Part 3

And what return was being made to the nation, that every rank and every class were keeping up a rivalry in munificence in favour of such an institution as this? What had they done, what were they doing, these seventy men, with their Abbot at their head, who were in the enjoyment of an income larger than that of many a principality? How was it that no one _in those days_ accused them of being indolent drones? Mere burdens upon the earth, as they were called frequently enough, and loudly enough, and angrily enough, three centuries later? It was the age for the expansion of the monastic system--none then wished to sweep the monks away. One of the reasons why the monasteries had retained their hold upon the affection of the people, and were regarded with reverence and pride and confidence, lay in this, that they had moved with the times, and that the monasticism of the 13th was very different indeed from the monasticism of the 9th century. The primitive asceticism had almost vanished; it had not, however, died, leaving nothing in its place. No one now expected to find the religious houses filled with religious people, everyone holy, devout, and fervent; the personal sanctity of the inmates was one thing, the sanctity of their churches and shrines was quite another. In the old days the monks were separate from the world, living to save their own souls at best; examples to such as trembled at the wrath of God, and longed for the life to come. As time went on they mixed more boldly with the sinful world, and gradually they became more and more the illuminators of the darkness round them. Now they were regarded as in great measure the salt of the earth, and if that salt should lose its savour, where was such virtue elsewhere to be found? Personally, the men might be worldly--vicious, as a rule, they certainly were not--they were, _mutatis mutandis_, what in our time would be called cultured gentlemen, courteous, highly educated and refined, as compared with the great mass of their contemporaries; a privileged class who were not abusing their privileges; a class from whence all the art and letters and accomplishments of the time emanated, allied in blood as much with the low as the high, the aristocracy of intellect, and the pioneers of scientific and material progress. The model farming of the 13th century would be regarded as barbaric by our modern theorists; but such as it was, it was only to be met with on the demesne lands of the larger monasteries, and was a prodigious advance upon the _petite culture_ of the open fields. The Priory at Norwich made an income out of its garden in the days of Edward III., and probably much earlier; the pisciculture of the religious houses remains a mystery as yet unsolved; the skill exhibited in the management of the water-power of many a district round even the smaller houses, still awakes wonder in those who think it worth their while to study it. At St. Alban's, as at Glastonbury, St. Edmund's Abbey, and elsewhere, the culture of the vine was made profitable for generations. The monasteries were the first to give personal freedom to the villeins, and the first to commute for money payments the vexatious _services_ which worried the best men and maddened the worst. The landlords in the 13th century were real _lords_ of the _land_. They were, as a class, very poor, spite of the privileges they enjoyed and the power that they possessed of making themselves disagreeable; and though the constitution of a _manor_ was a limited monarchy, and the _limits_ were very many, yet the lord could exercise a great deal of petty tyranny in his little kingdom if he were so disposed. In the manors which were in the possession of the religious houses the lord was necessarily non-resident, and the tenants were left to manage their own affairs with very little interference. The tenants of the monasteries were in a far more favoured condition than the tenants of some small lord, needy and greedy, who extorted his dues literally to the last farthing, and who knew exactly what the best beast was, on the land that owed him a heriot; and, when the tenant was _in extremis_, kept a sharp look-out that a fat bullock or a promising young horse should not be driven off before the owner died.

So the monasteries at the time we are now concerned with were regarded at once with pride and affection by the great bulk of the people; they were places of refuge where, in a turbulent time, men and women who had been stricken, bereaved or wronged, might find a quiet refuge and hide their heads and be forgotten and fall asleep, with the prayers of other sufferers to console and support them in their passage through the valley of the shadow of death. The gentlest spirits here could taste the bliss of a holy tranquillity; the ascetic could indulge his most fantastic self-immolation; the morbid visionary could dream at his will and give his imagination full play, none hindering him; evil demons might chatter and gibe and twit him at his prayers; choirs of angels might calm his despair with celestial lullabies; awful forms might rise from clouds of incense as the gorgeous procession moved along the vast church aisles, or stopped before some glittering shrine. What then? Who would question the reality of a miracle, or doubt that sublime revelations might be made to any holy monk as he wrestled in prayer with a rapture of the soul, and found himself lifted to the seventh heaven in ecstasy unutterable?

