from above. Looking earnestly upon that light, she saw the soul of the aforesaid servant of God in that same light, attended and conducted to heaven by angels." 1 Beda, H. E., iv. 23. 280 TJic Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire Rising in a great fright, the nun " ran to the Virgin who then presided in the monastery instead of the Abbess, and whose name was Frigyth, and with many tears and sighs told her that the Abbess Hilda, mother of them all, had departed this life, and had in her sight ascended to eternal bliss." Then Frigyth awoke all the sisters, and called them to the church to pray for Abbess Hilda, "which they did during the remainder of the night.'' At day- break came brothers from Strconcschalch, with news of Hilda's death, but the sisters told them they already knew it. " Thus it was by heaven happily ordained, that when some saw her departure (ait of this world, the others should be acquainted with her admittance into the spiritual life which is eternal." "These monasteries," adds the histor- ian, "are about thirteen miles distant from each other." For those who care rather lor what they them- selvi - .ire capable of believing than for the visions of that past which has " itched and moulded " in the mind ami matter of to-day, there remain, at least, from the life of St. Hilda two accepted and accredited facts. To her, whether inspired by heavenly vision or prepared by unconscious cerebration, Caedmon, the silent and uncouth, poured forth his poems of the Old - Whitby 283 and New Testament. 1 " The cowherd, from whose lips flowed the first great English song," may still be pictured leaving the feast because the harp came round, and going to the cattle-shed with humble con- sciousness that he was fit for that at least. Still may we think of him, if we dare trust old Bede a little farther, as standing before the royal abbess — the mother Hilda — in the morning and turning passages translated from Holy Writ into impromptu verse ; and when we read that " others after him strove to compose religious poems, but none could vie with him, for he learnt not the art of poetry from men nor of men, but from God," we may remember that even the nineteenth century has attributed to poets " a vision, and a faculty divine." The other fact which has hitherto resisted the solvents of historical criticism, is the celebrated Synod of Streoneschalch for fixing the time of the Easter festival. The scene in all its picturesqueness has been borrowed by later writers from the original of Bede. There, as presi- dent, sits King Oswiu, the man of action, the hard- handed conqueror of Penda ; there, to plead the cause of Rome, is Wilfrith of York ; while Colman, who has succeeded Aidan at Holy Island, stands forth for 1 Of course it has been said that he did nothing of the kind, and that the poems ascribed to him are of manifestly later date. 284 The Ruined Abbeys of ) 'orkskire the Celtic usage, the Irish Church, and the great name of Columba. And among these warrior kings and saintly bishops is Hilda, no diffident onlooker or wavering partisan, but the strong and zealous sup- porter of Colman, striving to avert the sentence which must drive the disciples of St. Aidan from Lindisfarne to Iona. At last the same timid super- stition, the same grovelling fear which, hand in hand with lust and greed, has marred in ever)- age the purity of the religion of love, speaks by the lips of Oswiu and espouses the side which can claim St. Peter for its champion. " I will rather obey the porter of heaven, lest, when I reach its gates, he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back on me and there be none to open." And so Hilda and Colman were defeated. Whether they or Wilfrith were in the right we are not called upon to decide, but we may at least be sure that King Oswiu was wrong, and no heavenly porter shall ever bid those gates roll back for the soul that would bargain with the wrath of < iod. After Hilda, the princess Elfleda, aided by Bishop Trumwine (a fugitive from tin- Picts), and by her mother, the widowed Queen Eanfleda, ruled well and wisely at Whitby for more than thirty years. She was a friend of St. ( uthbert, and sailed across U> Whitby 285 Coquet Island to visit and consult him. Our last glimpse of this old Whitby reveals it to us in great dignity and importance. Hilda was not only a pious lady of royal lineage, but also a moving spirit and living force in Northumbria. The atmosphere of Whitby became, and for some time remained, favour- able to the growth of intellect and the deepening of spiritual life. Aidan, Colman, and Cuthbert come and go and make their influence felt within its walls ; Caedmon, Bosa of York, and John of Beverley, call the outside world to witness to the greatness of the monastery. But the church and cloister on the Northumbrian cliff stood out exposed against a threatening sky, and in the next storm which sweeps up from the north, we lose for ever the gleam which night by night for two centuries had fallen through Hilda's windows upon the darkness of the coast. In 867 the Abbey was destroyed by Inguar and Hubba, and Titus, abbot of the monks, fled with the relics of St. Hilda to Glastonbury. It is on a new world that the curtain rises, — new and yet how old! The authorities for the history of the refounding of Whitby have been carefully collected and compared by the Rev. J. C. Atkinson. There is the narrative known as the " Memorial of Benefactions," preserved 2S6 The Ruined Abbeys of ) orksJiire at Whitby, and locally called the " Abbot's Book," the Record of Symeon of Durham, the story of the founding of St. Mary's Abbey at York, purporting to be