Scenes and characters of the middle ages

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

I HE Essays which are collected in this volume were originally published, from time to time, in the monthly numbers of the Art-Journal, extending over a period of nearly five-andtwenty years.

The woodcuts which accompanied them have gradually accumulated into a very considerable series of interesting and really valuable contemporary illustrations of the costume and manners of the Middle Ages, well worthy of being thus brought together in a convenient form.

The Essays were in some cases little more than popular sketches intended to introduce and explain the woodcuts, in some cases they were the results of some original research into little known subjects of antiquarian interest.

The author would gladly have rewritten the Essays on a more complete and systematic plan, had more important occupations left him the necessary leisure ; he has made some considerable additions to the original matter. It is hoped that in its present shape the work may interest the general reader; the illustrations cannot fail to be of value to the antiquary ; and the numerous references to the Illuminated MSS. in the British Museum will help the student to gather for himself fresh material from that rich and inexhaustible mine of medieeval archaeology.

Contents

\/ THE MONKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Chapter I. The Origin Of Monachism

PAOB

Hermits of the Thebaid — The " Laura " — Rule of Pachomius — ^Rule of St. Basil — British Monasteries i

CHAPTER n.

THE BENEDICTINE ORDERS.

St. Benedict— His Rule— Early Saxon Monasteries put under Rule of St. Benedict by Archbishop Dunstan — The Habit — Relaxation of DiscipHne — Reformed Orders of Benedictines — Founding of Clairvaux — Clugniacs — Carthusians — Cistercians ... . 6

CHAPTER in.

THE AUGUSTINIAN ORDERS.

Canons Secular — Canons Regular — Premonstratensians — GUbertines — Nuns of Tontevraud — ^Bonhommes — Brigittines — Hospitals — St. Bartholemew's . .18

CHAPTER IV.

THE MILITARY ORDERS.

Templars — Hospitallers— Trinitarians— Alien Priories 26

CHAPTER V.

THE ORDERS OF FRIARS.

TheirObject— Labours— Character— Dominicans— Franciscans— Carmelites— Austin

Friars — Chaucer's Friars — Dissolution of Monasteries 36

Contents.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CONVENT.

PAGK

Abbot — His Duties — His Habit — ^Abbess — Prior — Prioress — Chaucer's Prioress — Prior's Duties — Sub-prior — Precentor — Sacrist — Hospitaller — Infirmarer — Almoner — Master of the Novices — Porter — Kitchener — Seneschal — Cloister Monks — Novices — Chaplains — Artificers — Servants — Associates — Chaucer's Monks 54

CHAPTER VII.

THE MONASTERY.

Sites of Monasteries — Ground Plan — Church — Chapter-house — Fratry — Refectory — Other Buildings — Scriptorium — Abbot's Lodging — Hospitium — Piers Ploughman'sDescription ofaConvent of Friars — Dependent Cells . . . .70

I , THE HERMITS AND RECLUSES OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

CHAPTER I.

THE HERMITS.

Their Origin — Chararcter — Habit — Service for habiting and blessing Hermit — Different Social Classes — Sites of Hermitages — Richard of Hampole — Hermitages— St. Robert's Chapel, Knaresborough — At "Warkworth — At Dale Abbey . — At Wetheral' — At Bewdley — At Teuton — Construction of Hermitages — ■ Spenser's Hermit — Hermitage at Limay 93

Chapter II. Anchoresses, Or Female Eecluses

Origin— Early Customs— Description of Anchorage— Its Chapel— Chaplain— Anchorages in Town Churchyards, at York, Lincoln, Norwich, &c. . .' .120

Chapter III. Anchorages

Plan— Material— At Rettendon— At East Homdon— At St. Patricio— At Chipping Norton — At Warmington — Recluse Priests— Interior of Reclusorium— The "Ancren Riewle" — Bilney's Account of Anchoresses — Habit— Service for enclosing Recluse 1,2

