FOUNTAINS ABBEY

FOUNTAINS   ABBEY
THE   STORY  OF  A   MEDIÆVAL
MONASTERY BY GEORGE HODGES
D.D.  DEAN  OF  THE  EPISCOPAL
THEOLOGICAL   SCHOOL   CAM-
BRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
ALBEMARLE STREET W
MCMIV

Ballantyne Press
London & Edinburgh

TO MY WIFE
I INSCRIBE THIS FRUIT
OF A GOLDEN SUMMER

PREFACE

The records have been gathered together by Mr. Walbran, and printed, with many learned and interesting notes, in two volumes of the publications of the Surtees Society, entitled “Memorials of Fountains Abbey.” They begin with a contemporary narrative of the foundation of the Abbey, and extend to the grant which the king made of the Abbey lands after the suppression. They include the chronicle of the administrations of the abbots; the deed of the ground on which the Abbey stands; a series of royal charters and a series of papal privileges; various records of the dealings of the Monastery with its neighbours, clerical and lay; letters to Thomas Cromwell from Layton and Legh, the commissioners at whose demand the Abbey was surrendered, and from Marmaduke Bradley, the abbot who surrendered it; and the king’s assignment of pensions by name to the abbot and the monks after the dissolution.

Of these documents, the longest and most interesting is the contemporary account of the foundation—Narratio de fundatione Fontanis Monasterii. It was written by Hugh, a monk of the daughter house of Kirkstall, upon information given him by Serlo, an aged brother then resident in that abbey, who had once lived at Fountains. Serlo was almost a hundred years old when he sat in the sun in the cloister of Kirkstall, and told this story of his early days, answering Hugh’s questions. “It is now,” he says, “the sixty-ninth year of my conversion. When I first went to Fountains to associate myself to that holy brotherhood, I was, as I remember, about beginning my thirtieth year.” The Abbey, at that time, as he tells us in another place, was five years old; but he had been acquainted with the brethren before. “When the monks left the monastery of York, I myself was present. I had known their names and faces from my boyhood; I was born in their country, was brought up amongst them, and to several of them I was related by ties of blood. And although I am, as thou may see, far advanced in years, I am very grateful to my old age that my memory remains unimpaired, and particularly retentive of those things committed to it in early years. Such things, therefore, relating to the origin of the Monastery of Fountains, which I personally witnessed, or have gathered from the credible report of my elders, I will now relate.”

Serlo spent ten years at Fountains, leaving in 1147, with the colony which founded Kirkstall. After that, the chronicler writes not from personal observation, but from near acquaintance. There would naturally be frequent communication between the mother and the daughter house. The reminiscences end with the death of the sixth abbot, in 1190. Thence the history proceeds, by the hand of Hugh and others, to recount the administration of the seventh and eighth abbots, and mention is made in the last sentence of the ninth and tenth.

In addition to these books, information is to be had concerning the Cistercian Order in its official documents. These are the Life of St. Stephen Harding, the chief founder; the Exordium (1120), a history of the beginning of the Order; the Charta Charitatis (1119), its constitution; the Rule of St. Benedict, to whose strict keeping the Cistercians were pledged; the Usus Antiquiores or Consuetudines, the Customs of the Society; and the Instituta Capitali Generalis, or laws passed during several hundred years by the General Chapter for the government of the Order. A life of St. Stephen, in English, was published in 1844, under the editorship of John Henry Newman, as the first in a projected series of lives of the English saints. The Rule of St. Benedict is admirably summarised in the article on Monachism in the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” The Institutes have been printed in successive numbers of the “Yorkshire Archæological Journal” (vols. ix., x. and xi.) by the Rev. J. T. Fowler. The other documents are assembled in the 166th volume of Migne’s “Patrologia Latina.”

In the Rites of Durham, a contemporary account of the customs of a Benedictine abbey, light is thrown upon obscure passages in these official documents, and much help is given in the way of homely detail towards an understanding of the routine of the monastic day. Dean Stubbs, in his lectures on Ely Cathedral, and the Rev. John Henry Blunt, in his account of Sion House, prefixed to his edition of the “Myroure of oure Ladye,” take us pleasantly into the refectory, telling us what the monastic folk had for dinner, and with what curious signs they communicated one with another during the silent meal.

