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their mortar tempered with innocent blood. For which we may conceive, afterwards they sped never a whit the better. To give some instances of many :

2-5. Peterborough Abbey founded to expiate Murder. Middleton being on the same occasion. So also the Nunnery of Ambresbury. Suspicions therein might be a great Fault herein.

Wulphere, king of the Mercians, having murdered Wulphald and Rufine, his own sons, with cruel and barbarous immanity, because they had devoted themselves unto Christ, and embraced his religion; afterwards turning Christian himself, to wash away the stain of his impiety, built that famous abbey, since known by the name of Peterborough.*

King Athelstan drowned his brother Edwin, having put him into a little wherry or cock-boat, without any tackling or furniture thereunto, to the end he might impute his wickedness to the waves; and afterwards, as a satisfaction to appease his ghost, built the fair abbey of Middleton in Dorsetshire.+

To join to these two houses of monks, one of nuns; (such society hath not been unacceptable ;) Ælfrith, second wife to king Edgar, having contrived the death of Edward her son-in-law, king of England, murdered him by a company of hacksters and villains, at her appointment, at Corfe-Castle in Dorsetshire, to pave the way for the succession of her son Etheldred to the crown; afterwards built the stately nunnery of Ambresbury, with some other religious houses.

It is confessed, that wilful murder may be pardoned in Christ; and they who deny it are guilty, as much as lies in their power, of a worse soul-murder in their uncharitable opinion. Yet this we say, that all the chantings of the monks and nuns in their convents could not drown the noise of innocent blood. And if these founders of abbeys thought that their murder could be expiated by raising such beautiful buildings, their most polished marble and costly carved pieces were, in the expression of the prophet, but daubing over their damnable sins "with untempered mortar," Ezek. xxii. 28. But though abbeys long since have been demolished, we leave their founders to stand or fall to their own Maker, when his all-seeing eye hath discerned betwixt the errors of their judgment and integrity of their affections, endeavouring that which, they conceived, was to the glory of God and advance of true religion.

• CAMDEN'S Brit. in Northamptonshire. Hist. Eccl. Angl. sæc. 10, page 188.

+ Idem, in Dorsetshire.

HARPSFIELD

IV. OF THE SEVERAL ORDERS OF MONKS AND NUNS IN

ENGLAND.

1. A Heap of Monkish Orders in England.

So much of the superstition of the founders; come we now to their superstition, and other notorious sins, who lived in these foundations. But first we will premise their several Orders. Herein we pretend not to any critical skill. For, though every minister of God's word, whereof I am the meanest, is a spiritual herald to derive and deduce the pedigrees and genealogies of any institution, which hath its original in God's word, yet they are not bound (not to say it is a learned ignorance) to be skilled in the deductions, divisions, and subdivisions of these Orders, which have no foundation in the Scripture. Yea, hear what Matthew Paris, being a monk of St. Alban's, saith, Tot jam apparuerunt Ordines in Angliâ, ut ordinum confusio videretur inordinata.* It is possible then for my best diligence to commit an error and impropriety in reckoning them up. For what wonder is it if one be lost in a wood, to which their numerous Orders may well be resembled? though in all this wood there appears not one plant of God's planting, as one of their own abbots most remarkably did observe. In a word, when the frogs of Egypt died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields, "they gathered them together upon heaps," &c. Exod. viii. 13, 14. And give us leave in like manner fusedly to shovel up these vermin, now dead in England.

con

2. Benedictines the primitive Monks in England. First come forth the Benedictines, or Black Monks, so called from St. Benedict, or Benet, an Italian, first father and founder of that Order. Augustine the monk first brought them over into England; and these blackbirds first nested in Canterbury, whence they have flown into all the parts of the kingdom. For, as one rightly observeth, all the abbeys in England, before the time of king William the Conqueror, (and some while after,) were filled with this Order. Yea, all the abbeys in England, of the first magnitude, which had parliamentary barons, (abate only the prior of the Hospitallers of St. John's in London,) were of this Order; and though the Augustinians were their seniors in Europe, they were their juniors in England. Now as mercers, when their old stuffs begin to tire in sale, refresh them with new names to make them more vendible; so when the Benedictines waxed stale in the world, the same Order

• MATTHEW PARIS, A.D. 1257, page 949. Wellow.