What has been said applies mainly to the older houses, those which were under what may be called the _primitive_ Benedictine rule. If men were moved to rigid asceticism, however, and had a taste for bald simplicity; if art, and music, and ornate architecture, had no charm for them, and they dreamt that God could only be sought and found in the wilderness, the Cistercian houses offered such a congenial asylum. The Cistercians were the Puritans of the monasteries, and appealed to that mysterious sentiment which makes some minds shrink with fear from the touch of luxury, and regard culture as antagonistic to personal holiness. The sentiment was strong in the reign of Henry II., when nineteen Cistercian houses were founded; but it is not improbable that other motives, beside mere taste for a stricter discipline, led to the foundation of eight more in the reign of King John. Meanwhile the Benedictines had become by far the most learned and most _educating_ body in the land, and pre-eminent above them all was the great Abbey of St. Alban's. If it was not at this time the centre of intellectual life in England, it was because at this time centralization was unknown. Eadmer, Florence of Worcester, Gervase of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of Durham, were all 12th-century Benedictines. They were all students and writers of history, and history meant _literature_ till Peter Lombard arose at the end of the 12th century and revolutionized the world of thought--at any rate the domain of logic. John of Salisbury fiercely assails the intellectual innovators of his time on the ground that the new lights of the 12th century disdained to be students of history and affected contempt for the past. It was the old story; literary culture found itself in antagonism with scientific culture, and the vigorous childhood of scientific research was aggressive, insolent, and noisily insubordinate. The old seminaries, whose homes were in the Benedictine monasteries, refused to welcome the new learning. Its teachers settled themselves elsewhere; at Paris, on the other side of the water, they had a hard fight of it. Once in 1209 the Synod of Paris actually prohibited the reading of Aristotle's 'Metaphysics.' At Oxford they seem to have met with a more generous reception. Perhaps it was because that reception was too enthusiastic that King Stephen at the close of his miserable reign expelled Vacarius, the first teacher of scientific law in England. Whereupon young men of parts and ambition crossed the Channel, seeking and finding at Pavia and Bologna what was not to be had at home. The monastic schools held their own, and went on in the old groove; the intellectual revolution which soon came about by the agency of the Mendicant Orders was not yet dreamt of. St. Alban's, Malmesbury, and other such mighty foundations, stuck to the old studies, just as Eton and Winchester stuck to Latin Verse as the one thing needful, and reluctantly gave into the newfangled notion of having a 'modern side.'

Outside the Abbey precincts, a hundred yards from the great gate, and separated from it by the _Rome land_, which may possibly have served the boys as a playground, stood the Grammar School. Whether it offered a different training from that which was usually supplied to the scholars who were under training in the cloister, it is difficult to say. Within the precincts, when the 13th century began, there stood the great church--enriched by the accumulated offerings of centuries, and glowing with dazzling splendour of jewels and cloth of gold, and glass that glorified the very sunshine, and wonders of sculpture and colour and needlework filling the heart to overflowing with inexplicable hopes and longings for an ideal that seemed possible of realization, if only the Church in heaven should be as far removed above the actual of the Church on earth, as the glories of the Church on earth were removed above the squalid life of the common workday world. All this in witness that the great Abbey was, first and foremost, a religious foundation, raised in the first instance to the glory of God, and meant to help forward the worship of God, and make the worship worthy of the Most High.

But besides being primarily and emphatically a religious foundation, the Abbey in the 13th century had grown into something else, and had become the home of a corporation of scholars and students, who were the leaders of art and culture in an age when art and culture were to be met with nowhere outside the walls of a great monastery. There, in what might be called the museum of the Abbey, you might see no mean collection of antique gems that had once been the pride of Roman magistrates. Mysterious specimens of barbaric goldwork, fashioned by unknown craftsmen for the necks of nameless chieftains who had drawn the sword and perished, none knew when. Engraved gems that had been dug up in mysterious sepulchres, about which even imagination despaired of telling any story; relics of saints and martyrs, charters of Saxon kings, granted centuries before the Normans came to ring out the old and ring in the new. The wealth of mere archaeological specimens at St. Alban's made it such a museum of antiquities as provokes wonder and bitterness, as we read the catalogue of what was once there, and has perished utterly and for ever.[3]

The range of buildings to the south of the church covered a far larger area than that which the church itself occupied. Uncertain though the exact site may be and is, there had already been added in Brother Matthew's time what we should now call an Art school, a Library, and, almost more famous than all, the Scriptorium. By-and-bye, too, came the printing-press which John Herford set up in 1480. Wynkyn de Worde was sometime schoolmaster of Saint Alban's, and Lady Juliana Berners' famous volume issued from the Abbey Press, while Caxton was still pursuing his craft in the almonry of another monastery at Westminster.

