CHRONICA MONASTERLI S. ALBANI.*

THE Record-Office publications already comprise several docu- ments from the great Abbey of St. Alban's, and we have here the first half of another instalment, the annals of St. Alban's Abbey, "a Johanne Atnundesham monacho ut videtur conscripti," to which is prefixed a shorter " chronicon rerum gestarutn "in the same monastery, "a quodam ignoto auctore compilatum." The Chronicon extends from 1422 to 1431, and that portion of the Annales which is included in the present volume, from 1421 to 1440. If the Chronicon is to be considered as a regular Abbey chronicle, it must be regarded as one of the very latest extant ; it resembles, however, rather the private jottings of a monk than a journal posted regularly for the benefit of the whole Society. The period embraced by this concluding batch of St. Alban's records, renders it interesting to the historical inquirer for two reasons ; first, the scantiness of other contemporary accounts ; and, second, its proximity to the downfall of the Monastic system. The materials of the domestic History of England during this period are very sparse ; the Gesta Abbatum and the regular Abbey Chronicles had stopped, and now Walsingham's history stops also, while such chroniclers as continue busy themselves rather with the French wars than with home matters. It was scarce seven years from Agincourt when Henry V.'s brother Thomas, the Duke of Clarence, and with him a crowd of the English nobility, was betrayed by the treachery of his scout-master, and perhaps his own rashness, into the fatal action at Beauje, and fell, fighting very gallantly against an overwhelming force of French and" Scotch. A few months later the victorious Henry himself died at Vincennes, leaving his baby son to the guardianship of Warwick, France to the care of the Duke of Bedford, and England to be governed by the Duke of Gloucester. The latter of these three noblemen, known popularly as "the good Duke Humphrey," figures frequently in the Chronicon, and his tomb in the Abbey Church may be seen to this day. And now, to borrow the apt quotation of Mr. Riley, the English nation began to experience the woes denounced upon the land whose king is a child. While the French expeditions went forward, a good deal of lawlessness prevailed at home, of which we see records in these documents. 1Vhatever was going forward at home or abroad, the monks of St. Alban's were likely to hear of it as soon as anybody. They could hardly be said to have bid the world farewell. With their Abbey in an important town, but five-and-twenty miles from London, and on the great north road ; their Abb3t a peer (and Whetham- stede, the Abbot of this chronicle, was popular at Court), they lay like the garden in Tennyson's poem,— " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it."

St. Alban's Abbey had always been a favourite royal resort,. and the pages of the Chronicon ring with the visits of royal dukes and ladies, bishops and noblemen, as they file with their retinues into the court-yard, make some tarrying over the Abbey hospitality, and then ride away again, after giving sub- stantial offerings of money or jewelry, which the chronicler records with satisfaction. Could they have foreseen the shame- less embezzlement of their presents under a subsequent abbot, the noble donors might, perhaps, have inclined to be more close- fisted. There is rather a remarkable account given by the Chronicon writer of the punishment of a poacher during a Christ- mas visit of the Duke of Gloucester. It seems that a rabble of the servants fell to poaching the deer and rabbits in a wood hard by, "pro quo enormi facto" their ringleader was set in the stocks, where to him stepped up his master and literally broke his head, (" capite fractus,")with a mattrass-beater.

Two ill practices are recorded in the Chronicon which have not yet disappeared before modern civilization. The first was the seizure of part of an envoy's retinue by brigands. Abbot Whethamstede attended the Council of Pavia (afterwards trans- ferred to Sienna) in 1423, and having occasion to send five of his train back to England, they were pounced upon when scarce clear of the town, and " spoliati et incarcerati." The other practice to- which we refer, seems to have been part of the Irish difficulty of the day. In various parts of England, but principally in the neighbour- hood of the' two Universities, anonymous letters were received from

• Annala Nonasterii S. Albani. Edited by Henry Thomas Riley, 3LA. London Longmans and Cp. 1870.

fifteenth-century Rocks and Swings, threatening that unless the parties addressed buried sums of money in specified places for the behoof of the writers, their houses should be fired and burnt to the ground. These threats were carried out too, and the chronicler records the burning of the Schools at Cambridge by some of the same incendiaries. Two petitions were presented upon the matter to the King in Parliament. The practice was ascribed to the Irish, Welsh, and Scotch students at the Universities, who had nothing else to live on —but especially the Irishmen, who were distin- guished in one of these petitions as some of them "liege subjects of our Lord the King, born in Ireland," and others "not liege subjects of our Lord the King, but enemies unto him and to his realm, and who are called TVylde Irisshmen." Enactments conse- quently passed that no Irish student should be admitted without testimonials, and that all Irish undergraduates should give security for good behaviour. Were the Irish scholars unjustly treated, or are anonymous threatening letters a genuine old Irish insti- tution?