VOL. II.

+ ROBERT WHITGIFT, abbot of

1 CLEM. REYNER. De Antiq. Ordinis S. Benedict.

L

was set forth in a new edition, corrected and amended, under the names, (1.) Of CLUNIACKS: These were Benedictines sifted through a finer search, with some additionals invented and imposed upon them by Odo abbot of Cluni in Burgundy, who lived a. D. 913. But these Cluniacks appeared not in England till after the Norman Conquest; and had their richest convents at Barnstaple in Devonshire, Pontefract and Meux in Yorkshire, &c. (2.) CISTERCIANS, so called from one Robert, living in Cistercium, in Burgundy aforesaid. He the second time refined the drossy Benedictines; and Walter Especk first established their brotherhood in England at Rivaulx in Yorkshire. Besides which, they had many other pleasant and plentiful habitations, at Warden and Woburn in Bedfordshire, Buckland and Ford in Devonshire, Bindon in Dorsetshire, &c. The Bernardine monks were of a younger house, or under-branch of the Cistercians. (3.) Of GRANDMONT, which observed St. Benet's Rule, were brought into England, anno 1233, and were principally fixed at Abberbury in Shropshire. The family of these Benedictines, taken at large, with their children and grandchildren of Under-Orders springing from them, were so numerous and so richly endowed, that in their revenues they did match all the other Orders in England, especially if the foundations of Benedictine nuns be joined in the same reckoning. I doubt not but, since, these Benedictines have had their crudities deconcocted, and have been drawn out into more slender threads of sub-divisions. For, commonly, once in a hundred years, starts up some pragmatical person in an Order, who out of novelty alters their old Rules, (there is as much variety and vanity in monks' cowls, as in courtiers' cloaks,) and out of his fancy adds some observances thereunto; to cry quits with whom, after the same distance of time, ariseth another, and under some new name reformeth his reformation, and then his late new (now old) Order is looked on as an almanac out of date, wanting the perfection of new and necessary alterations.

3. Scandalum Benedictinorum.

A scandal hath lately been raised, much in dishonour of these Benedictines; namely, that all the ancient English monks before the Conquest were only of the order of St. Equitius. Some highly concerned to confute this report, wrote over to our antiquaries in England, for their judgments herein; from whom they received this following answer :

Quoniam hâc nostrá ætate exorta est controversia de monachatu Gregorii magni et Augustini Cantuariensis, sociorumque ejus quos

• Extant in CLEM. REYNER. De Apostolatu Benedictinorum in Angliá, page 202.

Gregorius in Angliam de suo monasterio prædicandi evangelii causâ destinâsse legitur; quibusdam ipsos ordini Benedictino addicentibus, quibusdam verò id acriter pernegantibus et ipsos ordini S. Equitii sice alicui alii ascribentibus: Nos qui multum temporis in rebus cetustis tàm civilibus quàm sacris, atque iis imprimis quæ ad Britanniam nostram potissimùm spectant, impendimus, rogati ut testimonium perhiberemus veritati, cum neutrius partis prejudiciis simus obnoxii: dicimus et affirmamus, nos duo solùm monachorum genera in primis Saxonicæ apud majores nostros ecclesiæ temporibus: unum eorum qui Egyptiensium mores secuti, in hâc insulâ florebant, ante adventum Augustini: alterum eorum qui Benedictini Augustino itineris erant comites. Hanc traditionem a patribus ad filios derivatam esse testamur, atque ita derivatam, ut non levibus innitatur fabulis, aut ambitiosis partium conjecturis, quin eam ipsam vetusta signatæ fidei exhibent apud nos monumenta. Ab Augustino insuper ad Henricum octavum perpetuo in hâc insula viguit Benedictina institutio; nec Augustino recentiorem ejuste originem, originisve recentioris vestigium ullibi comperimus. Tantùm abest Equitianum aliquem in hâc insulâ fuisse ordinem, ut nulla omninò hujusmodi neque ordinis neque nominis mentio in retustis, quibus cersamur, tabulariis, habeatur. Sanè aliorum

