Pickwick in the pound. But the holy martyr St. Alban
was not likely to let such an outrage pass; and when the rollicking
knight came to the abbey to make it up, and was for presenting a
peace-offering at the shrine, lo, the knightly nose began to bleed
profusely, and, to the consternation of the beholders, the offering
could not be made, and Sir Philip had to retire, holding his nose,
and shortly after he died--and, adds the chronicler, was speedily
forgotten, he and his.
Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is
reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there
was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the
canvassing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a
convent might be turned for years into a house divided against
itself, the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog.
Nor did it at all follow that because the convent had elected their
abbot or prior unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by
the king, to whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable
instance in Carlyle's "Past and Present."] King John kept monasteries
without any abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the
meantime, and leaving the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an
abbot was forced upon a monastery in spite of the convent, as in the
case of Abbot Roger Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks
not only detested because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they
denounced as actually immoral.
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