The writer gratefully acknowledges the friendly services of the Dean of Ripon and of Charles Edward Eardley Childers, of Pittsburg, and the courtesy of the Marquess and Marchioness of Ripon during his locumtenency of Studley Church, in the summer of 1901.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ERRATA

Plate facing page 52. For “The Cloisters”
read “The Cellarium”

Page 9, lines 3 and 13. For “Rievaux”
read “Rievaulx”

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING

They are propped up on either hand, like an old man leaning on his staff; but they live. The elm has wholly disappeared. Mr. Walbran’s maternal great-grandfather remembered “the stump of an enormous elm tree in the last stage of decay, which was called ‘the Fountain’s elm.’ ” It stood “between the river Skell and the stream from Stank’s pond, not far from the eastern boundary of the Abbey site.” But the smooth turf covers the place. Only the yews look down from their gentle hill upon the broken walls. There they were when the monks came, a little adventurous company, to begin their life of seclusion and prayer. Their leaves were green when the Abbey rose in splendour, and mitred abbots walked in their shadow. They saw the expulsion of the convent and the ruin of the monastery. They are a symbol of the persistence of the quiet, elemental forces amidst our human chance and change.

The monks of Fountains Abbey belonged to the Cistercian Order.

In the twelfth century, when the Abbey began, this was the newest religious society. The Benedictines, after splendid services to civilisation, had encountered the temptations which accompany the praises and the gifts of grateful communities, and had been worsted. They had verified the wise saying, “When anybody does a good thing, all the neighbours join together to keep him from doing it again.” They had grown rich in the treasures which are subject to the invasions of moth and rust and thieves, but they were growing poor in the accounts of heaven. The purpose of the Cistercians was to return to primitive monastic simplicity. Gregory the Great had said that he who would see angels must have his head pillowed on a stone. The Cistercians believed it.

Stephen Harding, who founded the Cistercian Order, was an Englishman, from Dorsetshire. He spent his early years in the monastery at Sherborne. Thence he went wandering, in the free fashion of the time, partly to see the sights, partly to save his soul, and made a pilgrimage to Rome. On his way back, in Burgundy, he chanced upon a little company of monks, who were encamped in a clearing in the midst of a thick forest. They had built a chapel with the trunks of trees, and around it had gathered a forlorn group of huts made of the boughs, and were freezing and starving to their hearts’ content. All this filled Stephen with devout envy. He joined this monastery, and thereafter saw England again no more.

But presently, the rule seemed to many of the brethren to be too hard for human endurance, and they relaxed it, and began to live more softly, so that Stephen was dissatisfied. And out he went, and a few like-minded brethren with him, in quest of hardship, which they found at Citeaux. This was a wild place in the dark woods, with a deep stream running through the midst of it, the banks of which were the residence of beasts of prey. Here Stephen was made prior; the honest severity of Benedict’s laws was sought again; the brethren lived in holy simplicity.

And then friends appeared. This good life was appreciated by rich and powerful neighbours, and they brought gifts and built a church; and one of them was buried there. This was Odo, duke of Burgundy, whose son Hugh, with a company of friends, people of the court, took a fancy for going to church at the monastery chapel, so that the plain place shone with their silks and jewels, and the simple brethren were distracted in their prayers by the neighbourhood of all this fine array. The chapel was becoming a fashionable church. By this time Stephen was the abbot—abbot of Cistercium, which was the Latin for Citeaux. And Stephen stopped it. He turned all these gay worshippers out of doors, forbade them ever to come in again, and shut the monastery gate in the face of all his influential friends.

Then he made the plain services more plain. He forbade that “in the House of God, in which they wished to serve God devoutly day and night, anything should be found which savoured of pride and excess, or can in any way corrupt poverty, that guardian of virtue, which they had chosen of their own accord.” There must be no gold or silver in the church, except a silver cup for the sacramental wine. A single candlestick must suffice for light, and that must be of iron and straight from top to bottom. Vestments must be of common stuff, no more of silk or cloth-of-gold. All the pictures must come down. The brethren said their prayers in a chapel as severe as a Puritan meeting-house. In the midst of a time of monastic splendour, when monks of St. Benedict and even monks of Cluny rode abroad like knights or princes, Stephen Harding’s household were separate from the world in all sincerity.