The voice of the Lollards was now heard in the land, and, as might be expected, we find here much about them and their sufferings. One Lollard, a tiler, endured death at the stake in May, 1430, at Maldon ; of whom the monk records that after the poor man's body had been burnt (" quo combusto," says the terse chronicle), a bystander picked up one of his bones, and happening to run a splinter of it into his hand, the whole hand and arm swelled and had to be amputated ; and that, the chronicler observed, showed the vindictiveness of the Lollard,—that one of his bones should be the cause of his neighbour's losing his arm. This brings us in natural sequence to the second circumstance which we have mentioned, as affording a special interest to these annals,—the approaching dissolution of the Monasteries. The abbeys had yet a hundred years to live. The tree, which had stretched its shade and its shelter over the poor and feeble, which had stood forth in its pure verdure an image to the world of God's own purity, stood yet ; grander than ever, to a careless view; but the trunk was rotten at the core, and the shade was poisoned by the rank and unwholesome undergrowth ; not as yet was the axe even laid to its root, but already the woodmen's footsteps began to be heard above the rustle of the foliage. One " Jak Scharpe" circulated throughout the country a remarkable petition, which is here preserved. He set forth with much earnestness that vast temporalities were wasted throughout the kingdom by bishops, abbots, and priors ; and then, after carefully explaining that he desired not to meddle with the humbler professors of religion, and that he was for leaving untouched the possessions of all colleges and charities, and all monks and nuns, prayed that the King would resume the temporalities of the higher dignitaries, and endow thereout 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,200 -esquires, and 100 houses of alms, who, he said, would spend the income much more for the public weal. To pass by the poor sort, and attack the rich and powerful, — this was plain speaking indeed ! No wonder that the St. Alban's monk endorsed this petition as " pessiina supplicatio." Poor Jak Scharpe was in advance of the age ; for this sin he was executed at Abingdon in 1431. A hundred and ten years later, Thomas Cromwell, the "malleus monachorum" who smote the monasteries down, met the same fate on Tower Hill ; but Cromwell had first done his work— perhaps Jak Scharpe had done his also. The reader perhaps recollects the language in which Mr. Fronde, certainly an im- partial writer, sums up the much-vexed controversy respecting the condition of the monasteries immediately before the Reforma- tion :—

" The Abbeys of the middle-ages floated through the storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the waves of the Flood, in the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence which surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were as little like what they once had been, as the living man in the pride of his growth is like the corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for ever."

Whatever may have been the case in other abbeys, there is no room for doubt that long before Thomas Cromwell took his hammer in hand, in St. Alban's Abbey, at any rate, the evil was rampant. In 1489, barely fifty years from the conclusion of the Annales printed in the present volume, the Archbishop of Canter- bury (Cardinal (Cardinal Morton), acting under the Pope's commission to inquire into the truth of the general accusations brought against the English houses of religion, found that the abbot (Whetham- stede, of course, was now dead) and his monks were wallowing in adultery and unclean life, and were convertingeven the jewelsof the shrine for their own base purposes. "If any of your brethren," wrote the Archbishop, "be living purely and religiously, if any be wise

and virtuous, these you thereupon depress and hold in hatred." Did

I this corruption originate under Abbot William, or was it at work, though not as yet so shamelessly patent, when these Anna/es were

i being written? Grossuesses like those which Morton detected I would, of course, never find their way into such a record. We find

regulations made by Abbot Whethamstede for the correction of certain laxities observed among the brethren, but we are hardly entitled to argue from them that the morality was already as low as it certainly was forty years later. What the abbot himself I thought of the spirit of the age appears from the preamble to a regulation against exhibiting the treasures of the Abbey to strangers :—

" Quia mundus out adoo malign° positus, ut monachatum non curarot crucifigere, dummodo per fas aut nefas concessum eis patri- monium sibi valeret in sortem occasionaliter extorquere."

But even a cursory glance through these Annales leads us to the inference that the vast territorial power of the monasteries had become an oppression to the people. There is ample evidence that the St. Alban's Abbey must have been a dangerous and disagreeable neighbour. One pro- ceeding recorded here is so singular that we cannot refrain from recounting it. In 1427-8 the abbot, having, it seems, nothing else to do, resolved on reviving an old suit of the Abbey against the Rector of Horpolle ; accordingly, he invited the Dean of Arches to dinner, and took that opportunity of asking him whether he, the abbot, had any case according to the Canon law, and generally to advise him in the matter, whereupon the Dean of

Arches advised him to get the cause removed into his, the Dean's, own Court of Arches, and the abbot having got this done, the Dean proceeded to give judgment in his favour.

Another odd thing in these Anna/es is the very execrable verses which are there ascribed to Whethainstede. As Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress breaks forth after each episode into ver- sification of much sturdiness and no metre, so, if the chronicler is to be literally understood (which Mr. Riley apparently thinks he is not), Abbot Whethamstede must have been affected with a curious sort of " eaeoethes malever.sificandi." Here is a specimen of this prosody, addressed to Sir Ralph Cromwell, apropos of a litigation between himself (the Abbot) and the Bishop of Norwich :—

" Lex detestatur quod index pars haboatur ; Sod tu, Radulpho pudeat, quod es mans uterque."

This sentiment might have been equally relevant to the suit of Abbot of St. Albans v. Rector of Horpolle.

We have only to say, in conclusion, that Mr. Riley has edited the volume with intelligent research, and has prefixed to it an interesting account of the main features of the Chronicon, supple- mented by apposite references to other authorities. He promises in the next volume to do as much for the Annals. We trust that he will not omit anything tending to throw light upon the moral atmosphere of the Abbey, either for good or bad.