of the few houses of the grey brothers in England than to be merged into the number of the abbeys of the white brethren. which were now springing up on every side. Accordingly he appealed to Rome, and backed up his appeal by a personal visit to the Pope. Eugenius, not having S. Bernard at his elbow, at once granted his request, and decided that Furness was to remain grey and Savigniac. But the Lancashire abbot had not calculated on the energy and vigour of those whom he was opposing. Returning in a satisfied and unsuspecting manner through France, he was captured by the Savigniac monks, probably at the instigation of S. Bernard, and carried a prisoner to Savigny, where, as the chronicler tells us somewhat naively, he became a very excellent monk, and was instructed in the use of the Cistercian order. Whether the instruction thus given was entirely to the taste of the quondam abbot we are not told. Meantime one Richard, of Baiocco, a doctor in divinity, was sent from Savigny to take the post of abbot of Furness, and under his dexterous management the monks gave up their scruples, and acquiesced in Cistercianism. A hundred years later the two abbots of Furness and Waverley quarrelled about the seniority of their foundations. A note in Dugdale says that a minute account of this dispute is given in the Waverley annals. Such, however, is by no means the case. A short and not very plain paragraph as to the termination of the dispute is all that is given. By this Furness appears to have to content itself with the barren honour of being the head of the Savigniac order in England, an order which had long ceased to exist; but the abbot of Waverley is to take precedence of all English Cistercian abbots whether in England or elsewhere. The progress of the ramifications of the Cistercian abbeys in England during the earlier years of the order exhibits the following series-Waverley, Rievaulx, Fountains, Garendon, Ford, Meaux, Thame, Kingswood, Kirksted, Louth Park, Boxley, Woburn, Bruerne, Combe. All these date within the first ten years of the appearance of the white monks in England, and they are only a small part of the actual foundations, so that the progress of the order in this country may bear comparison with its advance in other lands of Europe. 1 The early history of Thame furnished another instance that the Cistercian settlers were not always so devoted to the most wild, damp, and unhealthy spots as they professed to be. The aban 1 M. Luard says in his Preface, The question with Turness as to the precedency was settled' (p. 40); but, exercising that judicious reticence which is apt to seize upon editors in view of an obscure passage, he does not tell us how. The difficulty is, what Furness had to do with the tota generatio Elemosine in Angliá inasmuch as Furness was not founded from Elemosyna. The Editors of Dugdale have simply put the passage into a note in bald and unintelligible English. 2 Annales de Waverleiâ, p. 311. donment of Brightley brought the monks to the rich and pleasant pastures of Ford, and their disgust at the marshy and agueish swamps of Ottmoor induced Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, to give them his fine park at Thame, which, in spite of their ascetic devotion to the disagreeable, they did not decline in favour of their original location. The Cistercian settlement at Haverholme, in Lincolnshire, which had gone out from Fountains, was even yet more dainty as to its situation than the monks of Thame. One can easily pardon the unhappy recluses settled in Ottmoor, where, as Bishop Kennett says, their abode must have been more like an ark than a monastery, for wishing for a better place for practising their asceticism; but why the fine, dry, and well-wooded lands of Haverholme were not good enough, is not so easily to be divined. However, the monks found fault with the place, and again Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, a good friend of the order, came forward to establish them more to their mind. The Cistercian ascetics were removed from Haverholme, and established in Louth park, about the most choice spot in the county of Lincoln. Yet Croyland and Bardney had to be contented with their fens, but then they did not belong to the fashionable order which assumed to possess greater powers of self-denial than any other. At the Cistercian settlement of Pipewell, in Northamptonshire, which is not mentioned in the Waverley annals, the woods among which the monks were settled were by no means the disagreeable thing which those who magnify the hardships endured by the Cistercians would have them to be. This abbey was abandoned sub prætextu paupertatis (as the annalist tells us) about 200 years after its foundation; but the poverty had arisen from the waste which had been inflicted on the noble groves of oak which had originally surrounded the house. First of all, says the good monk who wrote the account of the abbey, the brethren loved their fine trees as a mother loves her only son. They carried away the thorns and underwood in carts or loaded upon the backs of their servants for the purposes of fuel, and spared the fine timber. But afterwards growing careless, they began to lop the branches, and cut away the roots of the oaks for this purpose. Then every one, whether layman or parson, who wanted to build a house in the neighbourhood, got an order for cutting timber in these woods, and the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages boldly made raids into the forest, and cut and carried away the trees. Certain of the abbots, also, made a good thing of selling the timber, and clearances were made for pasture and arable land. So that the monks, who on the re-establishment of the house invoked maledictions on those who had destroyed the fine woods, should refrain from such words (says the chronicler), inasmuch as their prede cessors themselves had been principally guilty, and had received the benefit of the spoil. The monks of Pipewell would seem not to have been very popular, and had to bear a good many annoyances from their neighbours. There was one Robert Bonteveleyn who is especially branded as having assailed them. He insisted on a right to keep a horse in the abbey stables, and to quarter his pack of hounds on the monks, to be fed by them as long as he pleased. On one occasion he sent his servant to fasten up his horse in the stall, and the abbot finding it there, was sorely perplexed what to do with it. At length, taking counsel, he caused the animal to be led away, and tied up in a stable belonging to the squire. Upon this Robert was excited to fury, and swore that if he caught any of the monks on horseback outside the abbey, he would cut their horses' tails off; or if they were on foot that he would maltreat them in some other way. At length by the payment of a considerable sum of money his ire was appeased. In another Cistercian house, that of Stoneleigh, in Warwickshire, the monks complained against their abbot that he granted the estates to several persons on lives, without