Contents. ix

Chapter IV. Consecrated Widows

PAGE

Service for their Benediction — Form of Profession — Examples — Lady Aleanor GifFard— Isabelle Golafre — Lady Cecyle of Ballavylle 152

Xxy THE PILGRIMS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Chapter I. Pilgrims

Origin of Pilgrimages — Saxon Pilgrims — Pilgrims of different Ranks — With different Motives — Popular Shi'lnes^ — Service for blessing Pilgrims — Robe — Hat — Staff — Scrip — Pilgrim Signs — Piers Ploughman's Pilgrim . . . . . 157

Chapter II

OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM AND ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY.

Pilgrims for Penance — For Pleasure — Went in Companies — Erasmus's "Peregrinatio Religionis erga" — Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham — Relics — Modem Pilgrims — Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage — Erasmus's Description of the Shrine of St. Thomas i. Becket — Relics — Shrine of St. Edmund at Bury — Female Pilgrims — Returned Thanks on Return Home — Tombs of Pilgrims — Illustrations of Costume 176

CHAPTER I.

THE PAROCHIAL CLERGY.

Conversion of the English — Parochial SYSleip — Cathedral Establishments — Parish Rectors — Impropriation — Foreign Incumbents — Pluralities — Incumbents in Minor Orders — Parish_Chaplains — Education of Priest — Poor Scholars — Education promoted by the Church — Chantry Priests — Guild Priests — Mass Priests — Domestic Chaplains — Chapel Establishments of Noblemen and Gentlemen — Oratories . . 195

CHAPTER. II.

CLERKS IN MINOR ORDERS, l^^

Names and Symbols of Minor Orders — Meaning of Title " Clerk "—Chaucer's Clerks

of Oxford — Parish Clerk — Antiquity of Office-Duties — Chaucer's Parish Clerk . 214

b

Contents.

CHAPTER 11 r.

THE PARISH PRIEST.

PAGE

Monies— Friars— Seculars— Rivalry between Friars and Secrdars— Extracts from

Piers Ploughman's Vision— Comparison of Mediaeval Seculars and Modern

Clergy— " Instructions to Parish Priests "—Chaucer's " Poor Parson " . . 222

Chapter I. Saxon Arms And Armour

Illustrated from Relics in their Graves— From Miniature Pictures— From Beowulf- The Helmet— Coat of MaU — Dagger— Sword— Spear— Shield— Horsemen- Troop of Soldiers — Mantle and Brooch 311

CHAPTER H.

, ARMS AND ARMOUR, FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST DOWNWARDS.

The Feudal System— Military Service— Armour of Knights— Coat of Mail— Chausses —Helmet — Ai'morial Bearings — Weapons — Sword — Spear— Axe— Mace — Cross-bow — Illustrations from Miniatures 326

CHAPTER HI.

ARMOUR OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

Gradual Introduction of Plate Armour — The Surcoat— Cyclas—Jupon— Belt- Leather Armour — QuUted Armour — Gambeson — Hacqueton — Illustrations from Miniatures— Jousting— Chaucer's " Sire Thopas "—The Squire . . .338

CHAPTER TV.

THE DAYS OF CHIVALRY.

Medieval England— The Knight-Errant— His Adventures— His Combats . . 353

CHAPTER V.

KNIGHTS-ERRANT.

Adventures — A Siege— Medieval Drill and Tactics — Warfare .... 369

CHAPTER VI.

MILITARY ENGINES.

Attack of Fortified Place— Scaling-ladder-^Trebuchet — Arbalast — Battering-ram —Mining — The " Sow " — Movable Tower — Mantelet — Cannon and Mortars — Field Works — Defences of Camp 380

CHAPTER VII.

ARMOUR OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY,

Plate Armour — Its Changes of Form — Illustrations from Miniatures . . 394

CHAPTER VIII.

