The monks build churches! I could not
from my own knowledge bring forward a single instance in all the
history of England of a monastery contributing a shilling of money or
a load of stone for the repair, let alone the erection, of any parish
church in the land. So far from it, they pulled down the churches
when they had a chance, and they were always on the look-out to steal
the rectory houses and substitute for them any cheap-and-nasty
vicarage unless the bishop kept a sharp look-out upon them and came
to the help of his clergy. Of all the sins that the monks had to
answer for, this greedy grasping at Church property, this shameless
robbery of the seculars, was beyond compare the most inexcusable and
the most mischievous. To the credit of the Cistercians it must be
told that they _at first_ set themselves against the wholesale
pillage of the parochial clergy. I am not prepared to say they were
true to their first principles--no corporate society ever was, and
least of all a religious corporation--but at starting the Cistercians
were decidedly opposed to the alienating of tithes and appropriating
them to the endowment of their abbeys, and this was probably one
among other causes why the Cistercians prospered so wonderfully as
they did during the first hundred years or so after their first
coming here; people believed that the new order was not going to live
by robbing parsons, as the older orders had done without remorse.
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