In the days of King John, however, people had so little idea of the possibility of the printing-press, that they were almost equally ignorant of such a material as paper for literary purposes. Yet it is a huge mistake which has not yet been exploded, as it ought to be, that reading and writing were rare accomplishments in the 13th century. Knowledge of a certain kind was disseminated far more effectively and far more universally than is generally believed. The country parson was expected to be the schoolmaster of his parish, and generally was so, and there was hardly a village in England during the reign of Henry III, in which there were not one or more persons who could write a _clerkly_ hand, draw up accounts in _Latin_, and keep the records of the various petty courts and gatherings that were continually being held, sometimes to the annoyance and grievous vexation of the rural population. The professional _writers_ were so numerous, and their training so severe, that they had got for themselves privileges of a very exceptional kind; the _clerk_ took rank with the _clergyman_, and the _writer_ of a book was almost as much esteemed as its _author_.

The scriptorium of a great monastery was at once the printing-press and the publishing office. It was the place where books were written, and whence they issued to the world. With the traditional exclusiveness of the older monasteries there was less desire, no doubt, to diffuse and disperse than to accumulate books, but the composing and the multiplication of books was always going on. The scriptorium was a great writing school too, and the rules of the art of writing which were laid down there were so rigidly and severely adhered to, that to this day it is difficult to decide at a glance whether a book was written in St. Alban's or St. Edmund's Abbey. Sometimes as many as twenty writers were employed at once, and besides these there were occasionally supernumeraries, who were professional scribes, and who were paid for their services; but nothing short of perfect penmanship, such trained skill, for instance, as would now be required for an engraver, would qualify a copyist to take part in the finished work, which the copying of important books required.

One of the conclusions which Sir Thomas Hardy arrived at during the course of his minute examination of Sir Frederick Madden's theory is so curious, and opens out such an unexpected view of the way in which our monasteries may have been brought under the influence of foreign literature, that it is worth while in this connection to quote the great critic's own words:

'After minutely examining every page of the manuscripts in question, as well as others, which were undoubtedly written in the monastery of St. Alban's, and comparing them with others executed in various parts of England and on the Continent, I can come to no other conclusion than that during the latter half of the 13th century, and perhaps a little earlier, there prevailed among the scribes in the Scriptorium of St. Alban's, a peculiar character of writing which is not recognizable in any other religious house in England during that period; but which is traceable in some foreign manuscripts, and even in private deeds executed in England in the neighbourhood of St. Alban's during the 12th and 13th centuries. These facts lead me to the inference, that _the schoolmaster who taught the art of writing to Matthew Paris and the other members and scholars of the establishment at St. Alban's was a foreigner_; that his pupils not only imitated their instructor in the formation of his letters, but also in his exceptional orthography.'

What questions suggest themselves as we accept the conclusion arrived at! Who was he, this 'foreigner,' who had come from across the sea to bring in his outlandish novelties into the great scriptorium? Was he some 'Frenchman' imported from sunny Champagne, where Thibaut, the mawkish singer was making verses which his people loved to listen to? Did he teach the young novices French as well as writing? Did he touch the lute himself on Feast-days, and charm them with some new lyric of Gasse Brusle, or delight them with one of Rutebeuf's merry ditties? France was all alive with song at this time, and princes were rivals now for poetic fame. It may be that this 'foreigner' brought in a taste for light literature as well as for a new fashion in penmanship, and made known to his pupils such alluring novelties as the 'Roman d'Alexandre, soon to be eclipsed by the 'Roman de la Rose.'

