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had lived probably much as other Norman barons of his day, and could not point to any very great amount of good deeds as a set off against his sins. He determined, therefore, to make all straight by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But he had put off the proposed expedition year after year, until at length old age had crept upon him, and the rotundity of body, which gave him his name, had become more and more troublesome. He did not see his way to the fulfilment of his vow, and doubtless those about him heard a good deal of this annoyance; and among others it came to the ears of brother Adam, a monk of Fountains. Adam had been one of the seceders from S. Mary's, York, but his original monastery was Whitby, from whence he had gone to York. We may gather from these frequent changes that he was somewhat of a restless spirit, and now he saw an opportunity for another change, and for gaining a more influential and important position. Accordingly brother Adam went to the Count of Albemarle, and suggested to him that, instead of endeavouring to perform his vow of pilgrimage, he should compound for it by founding an abbey of the Cistercian order. In that case he undertook to procure for him a complete absolution from his vow from the Pope. This, Adam knew would be no difficult matter, as S. Bernard was all powerful with Pope Eugenius, his pupil, and willing and able to procure any concession for the Cistercians. The Count readily consented to the arrangements, and bade brother Adam choose from his broad domains in Yorkshire, a spot for the abbey. Accordingly the monk started on his quest, and after careful search pitched upon the spot called Melsa, where was a pleasant hill, and abundance of wood and water, and a soil of great fertility. The Count was in despair when he heard of the selection. He had taken a great fancy to this spot, and was just preparing to make it a park for preserving game. Adam, however, would not abandon his choice, and the Count, mindful of his awkward vow, had to yield. Here then he built a large plain structure for the brethren, and Adam and his companions from Fountains established themselves, working diligently with their hands, and astonishing the country people, For the stolid population 'wondered at these folks in cowls, at one time busied in the 'divine offices, and at another occupied in rustic works." The Cistercians were doing in fact the same work that the modern colonist has to do, only with this difference-the monks, if they failed in their cultivation, had only to fall back on another monastery or on the offerings of the faithful-the colonist, if he fails, has no friendly order to support him, but must, in reality, not in word, stand or fall by his own exertions. This consider

1 Dugdale, Monasticon, vol. v. p. 391.

ation may help us to set at their true value the constantly recurring laudations of the toil, privations, and heroism of the Cistercians, because they preferred the active labours of the field to the tedious monotony of the cloister. That the brethren did not always care to continue the struggle with nature in the barren and wild spots which they chose for their settlements, is shown by the early history of Ford Abbey in Devonshire, founded in the same year as Meaux (1136). Twelve monks and an abbot had gone forth from the monastery of Waverley, at the invitation of Richard, Lord of Oakhampton, and had settled themselves on his domain at Brightley. Here buildings had been erected for them, but they found the place barren and unimprovable, and after five years they abandoned it. In the mean time the Lord Richard had died, and his sister Adelicia had succeeded him in his property. This lady beheld, one day, with astonishment, the monks of Brightley walking in solemn procession with a cross borne before them, on their way back to their old abode of Waverley. Having questioned them, and been told of their purpose, struck with contrition, the lady instantly offered them her rich manor of Ford, through which they were at that moment passing, with her manor-house and its offices, in exchange for the barren lands of Brightley. The Cistercians were not too self-denying to accept the offer. They established themselves comfortably in the mansion of their pious patroness, until, after a period of six years, suitable buildings had been erected for them on their new property.

At this period the Cistercian order was by a long interval the leading and most popular order in Europe. S. Bernard reached the summit of his enormous influence, when, as preacher of the crusade, he beheld first a King of France, and then an Emperor of Germany, prostrate before his feet, and all S. Bernard's influence was readily used for the advancement of his beloved order. Thus it was doubtless owing to his representation to the Pope, that the grey brothers of the order of Savigny became in 1146, at the Council of Rheims, formally incorporated into the Cistercians, and adopted their use. order had already one great abbey in England-Furness in Lancashire; founded at that spot by Stephen, Count of Mortaigne, in the year 1127. When Serlo, the fourth abbot of Savigny, formally surrendered his abbey to the Cistercians and S. Bernard, he also surrendered with it all its affiliated houses. But the abbot of Furness was by no means satisfied with this arrangement. Probably it seemed to him more dignified and more respectable to be the chief representative

1 Annales de Waverleiâ, p. 232.

This

of the few houses of the grey brothers in England than to be merged into the number of the abbeys of the white brethren which were now springing up on every side. Accordingly he appealed to Rome, and backed up his appeal by a personal visit to the Pope. Eugenius, not having S. Bernard at his elbow, at once granted his request, and decided that Furness was to remain grey and Savigniac. But the Lancashire abbot had not calculated on the energy and vigour of those whom he was opposing. Returning in a satisfied and unsuspecting manner through France, he was captured by the Savigniac monks, probably at the instigation of S. Bernard, and carried a prisoner to Savigny, where, as the chronicler tells us somewhat naively, he became a very excellent monk, and was instructed in the use of the Cistercian order. Whether the instruction thus given was entirely to the taste of the quondam abbot we are not told. Meantime one Richard, of Baiocco, a doctor in divinity, was sent from Savigny to take the post of abbot of Furness, and under his dexterous management the monks gave up their scruples, and acquiesced in Cistercianism. A hundred years later the two abbots of Furness and Waverley quarrelled about the seniority of their foundations. A note in Dugdale says that a minute account of this dispute is given in the Waverley annals. Such, however, is by no means the case. A short and not very plain paragraph as to the termination of the dispute is all that is given. By this Furness appears to have to content itself with the barren honour of being the head of the Savigniac order in England, an order which had long ceased to exist; but the abbot of Waverley is to take precedence of all English Cistercian abbots whether in England or elsewhere. The progress of the ramifications of the Cistercian abbeys in England during the earlier years of the order exhibits the following series-Waverley, Rievaulx, Fountains, Garendon, Ford, Meaux, Thame, Kingswood, Kirksted, Louth Park, Boxley, Woburn, Bruerne, Combe. All these date within the first ten years of the appearance of the white monks in England, and they are only a small part of the actual foundations, so that the progress of the order in this country may bear comparison with its advance in other lands of Europe.

