PART I.-WYCLIFFE'S ENGLAND.

FOR

CHAPTER I.

THE PIONEERS.

OR the educated mind, there is no more delightful pastime, or profitable exercise, than to meditate on those separate communities of religious persons, whose toilsome and pious labours were largely instrumental in reclaiming the British islands from primeval wildness, and converting their earlier inhabitants from Pagan superstition; and who, discharging at the same time the functions of the colonist and the missionary, were the founders of institutions that took deep root in the social system of our semi-barbarous ancestors, and through centuries of convulsion and change were of inestimable service to mankind as schools of civilisation and fountains of the true faith.

To realise the intellectual, moral, and material conditions under which these remote benefactors of our species achieved their fruitful work, is a task attended with many difficulties, arising from the fewness and inadequacy of the records, which are the only written memorials of their virtues and performances. But in the absence of fuller and worthier histories, we may well be thankful for the meagre chronicles which, at wide and irregular intervals, throw faint gleams of light athwart the otherwise unbroken gloom which covers these saintly actors from our reverential observation. For by the aid of those infrequent and uncertain lights something may surely be discerned of the simplicity and fervour, the mild submissiveness and superb

VOL. I.

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daring, the exquisite tenderness and almost superhuman strength, that distinguished them from the inferior natures, for whose temporal advantage and eternal salvation they laboured with unselfish zeal and invincible resoluteness. And when this insight has been gained into the sources of their influence over their contemporaries, it is possible, though arduous for us-by a judicious and vigorous exercise of reason and imaginationto bring ourselves face to face, as it were, with the men and women of British or Anglo-Saxon race, who embraced Christianity in the earlier stages of its long war of numerous conflicts with the paganism of the Celtic and Teutonic tribes, and who, having thus adopted the faith of the Cross, retired in companies to the fastnesses of the forests, or the desolate spots of the thinly-populated land, in order that, whilst complying with the precepts of the gospel, they might contribute directly, and with effectiveness, to the conversion of that Pagan world from which they had withdrawn themselves for a time.

Conspicuous in the churches that furnished martyrs to the agents of Diocletian's persecution, and perished under the incursions of the German immigrants, these communities of Christian believers were still more numerous and powerful in the churches founded by those Celtic missionaries, who repaid the wrongs inflicted on their race by endowing its persecutors with the blessings of conversion to the one true religion. In times prior to the creation of parishes they sent forth the priests, who, upon the second overthrow of Pagan superstition in Albion, ministered to the spiritual needs of the scattered congregations; and growing in number and importance as Christianity gained more general acceptance amongst the Saxon peoples, they entered upon the dawn of their greatness, when they witnessed the completion of that parochial system which owed its origin to their priests, and continues to this day a grand memorial of their care for the interests of religion in every quarter of the land.

It should, however, be borne in mind that these ancient communities of religious persons in the Celtic and early AngloSaxon churches differed widely in several important particulars from the monasteries of later times. Until the tenth century, when Dunstan's zeal and irresistible will, effecting the work

which Wilfrid was powerless to accomplish some three hundred years earlier, firmly planted the Benedictine system in the polity of the English Church, the monasteries of our remote ancestors were not so much colleges of ecclesiastics as associations of believers, who found it to be for their convenience and edification to dwell within a common home. We have called them communities of religious persons, but we should more exactly designate their constitution and functions by calling them associations of religious families; for they afforded shelter to the young and old of both sexes, to parents with young children in their arms, to widows and virgins. Comprising a clerical element, sufficient for the spiritual needs of its members, and the due instruction of its dependent churches, a Saxon monastery of the pre-Dunstan period consisted chiefly of laymembers, a considerable proportion of whom were females.