reserving any rent to be paid for the use of the monastery, and this was alleged to be for the support of his concubine, Isabel Beushall, by whom (the complaint says) he had more children than the number of the monks in the monastery.' In estimating the difficulties encountered in the first Cistercian settlements, we must not fail to take into account the number of villans and bondmen which were on the manors when ceded to them. At Stoneleigh there were sixty-eight villans who held portions of land for service, as also certain bondmen who were bound to give a fixed amount of labour, as well as make the gallows and hang thieves when caught; no one in those days ever thinking of inflicting a less punishment on a thief than hanging. The work of these subordinates, and of the great number of the lay brethren whom it was the peculiarity of the Cistercian order to collect, must have materially lightened the labours of the monks proper in their field work, and aided them greatly to make that profit in their farming, which the instances of change of site mentioned above show that they did not despise. A great order, protected by the most ample papal privileges, exempted from taxes, from tithes, and every burden, combining the healthy occupations of out-door work with the cloistral life thought to purchase a certainty of the bliss of another world, what wonder if the Cistercians grew and multiplied, and altogether obscured the other monastic orders during the twelfth and 1 Dugdale, Monasticon, vol. v. p. 435, seq. thirteenth centuries? Of the nunneries belonging to the order we have said nothing. They were for the most part small establishments, and their number in England never reached thirty. Neither have we space to speak of even a moderate proportion of the great abbeys and priories whose foundation is noticed in the Waverley annals, which nearly cover the period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Beaulieu is remarkable as having been founded by King John, the bitter enemy of the Cistercian order, by way of atoning for his crimes towards them. Netley, the picturesque, ruins of which are so well known, is notable for the smallness of its revenues, combined with the magnificence of its conventical church. Around Vale Royal, the letters of the last abbot, pleading for his house (preserved in Ormerod's Cheshire,) cast a pathetic interest. The history of this abbey, like that of Fountains, is a strange comment on the professed asceticism of the order. The abbot of Vale Royal,' says Mr. Ormerod, for nearly three centuries had maintained a style of splendour equal to that of many powerful barons. Like them he had his seneschal and his under seneschal. The ordinary 'law of his court was administered by a coroner and the bailiff's of Over and Weverham, in whom a capital privilegium was .' vested, with the powers of Infangtheof and Outfangtheof, 'equally serviceable in screening his own vassals from whatever 'enormities they might commit, and of subjecting to the abbot's vengeance, without possibility of appeal, all trespassers on his privileges within the limits which the charter had assigned to 'him. He had his page to attend upon him in the abbey, and 'his palfreyman to hold the reins of his horse on his journey, ' in which, from the account of the skirmish in Rutlandshire, he 'appears to have travelled with a powerful retinue and to have been attended by considerable families of the county.' Bernard would have found in this development of one of his children something as little to his taste as that which he saw in Abbot Peter of Clugni, and indeed in spite of high professions, after a short period there was no great discernible difference in externals between the old Benedictines, the Clugniacs, and the Cistercians. S. We shall now endeavour to gather from the annals before us some historical notices of the Cistercian Order, as a whole, during the period contained in the chronicle. Stephen was a good friend to the White Monks. He not only founded several abbeys for their brethren, but his whole policy was one of respect for the special privileges and exemptions of the Church. At the Council at London in 1163, he agreed to the most rigid canons proposed by the legate, against those who arrested clerks, 6 or in any way injured things ecclesiastical.1 Henry II, though somewhat different in his notions as to the rights of the State towards the Church, yet did not venture to subject the powerful order of the Cistercians to the exactions which he imposed on other Churchmen. The very heavy tax which was levied for the third crusade, in which many, and especially the poorer sort were tortured and afflicted,' did not touch the Cistercians.2 The order, however, did not fare so well in the taxing for the raising of King Richard's ransom. This was a matter in which the Pope was specially interested, and no protection to them from Rome was to be feared. The country also being thoroughly in earnest in the desire to raise the sum required speedily, was not ready to respect any ordinary exemptions. 'The chief men of England who were collecting this money, in addition to the contributions of the laity, levied a tenth on the revenues of all the churches. They took whatever treasure in gold, or silver, or precious stones they found in the abbeys and other churches, so that the crosses and the biers were stripped, and even the sacred vessels of the altar were plundered. But since among the monks of the Cistercian order there were found no treasures of gold and silver, as in other monasteries, the whole of the wool of one year's growth was forcibly seized.'3 From this it appears that as yet the strong objection of S. Stephen and S. Bernard to the use of costly ornaments in the Cistercian churches was respected. In the earlier part of their history the Cistercians were the antiritualists of their day. They had commenced with a violent opposition to the gorgeous ceremonial of Clugni. How long the antagonism was preserved we cannot exactly trace, but there is abundant proof that it at length issued in a very different view. The list of the sacred vessels of Fountains, with their gold and jewels, exhibits this great abbey as scarcely behind any in Europe in its magnificent collection of church plate. The accession of John threatened evil days to the Cistercians. For some cause or other, even before he was embroiled with the Pope, he was a bitter enemy of their Order. The chief abbots of the Cistercians, accordingly taking the advice of Archbishop Hubert, came in humble guise to the King when in the second year of his reign he went to hold a Parliament at Lincoln. John had just shown his devotion by acting with William, King of Scotland, as one of the bearers of the body of Sir Hugh ;* but the sight of the Cistercian abbots at once roused him to fury. He bade his attendants tread those obnoxious petitioners under the feet of their horses. This, however, they did dare to 1 Annales de Waverleiâ, 229. 2 Ib. 245. 4 Roger of Wendover, III. 162 (Ed. Coxe). 3 Ib. 248. |