Читать книгу English Monasteries - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 28

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There can be no doubt, however, that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the life of monks and canons regular became generally more lax and easy, while the numbers of those who embraced the monastic life decreased. In the twelfth century the monasteries had been full to overflowing: each newly-founded house was a sign that the parent monastery had no more room. In the middle of the thirteenth century the numbers were still large but not unwieldy. Such numbers as we have indicate that the monasteries were kept up to the complement of inmates required by their statutes, but that there was no general increase. In Cistercian abbeys the number of conversi swelled the total of inmates: at Louth Park during the same period there were 66 monks, while the conversi numbered 150[5]. Such numbers, however, decreased greatly within the next hundred years. In 1349, the year of the great pestilence, there were 42 monks at Meaux, but only seven conversi: 32 monks and all the conversi died. The pestilence worked similar havoc in other houses. In the small nunnery of Wothorpe, near Stamford, only one nun was left: Greenfield priory in Lincolnshire remained without a head for three months. There can be little doubt that the religious houses as a whole never recovered from the pestilence: there were not enough recruits from outside to compensate for the sudden decrease in numbers. Alnwick's visitations in the middle of the fifteenth century shew that the monasteries of his diocese were far from full. Later visitations in the diocese of Norwich strengthen the conclusion that even in important houses like the cathedral priory of Norwich a number of from 40 to 50 monks was exceptionally large. In 1492 there were only 17 canons in the wealthy priory of Walsingham. In the largest Premonstratensian houses, during the last quarter of the fifteenth century the numbers seldom exceeded 25. The distinction between the various orders was no longer clearly marked. After 1349 conversi ceased to form a part of most Cistercian monasteries. Within the next fifty years they disappeared altogether, and the monks, like the Benedictines, administered their estates by hired labour. At the suppression of the monasteries the number of monks at Furness, where the accommodation was unusually large, was only 30. In Bury St. Edmunds, one of the largest Benedictine abbeys, there were about 60.