Life of Saint Gilbert, Prior of Sempringham

Preface

The substance of the following pages is taken from the life of Saint Gilbert, published in the recent Edition of Dugdale's Monasticon, from a manuscript in the British Museum. The name of the author is unknown; it appears however incidentally that he was of the order of Sempringham, and knew Saint Gilbert personally in his last days. Portions of the life have been put together from contemporary sources, as, for instance, the well-known story of the nuns of Watton, taken from Saint Aelred's narrative published in Twysden's Collection. On that story itself it may be well to say a few words. The time is now past when it was necessary to prove that monasteries were not nests of wickedness. Indeed it is high time that it should be so, for to any one who looks into the evidence for such an assertion, it is wonderful that it should ever have been made. The case is made out simply by raking together all the isolated facts related by historians from the fourth century to the Reformation, and bringing them to bear against monastic institutions without distinction of order, age, or country. In one popular book, for instance, the customs of Catholic monks and Manichaean heretics, of monks in their first fervour, and of Orders in a relaxed state, are put side by side. There we may learn that monks were in the habit of fasting on Sundays, of neglecting the fasts of the Church, and of abstaining from meat, because the Creation was evil; and all this because the Council of Gangra condemned certain heretics for such malpractices.

What would be said if the same sort of evidence was applied to any other history? No one denies that at some periods monasteries required reform, that is, that in the intervals of their long services, monks conversed together instead of keeping silence and employing themselves in manual labour; nay, that in process of time, and in some monasteries, instances of flagrant wickedness might be found. But the unfairness of heaping all instances together, without attempting to classify or arrange them historically, will be evident to any one who thinks at all seriously on the subject. And indeed so materially have old prejudices been weakened within the last few years, that few persons will be found who consider such stories, as the one above mentioned, to be really specimens of the age in which they occurred. Still, however, as they ever leave vague and indefinite suspicions upon the mind, it may be well to quote the opinion of the very work to which we have alluded as especially unfair to the monastic orders. In Fosbroke's British Monachism, the following passage occurs: "It is singular that notwithstanding the story of the poor nun in Alfred of Revesby and Bale, Nigel Wireker says nothing of this Order but what observation of the rule implies; but it was yet young when he wrote." This Nigel was a satirist, who details in verse the faults of the monastic orders of his day. Cave makes him to have flourished about the year 1200, full eighty years after the first institution of the Nuns of Sempringham.

It only remains to add that in writing the following pages, use has been made of a manuscript life of Saint Gilbert, kindly lent by its author, William Lockhart, Esq., now a brother of the Institute of Charity established at Loughborough.

Introduction

It was a sad and dreary time for England when first Norman William mounted the throne which he inherited from the blameless Edward. The nobles were wandering about among the woods and forests of the land, and living like robbers among the impassable marshes of the country; while Edgar, England's darling, was an exile in Scotland. Her pleasant homes were turned into military fastnesses, for each man fortified his dwelling; and as he closed door and window at night, the head of the family said Benedicite, and the household responded Dominus, not knowing whether their homestead might not be burned over their heads at night. Who can tell the horrors inflicted on those of English blood by Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, and William Fitz-Osborne? Noble English virgins and matrons were the victims of the brutal Norman soldiers; monasteries were stripped of their lands, and many a Saxon expelled from his possessions to make room for a foreigner. Geoffrey, the mail-clad Bishop of Coutances, alone had 280 manors for his share of the spoil. A love of hunting seems to be the darling sin of our Norman monarchs, and to this William sacrificed whole villages, with their churches and inhabitants. He had a summary way of increasing his forest-lands; no need of planting trees, or waiting for the slow growth of oaks and beeches. There were then many woods in merry England, and he simply swept away the homes of the villagers who dwelt amongst and near them, so that the lands returned to their natural state of wilderness, and the stag couched undisturbed on the hearth of the peasants or in the long fern where once was the altar of the village church. But the greatest blot on William's fair fame is the terrible depopulation of the north of England. In the depth of winter the Conqueror went forth to his fearful revenge; he stalked on boldly over mountains covered with snow and frozen rivers; the horses dropped down dead with fatigue under his knights, but still he pressed on. The aged Archbishop of York died of grief at the approach of these miseries, and the Bishop of Durham with the relics of Saint Cuthbert fled before him. Behind him was famine and pestilence, and a hundred thousand men are said to have perished. He left not a village standing between York and Durham.

