Past and Present Part 7

Yet he did not forget benefits; far the reverse, when an opportunity occurred of paying them at his own cost. How pay them at the public cost;--how, above all, by _setting fire_ to the public, as we said; clapping 'conflagrations' on the public, which the services of blockheads, _non-idonei_, intrinsically are! He was right willing to remember friends, when it could be done. Take these instances: 'A certain chaplain who had maintained him at the Schools of Paris by the sale of holy water, _quaestu aquae benedictae_;--to this good chaplain he did give a vicarage, adequate to the comfortable sustenance of him.'

'The Son of Elias too, that is, of old Abbot Hugo's Cupbearer, coming to do homage for his Father's land, our Lord Abbot said to him in full Court: "I have, for these seven years, put off taking thy homage for the land which Abbot Hugo gave thy Father, because that gift was to the damage of Elmswell, and a questionable one: but now I must profess myself overcome; mindful of the kindness thy Father did me when I was in bonds; because he sent me a cup of the very wine his master had been drinking, and bade me be comforted in G.o.d."'

'To Magister Walter, son of Magister William de Dice, who wanted the vicarage of Chevington, he answered: "Thy Father was Master of the Schools; and when I was an indigent _clericus_, he granted me freely and in charity an entrance to his School, and opportunity of learning; wherefore I now, for the sake of G.o.d, grant to thee what thou askest."' Or lastly, take this good instance,--and a glimpse, along with it, into long-obsolete times: 'Two _Milites_ of Risby, Willelm and Norman, being adjudged in Court to come under his mercy, _in misericordia ejus_,' for a certain very considerable fine of twenty s.h.i.+llings, 'he thus addressed them publicly on the spot: "When I was a Cloister-monk, I was once sent to Durham on business of our Church; and coming home again, the dark night caught me at Risby, and I had to beg a lodging there. I went to Dominus Norman's, and he gave me a flat refusal. Going then to Dominus Willelm's, and begging hospitality, I was by him honourably received. The twenty s.h.i.+llings therefore of _mercy_, I, without mercy, will exact from Dominus Norman; to Dominus Willelm, on the other hand, I, with thanks, will wholly remit the said sum."' Men know not always to whom they refuse lodgings; men have lodged Angels unawares!--

It is clear Abbot Samson had a talent; he had learned to judge better than Lawyers, to manage better than bred Bailiffs:--a talent s.h.i.+ning out indisputable, on whatever side you took him. 'An eloquent man he was,' says Jocelin, 'both in French and Latin; but intent more on the substance and method of what was to be said, than on the ornamental way of saying it. He could read English Ma.n.u.scripts very elegantly, _elegantissime_: he was wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, though according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been brought up; wherefore indeed he had caused a Pulpit to be erected in our Church both for ornament of the same, and for the use of his audiences.' There preached he, according to the dialect of Norfolk: a man worth going to hear.

That he was a just clear-hearted man, this, as the basis of all true talent, is presupposed. How can a man, without clear vision in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head? It is impossible! Abbot Samson was one of the justest of judges; insisted on understanding the case to the bottom, and then swiftly decided without feud or favour. For which reason, indeed, the Dominus Rex, searching for such men, as for hidden treasure and healing to his distressed realm, had made him one of the new Itinerant Judges,--such as continue to this day. "My curse on that Abbot's court," a suitor was heard imprecating, "_Maledicta sit curia istius Abbatis_, where neither gold nor silver can help me to confound my enemy!" And old friends.h.i.+ps and all connexions forgotten, when you go to seek an office from him! "A kinless loon," as the Scotch said of Cromwell's new judges,--intent on mere indifferent fair-play!