ferè omnium in hâc insula origines ita observavimus, ut uniu cujusque etiam minimi ingressum suo anno consignatum habeamus : solius Benedictini ordinis originem ante Augustini sæculum non invenimus; ipsius sæculo floruisse apertè re reperimus. Unde exploratissimum nobis esse profitemur, non alterius ordinis fuisse ipsum sociosque ejus quam Benedictini; qui ideò proculdubiò, tam altas radices in Angliâ egerit, quoniam primi illi monachi a Gregorio in insulam destinati, regulæ Benedictina professores

extiterunt.

ROBERTUS COTTON.
JOHANNES SELDENUS.
HENRICUS SPELMAN.
GULIELMUS CAMBDENUS.

3

England may see four hundred years, yet not behold four such antiquaries, her natives, at once, the four wheels of the triumphant chariot of truth for our British History. This quaternion of subscribers have "sticken the point" dead with me, that all ancient English monks were Benedictines; which Order, lasting above one thousand years in this land, hath produced about two hundred and fifty writers of name and note, as Pitzæus accounteth them.*

Catalogue, page 966,

4, 5. Hue and Cry after St. Equitius. Why Habits of Monks not here presented.

What this St. Equitius was, (pretended founder of our first English monks,) is worth our inquiry. Sure, he could not be that Equitius of whom the African bishops complained in the council of Carthage, that by indirect courses he had invaded the priesthood; desiring by their legates, whom they sent to the emperor, that he might be expelled that office. Yet he, in defiance of their endea vours, went about to disturb the peace of the church. More probable it is, he was either Equitius, a deacon in the Apamean church, (flourishing in the fourth century,) and famous for his faith and fervency in religion, in assisting Marcellus, bishop thereof, to demolish the temple of Jupiter;† or else his contemporary Equitius, consul of Rome with Gratian, anno 378; or some other unknown unto us. But be he who he himself or any other pleaseth, (brother, if they will, to St. George on horseback,) he was never father of any monks in England.

I intended to present the reader with the habits of Benedictines, and all other Orders for the fashion, matter, and colour thereof. But, understanding the industrious work called "Monasticon" is coming forth, (which hath the speed of this my book for a term or two,) wherein that subject is handled at large, I thought better to forbear partly, because I presume Master Dodsworth (an eminent instrument in that useful work) better acquainted than I am with their tailors partly, because my wardrobe of their clothes (coming so long after his) will be beheld but as from the second-hand fetched from Long-lane, and his new bought out of the draper's shop.

6, 7. Augustinian Monks.

Whether H be a Letter.

The Augustinian monks succeed, younger than the Benedictines in England, though older in Europe. For St. Augustine of Hippo (on whom these monks would willingly recover themselves) was St. Benet's senior by sixty years. I cannot believe, that they came over into England (what some affirm) precise, anno 636, (others 640,) when Birinus was bishop of Dorchester; or that, 1059, they were seated in London; being rather inclined to believe, that Eudo the dapifer ("sewer," if you please) to king Henry I. first brought them into England, anno 1105; and that St. John's at Colchester was the prime place of their residence. However, I find that Waltham-Abbey (for Benedictines at the

Acta Concilii, sect. xxxii. and lx.
PHUS PAMPHILUS in his Chronicon. Augustin.

THEODORET. lib. iii. cap. 27.

1 JOSE

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