The scriptorium at St. Alban's was founded by Abbot Paul, a kinsman of Archbishop Lanfrance, when the great Abbey had already existed for three centuries. Paul became Abbot eleven years after the Conquest, and he showed himself an able and earnest administrator. From this time learning and a love of books became a tradition of the house. Abbot after abbot continued to add to the collection of MSS., and to increase the value of the library. But St. Alban's had never had a great historian of its own. Strange and shameful fact! East and west and north and south, all over the land, there were great writers holding up their proud heads. Out in the desolate wilds there at Peterborough, they had been actually keeping up a chronicle for centuries--aye, and written in the vernacular too. The lonely monastery of Ely, among the swamps, had its historian. Malmesbury boasted her learned William; and Worcester, which St. Wulstan had raised from the dust, as it were, only the other day, had already her Florence. In the great houses of the Northern Province there had been no lack of writers to whom the past was an open book. Even Westminster had long ago had her _chronographer_, and far away in furthest Wales, Geoffrey, the Monmouth man, was making men open their eyes very wide indeed with tales--idle tales they might be, but they were well worth the reading--and there was talk too of another young Welshman, Giraldus, who was on the way towards outdoing the other by-and-bye. What are we coming to? Holy St. Alban, shalt thou and thy house be put to shame?--that be far from us!

Thus it came to pass that about a century after the foundation of the scriptorium, and when the library had grown to an imposing size, Abbot Simon bestirred himself, and a new office was created in the Abbey, to wit, that of Historiographer. In our time we should have given this functionary a grander title, and called him Professor of History; but in the 12th century, they called him what he was, a writer of history, and from this time, in fact, the writing of history, after a certain authorized method, began, and what had been called, and deserves to be called, the St. Alban's School of History took its rise.

It is evident that before the 13th century had well begun, an historical compendium of great value had already been drawn up, which must have been compiled by careful students with a command of books such as during this age was rare.

'The compilation,' says Dr. Luard, 'whenever and by whomsoever it was written must be regarded as a very curious and remarkable one. The very large number of sources consulted, the miscellaneous character of many of the extracts, the mixture of history and legend, the giving fixed years to stories which even writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth had left undated, the care at one time and the carelessness at another, the slavishness with which one authority is followed, and the recklessness with which another is altered, the frequent confusion of dates, their ignorance and want of care, the blunders displayed in many instances from the compiler not understanding the author whom he is copying, as is especially the case in the extracts from the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle;" all these characteristics may well earn for the author the title that Lappenberg has given to him, though under the name of "Matthew of Westminster," namely, that of the "Verwirrer der Geschichte." At the same time there is no doubt that he had access to some materials which we no longer possess: and my object has been to trace all his statements, where possible, to their source, and to distinguish any additions that the compiler has made when they are merely rhetorical amplifications of his own, or when they are really from some source not now extant.'--Pref. to vol. i., p. xxxiii.

After all that can be said, the work surprises us by the erudition it displays. Nor is that surprise lessened when we have gone through the masterly analysis of its contents, which Dr. Luard has given us in the Preface to his first vol. Such as it was, it became the great text-book on which Roger of Wendover founded his own labours when he incorporated it into the chronicle which he left behind him. Roger of Wendover did good work, and laboriously epitomized, supplemented and improved, but he was a mere literary monk after all; a student, a bookworm, simple, conscientious, and truthful; a trustworthy reporter, 'a picker-up of learning's crumbs,' a monkish historiographer, in short; but by no means a historian of large views and of original mind. Roger of Wendover died in 1236, and Matthew Paris succeeded to his office and work.

From what has been said, the reader may be presumed to have gained something like an answer to our first question: _What_ was Brother Matthew? Briefly, he was a representative monk of the most powerful monastery in England during the 13th century, when that monastery was at its best, and doing the work which in after times the Universities and great schools of the country took out of the hands of the religious houses; work, too, which since those days has been done by the printing-press, and by many other institutions better fitted to deal with the requirements of an immensely larger population, and to be the instruments of diffusing culture and refinement through the nation after it had outgrown the older machinery.

When we come to look into the personal history of Brother Matthew, the details of his biography need not detain us long. Sir Henry Taylor's famous line is only half true, after all;

'The world knows nothing of its greatest men'

really means that the world knows less about them than it would like to know. And yet the world knows almost as much about them as is good for it. The leading facts of a man's career are all that concern most of us--the main lines--not the details. Of Matthew Paris we know enough, because he has himself given us so faithful a picture of his times, and so charming an insight into the daily life which he led.