Walter Besant

“ What could be too good, too costly, too precious for such men? They would accept no endowment. They lived on the broken meats of charity. Then let their church be adorned; let the pillars bear aloft the roof over chapels and altars ablaze with gold and lights; let their sacred vessels be of gold—nothing less would serve; let the vestments be of cloth of gold and silver. And so on until the dreadful suspicion arose that the Grey Friars were not so holy and so devoted as of old. They lived upon their reputation for a hundred years and more ”

“ Every Monastic House, every church, the King’s Palace, were all sanctuaries. But a sanctuary within the walls of the City, which was not a place of temporary refuge, not a place, such as a church, in which the fugitive could be starved into surrender, but a place in which every kind of criminal might find an asylum and safe retreat for life, a place which practically defied the arm of the Law and the hand of Justice, was certain to become an intolerable burden to a law-abiding city. And so St. Martin’s actually did become. Again and again the City of London revolted in vain against its powers ”

“ A Benedictine who rides abroad dressed like a knight with hawk and hound, for whom a hundred manors send up their rent, their wheat and their game; who keeps a splendid table; who admits to his order only young men well born; to whom the place is like the College of All Souls, a House of Fellows with no duties, ceases to be regarded with reverence on account of reputed piety. When not even the memory is left of the early piety; when the air is thick with stories of incontinence and greed; when the land is everywhere parcelled out among the religious ”

“ And the reason why the fashion of bequeathing money to anchorites suddenly ceased was that by the end of the fourteenth century the mind of London was saturated with that part of Lollardy which scoffed at hermits, friars, and monks. At the time when the House of Commons was petitioning the King to suppress all Religious Houses of every kind, the rich men of the City left off, as if by common consent, as if by a kind of conspiracy or secret resolution, the bequeathing of money to friars, hermits, and anchorites. A broad black line is drawn. No more money shall be left to these people. ”

“ I believe that the mediæval masters were, as a rule, and up to their lights, benevolent; they did look after their people; they gave them wages which allowed a higher standard of living than was possible for any other working men in the world; they looked after the old, and they brought up the young.
For myself, I cannot but think that had the craftsmen then obtained their desire, the result would have been disastrous to the fortunes of the City. London would have become another Ghent or Bruges; it would be, now, a city of deserted trade. ”

“ Never was any Religious Order so reverenced, never were any religious men so loved and worshipped by the good people of London. All the world brought them gifts; they were ruined by the gifts; since they would not receive estates, they must have gold and jewels; with the gold they built a church, magnificent even in that age of magnificent churches; since they must remain poor, they spent all their money on the church and its decorations and furniture.
And then the inevitable decay set in; with so great a Church and so noble a House the old begging for daily bread became a form ”

“ Let us consider the actual life of a monk, a Benedictine monk. To begin with, it is a great mistake to suppose that an Abbey was always and for choice planted in some remote and secluded spot. As the people of the eleventh and twelfth centuries no more acted without good and sufficient cause than we their descendants, there must have been a very good reason to justify the foundation of so many Religious Houses within and without the walls of the City of London. ”

“ In an age when the judgment of God could be solemnly invoked, when there was absolute belief in the punishments and tortures reserved for the guilty, a man would, as a general rule, hesitate before loading his soul, heavy with the actual crime, with perjuries and the blasphemy of calling upon an offended God to prove his innocence; to invite, that is, the Father of Justice himself to deliver a false judgment. It was this clear and unquestioning faith which made the trial by ordeal possible for the innocent man to claim, and generally impossible for the guilty. ”

“ The religious life, they discovered, is not always found in the Religious House; the hood does not make the monk. The Friars came over to the country; they showed the people a new kind of religious life; one not separated from the world, but moving and living in the world; one that saves the soul by losing it and mounts to Heaven by the prayers and gratitude of men and women whom it has lifted from the mire and slough of sin and disease and misery. No more noble form of Christianity can be presented. Francis discovered the very mind of the Founder. ”

“ It must have been well known to our Kings throughout the twelfth century that the creation of the Commune in the great trading cities of Western Europe was not only ardently desired by the citizens, but had been actually achieved by many. What they desired was a Corporation, a municipality, self-government within their own walls. It is certain that London looked with eyes of envy upon Rouen, a City with which it was closely connected by ties of relationship, as well as those of trade, because Rouen obtained her Commune fifteen years before London obtained the mere shadow of one. ”

“ Above all, there were the masses, which might lighten the sufferings of the soul in purgatory: there was the prodigal gift of the dying man out of selfish love for himself, the more generous and no less prodigal gift of the bereaved, out of holy charity for others. The dying man, from the King to the peasant, when he had no further use for his worldly riches would devote them to this end: the living, out of profound respect or deep affection for the beloved husband, parent, brother, kinsman, friend, would be, and actually was not less bountiful and munificent. ”