And yet, relentless and ambitious as he was, Norman William was one of the best monarchs of his age and race. If he was stern, it was with a calm and majestic sternness, very different from the bestial fury of his son the Red King. On his death-bed he declared that it was on principle that he had put in prison innocent men, because they were dangerous. In the beginning of his reign England had a prospect of peace, when he went back to Normandy and displayed to his noble visitors the beauty of the long-haired sons of England and its gold-tipped drinking horns, and congratulated himself on his easy conquest. His policy in the first years of his reign tended to effect a quiet and gradual amalgamation of the Norman and Saxon races. He married Saxon maidens to his nobles, and though he gave the lands of Englishmen to his followers, yet on the other hand he transplanted Englishmen to the Continent and endowed them with Norman fiefs. His administration of the law, though stern, was rigidly just, and it was said that a girl laden with gold might pass through England unharmed. He did not oppress the poor; it was rather the noble who felt his iron yoke, and probably the Saxon serf was not worse off under his Norman lord than under the Saxon Thane. The Englishmen had already begun to clip their long hair and to adopt Norman fashions, when the rising under Earl Morcar took place, and the beautiful and generous Edwin treacherously perished, to the universal grief of England. The Conqueror shed some tears over him, hut from that moment he seems to have been convinced that a gentle hand could not rule England, and his inexorable policy began.

Again, it should not be forgotten that in his exercise of Church patronage, he was free from simony, the besetting sin of his successors. He seems to have had a quick perception of character; and, with the same acuteness by which on his death he foretold that his wily Henry would outstrip his brethren, he fixed upon great Churchmen to rule the English Sees. It was perhaps fortunate for the Conqueror that his interest coincided with his duty, but it is true that the English Church was very much improved by the Conquest. It may be that he was desirous of weakening the native courts, and breaking up the old organisation which kept up an English feeling; but however this be, he certainly gave a great boon to the Church when he restored her internal jurisdiction instead of subjecting her to the civil tribunal of the Hundred courts. Whatever motives influenced him to remove the Saxon Abbots from Saxon monasteries, it is certain that generally religious houses flourished under the Norman successors whom he appointed. The Saxon clergy were too often in a state of rude ignorance and jovial indulgence. The great Abbey of Abingdon was well rid of its abbot, Sparhafoc, the cunning craftsman, who absconded with the gold with which he had been entrusted to make a new crown for the Confessor. A general reform took place throughout England on the model of Saint Albans, which became a school of holy discipline under Paul its first Norman abbot. The poor monks may have grumbled at his uncouth Norman fish-pie, which he introduced into the infirmary instead of the savoury meat, which was too apt to invite the brethren to put themselves on the sick list; but they could not help acknowledging the vast advancement of religion under his rule. The fine old Saxon character was everywhere greatly impaired, and nowhere more so than in the Church; a set of hunting and hawking abbots, men who loved hippocras and mead, sat in the seat of the ancient saints of the land. On the whole, Abbot Paul may not have been far wrong when he looked down on his predecessors, though of the noblest blood in England, as somewhat thick-witted and ignorant. An intellectual and active element was introduced into the English Church which it had not before; and though the Saxon historian declares that England took no part in the dispute between Pope and Antipope, yet William, by his appointment of Lanfranc, prepared the way for breaking down the mischievous nationality which, even more than our tossing sea, was beginning to cut us off from the rest of Christendom.

All these, however, are but the bright parts in a dark picture; the sins of Saxon England were to be punished, and tremendous was the amount of physical suffering which the poor country had to endure. The fusion between the rival races could only be effected by a red-hot furnace of suffering. Such was the hatred which existed between them, that even the ties of religion failed at first to bind them together. When, for instance, a Norman abbot came with his Norman chants to Glastonbury, the monks rebelled, and declared that they would not change their beloved Gregorian tones; then Abbot Turstin introduced an armed band into the church, and two monks were slain, one at the very altar, the other at its foot The monks defended themselves as they best could with the forms and candlesticks of the choir. At last the monk's frock got the better of the coat of mail, and the soldiers were driven out, but not till the church had been stained with blood, and the crucifixes and images of the Saints transfixed with arrows. In Saint

