APPENDIX. 6 No. 1. SUPPRESSION OF MONASTERIES. "Whatever accusations may have been brought against the monasteries, it is an undoubted fact that they were seminaries of learning, and the schools of the nation. 'In every great abbey,' says Bishop Tanner, Monast. p. xxx,— xxxiii., there was a large room called the Scriptorium, where several writers made it their whole business to transcribe books for the use of the library. They sometimes, indeed, wrote the leiger books of the house, and the missals, and other books used in divine service, but they were generally upon other works, viz.: the Fathers, Classics, Histories, &c. John Wethamsted, abbot of St. Albans, caused above eighty books to be thus transcribed during his abbacy. Fifty-eight were transcribed by the care of one abbot, at Glastonbury; and so zealous were the monks in general for this work, that they often got lands given, and churches appropriated, for the carrying of it on. all the greater abbeys, there were also persons appointed to take notice of the principal occurrences of the kingdom, and at the end of every year to digest them into annals. The constitutions of the clergy in their national and provincial synods, and after the conquest even Acts of Parliament, were sent to the abbeys to be recorded......secondly, they were schools of learning and education; for every convent had one person or more appointed for this purpose; and all the neighbours that desired it, might have their children taught grammar and church music without any expense to them. the nunneries also young women were taught to work, and to read English, and sometimes Latin also. So that not only the lower rank of people who could not pay for their learning, In In but most of the noblemen and gentlemen's daughters were educated in those places.' "These places, then, were the schools of the kingdom, where rich and poor were educated together, and the latter free of all expense; there the writings of antiquity were preserved from destruction, and the chronicles of our own history prepared. Let us now contrast what we have learned above were the duties, habits and employments, of the calumniated clergy of the Catholic Church, with the conduct of their calumniators, the so-called reformers. You have believed that the changes were all in favour of learning, and of a better and more enlightened order of things. It will be well, however, to have before us a summary of the foundations left by our Catholic forefathers for the benefit either of the poor, the sick, of learning, or religion, destroyed at the reformation, and though it differs slightly from some other accounts, I shall present the one drawn up by Burns.* Of lesser monasteries whereof we have the "The sum total of the clear yearly revenue of the several houses at the time of their dissolution, of which w have any account, seems to have been as follows: Of the great monasteries,..... Of all those of the lesser monasteries £. S. d. 104,919 13 31 29,702 1 101 * Eccles, Law. Art. Monasteries. 2,385 12 8 "And if we consider that there were many of the lesser monasteries and houses of the hospitallers and friars, of which no computation hath been found; and that not one of the colleges, hospitals, and great number of chantries and free chapels are reckoned in this estimate; and consider withal the vast quantity of plate and other goods which came into the hands of the king by the dissolution, and the value of money at that time, which was at least six times as much as it is at present, and also that the estimate of the lands was supposed to be much under the real worth, we must needs conclude the whole to have been immense. "I will subjoin also the account given by the same author, of the number of persons driven from their homes by these flagrant acts. Those of the lesser monasteries, dissolved by If we reckon the number in the greater monas- One for each chantry, and free chapel, 10,000 5,347 30,000 2,347 Total,............ 47,694 "Now, was the reformation favourable to learning, or was it its bitterest enemy? Ninety colleges at one fell swoop destroyed! and the only receptacles of the infirm, the hospitals, that might have melted a heart of stone to spare, the refuge of those whom God's hand has been heavy upon, the very visiting of which is a work so hallowed, one hundred and ten of these noble charities ruined at once! And this is the reformation: the heart sickens at the name, associated as it is with the destruction of every thing that religion, humanity, and reason, tells us is useful, instructive, and holy. Was it a change for the better to destroy so many hundred schools, where the poor were taught without cost, not merely their own language and the ordinary elements of learning, but even some of the more accomplished arts, as music? Was it a reformation to scatter, sell, and destroy some of the noblest libraries in the kingdom, collected at an enormous expense, and cherished as the best ornament of their houses by the religious, who, to increase their precious store, employed several persons to transcribe and preserve the elegant and precious productions of antiquity, thus guarding the springs from which learning was derived? Now, read the following accounts of the destruction of books and manuscripts, and judge whether it did not seem to be the object of the reformers to smother learning altogether, to plunge the nation into hopeless ignorance, or rather whether they cared what went to ruin, provided they could increase their plunder, and promote their own interests. 'Most of the learned records of the age,' says Collier,* were lodged in the monasteries. Printing was then but a late invention, and had secured but a few books in comparison of the rest. The main of learning lay in manuscripts, and the most considerable of these, both for number and quality, were in the monks' possession. But the abbeys at the dissolution falling oftentimes into hands who understood no farther than the estates, the libraries were miserably disposed of. The books, instead of being removed to royal libraries, to those of cathedrals or the universities, were frequently thrown in to the grantees, as things of slender consideration. Now these men oftentimes proved a very ill protection for learning and antiquity. Their avarice was sometimes so mean, and their ignorance so undistinguish * Collier, Eccl. Hist. Vol. ii. B. iii. p. 166. |