THE knight's education. j.^^^^^

Page— Playm?atToumaments-Squii-e-Chaucer'sSquire— Knighthood— Chaucer's

Knight-Chivalric Character of War— Tournaments regulated by Legislation ^^ —Single Combat— Wager of Battle 4°

CHAPTER IX.

ON TOURNAMENTS.

In the Romances — Froissart's Passage of Arms at St. Inglebert's — Chaucer's

Tournament of Palamon and Arcite 4^3

CHAPTER X,

MEDIEVAL BOWMEN.

Norman Archers at Hastings— Mounted Archers— The Cross-bow— Illustrations from Miniatm-es — Legislative Encouragement of Archery— Cannon— Hand-guns— Greek Fire ■. 439

CHAPTER XI.

FIFTEENTH CENTURY AND LATER ARMOUR.

Changes in the latter part of the Fifteenth Century— Armour of Henry VIII.— Tournament Armour— Henry VIII.'s Army— His Camp— Armour of the Time of Elizabeth— Of the Stuarts 45^

NY

THE MERCHANTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNINGS OP BRITISH COMMERCE.

Ancient British Commerce with the Phoenicians — Carthaginians — Gauls — Romans — Saxon Commerce — Charlemagne's Letter — Athelstan's Law — Saxon Exports and Imports — London^- Shipping— Commerce of London in the Twelfth Century — Carried on by Foreign Merchants — Shipping of Thirteenth Century— Galleys — Fourteenth Century Seaport — Early Illustration of Whale Fishery ..... . ij.6l

Chapter II. The Navy

Navy of Richard I. — Fourteenth Century Shipping — Fifteenth Century Shipping —

The Cinque Ports — Piracy — Private Naval Warfare. ^yc

Contents. xiii

Chapter III. The Social Position Of The Medieval Merchants

PAOK

Mediaeval Estimation of Trade — Cadets of good Families became Traders — Merchant Guilds — Bird's-eye View of Mediaeval England^Merchant Princes — The De la Poles at Hull — Cannynges at Bristol — Whittington at London — Their Munificence — Chaucer's Merchants and Burgesses — Alderman Field — Costume .............. 487

Chapter I. The Origin Of Monachism

E do not aim in these chapters at writing general history, or systematic treatises. Our business is to give a series of sketches of mediaeval life and mediaeval characters, looked at especially from the artist's point of view. And first we have to do with the monks of the Middle Ages. One branch of this subject has already been treated in Mrs. Jameson's " Legends of the Monastic Orders." This accomplished lady has very pleasingly narrated the traditionary histories of the founders and saints of the orders, which have furnished subjects for the greatest works of mediaeval art ; and she has placed monachism before her readers in its noblest and most poetical aspect. Our humbler task is to give a view of the familiar daily life of ordinary monks in their monasteries, and of the way in which they enter into the general life without the cloister ; — such a sketch as an art-student might wish to have who is about to study that picturesque mediaeval period of English history for subjects for his pencil. The religious orders occupied so important a position in medieval society, that they cannot be overlooked by the historical student ; and the flowing black robe and severe intellectual features of the Benedictine monk or the coarse frock and sandalled feet of the mendicant friar, are too characteristic and too effective, in contrast with the gleaming armour

B

The Monks of the Middle Ages.

and richly-coloured and embroidered robes of the sumptuous civil costumes of the period, to be neglected by the artist. Such an art-student would desire first to have a general sketch of the whole history of monachism, as a necessary preliminary to the fuller study of any particular portion of it. He would wish for a sketch of the internal economy of the cloister ; how the various buildings of a monastery were arranged ; and what was the daily routine of the life of its inmates. He would seek to know under what circumstances these recluses mingled with the outer world. He would require accurate particulars of costumes and the like antiquarian details, that the accessories of his picture might be correct. And, if his monks are to be anything better than representations of monkish habits hung upon " lay figures," he must know what kind of men the Middle Age monks were intellectually and morally. These particulars we proceed to supply as fully as the space at our command will permit.

