RELIGIOUS HOUSES 



The examples of colleges or collegiate churches in Suffolk are not many, 

 but they were fairly representative of different classes of such foundations for 

 the promotion of a common life amongst those serving a particular church. 

 The oldest of these was that of Mettingham Castle, which had been 

 originally established in 1350 at Raveningham, in Norfolk, by Sir John de 

 Norwich; his grandson, about 1387, moved these secular canons and the 

 rest of the establishment to Mettingham. The college of Bruisyard, estab- 

 lished in 1334 and removed here after an existence of seven vears at 

 Campsey, had but a short life, being suppressed in favour of a nunnery in 

 1356. The college at Wingfield was founded in 1362 ; and that of Sudbury 

 was founded by Simon of Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury, and his 

 brother in 1374. Stoke-by-Clare, originally a Benedictine cell, was changed 

 into an establishment of secular canons with vicars, clerks, and choristers in 

 141 5. Jesus College, Bury St. Edmunds, was founded in the time of 

 Edward IV, for the common life of certain chantry priests ; and Denston 

 College was a like foundation about the same time, but on a smaller scale. 

 The ill-fated Cardinal's College, Ipswich, 1522, fell at the time of its 

 founder's downfall, ere it was completed. 



As to the colleges, it is usual for many writers on monastic sub- 

 jects to point with no little approval to the founding of collegiate estab- 

 lishments instead of monasteries, seeing therein a love of education and 

 culture rather than of cloistered life. But a closer study of these colleges in 

 any given area would probably lead to a revision of such opinions ; certainly 

 in Suffolk the life and work of the monasteries would compare favourably 

 with that of the colleges. The promotion of learning was little advanced by 

 these collegiate establishments, and certainly the monasteries were doing 

 something in that direction. The later administration of Sudbury College 

 was most wasteful, and the funds squandered by non-resident secular canons 

 at the wealthy college of Stoke-by-Clare could not possibly have been thus 

 misused when in Benedictine hands. 



Perhaps other bishops, besides Bishops Goldwell and Nykke, kept special 

 registers of monastic visitations, but none are extant save those of these two 

 prelates, whose visitations from 1492 to 1532 are among the Bodleian 

 manuscripts. Their visitation records were printed by the Camden Society 

 in 1884, under the editorship of Dr. Jessopp. To that volume the ensuing 

 notices of the particular religious houses are much indebted. 



After studying, with as much closeness and frankness as is possible, the 

 records of the latter days of the religious houses of East Anglia and their 

 suppression, we find the opinion at which other investigators have recently 

 arrived become more and more strengthened, namely that the condition of 

 England's monasteries was better, and the general fulfilment of the solemn 

 obligations more faithfully observed, in the last fifty years of their life than 

 at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. 



The record of the exceedingly faithful and severe visitations of the White 

 canons of Leiston Abbey shows that the extra-diocesan visitations of religious 

 houses of those of their own order could be thorough and genuine, and sternlv 

 punitive in cases of offence. Nor, so far as we are aware, is there anv 

 reason to suspect that visitations of both Benedictines and Austins, by their 

 own duly authorized visitors, to which even the ' exempt ' abbey of St. Edmunds 



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