“ After so many years we no longer feel, though we may understand, the exasperation with which the abuse of the Monastic system came to be regarded: the accumulation of vast estates in the hands of a multitude who toiled not neither did they spin: who professed an austere Rule and lived a luxurious life: who despised wealth but enjoyed all that wealth could give: who pretended to pay no regard to birth yet admitted into their ranks none but those of gentle blood: with whom the difference between profession and practice was monstrous and scandalous. ”

“ When one talks of Queens and their misfortunes, it may be remembered that few Queens have suffered more than Elizabeth Woodville. In misfortune she sits apart from other Queens, her only companions being Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette. Her record is full of woe. But in that long war it seems impossible to find one single character, man or woman—unless it is King Henry—who is true and loyal. All—all are perjured, treacherous, cruel, self-seeking. All are as proud as Lucifer. ”

“ When we think of the great mass of people of Mediæval London, when we think of their laborious and industrious days, the precarious nature of their lives, the perils which attended them, far greater to our thinking than those of the present day—dangers ever present, of fire, famine, plague, pestilence, and war, we are moved to inquire into the ideas and beliefs which controlled the minds of this apparently inarticulate mass. ”

“ In our eyes it is pathetic to observe the hope and confidence always ready to be renewed, always doomed to disappointment, with which the people turned from one professedly ascetic order which—alas!—had fallen from its first profession and had now become rich, fat, and lazy, to another beginning with the best intentions, itself destined before long to fall off from the early zeal and the first austerities. Who could retain the pristine austerity when all these gifts came pouring in? When the broken victuals became a steady shower of all the good things that the earth had to give? ”

“ The Abbot then took the new recluse by the hand and led him down the nave of the church, followed by the choir and all the brethren, unto the little door leading into the West Cloister. The church was filled with people to see the sight. A new recluse is not seen every day. There were the domicellae, the maidens of the Queen, come from the Palace; there were knights and pages, and even men-at-arms; there were sanctuary men, women, and children; men with hawks upon their wrists; men with dogs; merchants from the wool staple; girls of wanton looks from the streets and taverns beyond the walls. ”

“ In 1338 a grocer of London sold a mazer ornamented with the image of St. Thomas of Lancaster. And a few years later the people made a saint of the preacher and hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole. All these popular but ephemeral saints worked miracles abundantly while the faith in their power lasted. Would that some poet had depicted the swarm of pilgrims who, in the year when the grocer sold that mazer, rode out of London on a pilgrimage to Pontefract where St. Thomas of Lancaster was buried!
Not only must men get a license to go on a pilgrimage: the shipmen who carried them were also licensed. ”

“ One understands that the more popular leaders of London between 1190 and 1272 were men who desired, above all things, to render impossible the burden of unequal taxation, and to give the commons a voice in the management of their own affairs. This twofold aim is really one, because it was believed that the people, if they had the power, would exercise it wisely and justly. The leaders, however, did not realise that the average man understands by justice the shifting of his burden to the shoulders of some other man, and he is quite careless who that other man is. ”

“ One of them, John Ball, whose preaching has been thought worthy of the historian, probably because he was considered to be so mischievous a person, taught a kind of rough socialism. “At the beginning we were all created equal: it is the tyranny of perverse men which has caused slavery to arise in spite of God’s Law: if God had willed that there should be slaves, He would have said at the beginning of the world who should be slave and who should be lord.” A poor argument, because, notoriously, we are not created equal, but unequal in every respect. ”

“ Every day through the summer came the penitents, the sick, the jovial pilgrims, who only wanted to put in a plea for indulgence. Outside the chapel there were taverns and merry-making places. First the pilgrim knelt at the shrine; sometimes he went round it on his knees; and prayed, with simple belief, if not with fervour; faith made the sick man whole; faith absolved the penitent; faith made the most careless happy in the belief that Our Lady of Muswell had knocked off many—he knew not how many—years of purgatory. ”

“ It is to be hoped that while the first was dragged by the heels to the gallows, while the second was murdered in a dungeon, while the third was put out of office and deprived of the right to speak and the power to act, some vision of the future was vouchsafed to them; some voice whispered in their dying ears that their life’s work was not lost, but would yet bear fruit in the coming freedom of the people for whom they had worked and for whom they suffered. ”

“ The Mayor and Aldermen, after a preamble to the effect that their City had been of late grievously afflicted by a dreadful mortality, so that the merchants were not able to wait in person upon his Holiness, proceeded to petition the Pope that he would “grant unto the venerable and religious man, Brother John de Werthyn, his chaplain, a man of honour, of approved life and manners, and also of learning, sprung from the high blood of the realm, who alone of all others strengthens us with the word of Christ, that he and he only, within the City may be able to absolve the people being penitent.” ”

“ William, called FitzOsbert, and sometimes William Longbeard, was the grandson of a certain Osbert, one of the Aldermen who, in 1125, had given to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, with the King’s permission, the lands belonging to the Cnihten Guild.
He was, therefore, by birth one of the governing class, whose abuses he attacked. He was also, it would seem from the first episode in his life which has come down to us, of a nature easily moved and imaginative, and, like his grandfather, disposed to piety. Such a mind belongs to the man who instinctively hates injustice and oppression. ”