English Monasteries

§ 85.

It is probable that the observances of all orders in the two centuries before the suppression tended to become very similar. Records of visitations in the fifteenth century shew that there had grown to be scarcely any difference between the ordinary customs of Benedictine monks and Augustinian canons: injunctions delivered to a house of one order were repeated in almost the same terms to a house of another. The Carthusian order stood apart from the rest, however, by virtue of its ascetic rule—a rule stricter and more frugal even than that followed by the early Cistercians. Each monk lived his own life in his cell, going to church for the night-office, the early masses and vespers, and to the frater for the mid-day meal and supper on Sundays and certain feast-days, but otherwise saying his offices alone and served with his two meals a day through a hatch in the wall of his cell. On Sundays and chapter festivals all the hours, except compline, were said in church, and two chapters were held, one after prime and the second after none. In this life of lonely austerity, given up to contemplation and precluded even from the field-work and farming which were part of the activity of the strictest orders, later medieval sentiment found much to admire; and the popularity of the Carthusians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was probably a recognition of their maintenance of the primitive simplicity from which the older and greater houses had declined.