Albans, too, Abbot Frederic was the head of the Saxon interest in the south of England, and the two hostile parties lasted in the abbey through the time of the next abbot up to the election of his successor. If these quarrels raged in the sanctuary itself, it is easy to imagine that the world without was not in a state of peace. There was again another cause which increased the sufferings of poor England, as well under the reign of the Conqueror as of his successors; and this was the quarrel of the Norman barons with their kings. In France feudalism was much more systematised than in England. William, when in Normandy, was but the head of a feudal state, the first among his peers. He asked leave of his barons before he invaded England, and when the field of Hastings had been won, and William fairly seated on his throne, the Norman nobles began to think that their work was done, and returned home to their manors in Normandy. William saw that he could not count on a feudal army, and henceforth employed mercenaries. When his authority was strengthened in England he was much more absolute across the Channel than on the Continent. He held his English crown by a very different tenure from that by which he wore his ducal coronet in Normandy. There he was a feudal baron of the King of France, but England he held by right of conquest; and this told even more on his own followers than on the English. To the Saxons he was the representative of Edward the Confessor, whose laws he had sworn to observe, but the Normans who followed him to England, when once on English soil, lost their Norman, without distinctly acquiring Saxon rights. Hence the feudal system was at first much less defined in England than in France; and hence the bloody wars which the English kings had to wage against their nobles. Bitterly do the barons complain of the Red King at Henry's accession, and fairly does the monarch promise improvement; but the wily Beauclerc only waits his time till he feels his throne firm beneath him. It is true that these quarrels made the English necessary to their Norman monarchs; loyally did they serve the Conqueror on the Continent, and Normandy saw her fair fields ravaged by her own Duke, leading a Saxon army. Again his son William owed his throne to his Saxon subjects, who, by the persuasion of their Archbishop Lanfranc, assisted him against his disaffected barons. Ultimately the English gained by it, but during this period of transition they were miserably ground down between the opposing parties. Neither king nor baron cared much for the poor Saxon, and Magna Charta has much more about baronial than about popular rights.

Alas for England in this dreadful time! All countries have had their day of probation, but few have passed through such a fiery trial as our own. Scarcely had England recovered from the Dane, when the Norman came, and Dane-land, March-land, and Saxon-land, with the remnants of the old Cymri, in Cambria, all alike felt his yoke; and if it was an iron yoke under the Conqueror, what was it under his successors? The Conqueror had a rough justice of his own, his long arm reached from one end of England to the other, and he knew every hide of land within it; he even several times endeavoured to learn the language of his new subjects, that he might judge their complaints himself, and would have done so, if he had not been too old to begin grammar anew. But under the reign of his foul successor, "riot was the rule" of England. He was a man almost ludicrous in his knavish wickedness, who blasphemed and robbed with a jest, and grinned over his captive when he had him in his power. He introduced into England a class of men even worse than the robber-soldier; his companions were effeminate youths, stained with terrible crimes; and far worse were they in their silken robes and long hair parted in the middle, like that of women, and their feet clad in peaked shoes of fantastic shape, than the lawless soldier, with his conical cap of iron, and his corslet of steel rings, albeit he ruthlessly wasted the stock of the husbandman. The foul lust of this man cried aloud to heaven for vengeance, and before he fell like a beast of the field, in the New Forest, men felt a strange presentiment that the wrath of God was coming upon him, and holy monks, even in their dreams, prayed to our Lord: O Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of mankind, for whom Thou hast shed Thy precious blood on the Cross, look in mercy upon Thy people, groaning in misery under the yoke of William.

Our Blessed Lord, however, did not leave His people without consolation in this dreadful time; the Church was still up in arms against the world; though a contest was going on in her own bosom, and such a man as Ralph Flambard sat on the throne of Durham, yet she had inexhaustible resources in the Saints whom the Lord raised up within her. Saint Anselm was a match for the Red King, with all his satellites, whether soldiers or prelates. Even his father, inflexible as he was, was foiled by the crosier of Saint Wulstan; and the simple monk, Guitmund, refused to hold either bishopric or abbacy in England, bidding the king beware lest the fate of unjust conquerors should await him; and so he left him, and went back across the sea to his quiet monastery of Saint Leuffroy of the Cross, in Normandy, a monk as poor as he came. So also, at the time when foul and lawless wickedness was raging in England, under William Rufus, the Lord was nurturing in secret in His Church a man to whose angelic purity it was afterwards given to create the only wholly English Order, one destined to provide a refuge for holy virgins from the snares of the world; and it is the life of this man that, by God's blessing, we hope now to show truthfully to the reader.

