Why not try
a thirteenth-century monastery next?" I politely thanked him for his
valuable suggestion, and promised to give it my respectful attention.
The following sketch is the outcome of our interview. "Facit
indignatio versus."]
* * * * * * *
It may be assumed as a fact which scarcely requires to be more than
stated that there are few subjects which the great mass of Englishmen
are so curiously ignorant of as the History of Monasticism, of the
constitution of the various Orders, of the fortunes of any single
religious house, or the discipline to which its members were, in
theory at least, compelled to submit. The assumption being granted,
it may naturally be asked, How is such ignorance to be accounted for?
It is due to more causes than one, but chiefly and primarily to the
vastness of the subject itself.
When the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII. there was an
utter obliteration of an order of things which had existed in our
island for certainly more than a thousand years, and how much longer
it is impossible to say. The names of religious houses which are
known to have existed before the Norman Conquest count by hundreds;
the names of men and women who presided over such houses during the
centuries preceding that event count by thousands. Some of these
religious houses had passed through the strangest vicissitudes; they
had been pillaged again and again; they had been burnt by Danish
marauders; their inmates driven out into the wilderness or ruthlessly
put to the sword; their lands given over to the spoiler or gone out
of cultivation; their very existence in some cases almost forgotten;
yet they had revived again and again from their ashes.
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