Nor was woman's presence a source of embarrassment, or an occasion of scandal, in these colonies of austere ascetics, in days when no edict of the Church imposed celibacy on her clergy, and social opinion had not yet discerned in marriage such a savour of sinfulness as rendered its estate incompatible with the sanctity of the priestly office. Frequently the feminine element, both in numbers and capacity, preponderated over the male in the British and Saxon monasteries, which not seldom obeyed the supreme control of the opulent and royal ladies, to whose munificence they owed their existence. The pious princess, who converted her residence into a refuge from worldly temptations for enthusiastic devotees, enjoyed a natural right to regulate the life of the guests who accepted her hospitality; and if she possessed the intelligence and energy to govern a numerous household, she soon came to exercise the functions of a religious superior by discharging efficiently the duties of a hostess. was thus that the Deirian princess--whose beneficent career has given rise to so many unworthy jests-established her right to rule the monasteries, in which priests and bishops received instruction from her lips, and in the most famous of which she fostered the sacred genius of the cowherd, Ceadmon, whose rhythmical translations of the Bible stories charmed the ears and illuminated the minds of the rude Northumbrian converts. Thus also the Princess Ebba became the spiritual directress, as

It

well as the temporal guardian, of her disciples at Coldingham. And whilst these Northumbrian ladies were thus spending their substance and lives in the service of the Church, Queen Etheldreda, after escaping from her husband's detested importunities, established in East Anglia the monastery in which she emulated the virtues and services of her aunt, the Abbess Hilda.

Whilst he meditates upon the incidents which must have attended the plantation of those early communities, the scholar of the nineteenth century surrounds himself with visions that strengthen whilst they delight the mind from which they have emanated. Looking down upon the minster of his native city from an eminence, that commands an uninterrupted view of the landscape, of which the antique tower is the central object, he gradually loses sight of all the marks which man's incessant industry has put upon the familiar country. No longer darkened by the factories that defile its waters whilst they utilise its force, the river flows clear and bright between banks, whose majestic trees throw dark shadows on its still and glassy surface. The ripening corn-fields, the green meadows, and pleasant homesteads of a hundred farms disappear, and are replaced by grand breadths of the virgin forest, that clothes the unoccupied valley and distant hills with every variety of greenness, and every diversity of curving lines. Far away, where the blue haze thickening the atmosphere deprives the outlines of their fineness, is just discernible the peak from whose summit may be seen, on the other side of a stretch of morass and moorland, the stronghold of the thane, whose goodwill to the Christian faith has recently borne fruit, in a grant of uncleared forest, to a band of religious enthusiasts, whom he has graciously empowered to live in the fastnesses of the conceded wilderness,earning heaven by their prayers, whilst they enrich the earth by their labour.

And now, floating slowly with the river's steady current, there comes to the dreamer's vision a large, rude raft, similar in make to the smaller of those unwieldy floats, which, growing with the stream's width and the progress of their seaward course, move slowly down the Rhine from the interior of Europe to the ports, where they are broken up and sold for the benefit of the workmen, whose not unskilful labour felled their massive

timbers in the forest, knit their cumbrous parts into monstrous floors, and then navigated them to the spot appointed for their destruction.

Just as each of those Rhine-rafts is seen to bear its company of workers, so the float of our scholar's vision bears a freight of passengers, whose hands made the vessel on which they are slowly gliding to their toil.

Perhaps the whole crew numbers fifty souls; and as they draw nearer to his point of observation, the dreamer observes them looking eagerly to the bank on which they are about to alight.

Amongst them are faces of every age, from the furrowed visage of the veteran, marked by the scars of battle, to the smooth cheek of the blue-eyed boy, who has embraced the sacred life with the fierce fervour of youthful enthusiasm. Beside men, whose garb and tonsure indicate their priestly rank, stand laymen, whose various pursuits have fitted them to endure the toil and hardships of settlers in the forest. Some of them have learnt in the courts of princes the emptiness of earthly honour; some are simple craftsmen, who from their earliest years have sustained themselves by the labour of their hands; and whilst most of them are endowed with natures that, under any circumstances, would preserve them from the commission of heinous offences, there are others, whose penitential air betokens the secret anguish of remorse for crimes known only to themselves and God. A brotherhood of rude creatures, in all of whom there is perhaps less of earthly learning than is possessed by any clever twelve-years' lad of our own time, who has had the training of a village school; and of them all, the one least familiar with the learning of books is the broad-shouldered, beetle-browed monk, whom they have made their chief in unconstrained homage to his thorough goodness and proved devotion to the rules by which they have consented to regulate their lives. Such are the men who leap from the raft to the river's bank, bearing in their hearts the vital truths of the gospel story, and in their hands the few implements that will enable them to make a clearing and raise a Christian temple in the silent wood. Nor must notice be omitted of the patient women, who are sharers in the under