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Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country
The church and cloisters were encompassed with a wall, which commenced at the east side of the great northern door, and formed the strait enclosure; and a space of ground, to the amount of sixty-five acres, was surrounded with a strong stone wall, which enclosed the porter's lodge, the mills, granaries, ovens, kilns, and fish-ponds belonging to the Abbey, the ruins of which are still visible. This last was the great enclosure, now called the deer-park, within which, placed on the crown of an eminence that rises immediately from the Abbey, and seen over all low Furness, are the remains of a beacon or watch-tower, raised by the society for their further security, and commanding a magnificent prospect. The door leading to it is still remaining in the enclosure wall, on the eastern side.
During the residence of the monks at Tulket, and until the election of their fifth Abbot (Richard de Bajocis) they were of the order of Savigny under the rule of St. Benedict; and from their habit or dress were called Grey Monks; but at the time of the general matriculation of the Savignian monasteries with that of Citeaux, the monks of Furness also accepted of the reform, exchanged their patron St. Benedict for St. Bernard, changed their dress from grey to white, and so became White Monks, Bernardins, or Cistercians, the rule of which order they religiously observed until the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Cistercian order in its origin was devoted to the practice of penance, silence, assiduous contemplation, and the angelical functions (as Mr. West expresses it) of singing the divine praises; wherefore it did not admit of the ordinary dissipation which attends scholastic enquiries. St. Bernard who was himself a man of learning, well knowing how far reading was necessary to improve the mind even of a recluse, took great care to furnish his monks with good libraries. Such of them as were best qualified were employed in taking copies of books in every branch of literature, many of which, beautifully written on vellum, and elegantly illuminated, are at this time to be seen in their libraries. They used neither furs nor linen, and never eat any flesh, except in time of dangerous sickness; they abstained even from eggs, butter, milk, and cheese, unless upon extraordinary occasions, and when given to them in alms. They had belonging to them certain religious lay brethren, whose office was to cultivate their lands, and attend to their secular affairs: these lived at their granges and farms, and were treated in like manner with the monks, but were never indulged with the use of wine. The monks who attended the choir slept in their habits upon straw; they rose at midnight, and spent the rest of the night in singing the divine office. After prime and the first mass, having accused themselves of their faults in public chapter, the rest of the day was spent in a variety of spiritual exercises with uninterrupted silence. From the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (the 14th of September) until Easter they observed a strict fast: and flesh was banished from their infirmaries from Septuagesima until Easter. This latter class of monks was confined to the boundary wall, except that on some particular days the members of it were allowed to walk in parties beyond it, for exercise and amusement; but they were very seldom permitted either to receive or pay visits. Much of these rigorous observances was mitigated by a bull of Pope Sixtus IV., in the year 1485, when among other indulgencies the whole order was allowed to eat flesh three times in every week; for which purpose a particular dining-room, separate and distinct from the usual refectory, was fitted up in every monastery. They were distinguished for extensive charities and liberal hospitality; for travellers were so sumptuously entertained at the Abbey, that it was not till the dissolution that an inn was thought necessary in this part of Furness, when one was opened for their accommodation, expressly because the Monastery could no longer receive them. With the rules of St. Bernard the monks had adopted the white cassock, with a white caul and scapulary. Their choral dress was either white or grey, with caul and scapulary of the same, and a girdle of black wool; over that a hood and a rocket, the front part of which descended to the girdle, where it ended in a round, and the back part reached down to the middle of the leg behind: when they appeared abroad, they wore a caul and full black hood.
