The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [172]
Cromwell’s inspectors had found it to be a fraud, refilled regularly with ground Dover chalk dissolved in thin olive oil. The slightly yellow tint gave it an authentic look of antiquity.
The monks at that particular shrine had made a tidy living from exhibiting their precious “relic.”
“Disgraceful,” I said, but more in sadness than in anger.
I turned to the next confiscation. This was a marble Virgin that wept “real tears” and could be petitioned (with money) to share one’s own sufferings. I turned it around. There was a small line behind the head, indicating an opening of some sort. I pressed upon the neck, and the stone piece moved outward. I prized it out, and found the head to be hollow. There was a porous container inside to be filled with salt water that oozed through the minute ducts leading to the Virgin’s eyes at just the proper rate. It was an ingenious contraption. And it only had to be refilled once a week.
All across the land there were similar versions of these famous hoaxes. They could not be maintained without the conspiracy of corrupt monks. How could one profess himself a follower of Christ and yet practise the same trickery as the priests of Isis or the Canaanites?
Parliament had passed the Act of Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries. The Act began: “Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living is daily used among the small abbeys . . .” It was based on the reports that at Garadon there were five homosexuals, “one with ten boys”; that at Selby one of the monks had had sexual relations “with five or six married women” who had come to seek benefit from the Abbey’s “Virgin Girdle,” which protected one in childbirth; that at Warter, Brother Jackson was “guilty of incest with a nun,” and that at Calder, one Matthew Ponsonby “showed peculiar depravity.” At Bath Priory—where the prior had tried to buy Cromwell off by sending him a leash of Irish wolfhounds—monks were “more corrupt than any others in vices with both sexes.” At Lewes, the prior had “eight whores” and the place was a “very whorehouse and unnatural vices are here, especially the sub-prior, as appears by the confession of a fair young monk.”
One by one the houses were being closed. Those monks who had a true calling were being transferred to larger, stricter houses. The rest were to leave and find their livelihood elsewhere. Their monastic property was to be sold and the proceeds to revert to the Crown. The relics were being sent here, for my inspection. It was an unhappy task.
Monasticism had begun as a pure flowering of spiritualism. The great founder of communal Christian living (for until then there had been only desert-living Christian hermits) was Saint Benedict. He thought it better for men to live with other men, and gathered together hermits and wrote instructions, called the Rule, by which they could actually increase their spiritualism by living in a community governed by holy rules. In his view, a man should best divide his time between prayer, study, and manual work.
In time, other interpretations of his Rule prevailed. The Cistercians stressed manual labor and apartness from civilizalisasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.”
Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But these people knew nothing of me, and I nothing of them. The only touch of love and softness they had ever known was through the great Cistercian monasteries: Fountains, Rievaulx, Jervaulx, Kirkstall. There they could stumble in following a snowstorm and find warmth, food, shelter. There, and only there, could travellers stay the night in safety. There they could be taught to read and write, if they so desired.
Now rumour reached them that their abbeys were to be closed.