Monachism arose in Egypt. As early as the second century we read of men and women who, attracted by the charms of a peaceful, contemplative life, far away from the fierce, sensual, persecuting heathen world, betook themselves to a life of solitary asceticism. The mountainous desert on the east of the Nile valley was their favourite resort ; there they lived in little hermitages, rudely piled up of stones, or hollowed out of the mountainside, or in the cells of the ancient Egyptian sepulchres, feeding on pulse and herbs, and water from the neighbouring spring.

One of the frescoes in the Campo Santo, at Pisa, by Pietro Laurati, engraved in Mrs. Jameson's " Legendary Art," gives a curious illustration of this phase of the eremitical life. It gives us a panorama of the desert, with the Nile in the foreground, and the rock caverns, and the httle hermitages built among the date-palms, and the hermits at their ordinary occupations : here is one angling in the Nile, and another dragging out a net ; there is one sitting at the door of his cell shaping wooden spoons. Here, again, we see them engaged in those mystical scenes in which an overwrought imagination pictured to them the temptations of their senses in visible demon-shapes— beautiful to tempt or terrible to affright j or materialised the spiritual joys of their minds in angelic or divine visions : Anthony driving out with his staff the beautiful demon from his cell, or

The Origin of Monachism.

rapt in ecstasy beneath the Divine apparition.* Such pictures of the early hermits are not infrequent in mediaeval art — one, from a fifteenth century MS. Psalter in the British Museum (Domit. A. xvii. f. 4 v), will be found in a subsequent chapter of this book.

We can picture to ourselves how it must have startled the refined Graeco- Egyptian world of Alexandria when occasionally some man, long lost to society and forgotten by his friends, reappeared in the streets and squares of the city, with attenuated limbs and mortified countenance, with a dark hair-cloth tunic for his only clothing, with a reputation for exalted sanctity and spiritual wisdom, and vague rumours of supernatural revelations of the unseen world ; like another John Baptist sent to prfeach repentance to the luxurious citizens ; or fetched, perhaps, by the Alexandrian bishop to give to the church the weight of his testimony to the ancient truth of some doctrine which began to be questioned in the schools.

Such men, when they returned to the desert, were frequently accompanied by numbers of others, whom the fame of their sanctity and the persuasion of their preaching had induced to adopt the eremitical life. It is not to be wondered at that these new converts should frequently build, or select, their cells in the neighbourhood of that of the teacher whom they had followed into the desert, and should continue to look up to him as their spiritual guide. Gradually, this arrangement became systematised ; a number of separate cells, grouped round a common oratory, contained a community of recluses who agreed to certain rules and to the guidance of a chosen head ; an enclosure wall was generally built around this group, and the establishment was called a laura.

The transition from this arrangement of a group of anchorites occupying the anchorages of a laura under a spiritual head, to that of a community

* We cannot put down all these supernatural tales as fables or impostures ; similar tales abound in the lives of the religious people of the Middle Ages, and they are not unknown in modem days: e.g., Luther's conflict with Satan in the Wartzburg, and Colonel Gardiner's vision of the Saviour. Which of them (if any) are to be considered true supernatural visions, which may be put down as the natural results of spiritual excitement on the imagination, which are mere baseless legends, he would be a very self-confident . critic who professed in all cases to decide.

The Monks of the Middle Ages.

living together in one building under the rule of an abbot, was natural and easy. The authorship of this ccenobite system is attributed to St. Anthony, who occupied a ruined castle in the Nile desert, with a community of disciples, in the former half of the fourth century. The coenobitical institution did not supersede the eremitical ; both continued to flourish together in every country of Christendom.*

The first written code of laws for the regulation of the lives of these communities was drawn up by Pachomius, a disciple of Anthony's. Pachomius is said to have peopled the island of Tabenne, in the Nile, with coenobites, divided into monasteries, each of which had a superior, and a dean to every ten monks ; Pachomius himself being the general director of the whole group of monasteries, which are said to have contained eleven hundred monks. The monks of St. Anthony are represented in ancient Greek pictures with a black or brown robe, and often with a tau cross of blue upon the shoulder or breast.