Once, when the poverty which they invited came and lodged with them so long that the pantry was bare even of crumbs, one of the brothers went out to beg for bread, and came home with a great apronful. But when Stephen found that the bread had come from one who had made his money by dishonesty, he took it off the table, carried it into the fields and gave it to the shepherds. The brethren used to notice that in the evening, when the abbot went into the church, he often stopped, after he had shut the door, and pressed against it with his hand. And when they asked him what it meant, he said, “I am forced during the day to give free course to many thoughts for the ordering of the house; all these I bid remain outside the door, and tell them not to venture in, and to wait till the morrow, when I find them all ready for me after Prime has been said.”

It seemed, for a time, as if this severity of discipline and this unworldliness of spirit would forever bar the door against new-comers. Brethren died, and nobody took their places. At last, however, all this good planting came to its proper harvest. One day, in the year 1113, thirty men appeared at the gates of Citeaux, asking to be received as novices. And their leader was a man whose character and strength made him presently the greatest churchman of his time. With the accession of Bernard, the Cistercian monastery grew speedily into the Cistercian Order; and the Cistercian Order came in due time into England.

Turstin, Archbishop of York, wrote to Bernard at Clairvaux, asking for Cistercian monks; and Bernard, being now, in Stephen’s old age, at the head of the Order, sent over a colony which settled in the valley of the Rie, at Rievaux. There they lived their new life of simple devotion. And presently the fame of the sanctity of the monks of Rievaux began to vex the consciences of their neighbours.

The Benedictine abbey of St. Mary of York was a rich and vast establishment. It had received gifts from William the Norman, and from William his son. It was so fine that Richard the prior and a little company of sympathetic brethren, touched by the example of the simple manners of Rievaux, came to the conclusion that it was too good a place to be an appropriate residence for a Christian. They determined to leave it.

Richard the prior, Gervase the sub-prior, Richard the sacrist, Walter the almoner, and Robert the precentor were of one mind in the matter, and presently a sufficient number of devout conspirators was added to make thirteen. That was the required number for the beginning of a monastic colony. Together they came to the old abbot and asked leave to go. But the abbot met them with a stout refusal. The malcontents were made to understand that they had asked a grievous thing; they had despised their order, and brought confusion into the holy house; they had attempted to break their solemn vows. To this, the prior made appropriate answers, but satisfaction was impossible. Back and forth, the matter was discussed all summer, most of the monks taking the abbot’s part. At last, in October, the archbishop came. There was a noisy meeting in the cloister; abbot and archbishop, monks and seculars; with the townsfolk crowding at the abbey gate. “Your church is interdicted!” cried the archbishop, raising his voice above the din. “Interdict it, for aught we care, for a hundred years!” shouted the brethren. Then they made a rush for the prior and his friends, who got with great haste into the church, the archbishop being with them, and barred the door for fear of their lives. Finally, they escaped in safety. The affair made a great commotion in a day when abbots and bishops were seldom on good terms. The abbot sent messengers to the King, the first Henry; the bishop wrote to the legate of the Pope. But the thing was done, and stayed done.

Two Richards, two Ralphs, Gervase, Walter, Robert and Alexander, Geoffrey, Gregory, Thomas, Hamo and Gamel thus abandoned St. Mary’s, and for the moment were lodgers in the archbishop’s house. Even this little company were not all of one mind, for presently two of them were homesick and went back; of whom Ralph “made terms with his flesh and his belly clave to the ground,” that is, he remained in the old way, but Gervase again repented and cast his lot with the reformers. Ralph’s place was taken by a second Robert, a monk of Whitby.

Archbishop Turstin had a country seat at Ripon, to which he went to keep the Christmas of 1132, bringing the thirteen brethren with him. And on the morrow of the festival, taking them out three miles into the country, he established them upon a piece of his own land, in the narrow valley of the Skell. The deed of gift of this land—the “charter of foundation”—is still preserved at Studley Royal. William the dean of York, William the treasurer, Hugh the precentor, Robert and William the archdeacons, five canons of St. Peters, five canons of St. Wilfrid, and nine laymen signed it as witnesses.