Eloquence in three languages is good; but it is not the best. To us, as already hinted, the Lord Abbot's eloquence is less admirable than his _in_eloquence, his great invaluable 'talent of silence'! '"_Deus, Deus_," said the Lord Abbot to me once, when he heard the Convent were murmuring at some act of his, "I have much need to remember that Dream they had of me, that I was to rage among them like a wolf. Above all earthly things I dread their driving me to do it. How much do I hold in, and wink at; raging and shuddering in my own secret mind, and not outwardly at all!" He would boast to me at other times: "This and that I have seen, this and that I have heard; yet patiently stood it." He had this way, too, which I have never seen in any other man, that he affectionately loved many persons to whom he never or hardly ever showed a countenance of love. Once on my venturing to expostulate with him on the subject, he reminded me of Solomon: "Many sons I have; it is not fit that I should smile on them." He would suffer faults, damage from his servants, and know what he suffered, and not speak of it; but I think the reason was, he waited a good time for speaking of it, and in a wise way amending it. He intimated, openly in chapter to us all, that he would have no eavesdropping: "Let none," said he, "come to me secretly accusing another, unless he will publicly stand to the same; if he come otherwise, I will openly proclaim the name of him. I wish, too, that every Monk of you have free access to me, to speak of your needs or grievances when you will."

The kinds of people Abbot Samson liked worst were these three: '_Mendaces_, _ebriosi_, _verbosi_, Liars, drunkards and wordy or windy persons;'--not good kinds, any of them! He also much condemned 'persons given to murmur at their meat or drink, especially Monks of that disposition.' We remark, from the very first, his strict anxious order to his servants to provide handsomely for hospitality, to guard 'above all things that there be no shabbiness in the matter of meat and drink; no look of mean parsimony, _in novitate mea_, at the beginning of my Abbots.h.i.+p;' and to the last he maintains a due opulence of table and equipment for others; but he is himself in the highest degree indifferent to all such things.

'Sweet milk, honey and other naturally sweet kinds of food, were what he preferred to eat: but he had this virtue,' says Jocelin, 'he never changed the dish (_ferculum_) you set before him, be what it might.

Once when I, still a novice, happened to be waiting table in the refectory, it came into my head' (rogue that I was!) 'to try if this were true; and I thought I would place before him a _ferculum_ that would have displeased any other person, the very platter being black and broken. But he, seeing it, was as one that saw it not: and now some little delay taking place, my heart smote me that I had done this; and so, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the platter (_discus_), I changed both it and its contents for a better, and put down that instead; which emendation he was angry at, and rebuked me for,'--the stoical monastic man! 'For the first seven years he had commonly four sorts of dishes on his table; afterwards only three, except it might be presents, or venison from his own parks, or fishes from his ponds. And if, at any time, he had guests living in his house at the request of some great person, or of some friend, or had public messengers, or had harpers (_citharoedos_), or any one of that sort, he took the first opportunity of s.h.i.+fting to another of his Manor-houses, and so got rid of such superfluous individuals,'[13]--very prudently, I think.

As to his parks, of these, in the general repair of buildings, general improvement and adornment of the St. Edmund Domains, 'he had laid out several, and stocked them with animals, retaining a proper huntsman with hounds: and, if any guest of great quality were there, our Lord Abbot with his Monks would sit in some opening of the woods, and see the dogs run; but he himself never meddled with hunting, that I saw.'[14]

'In an opening of the woods;'--for the country was still dark with wood in those days; and Scotland itself still rustled s.h.a.ggy and leafy, like a damp black American Forest, with cleared spots and s.p.a.ces here and there. Dryasdust advances several absurd hypotheses as to the insensible but almost total disappearance of these woods; the thick wreck of which now lies as _peat_, sometimes with huge heart-of-oak timber-logs imbedded in it, on many a height and hollow.

The simplest reason doubtless is, that by increase of husbandry, there was increase of cattle; increase of hunger for green spring food; and so, more and more, the new seedlings got yearly eaten out in April; and the old trees, having only a certain length of life in them, died gradually, no man heeding it, and disappeared into _peat_.