St. Basil, afterwards bishop of Cesaraea, who died a.d. 378, introduced monachism into Asia Minor, whence it spread over the East. He drew up a code of laws founded upon the rule of Pachomius, which was the foundation of all succeeding monastic institutions, and which is still the rule followed by all the monasteries of the Greek Church. The rule of St. Basil enjoins poverty, obedience, and chastity, and self-mortification. The habit both of monks and nuns was, and still is, universally in the Greek Church, a plain, coarse, black frock with a cowl, and a girdle of leather, or cord. The monks went barefooted and barelegged, and wore the Eastern tonsure, in which the hair is shaved in a crescent ofif the fore part of the head, instead of the Western tonsure, in which it is shaved in a circle off the crown. Hilarion is reputed to have introduced the Basilican institution mto Syria ; St. Augustine into Africa ; St. Martin of Tours into France • St. Patrick into Ireland, in the fifth century. '

The early history of the British Church is enveloped in thick obscurity but It seems to have derived its Christianity (indirectly perhaps) from an Eastern

« Besides consulting the standard authorities on the archaeology of the subject th. student wiU do weU to read Mr. Kingsley's charming book, '■ The Hermits of the Desert "

. The Origin of Monachimi.

source, and its monastic system was probably derived from that established in France by St. Martin, the abbot-bishop of Tours. One remarkable feature in it is the constant union of the abbatical and episcopal offices ; this conjunction, which was foreign to the usage of the church in general, seems to have obtained all but universally in the British, and subsequently in the English Church. The British monasteries appear to have been very large ; Bede tells us that there were no less than two thousand one hundred monks in the monastic establishment of Bangor in the sixth century, and there is reason to believe that the number is not overstated. They appear to have been schools of learning. The vows do not appear to have been perpetual; in the legends of the British saints we constantly find that the monks quitted the cloister without scruple. The legends lead us to imagine that a provost, steward, and deans, were the officers under the abbot ; answering, perhaps, to the prior, cellarer, and deans of Benedictine institutions. The abbot-bishop, at least, was sometimes a married man.

Chapter II. The Benedictine Orders

|N the year 529 a.d., St. Benedict, an Italian of noble birth and great reputation, introduced into his new monastery on Monte Cassino — a hill between Rome and Naples — a new monastic rule. To the three vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity, which formed the foundation of most of the old rules, he added another, that of manual labour (for seven hours a day), not only for self-support, but also as a duty to God and man. Another important feature of his rule was that its vows were perpetual. And his rule lays down a daily routine of monastic life in much greater detail than the preceding rules appear to have done. The rule of St. Benedict speedily became popular, the majority of the existing monasteries embraced it ; nearly all new monasteries for centuries afterwards adopted it ; and we are told, in proof of the universality of its acceptation, that when Charlemagne caused inquiries to be made about the beginning of the eighth century, no other monastic rule was found existing throughout his wide dominions. The monasteries of the British Church, however, do not appear to have embraced the new rule.

St. Augustine, the apostle of the Anglo-Saxons, was prior of the Benedictine monastery which Gregory the Great had founded upon the Celian Hill, and his forty missionaries were monks of the same house. It cannot be doubted that they would introduce their order into those parts of England over which their influence extended. But a large part of Saxon England owed its Christianity to missionaries of the native church sent forth from the great monastic institution at lona and afterwards at Lindisfame and these would doubtless introduce their own monastic system. We find

The Benedictine Orders.

in fact, that no uniform rule was observed by the Saxon monasteries ; some seem to have kept the rule of Basil, some the rule of Benedict, and others seem to have modified the ancient rules, so as to adapt them to their own circumstances and wishes. We are not surprised to learn that under such circumstances some of the monasteries were lax in their discipline ; from Bede's accounts we gather that some of them were only convents of secular clerks, bound by certain rules, and performing divine offices daily, but enjoying all the privileges of other clerks, and even sometimes being married. Indeed, in the eighth century the primitive monastic discipline appears to have become very much relaxed, both in the East and West, though the popular admiration and veneration of the monks was not diminished.