The place, as the narrative says, was a long way out of the world—locum a cunctis retro seculis inhabitatum; it was full of thorns and rocks, and seemed a better dwelling for wild beasts than for men. But they accepted it with gratitude. In the midst of the valley they made a thatched hut, with the trunk of the great elm for roof-pole, and having chosen the prior Richard to be their abbot, they began with contented minds to live the life of devotion and straitness for which they had longed amidst the pernicious comforts of the Abbey of St. Mary. They named their little monastery De Fontibus, from the springs which abounded in the valley. “O ye wells, bless ye the Lord,” they sang—Benedicite, fontes Domino, and the words were echoed back in the frosty air from the cliffs on either side.

The same spirit was in all their hearts—the spirit of religion, the desire to devote themselves more perfectly to God. They took life very seriously. They had stout convictions, and purposed to live in consistency with them, and sought a place where that should be possible.

In the following spring, the brethren sent messengers to St. Bernard at Clairvaux, asking to be admitted to the Cistercian Order. Bernard was at that time the greatest man in Europe. He had just decided between two rival claimants which was the true Pope. He received the men of Fountains with great kindness, finding in them a spirit kindred with his own. He sent them back with a gracious letter, which is still preserved. Fratribus charissimis et desideratissimis, he wrote, Ricardo abbati et hiis qui cum eo sunt, frater Bernardus abbas Clarevallis, in Domino, salutem. And he sent with them Geoffrey, a monk of his own monastery, a person of ability and experience, to teach them the new ways. Thus the new life began; and presently their number was increased. Seventeen new brethren came, seven of them being in orders.

Their number was increased, but their resources were in no way enlarged. The archbishop, indeed, continued to be good to them, and the neighbours occasionally sent things in,—housewives at their weekly baking remembering the brethren and putting in an extra batch for them.

A little money they earned by making mats. But that year there was a famine in the land, till the abbot had to go out through the surrounding country to find food, and even then found none; so that for a time they lived on leaves which they boiled with salt in the water of the stream—the friendly elm, as the narrative says, affording them food as well as shelter. One day, they said, the Lord Christ knocked at the door, in the guise of an ill-clad, hungry man, and asked an alms in the starving time, when they had but two loaves and a half, and no prospects of more. At first, they had prudently refused him, but when he continued asking had given him one loaf. And behold, within a half-hour, two men appeared from Knaresborough Castle with a plentiful supply of bread, over which the monks recited the “Inasmuch as ye have done it” of the Gospel.

Finally, the situation became intolerable. The brethren had, indeed, made choice of poverty, and had come out into the wilderness in devout search of her; but this was a different matter. This was destitution rather than poverty, so that, the next year, when there appeared no likelihood of any betterment, the abbot made a journey to Clairvaux, and begged St. Bernard to give them lands in France, or in any place where they might live and not die. And Bernard agreed to give them a habitation near his own abbey.

Happily, they did not need the gift. Abbot Richard, on his return, found a change in the fortunes of the house. The colony had been joined by Hugh, the dean of York. He had been in the company of the archbishop on the day of his stormy visitation, and had seen the men of Fountains as they faced the reproaches of their brethren; and being now an old man and tired of the world, he had resolved to say his prayers for the rest of his life with them. Thus he had resigned his high position, and turned his back on his splendid minster, and had cast in his lot with the starving colony. And he was fortunately rich, and brought books with him, and money. Part of the money they gave to the poor, part they put into the general fund, part they used to pay the carpenters and masons who were building the church and cloister.

After this, prosperity continued. Canon Serlo, of York, who, like the dean, had witnessed the escape of the monks from St. Mary’s, and whose name is still to be seen among the witnesses to the charter of foundation, now became a brother of Fountains; and with him Canon Tosti, who is remembered in the narrative as a pleasant person. And each added to the treasury. Then Robert and Raganilda de Sartis, owners of the neighbouring estate of Herleshow, gave it to the monks, adding to it the forest of Warsall. Also Serlo de Pembroke, a young courtier—juvenis quidam de domo regis—lying at the point of death, gave them his country-seat at Cayton, and when he died was buried in the monks’ graveyard, inter sanctos. This was probably the first interment in the little cemetery which awaited the brethren to the east of the rising church. About the same time, the abbot got a farm at Aldbrough—grangiam fertilem—in a place which even from Roman times had been a fruitful region.

