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ENTRANCE TO THE CHAPTER-HOUSE, KIRKSTALL ABBEY

PLAN OF THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY OF KIRKSTALL, AS IT WAS

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PART OF THE RUINS OF JERVAULX ABBEY

HOUSE, PARTLY 17TH CENTURY, AT THE ENTRANCE TO

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CARTHUSIAN MONASTERY OF MOUNT GRACE. GROUND-PLAN
OF ONE OF THE MONKS' HOUSES .

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DOOR LEADING FROM THE OUTER COURT TO THE GREAT
CLOISTER AT MOUNT GRACE PRIORY

MOUNT GRACE PRIORY

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PLAN OF THE ABBEY OF ST. AGATHA'S, NEAR RICHMOND

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THE RUINED ABBEYS OF

YORKSHIRE

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ST. MARY'S, YORK

SOME years ago a countryman put to a traveller in the neighbourhood of Furness Abbey the following question: "About those monks, sir-I sometimes wonder, and perhaps you can tell me were they really black men ?"

From this perfectly true story we may learn that there are depths of ignorance on the subject of monasticism beneath even our own or our neighbour's. We may reflect, too, if we please, on the fleeting nature of fame and the slender trace that so much power, and wealth, and zeal have left behind. Only let us, at the same time, be careful to seem, at least, to know that, though English monasteries were not inhabited by black men, they were, in many cases, by

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black monks- so narrow is the boundary between truth and error-and that these dusky antediluvians were called Benedictines.

How many of us learn abroad to interest ourselves in that which we have ignored a hundred times at home. In the Vatican, the Pitti Palace, the Brera, the Louvre, we are familiar, for instance, with a figure, draped now in white and now in black, sometimes bearded and sometimes beardless, here with crosier in hand and mitred head, there rolling, emaciated, in a bed of thorns, but testifying, by this very variety of treatment, to the manifold and dramatic interest which, to the eye of faith, centred in the name of St. Benedict. And yet long ago, at York, it may be, or at Whitby, in the outskirts of Leeds or of Ripon, or in the quiet dales of the Ure and the Rye, we have been face to face with this remarkable man in the intimate expression of his mind and the immediate outcome of his life. For without St. Benedict there had been no St. Mary of York, and without St. Mary of York there had been no St. Mary of Fountains.

Yes; this saint, this mystic, this superstitious monk, who seems so much at home in the pictures of far-off popish ages and the galleries of far-off popish lands, did actually find foothold in Yorkshire,

making what is now a land of moors and mills a land of moors and monasteries, and leaving among the sportsmen and manufacturers of to-day a mark hitherto indelible.

Of nearly twenty monastic ruins of which Yorkshire has reason to be proud, or ashamed, seven only —those, viz., of Bolton, Kirkham, St. Agatha, Eggleston, Guisborough, Mount Grace, and Coverhambelong to non-Benedictine orders. York, Selby, and Fountains, the only mitred abbeys in the county, were Benedictine; Whitby, "the Westminster of the Northumbrian kings," revived from two hundred years of spoliation and neglect at the touch of Benedictine hands.

The monastic ruins of England are the witnesses to an historic fact which is too apt to be forgotten or neglected. We all know there was monasticism in England before the Reformation; for were there not monasteries to be suppressed by the providential rapacity of Henry VIII? But we are inclined to relegate their history to the regions of ecclesiology and others equally dusty and obscure; forgetting, if we ever knew, that they were interwoven with the fibre of our national life-bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And yet our hotels, our workhouses, our refuges, and probably a dozen other familiar modern

institutions, have been morally, and too often materially, built out of their ruins. In them our parliaments met, our annals were composed, our classics copied and preserved; and, what is even more important, in them the very humanity which we inherit once found fit utterance for its superhuman aspirations, and, how blindly and wrongly soever, poured out its

1 "The leasehold tenants of abbey lands were, in fact, the most enviable members of the agricultural class in the Middle Ages, and the monks set an example of agricultural improvement to all other landlords. Hospitality and charity were practised on a vast scale, and some historians regard the regular distribution of alms at the convent door, or the dinner open to all comers in the refectory, as the mediæval substitute for the poor-law system. Considering how unequally the monasteries were scattered over the face of the country, such direct relief can only have been accessible to a small proportion of the rural poor, even where it was not capriciously bestowed; but the civilising influences of monasteries doubtless extended far more widely, and were especially valuable in the north of England, where private estates were of enormous size, and where resident landowners were therefore few and far between. When merchants, with a shrewd eye to business, and often living in London or other towns, succeeded the benevolent monks, as they were succeeding the free-handed nobles and knights, it must have fared ill at first with the weaker members of the labouring class. The dissolution of monasteries thus became a secondary cause of the great agrarian revolution which marked the sixteenth century, and which laid the foundation of the present English land-system. The north of England, where the monasteries had been almost the only centres of culture and improvement, appears to have suffered most by their dissolution, as the south gained most by the growth of London and the extension of intercourse with the Continent."-English Land and English Landlords, by the Hon. George C. Brodrick. Cf. Hallam, Middle Ages, 12th edition, vol. iii. p. 360.

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