In the illuminations of Anglo-Saxon MSS. of the ninth and tenth centuries, we find the habits of the Saxon monks represented of different colours, viz., white, black, dark brown, and grey.* In the early MS. Nero C. iv., in the British Museum, at f. 37, occurs a very clearly drawn group of monks in white habits; another group occurs at i. 34, rather more stiffly drawn, in which the margin of the hood and the sleeves is bordered with a narrow edge of ornamental work.

About the middle of the ninth century, however. Archbishop Dunstan reduced all the Saxon monasteries to the rule of St. Benedict j not without opposition on the part of some of them, and not without rather peremptory treatment on his part ; and thus the Benedictine rule became universal in the West. The habit of the Benedictines consisted of a white woollen cassock, and over that an ample black gown and a black hood. We give here an excellent representation of a Benedictine monk, from a book which formerly belonged to St. Alban's Abbey, and now is preserved in the British Museum (Nero D. vii. f. 81). The book is the official catalogue which each monastery kept of those who had been benefactors to the house, and who were thereby entitled to their grateful remembrance and their prayers. In many cases the record of a benefaction is accompanied by an illuminated portrait of the benefactor. In the i)resent case, he is

.* Strutt's "Dress and Habits of the People of England."

The Monks of the Middle Ages.

represented as holding a golden tankard in one hand and an embroidered cloth in the other, gifts which he made to the abbey, and for which he is thus immortalised in their Catalogus Benefactorum. Other illustrations of Benedictine monks, of early fourteenth century date, may be found in the Add. MS. 17,687, at f. 3 ; again at f. 6, where a Benedictine is preaching ; and again at i. 34, where one is preaching to a group of nuns of the same order; and at f. 41, where one is sitting writing at a desk (as in the scriptorium, probably). Yet again in the MS.

Royal 20 D. vii., is a picture of St. Benedict preaching to a group of his monk^. A considerable number of pictures of Benedictine monks, illustrating a mediaeval legend of which they are the subject, occur in the lower margin of the MS. Royal 10 E. iv., which is of late thirteenth or early fourteenth century date. A drawing of Abbot Islip of Westminster, who died A.D. 1532, is given in the "Vetusta Monumenta," vol. iv. PI. xvi. In working and travelling they wore over the cossack a black sleeveless tunic of shorter and less ample dimensions.

The female houses of the order had the same regulations as those of the monks ; their costume too was the same, a white under garment, a black gown and black veil, with a white wimple around the face and neck. They had in England, at the dissolution of the monasteries, one hundred and twelve monasteries and seventy-four nunneries.* For illustration of an abbess see the fifteenth century -MS. Royal 16 F. ii. at f. 137.

The Benedictine rule was all but universal in the West for four centuries ; but during this period its observance gradually became relaxed.

Benedictine Monk.

* This is the computation of Tanner in his " Notitia Monastica ;" but the editors of the last edition of Dugdale's "Monasticon," adding the smaller houses or cells, swell the number of Benedictine establishments in England to a total of two hundred and fifty-

The Benedictine Orders.

We cannot be surprised if it was found that the seven hours of manual labour which the rule required occupied time which might better be devoted to the learned studies for which the Benedictines were then, as they have always been, distinguished. We should have anticipated that the excessive abstinence, and many other of the mechanical observances of the rule, would soon be found to have little real utility when simply enforced by a rule, and not practised willingly for the sake of self-discipline. We are not therefore surprised, nor should we in these days attribute it as a fault, that the obligation to labour appears to have been very generally dispensed with, and some humane and sensible relaxations of the severe ascetic discipline and dietary of the primitive rule to have been very generally adopted. Nor will any one who has any experience of human nature expect otherwise than that among so large a body of men — many of them educated from childhood * to the monastic profession — there would be some who were wholly unsuited for it, and some whose vices brought disgrace upon it. The Benedictine monasteries, then, at the time of which we are speaking, had become different from the poor retired communities of self-denying ascetics which they were originally. Their general character was, and continued throughout the Middle Ages to be, that of wealthy and learned bodies ; influential from their broad possessions, but still more influential from the fact that nearly all the Uterature, and art, and science of the period was to be found in their body. They were good