A sorrowful waste of n.o.ble wood and umbrage! Yes,--but a very common one; the course of most things in this world. Monachism itself, so rich and fruitful once, is now all rotted into _peat_; lies sleek and buried,--and a most feeble bog-gra.s.s of Dilettantism all the crop we reap from it! That also was frightful waste; perhaps among the saddest our England ever saw. Why will men destroy n.o.ble Forests, even when in part a nuisance, in such reckless manner; turning loose four-footed cattle and Henry-the-Eighths into them! The fifth part of our English soil, Dryasdust computes, lay consecrated to 'spiritual uses,' better or worse; solemnly set apart to foster spiritual growth and culture of the soul, by the methods then known: and now--it too, like the four-fifths, fosters what? Gentle shepherd, tell me what!

FOOTNOTES:

[13] _Jocelini Chronica_, p. 31.

[14] Ibid. p. 21.

CHAPTER XII.

THE ABBOT'S TROUBLES.

The troubles of Abbot Samson, as he went along in this abstemious, reticent, rigorous way, were more than tongue can tell. The Abbot's mitre once set on his head, he knew rest no more. Double, double toil and trouble; that is the life of all governors that really govern: not the spoil of victory, only the glorious toil of battle can be theirs.

Abbot Samson found all men more or less headstrong, irrational, p.r.o.ne to disorder; continually threatening to prove _un_governable.

His lazy Monks gave him most trouble. 'My heart is tortured,' said he, 'till we get out of debt, _cor meum cruciatum est_.' Your heart, indeed;--but not altogether ours! By no devisable method, or none of three or four that he devised, could Abbot Samson get these Monks of his to keep their accounts straight; but always, do as he might, the Cellerarius at the end of the term is in a coil, in a flat deficit,--verging again towards debt and Jews. The Lord Abbot at last declares sternly he will keep our accounts too himself; will appoint an officer of his own to see our Cellerarius keep them. Murmurs thereupon among us: Was the like ever heard? Our Cellerarius a cipher; the very Townsfolk know it: _subsannatio et derisio sumus_, we have become a laughingstock to mankind. The Norfolk barrator and paltener!

And consider, if the Abbot found such difficulty in the mere economic department, how much in more complex ones, in spiritual ones perhaps!

He wears a stern calm face; raging and gnas.h.i.+ng teeth, _fremens_ and _frendens_, many times, in the secret of his mind. Withal, however, there is a n.o.ble slow perseverance in him; a strength of 'subdued rage' calculated to subdue most things: always, in the long-run, he contrives to gain his point.

Murmurs from the Monks, meanwhile, cannot fail, ever deeper murmurs, new grudges acc.u.mulating. At one time, on slight cause, some drop making the cup run over, they burst into open mutiny: the Cellarer will not obey, prefers arrest on bread-and-water to obeying; the Monks thereupon strike work; refuse to do the regular chanting of the day, at least the younger part of them with loud clamour and uproar refuse:--Abbot Samson has withdrawn to another residence, acting only by messengers: the awful report circulates through St. Edmundsbury that the Abbot is in danger of being murdered by the Monks with their knives! How wilt thou appease this, Abbot Samson! Return; for the Monastery seems near catching fire!

Abbot Samson returns; sits in his _Talamus_, or inner room, hurls out a bolt or two of excommunication: lo, one disobedient Monk sits in limbo, excommunicated, with foot-shackles on him, all day; and three more our Abbot has gyved 'with the lesser sentence, to strike fear into the others'! Let the others think with whom they have to do. The others think; and fear enters into them. 'On the morrow morning we decide on humbling ourselves before the Abbot, by word and gesture, in order to mitigate his mind. And so accordingly was done. He, on the other side, replying with much humility, yet always alleging his own justice and turning the blame on us, when he saw that we were conquered, became himself conquered. And bursting into tears, _perfusus lachrymis_, he swore that he had never grieved so much for anything in the world as for this, first on his own account, and then secondly and chiefly for the public scandal which had gone abroad, that St. Edmund's Monks were going to kill their Abbot. And when he had narrated how he went away on purpose till his anger should cool, repeating this word of the philosopher, "I would have taken vengeance on thee, had not I been angry," he arose weeping, and embraced each and all of us with the kiss of peace. He wept; we all wept:'[15]--what a picture! Behave better, ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot; or know at least that ye must and shall obey him.

