its downfall conveys a lesson no less valuable to persons of action than to students, by showing the perilous unsoundness of all institutions which endow individuals with enormous wealth and power on conditions that leave them unaccountable for their conduct to the social opinion of their contemporaries.

THE

CHAPTER III.

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.

HE commencement of the generations, to which the first part of these sketches of the social story of English clergy directs the reader's attention, was a period in which the monastic system, after accomplishing the most beneficial and truly honourable part of its career in this country, had entered upon the fulness of its dazzling splendour and dangerous power. It was also a period in which the inmates of the monasteries afforded considerable justification for some of those charges of luxury and neglect of duty that were loudly preferred against them by their enemies, and were sustained by the less noisy expostulations of their wisest and best friends. The same also may be said of the entire Church, which, after rendering priceless services to mankind during the darkest centuries of our national existence, was teeming with corruptions that roused sentiments of antagonism to the clerical order in the breasts of patriotic laymen, whilst they drove many of the more zealous and devout of the clergy themselves to the painful conclusion that no measures, short of fundamental and even revolutionary change, could restore the ecclesiastical establishments to their original virtue, and make them once again universally conducive to the ends for which they had been created.

But whilst the deep-seated diseases of the Church were visible to the few observers whose exceptional sagacity enabled them to interpret the outward symptoms of insidious political disorder, there had never been a time when, to the eyes of ordinary men of conservative temper, the ecclesiastical system had seemed so uniformly triumphant and efficient, so sound at heart and vigorous in all its members. To persons of this common type-the self-complacent mortals who never look

beneath the surface of public affairs, and misread all the superficial phenomena of politics in the manner that is most agreeable to their prejudices and private interests—the current whisperings and murmurs against the rapacity and dissoluteness of the clerical order were nothing more than the utterances of a few turbulent spirits, men for the most part of little name and no wealth, whose treasonable and blasphemous discontent with the existing state of things, springing from envy of the rich rather than from any desire for the public good, it would be well to check with a timely and unsparing use of the hangman's cord. And no inquirer into the social life of England in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, can deny that it abounded with facts which gave considerable countenance to the lethargic and contented minds that took this view of the Lollardy, whose earlier rumblings, ominous of the coming storm, had made themselves audible before Chaucer's birth, and whose course derived from the poet's pen a stimulus that contributed largely to the influence of Wycliffe's doctrines.

The thirteenth and fourteenth were the centuries which witnessed the erection of the most perfect specimens of that Gothic architecture which covered the land with sacred edifices, that are scarcely more admirable for the grandeur and harmony of their designs, than for the exquisite beauty and richness of the labour expended with lavish profuseness on the details of their structure. The hundred and forty years that intervened between the consecration of Boniface of Savoy to the archbishopric of Canterbury and the murder of Simon Sudbury, were years which, notwithstanding a succession of occurrences unfavourable to the interests and enterprises of art, saw no cessation in the labours to which we are indebted for the cathedrals, the churches, the colleges, the cloisters, that rebuke the clamour and feverish restlessness of our time by their solemn stillness and majestic loveliness, and will long remain sublime memorials of ages when all the artistic instincts and faculties of our ancestors were concentrated upon one worthy field of effort. Wheresoever we draw the finger over a map of England, it runs athwart spots associated with the architectural triumphs of the period in which our cathedral towns were seldom without the music of the sculptor's hammer and chisel; and not

a few of them-such as London, Westminster, Wells, Lichfield, Ely, Gloucester, Worcester, Salisbury, Canterbury, Winchester, Oxford-witnessed in the achievement of new, or the restoration and extension of old buildings, the creation of those artistic beauties for which they are chiefly famous at the present time. Nor was this activity confined to the sites of our remaining cathedrals, and the most memorable of the religious houses which Henry the Eighth's despotic grasp deprived of injurious existence. The monastic dwellings that arose in this period could be counted by hundreds ;* and whilst some of them were grand structures, whose erection and adornment required the labour of many hands for a series of years, the least important of them comprised works that rendered their accomplishment a matter of keen daily interest to numerous persons besides the workmen employed upon them, and the proprietors at whose charges they were chiefly built.

Of the universality of the interest taken by the entire population in the general progress of these works, and yet further of the exact information which persons residing in one locality possessed concerning architectural operations carried forward in another and remote part of the kingdom, no reader can form an adequate conception who labours under the common but very erroneous impression that there was very little intercommunication between distant quarters of medieval England, and that the habit of locomotion was unusual amongst the subjects of the Norman and Plantagenet monarchs. To understand the social life of our ancestors throughout the strictly feudal period of our history, the student must thoroughly disabuse himself of this false and very misleading notion, and must never omit to

* In Catholic England, whilst Westmoreland had fewer monasteries than any other shire, Gloucestershire was the county most highly favoured, or, as Fuller expressed it, most pestered' by monks. Of all counties,' says the author of 'The Church History of Britain,' 'in England, Gloucestershire was most pestered with monks, having four mitred abbeys, besides St. Augustine's in Bristol (who sometimes passed for a baron), within the compass thereof: viz. Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Cirencester, and Wivelscombe. Hence the topical wicked proverb, deserving to be banished out of that county, being the profane child of superstitious parents, "As sure as God is in Gloucestershire;" as if so many convents had certainly fastened His gracious presence to that place. As Gloucestershire was the fullest of, so Westmoreland was the freest from monasteries.'

remember that journeyings were more frequent amongst our forefathers of every social rank, before the Reformation, than in the times that intervened between the suppression of the religious houses and the middle of the eighteenth century.

One of the most noteworthy features of Old England was the wide dispersion of the estates in the possession of a single large proprietor. A great baron often held lands in a southern an eastern and a midland shire; or, whilst he had a castle and manors in a northern county, he would have separate properties in western and south-western regions of the kingdom. Roger Bigod's lands lay in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Sussex, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, and in Ireland. The domains of Isabella de Fortibus were scattered over an extent of country that had the Isle of Wight for its southern extremity and a part of Yorkshire for its northern boundary. It was the same with the landed corporations. The property of a brotherhood often lay in a dozen or more different counties. For instance (as Mr. Thorold Rogers informs us, in his History of Agriculture and Prices'), Merton College owned, in the fourteenth century, estates scattered over Oxfordshire, Kent, Surrey, Bucks, Warwick, Wilts, Leicester, Cambridge, Hunts, Hants, Durham, and Northumberland;' to which the Wardens and Fellows of the association paid periodical visits, in accordance with the intentions of their founder, and the ordinary custom of the large landowners of the time, who were continually making progresses from shire to shire, to receive the rents of their numerous tenants and inspect their widely-separated manors. So long as the ecclesiastical and lay proprietors thus exercised personal supervision over their various distant properties, it was naturally a part of their policy to see that roads were kept in efficient repair; and whilst the legislature compelled the owners of real estate to maintain good roads throughout the country, the continual streams of wayfarers upon the highways called into existence a supply of hostelries sufficient for their entertainment, and insured to the unattended traveller a measure of personal security, the absence of which, in times subsequent to the Reformation, was one of the reasons why the custom of making journeys for mere pleasure was so very generally relinquished in the seventeenth century.