Presently, in 1135, King Stephen being at York, the monastery was exempted by him from payment of “taxes, danegelds, assises, pleas and scutages.” Also, a little later, in 1141, Pope Innocent exempted the monastery from payment of tithes.

From that day, says Serlo the narrator, who had now become a member of the monastic household, the Lord blessed our valleys with the blessing of heaven above and of the deep that lieth under, multiplying the brethren, increasing their possessions, pouring down showers of benediction, being a wall unto them on the right hand and on the left. What perfection of life, he cries, was there at Fountains! What emulation of virtue! What stability of discipline! The house was enriched in wealth, without; still more in holiness, within. Its name became famous, and the great people of the world reverenced it.

CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF THE ABBEY

The goodness of the brethren made a deep impression upon the community. Turbulent and cruel as were the times, there was, nevertheless, some attention paid to the voice of conscience. It is true that this voice commonly made itself heard after the event, and served rather to reproach men than to deter them; but it did speak, and men listened. The deeds which they did were incredibly bad, but after they had done them, and the fierce heat of passion had died down, they were both sorry and afraid. Then they remembered that “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” Doubting the value of their own prayers, they looked about for righteous men to make intercession for them. God sat on His throne, like the king, and had His court about Him, part of angels, part of saints in glory, and part of holy persons still in the flesh. The sinner’s hope of success in his petition lay in the securing of the kindly offices of some of these influential courtiers. And these were to be found most readily on earth in monasteries. Accordingly, these companies of praying men seemed, even to the sinners of the neighbourhood, to be engaged in an important and essential business. If the sinner had money enough, he engaged a group of them to pray for him in particular. He built a monastery, and established them in it for that necessary purpose.

Thus Ralph de Merlay, chancing on his travels to spend a day at the Abbey, and there beholding the pious conversation of the brethren, made up his mind, from what he saw, that these were the kind of men to have influence with God; and being in need of friends at that court, he asked the abbot to let him have some of them, pro redemptione animae suae. This was the first colony which went out from Fountains. The year was 1137. The knight took the monks into his castle at Morpeth, in whose neighbourhood he presently built them a monastery, which they called Newminster. The abbot of this new brotherhood was the Robert who had come from Whitby to take the place of the inconstant Gervase after the flight from York: a good man, modest in his bearing, gentle in his conversation, bearing rule with mercy, and at last enrolled in the honourable list of the saints. The abbey, like the mother house, was built beside a little river; and its three daughters, Pipewell, Sawley and Roche, sat likewise, in the true Cistercian manner, on the banks of narrow streams.

In the next year another nobleman, Hugh of Tatshall, in Lincolnshire, resolved to establish a Cistercian house, and sent to Abbot Richard for advice and monks from Fountains, and founded Kirkstead Abbey on the river Witham. At the same time the Bishop of Lincoln asked the abbot for more men—the two companies of colonists leaving Fountains on the same day—and settled them, after some wandering, at Louth Park. Their abbot was the Geoffrey who forsook his companions at the bishop’s, and went back to St. Mary’s, to return in deep penitence; who was thus assured of their entire confidence in him.

In 1145, Hugh de Bolebec, for the redeeming of his sins, begged for the services of the brethren of Fountains, and an abbey was built at Woburn.

In 1146, the Bishop of Bergen came to Fountains, and his heart was set on having a Cistercian house in Norway. Thirteen brethren were found to brave the sea and the unknown land. Thus was erected the monastery of Lisa-Kloster, the abbey of the valley of light. One of the Ralphs of the original settlement was the abbot. In the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is a manuscript life of St. Olaf, which was once among the books of Fountains. It is bound with other manuscripts in the skin of a seal. Ralph came back after many laborious years to spend his last days in the mother house. He may have brought with him this memento of the Norway mission. It is pleasantly told of him in the narrative that he used to sleep a good deal in his old age, and that the Lord sent a prompting angel to awake him when he slept too long—si sompno, forsitan, per noctes diutius indulgeret, eum excitaret.

The next year, 1147, saw three colonies go out from Fountains. Henry de Lacy, of Pontefract Castle, having meditated upon his misdeeds during a long illness, vowed that he would build a Cistercian house to the honour of the Virgin