NOTES TO "THE ROOKS OF FURNESS."

In the southern extremity of Furness, about half a mile to the west of Dalton, a deep narrow vale stretches itself from the north, and opens to the south with an agreeable aspect to the noonday sun; it is well watered with a rivulet of fine water collected from the adjacent springs, and has many convenient places for mills and fish-ponds. This romantic spot is the Vale of Deadly Nightshade, or, as it is sometimes called, Bekangs-Gill.

The solitary and private situation of this dell being so well formed and commodious for religious retreat had attracted the attention of Evanus, or Ewanus, a monk, originally belonging to the monastery of Savigny in Normandy, from which he and a few associates had migrated, and had recently seated themselves at Tulket, near Preston in Amounderness, where Evanus was chosen to be their first abbot. Accordingly, they were induced to change their residence; and exactly three years and three days after their settling at Tulket on the fourth of the nones of July, 1124, they removed to the sequestered shades of Bekangs-Gill, and there began the foundation of the magnificent Abbey of St. Mary in Furness, in magnitude only second of those in England belonging to the Cistercian Monks, and the next in opulence after Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, being endowed with princely wealth and almost princely authority, and not unworthy of the style in which its charter records the gifts and grants, with all their privileges, of its Royal founder, "to God and St. Mary," in the following words:—

"In the name of the Blessed Trinity, and in honour of St. Mary of Furness, I Stephen, earl of Bulloign and Mortaign, consulting God, and providing for the safety of my own soul, the soul of my wife the countess Matilda, the soul of my lord and uncle Henry king of England and duke of Normandy, and for the souls of all the faithful, living as well as dead, in the year of our Lord 1127 of the Roman indiction, and the 5th and 18th of the epact:

"Considering every day the uncertainty of life, that the roses and flowers of kings, emperors, and dukes, and the crowns and palms of all the great, wither and decay; and that all things, with an uninterrupted course, tend to dissolution and death:

"I therefore return, give and grant, to God and St. Mary of Furness, all Furness and Walney, with the privilege of hunting; with Dalton, and all my lordship in Furness, with the men and everything thereto belonging, that is, in woods and in open grounds, in land and in water; and Ulverston, and Roger Braithwaite, with all that belongs to him; my fisheries at Lancaster, and Little Guoring, with all the land thereof; with sac[10], and soc[11], tol[12], and team[13], infangenetheof[14], and every thing within Furness, except the lands of Michael Le Fleming; with this view, and upon this condition, That in Furness an order of regular monks be by divine permission established: which gift and offering I by supreme authority appoint to be for ever observed: and that it may remain firm and inviolate for ever, I subscribe this charter with my hand; and confirm it with the sign of the Holy Cross.

"Signed by

Henry, King of England and Duke of Normandy.
Thurstan, Archbishop of York.
Audin, } Bishops.
Boces, }

Robert, Keeper of the Seal.
Robert, Earl of Gloster."

The magnitude of the Abbey may be known from the dimensions of the ruins; and enough is standing to show the style of the architecture, which breathes the same simplicity of taste which is found in most houses belonging to the Cistercian monks, which were erected about the same time with Furness Abbey. The round and pointed arches occur in the doors and windows. The fine clustered Gothic and the heavy plain Saxon pillars stand contrasted. The walls shew excellent masonry, are in many places counter-arched, and the ruins discover a strong cement. But all is plain: had the monks even intended, the stone would not admit of such work as has been executed at Fountains and Rieval Abbeys. The stone of which the buildings have been composed is of a pale red colour, dug from the neighbouring rocks, now changed by time and weather to a tint of dusky brown, which accords well with the hues of plants and shrubs that everywhere emboss the mouldering arches.

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 pounds[16] 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.