The privileges and immunities granted to the Cistercian order in general were very numerous: and those to the Abbey of Furness were proportioned to its vast endowments. The Abbot held his secular court in the neighbouring castle of Dalton, where he presided, with the power of administering not only justice, but injustice, since the lives and property of the villain tenants of the lordship of Furness were consigned by a grant of King Stephen to the disposal of the lordly Abbot! The monks also could be arraigned, for whatever crime, only by him. The military establishment of Furness likewise depended upon the Abbot. Every mesne lord and free homager, as well as the customary tenants, took an oath of fealty to the Abbot, to be true to him against all men, except the king. Every mesne lord obeyed the summons of the Abbot, or his steward, in raising his quota of armed men; and every tenant of a whole tenement furnished a man and a horse of war for guarding the coast, for the border service, or any expedition against the common enemy of the king and kingdom. The habiliments of war were a steel coat, or coat of mail, a falce, or falchion, a jack, the bow, the byll, the crossbow, and spear.
What wonder, says a lively writer, that Abbot Pele, or any other man, owning such vast possessions and having such temporal and spiritual privileges as the following, should have grown proud and gross, and contumacious! Within the limits of his own district he was little short of omnipotent. The same oath of fealty was taken to him as to the king himself; he had no less than twelve hundred and fifty-eight able men armed with coats of mail, spears, and bows and arrows, upon the possessions of the Monastery, ready for active service, four hundred of whom were cavalry; besides manorial rights, he had extended feudal privileges, appointment of sheriff, coroner, and constable, wreck of the sea, freedom from suit of county; a free market and fair at Dalton, with a court of criminal jurisdiction; lands and tenements exempt from all toll and tax whatever; the emoluments incidental to wardship, such as the fining of young ladies who married against his will, &c. He had the patronage of all the churches save one; no bailiff could come into his territories under any pretence whatever; and no man was to presume in any way to molest or disturb him on pain of forfeiting ten pounds to the king. In addition to its rich home territory in the North Lonsdale, the Abbey possessed the manor of Beaumont in the south; land and houses at Bolton, and in many other places near Lancaster; five villages in Yorkshire, with much land and pasturage; and a mansion for the abbot, in York itself; all beautiful Borrowdale in Cumberland was their property; houses at Boston in Lincolnshire; land in the Isle of Man; and houses in Drogheda and two other towns in Ireland. The home lordship comprehended the rich district of Low Furness and all the district included between the river Duddon on the one side, and the Elter (beginning at the Shire Stones on the top of Wrynose), Lake Windermere and the Leven on the other; with the isles of Walney and Foulney, and the Pile of Fouldrey. They had an excellent harbour of refuge fitted to accommodate the largest vessels of that era at any time of tide, and they had four good iron mines in their near neighbourhood, the ore of which, however, they do not seem to have exported. The total income of the society appears, at the time of its dissolution in 1537, to have been more than nine hundred pounds a-year; which would be represented by about ten times that value in our time, or nine thousand a-year.
But in the reign of Edward the First, its revenues seem to have been nearly as large again. According to the late Mr. Beck, the author of Annales Furnesienses, to which we are indebted for much of these particulars, the tenants of the Abbey paid great part of their rents by provisioning the monks with grain, lambs, calves, &c., or bartered them for beer, bread, iron, wood, and manure. More than two hundred gallons of beer were distributed weekly among these tenants upon tunning days, accompanied with about three score of loaves of bread; the expenditure in this particular alone, per annum, must have been at least one thousand pounds of our present money: one ton of malleable iron was also given to the same people for the repair of their ploughs, and wood for that of their houses and fences. They might take, too, all the manure—amounting yearly to four or five hundred cartloads—with the exception of that from the Abbot's and high stables. The tenants paid by way of fine, or admission to their tenements, but one penny, called "God's Penny," and were sworn to be true to the king and to the convent. What alms were distributed amongst the poor by this wealthy and pious society we have no means of discovering. It was bound, upon the anniversary of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, to distribute two oxen, two cows, and one bull among the poor folks who assembled for that purpose at the Porter's Lodge. At the same place, ninety-nine shillings' worth of bread, and six maze of fresh herrings, valued at forty shillings, were also given in alms every Monday and Tuesday; the convent maintained from its very commencement thirteen poor men, allowing each of them thirty-three shillings and fourpence yearly: and eight widows received a similar allowance of provisions to that allowed for the same number of monks. They had five flagons of ale weekly, and each of them a clibanus,15 which it is supposed must have been a certain quantity of bread. Lastly, there were two schools held in some part of the monastery, where the children of those tenants who paid their rent in provisions, and who it is probable lived in the neighbourhood, received their education gratuitously, and dined in the hall during their attendance as well. If one of these showed symptoms of superior intelligence, he had the privilege of being elected into the society in preference to all others, by which step he might rise by good fortune or finesse even to be Lord of Furness.
