Читать книгу English Monasteries - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 27

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'Decem sunt abusiones claustralium,' runs an inscription upon the quire-stalls of St. Agatha's abbey, now in Richmond church, 'The abuses of those in cloister are ten: costly living, choice food, noise in cloister, strife in chapter, disorder in quire, a neglectful disciple, a disobedient youth, a lazy old man, a headstrong monk, a worldly religious.' The actual evidence of documents, when compared with the counsels of perfection in the rules of orders and the custom-books of monasteries, supplies a commentary on this text which applies to every century from the thirteenth to the sixteenth. It must also be owned that grave moral offences were not uncommon. Where slackness of rule was prevalent, temptations of this kind must have abounded, and convents which had the misfortune to possess an unworthy or lazy head were liable to succumb to them. Such weaknesses, however, are just those on which satirists lay excessive emphasis and to which scandal lends a too ready ear. The evidence of episcopal visitations, while it discloses much that is repellent to our ideal of the religious life, seldom proves that moral corruption was general in any given monastery, or that individual backslidings went without punishment. Cases of immorality, though not few, are generally treated with an individual prominence which would be impossible, if a whole monastery were implicated in them. This fact must be laid against the credence which is still sometimes given to the so-called comperta of Henry VIII's commissioners, the trustworthiness of which is now rightly discredited. Bishops like Alnwick would spend months of hard work in visitations and several days, if necessary, on the impartial examination of the evidence for a single crime, while such commissioners as Dr. Layton rushed at full speed through the monasteries committed to their inquiry, with prejudices already formed and with the most casual examination of witnesses, enforcing resignations of abbots and extorting confessions and bribes from frightened monks and nuns, with the closely allied objects of bringing the revenues of the houses to the royal exchequer and of earning grants of prebends and deaneries for themselves.