written by Stephen of Whitby, the Dugdale nar- rative derived from the Dodsworth MSS., besides the Domesday notices and references in charters and documents. But none of these help us to bridge over the century and a half of ominous silence which suc- ceeded the coming of Inguar and Hubba. " Strconcs- halch lay desolate for two hundred and seven years," says one historian, and the " Memorial of Benefac- tions," tells us that at the time of the refounding '" there were, as ancient countrymen have delivered to us, about forty cells or oratories, only the walls of which, however, together with the disused and shelterless altars, remained." For all that we can now see, the Saxon, the Norman, and the Early English buildings are eonncctcd only by identity of site and continuity of tradition, and it is from such precious fragments as the dark < rypt ot St. Wilfrid at Ripon that we must learn how men built in Hilda's time. History, in this more lasting than its monuments, has preserved for US the name and fame of that old group of royal warriors and saints, to whom henceforth must succeed a rough soldier from the Conqueror's army — " miles strenuissi- Whitby 287 mus in obsequio domini sui Wilhelmi Nothi, Regis Anglorum." Regenfrith, or, as the charters call him, " Reinfrid," must have been a man of strong convictions and steadfast purpose. In the course of a march or journey in the service of the Conqueror, he turned aside to visit Streoneshalch as we now visit the ruins of the later Whitby, but with this difference — he was " pricked to the heart by the tokens of ruin and desolation," and afterwards became a monk at Eves- ham. Thence, after ten years of discipline, he emerged between 1076 and 1080, with the vision ot the roofless cells and desecrated altars of Whitby still before his eyes. He was accompanied by Ealdwine, Prior of Winchcumbe, and Oswin, a monk ; and the three, with their scanty possessions carried on an ass, set manfully forth to restore monasticism in Northumbria. Their first halt was at Monkchester, their second at Jarrow. Here Oswin was left while Ealdwine and Regenfrith continued their journey. At last they, too, separated, and Regenfrith came alone to Streones- halch, "which is also named ' Hwiteby.'" Before long he had gathered round him, by the unfailing magic of a genuine enthusiasm, a little company eager for the religious life. Then the great family 288 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of the Percies come upon the scene. It is William de Percy who gives Regenfrith and his monks leave and licence to occupy the sacred places of Hilda and Eanfleda, of Caedmon, Bosa, and John of Beverley. But for this patronage the}- expect their reward. Scrlo de Percy, brother of William, must succeed Regenfrith as Prior, to the exclusion and bitter dis- appointment of Stephen, a monk with capacity, am- bition, and a part} - . This led to the secession of Stephen and his friends to York", where he became abbot, and wrote the record to which we have more than once referred. Meanwhile the devotion of William de Percy could not rest till he hail raised his Priory into a rich and powerful Abbe)- ; and then, for some reason, Serlo was displaced, and a younger William, nephew of the founder, was made abbot. The conduct of the elder William, the brother of Serlo, towards the monaster)- has been much dis- cussed, and he has been accused of " violence and injustice" by >omc historians, and entirely acquitted by others. His sins, whatever the)- were, did not impair an impetuous and, perhaps, imperious piety, which eventually ended his career by a Crusader's death. When Whitby Priory became an Abbey the Kin;.; WHITBY CHURCH. FROM A WINDOW OF THE ABBEY U Whitby 291 (Henry I.) granted to the monks the port, or haven, with the wreck and all other appurtenances. To the fifth year of Henry II belongs the strange and pic- turesque, but somewhat lengthy, story of how William de Bruce and Ralph de Percy, with a " gentleman and freeholder " called Allatson, did, on the 16th October, so belabour with their boar-staves a pious hermit of Eskdaleside — a " wood or desert place belonging to the Abbot of Whiteby " — that he shortly afterwards died. But the point to be observed is the power of the Abbot, who, " being in very great favour with King Henry," removed these great men from the sanctuary at Scarborough, whither they had fled, and brought them in such peril of their lives that they were glad to accept the hermit's deathbed forgiveness, and profit by his intercession. The conditions demanded by him were, that they and theirs should hold their lands of the Abbot of Whitby and his successors by the strange service of annually, on Ascension evening, themselves cutting with a knife of one penny price, and carrying on their backs, and setting up, certain " stakes, strutt-towers, and yethers," as a fence against the tide at the town of Whitby, while the " officer " of Eskdale blew, " Out on you ! out on you !" for their heinous crime. The prosperity of the Abbey would henceforth 292 The Ruined . Xbbeys of Yorkshire have been only too great, 1 and its wealth too rapidly- increased, if it had not been for repeated inroads of robbers and pirates, and the invasion of the coast on one occasion by the King of Norway himself. But, in spite of all, the monks of Whitby, retiring now to Hackness, and now again returning to build and adorn their monastery, raised, by degrees, a church of great size and remarkable beauty. Working, as usual, from east to west, they have left us specimens of at least two periods of Early English and one of Decorated architecture. The choir, indeed, with its dog-tooth mouldings, is an early example of the " first pointed " style, while the north transept, in which the mouldings arc adorned with lilies, is distinctly later. The western part of the nave is decorated of a rich and rather un- common type. The very decided bend in this arm of the cross is a feature which, like other irregularities more or less similar, has led to the theory that the monk-builders deliberately signified thereby the in- clination of our Lord upon the Cr< It would be exceedingly interesting to discover substantia] proof of this quaint and, perhaps, fanciful hypothesis. At present, however, it must be received with caution. 