When William
the Conqueror came among us, and that stern rule of his began, there
was scarcely a county in England and Wales in which one or more
religious houses were not to be found, and during his reign of
twenty-one years about thirty new monasteries of one sort or another
were added to those already existing.
To begin with, the very word monastery is a misnomer: the word is a
Greek word, and means the dwelling-place of a solitary person, living
in seclusion. But, misnomer though it be, the employment of the word
in a sense so widely different from that which it first bore, until
it got to designate the dwelling-place of a corporate body, among
whom no solitude was allowed and privacy was almost impossible, is of
itself very significant as indicating the stages through which the
original idea of monasticism passed.
It was natural enough, when society was in a condition of profound
disorganization, and sensuality and violence were in the ascendant,
that men and women of gentle nature should become convinced that the
higher life could only be lived in lonely retirement, far from the
sound of human voices and the contact of human creatures, whose very
nearness almost implies sin. But what a vast step from this to that
other conviction which the developed form of monasticism expresses,
when experience has convinced the devout searcher after God that no
great work can be done in improving the world, or raising the tone of
society, or in battling with our own weaknesses and vices, except by
earnest, resolute, and disciplined co-operation.
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