RELIGIOUS HOUSES 
Warden* to do his penance; the choice 
would scarcely have been made if the house 
had been in an unsatisfactory state of disci- 
pline. Again, towards the end of the same 
century, when there seems to be no doubt 
that the abbey of St. Alban’s was in excellent 
order under Thomas Delamere, and the general 
faithfulness to rule bore indeed its natural and 
proper fruit in the desire of a few to ‘live 
more perfectly,’ one of those who left the 
house with the abbot’s permission to follow a 
more ascetic ideal went ‘to the white monks 
at Warden.’? This is not proof, but it 
furnishes at any rate a strong probability that 
the Cistercian rule was really well kept at 
Warden at this time, and that the restoration 
of the monastic buildings had been followed, 
as it should be, by an increase of fervour with- 
in the monastery. 
Such notices as we possess of the life of 
the house just before the dissolution are 
far from happy ones; at the same time 
they form an interesting illustration of the 
effect produced by the royal visitors and their 
injunctions upon a monastery where ‘true 
religion and sound learning’ no longer 
flourished. The royal visitors, Legh and 
Ap Rice,’ delivered the injunctions at War- 
den, where the abbot, Henry Emery, was 
well inclined to the new learning, and had 
only lately‘ been elected by the influence of 
the Duke of Norfolk.® It was probably not 
long after the departure of the visitors that he 
wrote a letter® to Cromwell, complaining 
bitterly of the conduct of the brethren, and 
desiring to resign his office. The injunctions” 
1 Linc, Epis. Reg., Memo. Dalderby, 194 (1311). 
2 Matth. Paris, Gesta Abbatum (Rolls Series), 
iii. 416, 
3 Named in the abbot’s letter. 
‘ At the Convocation of 1529, the abbot of 
Warden was Augustine (London). At his resig- 
nation he went to live at Woburn, and seems to 
have had most sympathy with the old learning 
(Depositions of the Abbot of Woburn, L. and P. 
Hen. VIII, [P.R.O)], xiii. pt. i. 981). 
5 Norfolk himself says so in a letter to which 
allusion must be made presently. 
6 Wright, Suppression of Monasteries, letter xxi. 
Pp- 53-5. 
7 The injunctions are fully described in Canon 
Dixon’s History of the English Church, i. 378-81. 
Some of them only enforced the ordinary rules 
of community life: but others, like this one of 
enclosure, and the order that the divine office 
should be said and not sung, and that in a low 
voice, could not have been framed except with 
a view to making the religious life less attractive— 
especially when delivered by such men as Legh and 
Layton. So also with the order that each rule 
should be tested by Holy Scripture, which looks 
which seem to have caused most discontent 
were those which enjoined ‘that no monk or 
brother of this monastery by any means go 
forth of the precincts of the same’—a re- 
striction which had never been customary 
amongst English monks; and that which 
ordered a lesson of Holy Scripture to be read 
and expounded daily to the assembled convent. 
His brethren, said the abbot, told him that he 
was the cause of their being shut up in this 
way: as for the lecture, he seldom now at- 
tempted it, for they would not come and 
hear it. Dan Thomas London, whom he 
had appointed to read it, had substituted the 
book of Ecius Omelies which were ‘all carnal 
and of a brutal understanding, and entreat of 
many things clean anenst the determination 
of the Church of England.” The abbot, 
discovering this, sent Dan Thomas up to 
London to Dr. Legh, and made his own 
brother lecturer instead ; but then few or 
none would attend. ‘Thinking this might be 
ignorance, he bought every one a grammar 
book, but only two were willing to be in- 
structed. He could not even enforce obedi- 
ence. One monk who had been sent out on 
business and had stopped away a whole night 
(in an alehouse, the abbot said) refused to 
be corrected on his return, and said the abbot 
had no authority to rebuke him ; further than 
this, he stirred up all the rest to such violent 
opposition that the abbot was afraid for his 
life and had his door guarded by servants for 
three nights. Besides these offences against 
order all but four out of the fifteen monks 
were in ‘total ignorance of their rule’ and 
the statutes of their order ; five were ‘com- 
mon drunkards’; one, the sub-prior, was 
guilty of immorality with the connivance of 
others. It was a case where an abbot might 
well be willing to resign : whether his accu- 
sations were true or false, he had fairly proved 
himself incapable of governing the house. 
But his evidence loses something of its value 
in the light of subsequent events. ‘The 
surrender of the house did not immediately 
well enough at first sight. Saint Benedict’s rule 
is largely drawn from Holy Scripture and would 
stand the test well, but the point to con- 
sider was the effect among the religious of such 
criticism. All real reformers of the religious life 
have found their best success in appealing to the 
rule itself and the high ideals of holy founders, and 
contrasting these with the degenerate practice of 
later days—never in depreciating the rule, or the 
institution itself. As an attempt to reform the 
monasteries such injunctions were foredoomed to 
failure, and their results are excellently shown at 
Warden. Wolsey’s efforts to reform the Augus- 
tinians were planned on very different lines. 
363 