The society numbered three and thirty monks at the time of its dissolution, and about one hundred converts and servants, and no convert was admitted who could not pay for the labour of an hireling. To have been head of such a colony at home, and to have wielded such a power abroad, must have made even the most pious of abbots "draw too proud a breath;" and yet with all the faults and all the vices of that cowled priesthood, we cannot now forbear to pity their sad fate, when bidden by the remorseless king to leave their grand old residences and quiet ways of life wherein they had lived so long!
It must be added, that to so much power and so great prosperity, with all the beneficence and usefulness of the society there had come to be allied an amount of profligacy and irreligion proportionate to the many advantages which it had enjoyed.
The early part of the sixteenth century found the morality of the monastery represented in many instances by social arrangements in direct violation of the injunctions laid upon all monastic institutions, "in the king's behalf;" amongst others, of that one which especially enjoins that "women of what state or degree soever they be, be utterly excluded from entering into the limit or circuit of this monastery or place, unless they first obtain license of the King's Highness, or his visitor." It was stated, and apparently well authenticated, that Rogerus Pele (abbot) had two wives, or what amounted to the same thing, two concubines; and amongst his subordinate monks, Johannes Groyn had one, whilst Thomas Hornsby had five. Thus, evil days in one sense had already come; and others were fast drawing nigh. The mandate, moreover, had been prepared for their destruction independently of these and such like shortcomings; but they afforded a powerful handle by which to wrest them to destruction.
First came the commissioners appointed by the King for visiting the monasteries in the North of England, with their searching examination into everything connected with each separate society: next, the list of crimes charged on the monks at the time of the visitation: then the devices of the Earl of Sussex "advertised" in his letter to the King, wherein "I, the said erle, devising with myselfe, yf one way would not serve, how, and by what other means, the said monks might be ryd from the said abbey;" the summons to Whalley of the unhappy Abbot to make his proposal, in his own handwriting, according to the "ded enrolled, which A. Fitzherbert hath drawn" for the surrender of his monastery to the King: and then the final consummation of all. For come it must. On the 7th day of April, 1537, in spite of prayers to the "kynge," in spite of many a "shillinge in golde" given to the "right honerable and our singler goode Mr. Mayster Thomas Cromwell, secretarie to the Kynge's highness," the royal commissioners came down upon their prey. After hanging the Abbot of Whalley, and the royal injunction that "all monks and chanons, that be in any wise faultie, are to be tyed uppe without further delay or ceremonie," the Abbot of Furnesse is found "to be of a very facile and ready minde," and all hope of averting his doom being over, and his sense of peril hastening his submission, "it coming freely of himself and without enforcement," he signed the fatal deed of surrender, confessing with contrition "the mysorder and evil lyfe both to God and our prynce of the brethren of this monasterie;" the pen passed from the hand of the Superior to each monk in succession, and the "lamp on the altar of St. Mary of Furness was extinguished for ever."
With forty shillings given to them by the King, and clad in "secular wedes" (that is, lay garments), without which they were not permitted to depart, they turned their faces from their magnificent home in the Nightshade Dell. To the degraded Abbot was given the Rectory of Dalton, valued at £33 6s. 9d. yearly, obtained with difficulty, and even of which he was not allowed undisturbed possession. But no traces of his associates at the Abbey appear to have survived their departure from it, unless we dimly discern them in the miserable record which relates that sixteen years after the period of their dissolution, fifteen pounds16 were still paid in annuities out of the revenues of the late monastery; that noble possession which the hapless Thirty surrendered to the King.
