Poor old
fellows! had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the
flower-beds? Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion
among them; but in the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by
his letters, there were other diversions of a far more reprehensible
character. Actually at the small Priory of Coxford, in Norfolk, the
prior and his canons were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was
dreadful! In other monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only
the abbots, but the common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to
be found as monks keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister,
Peckham denounces these breaches of decorum as grave offences, which
were not to be passed over and not to be allowed. What! a black monk
stalking along with a bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse
than the Jackdaw of Rheims, using bad words in the garth, and showing
an evil example to the chorister boys, with his head on one side!
But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all
delights to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking.
"Sir, I like my dinner!" said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one
thought the worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in
a great abbey was clearly a very important event in the day--I will
not say it was _the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important
one.
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