1

The early history of Thame furnished another instance that the Cistercian settlers were not always so devoted to the most wild, damp, and unhealthy spots as they professed to be. The aban

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1 M. Luard says in his Preface, The question with Turness as to the precedency was settled' (p. 40); but, exercising that judicious reticence which is apt to seize upon editors in view of an obscure passage, he does not tell us how. The difficulty is, what Furness had to do with the tota generatio Elemosina in Anglia inasmuch as Furness was not founded from Elemosyna. The Editors of Dugdale have simply put the passage into a note in bald and unintelligible English.

Anuales de Waverleiâ, p. 311.

donment of Brightley brought the monks to the rich and pleasant pastures of Ford, and their disgust at the marshy and agueish swamps of Ottmoor induced Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, to give them his fine park at Thame, which, in spite of their ascetic devotion to the disagreeable, they did not decline in favour of their original location. The Cistercian settlement at Haverholme, in Lincolnshire, which had gone out from Fountains, was even yet more dainty as to its situation than the monks of Thame. One can easily pardon the unhappy recluses settled in Ottmoor, where, as Bishop Kennett says, their abode must have been more like an ark than a monastery, for wishing for a better place for practising their asceticism; but why the fine, dry, and well-wooded lands of Haverholme were not good enough, is not so easily to be divined. However, the monks found fault with the place, and again Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, a good friend of the order, came forward to establish them more to their mind. The Cistercian ascetics were removed from Haverholme, and established in Louth park, about the most choice spot in the county of Lincoln. Yet Croyland and Bardney had to be contented with their fens, but then they did not belong to the fashionable order which assumed to possess greater powers of self-denial than any other. At the Cistercian settlement of Pipewell, in Northamptonshire, which is not mentioned in the Waverley annals, the woods among which the monks were settled were by no means the disagreeable thing which those who magnify the hardships endured by the Cistercians would have them to be. This abbey was abandoned sub prætextu paupertatis (as the annalist tells us) about 200 years after its foundation; but the poverty had arisen from the waste which had been inflicted on the noble groves of oak which had originally surrounded the house. First of all, says the good monk who wrote the account of the abbey, the brethren loved their fine trees as a mother loves her only son. They carried away the thorns and underwood in carts or loaded upon the backs of their servants for the purposes of fuel, and spared the fine timber. But afterwards growing careless, they began to lop the branches, and cut away the roots of the oaks for this purpose. Then every one, whether layman or parson, who wanted to build a house in the neighbourhood, got an order for cutting timber in these woods, and the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages boldly made raids into the forest, and cut and carried away the trees. Certain of the abbots, also, made a good thing of selling the timber, and clearances were made for pasture and arable land. So that the monks, who on the re-establishment of the house invoked maledictions on those who had destroyed the fine woods, should refrain from such words (says the chronicler), inasmuch as their prede

cessors themselves had been principally guilty, and had received the benefit of the spoil. The monks of Pipewell would seem not to have been very popular, and had to bear a good many annoyances from their neighbours. There was one Robert Bonteveleyn who is especially branded as having assailed them. He insisted on a right to keep a horse in the abbey stables, and to quarter his pack of hounds on the monks, to be fed by them as long as he pleased. On one occasion he sent his servant to fasten up his horse in the stall, and the abbot finding it there, was sorely perplexed what to do with it. At length, taking counsel, he caused the animal to be led away, and tied up in a stable belonging to the squire. Upon this Robert was excited to fury, and swore that if he caught any of the monks on horseback outside the abbey, he would cut their horses' tails off; or if they were on foot that he would maltreat them in some other way. At length by the payment of a considerable sum of money his ire was appeased. In another Cistercian house, that of Stoneleigh, in Warwickshire, the monks complained against their abbot that he granted the estates to several persons on lives, without reserving any rent to be paid for the use of the monastery, and this was alleged to be for the support of his concubine, Isabel Beushall, by whom (the complaint says) he had more children than the number of the monks in the monastery.'

In estimating the difficulties encountered in the first Cistercian settlements, we must not fail to take into account the number of villans and bondmen which were on the manors when ceded to them. At Stoneleigh there were sixty-eight villans who held portions of land for service, as also certain bondmen who were bound to give a fixed amount of labour, as well as make the gallows and hang thieves when caught; no one in those days ever thinking of inflicting a less punishment on a thief than hanging. The work of these subordinates, and of the great number of the lay brethren whom it was the peculiarity of the Cistercian order to collect, must have materially lightened the labours of the monks proper in their field work, and aided them greatly to make that profit in their farming, which the instances of change of site mentioned above show that they did not despise. A great order, protected by the most ample papal privileges, exempted from taxes, from tithes, and every burden, combining the healthy occupations of out-door work with the cloistral life thought to purchase a certainty of the bliss of another world, what wonder if the Cistercians grew and multiplied, and altogether obscured the other monastic orders during the twelfth and

1 Dugdale, Monasticon, vol. v. p. 435, seq.
2 Dugdale's History of Warwickshire.'

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