* If a child was to be received his hand was wrapped in tlie hanging of the altar, " and then," says the rule of St. Benedict, " let them offer him." The words are " Si quas forte de nobilibus oflfert filium suum Deo in monasterio, si ipse puer minore aetata est, parentes ejus faciant petitionem et raanum pueri involvant in pallu altaris, et sic eurn oflFerunt " (c. 59). The Abbot Herman tells us that in the year 1055 his mother took him and his brothers to the monastery of which he was afterwards abbot. " She went to St. Martin's (at Toumay), and delivered over her sons to God, placing the httle one in his cradle upon the altar, amidst the tears of many bystanders" (Maitland's "Dark Ages," p. 78). The precedents for such a dedication of an infant to an ascetic life are, of course, the case of Samuel dedicated by his mother from infancy, and of Samson and John Baptist, who were directed by God to be consecrated as Nazarites from birth. A law was made prohibiting the dedication of children at an earlier age than fourteen. At f. 209 of the MS. Nero D. vii., is a picture of St. Benedict, to whom a boy in monk's habit is holding a book, and he is reading or preaching to a group of monks.

lO The Monks of the Middle Ages.

landlords to their tenants, good cultivators of their demesnes; great patrons of architecture, and sculpture, and painting ; educators of the people in their schools; healers of the sick in their hospitals; great almsgivers to the poor ; freely hospitable to travellers ; they continued regular and constant in their religious services; but in housing, clothing, and diet, they lived the hfe of temperate gentlemen rather than of self-mortifying ascetics. Doubtless, as we have said, in some monasteries there were evil men, whose vices brought disgrace upon their calling; and there were some monasteries in which weak or wicked rulers had allowed the evil to prevail. The quiet, unostentatious, every-day virtues of such monastics as these were not such as to satisfy the enthusiastical seeker after monastical perfection. Nor were they such as to command the admiration of the unthinking and illiterate, who are always more prone to reverence fanaticism than to appreciate the more sober virtues, who are ever inclined to sneer at religious men and religious bodies who have wealth, and are accustomed to attribute to a whole class the vices of its disreputable members.

The popular disrepute into which the monastics had fallen through their increased wealth, and their departure from primitive monastical austerity, led, during the next two centuries, viz., from the beginning of the tenth to the end of the eleventh, to a series of endeavours to revive the primitive discipline. The history of all these attempts is very nearly alike. Some young monk of enthusiastic disposition, disgusted with the laxity or the vices of his brother monks, flies from the monastery, and betakes himself to an eremitical life in a neighbouring forest or wild mountain valley. Gradually a few men of like earnestness assemble round him. He is at length induced to permit himself to be placed at their head as their abbot, requires his followers to observe strictly the ancient rule, and gives them a few other directions of still stricter life. The new community gradually becomes famous for its virtues ; the Pope's sanction is obtained for it ; its followers assume a distinctive dress and name ; and take their place as a new religious order. This is in brief the history of the successive rise of the Clugniacs, the Carthusians, the Cistercians, and the orders of Camaldoli and Vallombrosa and Grandmont ; they all sprang thus out of the Benedictine order, retaining the rule of Benedict as the groundwork of their several systems. Their departures from the Benedictine rule were comparatively few and trifling, and need not be enumerated in such a sketch as this : they were in fact only reformed Benedictines, and in a general classification may be included with the parent order, to which these rivals imparted new tone and vigour.