Gilbert in the Schools

It was about the close of the reign of our first William that Gilbert was born, though the exact year is not known. His father, Sir Joceline, was a Norman knight, and a good soldier, whose services had been rewarded by many gifts of land in Lincolnshire, and especially with the lordship of Sempringham in that county. He was probably one of the vavassors, or inferior nobility of the realm. His mother was a Saxon lady, the daughter of a Thane, and of the same rank as her husband. He is thus an early instance of the blending of Norman and Saxon blood, and though, as will be seen by-and-by, his character partook more of the homeliness of his mother's race, yet certain adventurous journeyings on the Continent showed that he had also some of the spirit of his kinsmen, who went forth from home to gain England, the south of Italy, and Sicily. But little is known of his parents, and they soon disappear from the history, so that they most probably died before he had attained the age of manhood. All that appears from his chronicler is, that they lived on their estate, "in the midst of their people." A little before his birth, it is said that his mother dreamt that the moon had come down from the sky, to rest upon her bosom; and his fanciful disciple sees in it a presage that his childhood, pale, wan, and sickly as the crescent of the new moon, was destined by the grace of the Sun of righteousness to expand into a full orb of brightness. At all events it is certain that, as a child, he was no favourite with those about him. His recollections of childhood, as he used afterwards, in extreme old age, to tell his canons, were very painful. He was puny, plain, and shy; his father saw in him no qualities, either of mind or body, to make a soldier. He was therefore, "by divine providence, in his tender age," destined to be a clerk; had it not been for his childish ailments, he might have been all his days a thick-witted baron, spending all his time in the saddle, with harness on his back. Even here, however, he did not seem at first to have found his element; like most children he disliked his book, and for a long time he seems to have been allowed to run wild as he would. His features were plain, and nothing is said in his history about his mother's love. He was looked upon as half an idiot, and he used to tell of himself that the very servants would hardly sit at table with him, so much was he neglected and despised. Thus did God shield him from the deceitfulness of riches, for it is expressly said that his father was a rich man.

He was nursed up in the school of poverty and humiliation, and the shadow cast from his sickly and unamiable childhood rested upon him throughout his life, tempering the burning heat of prosperity.

As is often the case with dull children, the reproaches of his friends, or the natural expansion of his mind, produced a sudden reaction, and he began to apply himself to study. His parents seeing him take this turn determined to send him to Paris; thither then in early youth he went, as to the principal seat of learning in Europe. Our own Oxford, though more ancient as a seat of learning than Paris, had not yet attained its subsequent celebrity. It was a strong and fair city, with its castle rising high in the midst of the streams which all but surrounded it, but it was then rather too warlike to be a great seat of learning, and had to stand many a siege before it attained to its eminence. Nor, indeed, was Oxford ever the intellectual centre of Europe, as was Paris; as the Archbishop of Canterbury was "the Pope of the farther world," so had Oxford a world of its own, with intellects as active and as penetrating as any which ruled the schools on the Continent. But Paris had, even in Gilbert's time, its four nations, one of which included even the far east. To Paris then, and not to Oxford, came Gilbert; and he might, had it pleased him, have found food enough for his curiosity, for the quarrels between Realists and Nominalists had begun already to be heard in the schools of Paris. Roscelinus, the opponent of Saint Anselm, had taught in Paris; and there was a person then in France whose name has spread wider than that of the heretical head of the Nominalists. Peter Abelard was still a young man, though probably about ten years older than Gilbert. The career of the two youths was, however, to be very different; the terms of the schools are banished from the life of Gilbert; it is not known who was his master, whether Bernard of Chartres, or William of Champeaux, or Abelard himself. Not but that he was, in after times, a distinguished teacher in England, but it was not God's will that intellect should be the most prominent part of his character. All that is said of his studies at the school of Paris is, that he made up by his diligence for the waste of his early years, and "received an abundant talent of learning." But it proved to be a good school of discipline for him, and a marked change took place in his character; he had to struggle with poverty, for his father, notwithstanding all his riches, gave but a poor maintenance to the son who had disappointed him. Again, amidst all the dangers which surrounded him, by a severe purity, he offered up his body as a sacrifice to the Lord, and thus the grace of God trained him for that work which he was destined to perform in the Church.

It is not known how long he remained at Paris, but he came back to England with the degree of master and license to teach. He was not of those who remained on the mountain of Saint Genevieve, disputing over and over again on the old questions, who were to be found by their friends after many a long year not a whit advanced from the point where they started. Nor did he repair, as did many scholars in those days, to Salerno, to exercise afterwards the more profitable art of medicine. Nor again did he seek, the courts of king or prelate to make his fortune. He did net even seek the cloister, much less there, as saith the quiet satirist of the schools, carry his proud heart under the hood of Saint Benedict and exempt himself from conventual discipline, by keeping his old profession. He went back to England, to his old home in his father's house, and opened a school, or, to give him his proper title, he became a regent master.