1 William Rufus was among its ben< giving the Church d All Sainton Fishergate, Yorl odition ol prayers for himself and his heirs. Whitby 293 The triforium, with its dual system of pointed arches, has been referred to in the chapter on Rievaulx. The north front of the transept differs from the east end of the choir in having a round window in the gable ; but the remnants of the south transept, as well as the south wall of the nave, lie in con- fused heaps of ruin. The tower, alas ! fell fifty years ago. From that tower, when Robin Hood and Little John pleased the good monks by feats of archery, men say their arrows flew three miles inland. The strong sea-breeze that sped those fabled flights pre- vailed at last over the solid masonry, but not till the national weapon had long been laid aside and the national piety had flowed for centuries in other channels. To-day, as we look down from low and ruinous walls on Whitby — the old and the new, divided by the harbour and encompassed by the hills — two comments among many haunt us most. " What happy peaceful lives the good monks must have lived in those calm retreats !" the kinder critics say. It may be true of some. Yet before and above all else a monastery was a refuge from despair. The fight against the world's wickedness was lost, and there was nothing left for it but either self-surrender to a 294 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire reckless life or flight to lonely forts and fastnesses of prayer. To him who sees the deluge rise, and knows what waste of waters heaves and swings above his home, the ark is no place of mild contentment. And, then, there is the worldly-wise man's angry and contemptuous cry, " To what purpose is this waste?" A great modem, careless even while he lived to hide his thought, said, we are told, that of two things mostly desired by men he felt no need : they were Religion and Poetry ; in place of which he was satisfied with intellectual activity and the domestic affections. Those who crave and those who do not crave for a spiritual, an unearthly life, — those who look and those who do not look to the hills from whence cometh help, — arc always distinguishable. But in the Middle Ages the gross and unlovely aspect of god- lessness, and the comparative fewness of the third class who keep their religion for times of sickm loss, and fear, brought into strong relief the fact that a remnant were still looking for and hasting unto the coming of a deliverer — still felt the need of a religion. The desires of men are only, ill an indirect way, the index of their needs. The miner, whose father and father's father have laboured underground, needs sun- light and free air — he desires, it may be, only the Whitby 295 gin-shop. And even in one lifetime the ascetic may cease to yearn towards the brother whom he hath seen, the agnostic towards the God whom he hath not. But to few, surely, is it granted or ordained to stand always gazing up into heaven, or dwell con- tinually on the Mount of Transfiguration. Circum- stances, or a peculiar relation of the understanding to the soul, mark out the Bernards and Teresas from the crowd, and their halo, reflected in a thousand humble lives, defies neglect and mockery. And yet, in spite of its imperfect vision and mistaken premises, the world in this is partly right. Monasticism, in an evil time, both held and wrought much good ; but it can scarcely be denied that, measured even by its success in promoting those ends to which the world is so indifferent, it was a system involving waste — waste of bodily strength, and money, and land, and skill, with which God might have been better served. When He demands the precious ointment, let it flow from the shattered casket and no word be said of waste. But that is only now and then, while poor humanity is always with us. Do not Dominic and Francis teach us this ? Perhaps the monks forgot the creature in the Creator ; perhaps we are too apt to do the opposite. Well, at least, the day is ours, and among the ruins 2<)6 The Ruined Abbeys of Yorkshire of their costly and laborious worship we can spend and toil to serve. " Percantatis laudibus " — " praises having been sung" — such was Carlyle's ruthless rendering of a passage in the Chronicle of Joscclyn of Brakcland. Poor monks, misguided self-torturers, their "lauds" indeed, arc sung and ended long ago, and the Yorkshire valleys resound no more with those Benedictine chants which Palcstrina wove, they say, into his Masses. In that, at least, the country- side is poorer. And yet if we, in our way, arc living for their Master's sake the life of self-renuncia- tion, we shall not fail in the hour, it may be, of our sorcst need and faintest hope, to hear amid the silence or the din of moor or mill some strain of holy triumph, bidding US, in the words of St. Benedict, " Xcvcr to despair of the mercy of God." nil END ' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. ft NOV 06198? ID0V2 J9W J oro L9-60tH 7, 54 (5990)444 L 005 326 790 2 LIBRARY FACILITY A A 000 284 708