Worn down in this manner, with incessant toil and tribulation, Abbot Samson had a sore time of it; his grizzled hair and beard grew daily grayer. Those Jews, in the first four years, had 'visibly emaciated him:' Time, Jews, and the task of Governing, will make a man's beard very gray! 'In twelve years,' says Jocelin, 'our Lord Abbot had grown wholly white as snow, _totus efficitur albus sicut nix_.' White atop, like the granite mountains:--but his clear-beaming eyes still look out, in their stern clearness, in their sorrow and pity; the heart within him remains unconquered.

Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too; little s.n.a.t.c.hes of encouragement granted even to a Governor. 'Once my Lord Abbot and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I inquired of an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood this was, and of what manor; who the master, who the keeper?'--All this I knew very well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was! But 'the old woman answered, The wood belonged to the new Abbot of St. Edmund's, was of the manor of Harlow, and the keeper of it was one Arnald. How did he behave to the people of the manor? I asked farther. She answered that he used to be a devil incarnate, _daemon vivus_, an enemy of G.o.d, and flayer of the peasants' skins,'--skinning them like live eels, as the manner of some is: 'but that now he dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be a wise and sharp man, and so treats the people reasonably, _tractat homines pacifice_.' Whereat the Lord Abbot _factus est hilaris_,--could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself; and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for a while.[16]

A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph now and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least to give the adversary as good as he brings; and, with swift force or slow watchful manoeuvre, extinguish this and the other solecism, leave one solecism less in G.o.d's Creation; and so _proceed_ with our battle, not slacken or surrender in it! The Fifty feudal Knights, for example, were of unjust greedy temper, and cheated us, in the Installation-day, of ten knights'-fees;--but they know now whether that has profited them aught, and I Jocelin know. Our Lord Abbot for the moment had to endure it, and say nothing; but he watched his time.

Look also how my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his _un_due 'debt' in the Court of Witham, with barons and apparatus, gets a Roland for his Oliver! Jocelin shall report: 'The Earl, crowded round (_constipatus_) with many barons and men-at-arms, Earl Alberic and others standing by him, said, "That his bailiffs had given him to understand they were wont annually to receive for his behoof, from the Hundred of Risebridge and the bailiffs thereof, a sum of five s.h.i.+llings, which sum was now unjustly held back;" and he alleged farther that his predecessors had been infeft, at the Conquest, in the lands of Alfric son of Wisgar, who was Lord of that Hundred, as may be read in Domesday Book by all persons.--The Abbot, reflecting for a moment, without stirring from his place, made answer: "A wonderful deficit, my Lord Earl, this that thou mentionest! King Edward gave to St. Edmund that entire Hundred, and confirmed the same with his Charter; nor is there any mention there of those five s.h.i.+llings. It will behove thee to say, for what service, or on what ground, thou exactest those five s.h.i.+llings." Whereupon the Earl, consulting with his followers, replied, That he had to carry the Banner of St. Edmund in war-time, and for this duty the five s.h.i.+llings were his. To which the Abbot: "Certainly, it seems inglorious, if so great a man, Earl of Clare no less, receive so small a gift for such a service. To the Abbot of St.

Edmund's it is no unbearable burden to give five s.h.i.+llings. But Roger Earl Bigot holds himself duly seised, and a.s.serts that he by such seisin has the office of carrying St. Edmund's Banner; and he did carry it when the Earl of Leicester and his Flemings were beaten at Fornham. Then again Thomas de Mendham says that the right is his. When you have made out with one another, that this right is thine, come then and claim the five s.h.i.+llings, and I will promptly pay them!"