Of the three and thirty monks of which the society at Furness was composed, the names of the Abbot, the Prior, and twenty-eight of the brethren, were appended to the deed: two had been committed to ward and sure custody in the King's castle of Lancaster, for being "found faultye:"17 and one of the number remains unaccounted for.
KING DUNMAIL
NOTES TO "KING DUNMAIL."
The heroic king Dunmail was the last of a succession of native princes, who up to the tenth century ruled over those mountainous provinces in the north-western region of England which were chiefly peopled by the earliest masters of Britain, the Celtic tribes of Cymri, or Picts. The territories of Dunmail, as king of Cumbria, included the entire tract of country from the western limits of the Lothians in Scotland to the borders of Lancashire, and from Northumberland to the Irish Sea.
The several British kingdoms which were originally comprised within this area maintained a long and resolute resistance against the power of the first Saxon monarchs; and although in the course of time most of them were brought under the supremacy of those strangers, as tributary provinces, they still continued a sort of independent existence, electing their own kings and obeying their own laws.
On the establishment of the Heptarchy, several of these provinces were included within the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria; but although they were claimed by the Northumbrian monarchs, there was even then little admixture of their people with the fair-haired followers of Hengist and Horsa, and each continued to be governed by its own chieftain or king until the Norman conquest, and existed under what was called the Danish law. So long as the native chieftains were allowed to exercise a subordinate authority, the Northumbrian kings had no occasion to interfere with the internal government of the subject provinces. If the tribute was duly rendered, they remained unmolested; if it was withheld, payment was enforced by arms; or, in extreme cases, the refractory state (to use a modern phrase) was "annexed," and the domestic government extinguished.
Of the petty rulers of these British kingdoms no notices have been transmitted to us. These are confined to the kings of Strathclyde, or, as they are designated by our earliest informers, of Alclyde; the latter being the name of their capital, which stood on a rocky eminence, adjacent to the modern town of Dumbarton; whilst the former significantly describes the position of their territory in the great strath or valley of the Clyde. This little district (of Strathclyde), which must not be confounded with the larger territory of Cumbria, that as yet had no existence under any general government or common name, comprised the modern counties of Lanark, Ayr, and Renfrew, on the south of the Clyde, and, probably, Dumbartonshire on the north. In the series of Strathclydian kings, tradition has placed the name of the celebrated King Arthur; and the local nomenclature is said to afford many traces of his fame, especially in the case of their citadel of Alclyde, or Dumbarton, which is styled "Castrum Arthuri," in a record of the reign of David the Second. Ryderic, the successor of Arthur, died in 601, in the eighth year of the reign of Ethelfrith, king of Northumberland; and from that time onward, during the remainder of this and the succeeding reigns of Edwin and Oswald, we hear nothing of the independent existence of this people, nor do we even know the names of their chieftains; it is probable that they had been reduced to subjection. But in the very year of Oswald's disastrous death, A. D. 642, we find the Britons carrying on important military operations on their own account, in which Owen their king distinguished himself, by slaying on the battle-field of Strath-carmaic, Donal Break, king of the Scots. During the long reign of Oswi in Northumberland, we read of one king of Strathclyde, Guinet, but the record is only of his death, A. D. 657, not of any exploit which he performed. On the death of Ecgfrith, A. D. 670, the Britons of Strathclyde appear to have recovered their liberty; and thenceforward we have a tolerably complete list of their kings during the two succeeding centuries.
Ethelfrith, who had effected the conquest of the central and western portion of Northumbria, and may be regarded as the founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, "conquered," as we read in Beda, "more territories from the Britons than any other king or tribune;" but although he was thus able to overrun a vast district of country, his followers were not sufficiently numerous to colonise it. In some places, indeed, "he expelled the inhabitants, and placed Angles in their stead," but "in others," and doubtless to a much greater extent, "he allowed the vanquished to retain their lands, on payment of tribute." In the reign of Edwine, too, the Anglo-Saxon population were under his immediate government; the petty British States were still ruled by tributary princes. And no doubt their political condition continued more or less the same during the century and half which preceded the dissolution of the Heptarchy, and after the reconstruction of its several parts under one crown.