At this time, a schoolmaster was a man of great importance; his person was as inviolable as that of a clerk, and he was considered as a half ecclesiastical personage. This office was a passport to the favour of kings and to ecclesiastical dignity. Two rulers of the schools of Bee at this time successively sat on the throne of Canterbury; Geoffrey, the schoolmaster of Saint Katherine's, became Abbot of Saint Albans, where a large library had lately been laid up in the painted cupboards by Paul, the first Norman abbot, and a whole manor set apart for its maintenance. The education of the country was then carried on by the old schools which had been connected with the monasteries and the cathedrals and other churches. No one could teach without a license, and this was to be obtained from any master who himself was the ruler of a school. Sometimes a secular ruled the school of the monks, and a monk might rule a secular school, but all were under the control and patronage of the Church, as the decrees for their protection testify, and it was considered almost simony to exact money for a presentation to a school, and no one could even let his school to another master. The universities were continually sending forth masters, who set up unendowed schools for themselves; and the Church soon after this, in Pope Alexander III's time, strengthened the hands of the old schools, by ordaining that each cathedral chapter should set apart a benefice for the master of the school, "because the Church of God, as a pious mother, is bound to provide for the poor, lest the opportunity of reading and improving themselves be taken away from them." At the same time, the same Pope encourages to the utmost the establishment of new schools, where the masters would necessarily be paid by the scholars, by forbidding under an anathema any cathedral dignitary from exacting money for a license, from any one who wished to set up a school, provided he were only competent.

Such was the situation in which Gilbert was now placed; he had found his way back to the home of his youth, where he had lived neglected and despised, but he was now a much more important person than when he left it and was considered by his father as a degenerate son. Now the whole country round, from a great distance, came to hear the new doctor from Paris. Not only boys were put under his charge and young men became his hearers, but girls and maidens also came to be instructed by him. Females were not behindhand in the intellectual enthusiasm of the period. Learning was a romantic quest, an unknown land, in which even females might go forth and make discoveries. The well-known Heloise will occur to everybody, and the daughters of Manegold, a schoolman celebrated in his day, taught philosophy to those of their own sex. Here, then, Gilbert found himself in a situation of great responsibility. The obscure township of Sempringham had suddenly, through his means, sprung up into an extensive school. His father no longer looked upon him as an unworthy scion, and found that he might be usefully and even honourably employed without breaking bones at tournaments, or hunting and hawking over his lands. He therefore, instead of leaving him to glean a precarious subsistence from his pupils, supported him out of his possessions, and this enabled Gilbert to assume an authority over his scholars, which he could not otherwise have maintained. He walked about in a dress becoming the son of the lord of Sempringham, but all the while he was in heart a monk, and he began immediately to form his pupils into an association, which might save them from the dangers to which their situation exposed them. Not content with teaching them the trivium and quadrivium, he became their spiritual guide, and subjected them to a species of monastic discipline. Knowing how a breath may spoil the beautiful innocence of childhood, and yet how easily holy discipline may shut out the knowledge of evil till the soul is strong enough to fight against it, he taught them to consecrate the whole day to God. The male children slept all together in a dormitory, where all might be controlled; he taught them reverence at church, and at certain times and places a religious silence was observed, and they had stated times for study and prayer. He was now happier than he had ever been before, beloved and honoured in his own home, and the guide of happy children and of a band of youths and maidens, who praised the Lord under his direction.

The Rectory

He was not long, however, to enjoy this peace; two new churches were founded in his father's lands at Sempringham and Tirington. It does not appear whether Sir Joceline was himself the founder of them, at all events he conceived that the right of presentation belonged to him, and he nominated his son to the vacant churches. It was much against his will that he accepted the charge; he knew that it would probably be disputed, and a lawsuit was of all things the most opposed to his character. On the other hand, he thought it his duty to defend his father's rights, and as the cause would come before an ecclesiastical tribunal and under the cognisance of the bishop, he could have no scruple in accepting the benefice, if it were given in his favour. A long lawsuit followed, as he had expected. If ever there was a system in confusion it was the parochial system of England at the Conquest. It had been introduced amongst us later than in any other of the existing kingdoms in Europe, and traces existed even after the conquest of the old division of church property by the bishop himself among his clergy; Lanfranc, for instance, and William of Saint Carilefe, Bishop of Durham, were the first in their respective sees to separate the bishop's lands from those of the monks of the cathedral, who originally performed the functions of the parish priests. Thus the parishes in England were in that most dangerous of states, a state of transition; at first, matters are generally clear and simple, and then comes an intermediate state, when questions arise and everything is vague and floating, till evils and abuses compel authority to step in.