io8 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 191 3 



vehicles, but the views obtained during this part of the journey more than com- 

 pensated for such sUght inconvenience, and it was easy to understand how the 

 poet Wordsworth rejoiced in his return visit to a country so rich in natural 



beauties. 



" Though absent long, 

 These forms of beauty have not been to me 

 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye ; 

 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 

 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them. 

 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet 

 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." 



Familiar as the majestic ruined Abbey was to nearly every one of the 

 Members, not a few were drawn within its grassy precincts once more to 

 reflect upon the nobility of its design and the great structural skill displayed 

 in its erection. Since passing into the hands of the Crown, steps have been 

 taken to check the progress of weakening and decay at points where such 

 attention was most needed. The heavy wooden supports will be tolerated 

 because they were absolutely necessary, and there is no reason why the rum, 

 as it now stands, should not endure for many generations to come. 



The story of Tintern Abbey begins in the closing years of the eleventh 

 century. The Abbot of a Benedictine House in Burgundy, lamentmg the 

 degeneracy of the Benedictine Order, endeavoured to call back its disciples 

 to the strictness of St. Benedict's rule by the establishment of a new Order. 

 Its mother house was founded at Cistercium, a small hamlet in Eastern 

 France, and hence the Order came to bear the name Cistercian. It quickly 

 aroused the active sympathy of a large number of persons who were anxious 

 to reform the Benedictine Order, and in less than a century nearly 2,000 

 Abbeys in Europe had adopted the Cistercian rule. The first Cistercian 

 Abbey in England was founded at Waverley, a little town on the border of 

 Hampshire ; Furness was probably the second, and Tintern ranks third. The 

 Order was a poor man's Order. " Lahorare est or are " was a guiding principle 

 of their life. That labour was spent upon the soil. The Cistercians were, 

 in fact, farmers ; agriculture was their business. Under their skilful planning 

 and hard toil the sohtarv place was made to blossom as the rose ; and, as 

 Wordsworth puts it in his well-known sonnet on a Cistercian Abbey : — 



"A gentler life spreads round the holy spires : 

 Where'er they rise the sylvan waste retires. 

 And aery harvests crown the fertile lea." 



The Cistercian house was, in truth, a house of hard work, without a taint 

 of pauperism and without the dangers which attended the Mendicant Orders 

 in later days. In accord with one of the guiding principles of the Order the 

 number of monks was small. Theirs it was to maintain the exacting offices 

 of the Church and to direct and assist the labours of the tillers of the soil. 

 The tillage was the work of a large number of lav brothers or Conversi, mostly 

 illiterate, and taken from the lowest classes of the people. Yet all formed one 

 family • employers and employed were in a true sense co-partners, all striving to 

 maintain the dignity of labour. Thus, if we would picture Tintern in its palmy 

 days we must imagine the conventual buildings on the north side of the church 

 peopled with two classes of inmates : a few white-habited monks, who for 

 four hours a day recited the choir offices in their grand church, and devoted 

 the rest of their waking hours to the cultivation and development of the 

 Abbey lands ; and a crowd of lay brothers, whose business it was to culti- 

 vate the soil to the best advantage, ever working with the inspiring guidance 

 of men who regarded their high calling as involving a duty to man as well as 

 to God. 



