The
swindler always thinks his victim a fool, and the victim never
forgives the smarter man who has taken him in. Accordingly the monks
always pretended to think scorn of the clergy, and when the
monasteries fell the clergy were the very last people to lament their
fall.
And this brings us to the question of the moral condition of the
monasteries. Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century "the
golden age of English Churchmanship." Subject to correction from the
greatest of England's great historians--and subject to correction,
too, from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable
eminence, are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this
subject--I venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century
was also the golden age of English Monachism. Certainly we know much
more about the monasteries and their inner life during this period
than at any other time. The materials ready to our hand are very
voluminous, and the evidence accessible to the inquirer is very
various. I do not believe that any man of common fairness and candour
who should give some years to the careful study of those materials
and that evidence could rise from his examination with any other
impression than that, as a body, the monks of the thirteenth century
were better than their age. Vicious and profligate, drunken and
unchaste, as a class, they certainly were not.
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