Whereupon the Earl said, He would speak with Earl Roger his relative; and so the matter _cepit dilationem_,' and lies undecided to the end of the world. Abbot Samson answers by word or act, in this or the like pregnant manner, having justice on his side, innumerable persons: Pope's Legates, King's Viscounts, Canterbury Archbishops, Cellarers, _Sochemanni_;--and leaves many a solecism extinguished.

On the whole, however, it is and remains sore work. 'One time, during my chaplaincy, I ventured to say to him: "_Domine_, I heard thee, this night after matins, wakeful, and sighing deeply, _valde suspirantem_, contrary to thy usual wont." He answered: "No wonder. Thou, son Jocelin, sharest in my good things, in food and drink, in riding and suchlike; but thou little thinkest concerning the management of House and Family, the various and arduous businesses of the Pastoral Care, which hara.s.s me, and make my soul to sigh and be anxious." Whereto I, lifting up my hands to Heaven: "From such anxiety, Omnipotent merciful Lord deliver me!"--I have heard the Abbot say, If he had been as he was before he became a Monk, and could have anywhere got five or six marcs of income,' some three-pound ten of yearly revenue, 'whereby to support himself in the schools, he would never have been Monk nor Abbot. Another time he said with an oath, If he had known what a business it was to govern the Abbey, he would rather have been Almoner, how much rather Keeper of the Books, than Abbot and Lord.

That latter office he said he had always longed for, beyond any other.

_Quis talia crederet?_' concludes Jocelin, 'Who can believe such things?'

Three-pound ten, and a life of Literature, especially of quiet Literature, without copyright, or world-celebrity of literary-gazettes,--yes, thou brave Abbot Samson, for thyself it had been better, easier, perhaps also n.o.bler! But then, for thy disobedient Monks, unjust Viscounts; for a Domain of St. Edmund overgrown with Solecisms, human and other, it had not been so well.

Nay neither could _thy_ Literature, never so quiet, have been easy.

Literature, when n.o.ble, is not easy; but only when ign.o.ble.

Literature too is a quarrel, and internecine duel, with the whole World of Darkness that lies without one and within one;--rather a hard fight at times, even with the three-pound ten secure. Thou, there where thou art, wrestle and duel along cheerfully to the end: and make no remarks!

FOOTNOTES:

[15] _Jocelini Chronica_, p. 85.

[16] _Jocelini Chronica_, p. 24.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN PARLIAMENT.

Of Abbot Samson's public business we say little, though that also was great. He had to judge the people as Justice Errant, to decide in weighty arbitrations and public controversies; to equip his _milites_, send them duly in war-time to the King;--strive every way that the Commonweal, in his quarter of it, take no damage.

Once, in the confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Coeur-de-Lion was away, our brave Abbot took helmet himself, having first excommunicated all that should favour Lackland; and led his men in person to the siege of _Windleshora_, what we now call Windsor; where Lackland had entrenched himself, the centre of infinite confusions; some Reform Bill, then as now, being greatly needed. There did Abbot Samson 'fight the battle of reform,'--with other ammunition, one hopes, than 'tremendous cheering' and suchlike! For these things he was called 'the magnanimous Abbot.'

He also attended duly in his place in Parliament _de arduis regni_; attended especially, as in _arduissimo_, when 'the news reached London that King Richard was a captive in Germany.' Here 'while all the barons sat to consult,' and many of them looked blank enough, 'the Abbot started forth, _prosiliit coram omnibus_, in his place in Parliament, and said, That _he_ was ready to go and seek his Lord the King, either clandestinely by subterfuge (_in tapinagio_), or by any other method; and search till he found him, and got certain notice of him; he for one! By which word,' says Jocelin, he acquired great praise for himself,'--unfeigned commendation from the Able Editors of that age.

By which word;--and also by which _deed_: for the Abbot actually went 'with rich gifts to the King in Germany;'[17] Usurper Lackland being first rooted out from Windsor, and the King's peace somewhat settled.