§ 24.
'
Decem sunt abusiones claustralium,' runs
an inscription upon the quire-stalls of St Agatha's
abbey, now in Richmond church, 'The abuses of those
in cloister are ten: costly living, choice food, noise in
cloister, strife in chapter, disorder in quire, a neglectful
disciple, a disobedient youth, a lazy old man, a
headstrong monk, a worldly religious.' The actual
evidence of documents, when compared with the
counsels of perfection in the rules of orders and the
custom-books of monasteries, supplies a commentary
on this text which applies to every century from the
thirteenth to the sixteenth. It must also be owned
that grave moral offences were not uncommon.
Where slackness of rule was prevalent, temptations
of this kind must have abounded, and convents which
had the misfortune to possess an unworthy or lazy
head were liable to succumb to them. Such weaknesses,
however, are just those on which satirists lay
excessive emphasis and to which scandal lends a too
ready ear. The evidence of episcopal visitations,
while it discloses much that is repellent to our ideal of
the religious life, seldom proves that moral corruption
was general in any given monastery, or that individual
backslidings went without punishment. Cases of
immorality, though not few, are generally treated
with an individual prominence which would be impossible,
if a whole monastery were implicated in
them. This fact must be laid against the credence
which is still sometimes given to the so-called
comperta
of Henry
VIII's commissioners, the trustworthiness
of which is now rightly discredited. Bishops
like Alnwick would spend months of hard work in
visitations and several days, if necessary, on the impartial
examination of the evidence for a single crime,
while such commissioners as Dr Layton rushed at full
speed through the monasteries committed to their
inquiry, with prejudices already formed and with the
most casual examination of witnesses, enforcing
resignations of abbots and extorting confessions and
bribes from frightened monks and nuns, with the
closely allied objects of bringing the revenues of
the houses to the royal exchequer and of earning
grants of prebends and deaneries for themselves.