On Northumbria being overrun by the renowned Danish Viking Healfdene, A. D. 875, fifty years after the Heptarchal kingdoms had been dissolved, it is recorded that the indigenous inhabitants of the part called Cymriland, the Cumbrians, or Britons, being too weak to defend themselves from the hateful aggressions of the Danes, and deprived of the protection of the Saxon kings of Northumbria, who had themselves succumbed to the common enemy, turned for aid to the only neighbours who seemed sufficiently powerful to resist the invaders. They therefore implored the aid of Grig or Gregory, king of Scotland, by whose assistance in the following year the Scandinavian ravagers were expelled. These Indigenœ, or British inhabitants, must have been the people of Galloway, and of the district around Carlisle; for the Strathclyde Britons were already under the authority of Gregory, as the guardian of Eocha, a minor, who, as the son of Hu king of Strathclyde, and nephew of the second Constantine, king of Scotland, succeeded to the crowns of both these realms. Whether the Britons subsequently quarrelled with their powerful ally, and being defeated in battle, were obliged to cede to the victor their rocky highlands and adjacent places; or they voluntarily submitted themselves to Gregory, with their lands and possessions, thinking it preferable to be subject to the Scots, who, although enemies, were Christians, than to infidel pagans, there does not appear to be any evidence to determine.
The vigour of Gregory king of Scotland having been found, notwithstanding his prowess and the success of his arms, inadequate to support an authority which had been usurped by him as regent during the minority of Eocha, after holding the reins of government in Scotland and Strathclyde during eleven years, was expelled, together with Eocha, by Donal, son of the late King Constantine II., A. D. 893.
To Donal, who was slain by the Danes, A. D. 904, succeeded his cousin Constantine III., the son of Aodh, who had been slain by Gregory. Another Donal, brother to Constantine III., had been "elected" king of the Strathclyde Britons four years before the elevation of that monarch to the throne of Scotland. During the life of this Donal, the districts of Carlisle and Galloway were not united to Strathclyde, but remained attached to Scotland; from which, however, they were separated after his decease, and given to his son and successor, Eugenius.
To the new kingdom, thus founded by Constantine in favour of his nephew and presumptive heir, by the union of Carlisle and Galloway with Strathclyde, was given the name of Cumbria, derived from the common appellation of its inhabitants. Its extent is precisely defined in a return made by the prior and convent of Carlisle to a writ of Edward the First, requiring them, as well as other religious houses, to furnish, from chronicles or other documents in their possession, any information bearing upon the alleged right of supremacy over Scotland vested in the English crown. The return sets forth, "That district was called Cumbria, which is now included in the bishoprics of Carlisle, Glasgow, and Whitherne, together with the country lying between Carlisle and the river Duddon:" in other words, the entire tract from the Clyde to the confines of Lancashire. In the "Inquisitio Davidis," which does indeed extend to all parts of Cumbria which remained in David's possession, we are expressly told that "he had not then within his dominion the whole Cumbrian region," the present county of Cumberland, or, as it was then called, Earldom of Carlisle, having been severed from it soon after the Norman Conquest. Although Fordun is the only author who narrates the cession of Carlisle and Galloway to Gregory, and the subsequent grant of these districts to Eugenius, whereby they were united to Strathclyde, and the whole merged into a single government, we have abundant evidence of the existence of Cumbria and the intimate union of Constantine and Eugenius at this period. In the year 938, these princes, in conjunction with the Danes and Welsh, attempted to wrest the sovereign power out of the vigorous hands of Athelstane. The combined forces were signally defeated by the Anglo-Saxon monarch at Brunanburgh (supposed by some to be Bromborough, near Chester); Eugenius was slain, and Constantine escaped only by a precipitate retreat.