Priory at Hornby was a less important house, consisting of a prior and three canons, dependent on the Leicestershire abbey of Croxton.20 Cartmel, Conishead, and Burscough, of the black or Austin canons; Cockersand and Hornby, of the Præmonstratensian or white canons, complete the list of canonical establishments in the county. The movement which gave rise to them seems to have soon spent itself. Ten or twelve years at most saw the foundation of all the five houses just named; and the stream of benefactions for the further provision for religious life in this part of England either flowed back into old channels, and gave rise to the Benedictine priories of Lytham and Upholland, or, caught by the movement of the 13th century, brought Lancashire under the influence of the Friars. X.-LYTHAM, 1199. (Dugdale, iv, 281.) 21 The priory of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert had its origin in the donation which Richard FitzRoger made, in 1199, of all his lands in Lytham, with the church there, to the black monks of the Cathedral Priory of Durham. There is little to be said about this foundation, interesting from our present point of view only as bringing to bear on the neighbourhood the influences of the lordly minster on the Wear. The Lytham monks seem to have maintained their close connexion with Durham till 1443, in which year the house secured a larger measure of autonomy than it had previously possessed. Henceforth-by direction of Pope Eugene IV, and 20 But the independent surrender of Hornby seems to show that at the end it was a distinct corporation. 21 The church of Lytelbourn was also bestowed on them. with consent of Henry VI-its priors were to be perpetual and no longer removable at the goodwill and pleasure of the authorities at Durham. XI. DOMINICAN FRIARY, Lancaster. XII. FRANCISCAN FRIARY, Preston. I have grouped the three houses of Friars together, because first of all there is very little known of their history, and secondly because their general aims and principles were more or less identical. The Dominicans-otherwise known as the Black or Preaching Friars-were provided with a convent in Lancaster by Sir Hugh Harrington in 1250; the Friars Minor, or Franciscans, owed their Preston house to the goodwill of a Mr. Preston, of the town, and Henry, Earl of Lancaster, son of King Henry III. Among their benefactors was Sir Robert Holland (founder, as we shall see by and bye, of the Benedictine monastery at Upholland), who was buried in their church,23 among "divers of "the Shirburnes and Daltons, gentlemen." The Austin Friars of Warrington seem to have been indebted to the Boteler family for their establishment in that town. Now, as already mentioned, the institution of the friars differed radically from any form of religious life which had been seen in the western Church, at least since the days of St. Benedict. In almost every point we find them bringing in new ideas, new principles, which marked them off in a most striking manner from the older orders. Monks and 22 There was possibly a fourth, of Franciscans, at Lancaster. 23 Monasticon, vi, 1513. Hist. Soc., vol. xli, p. 175, for Warrington; Ibid., xli, p. 127, Burscough. Q regular canons were allowed to possess propertynot individually, it is true, but in their corporate capacity; the friars, in early times at least, renounced even this, and lived on the alms which were offered them, or which they begged from door to door. The monks and canons regular of divers orders were bound by strict obligation to their respective monasteries,-the friar had no local ties; for him "the province" took the place of the cloister-the whole of Christendom was his home. Freed from the obligations of the solemn choral observance of the greater abbeys, unhampered by the cares of property, detached from mere parochial duties and local interests, the friars were at liberty to throw all their energies into their work of preaching or teaching. Thus they supplied the long-felt want of a body of men ready to come to the aid at all times of bishop and priest; and in preaching the gospel to the poor, or infusing new life and new ideas into the Universities, in bringing England more into touch with the Continent, their influence was entirely beneficial. It was not only in their external organisation and work that the Friars were marked off from the orders which preceded them; the internal conception of their state and of their obligations was widely different. Some of the points of difference have been just spoken of. Another there is to which allusion must be made if we would understand the essential difference between monk and friar. In the Benedictine life not only was the monastery of profession everything to a monk, and its walls, as a rule, his life-long home; but the whole theory of his religious life and the position held by his superior towards him was, if I mistake not, utterly unlike what was to be found among the friars. With the monk the "monastery' was everything; with the friar it was the "order." Of religious institutes in England, the Benedictine was clearly the oldest, but "order" in the modern sense, in the sense of the friars, it certainly was not. In the old Benedictine's mouth, "order" meant the rule of life, the daily round of duties, the "order" of liturgical and monastic observance; with the Cluniacs and Cistercians it came to mean the whole body of monasteries governed from Cluny or Citeaux, in which the daily life was ordered as in those great sanctuaries; but among the friars, the "mendicants," the word came to be used to designate the whole wide-scattered fraternity, children. of St. Dominic or St. Francis, whose only bond of unity was the unity of the strictly organised centralisation which those saints had established in their respective families. The old Benedictine idea, that each monastery was a distinct corporate entity, found no place in the ethics of the mendicant. orders; a convent of friars was not a "family," as were the brethren of the old abbeys; the very function of the ruler of the house was changed in the 13th century institutes, and the abbot, the father, with his direct and intimate and paternal relations to his monks, his life-long responsibility before God and the Church, for the souls and salvation of each of his children, gave place to a "superior" (a prior, or a vicar, or guardian) who ruled with a divided responsibility; not as of old, in his own right, so to say, and by the choice of his brethren, but as representing rather the authority of the "order" and its absent general. Both systems were good; for both was there room in the Christian church; and that the new did not blind men to the merits and advantages of the old is shown by the foundation, even after the coming of the friars, of monasteries of the older orders, as for instance, here in Lancashire, of the Priory of Upholland. But, first, some notice must be given of the important Abbey of Whalley. XIV. WHALLEY ABBEY, 1296. This great Cistercian establishment, second only to Furness in dignity and wealth, was transferred to Lancashire from Stanlaw in Cheshire in 1296. The abbey of Stanlaw (Locus Sancti Benedicti), founded in 1175, on the left bank of the Mersey, between Eastham and Runcorn, had a chequered existence; its low-lying site was liable to the inrush of the Mersey floods; in 1287 the tower of its church fell to the ground, half-ruining the adjacent buildings; two years later a disastrous fire destroyed the greater part of the monastery. Wearied out by these constant reverses, the community determined to look out for a new abode, and finally decided on fixing themselves on their Lancashire property at Whalley. "There was at Whalley," writes one of its abbots," a certain parish church, built in honour "of all saints, in the cemetery of which church were certain stone crosses there erected, and "called by the people the crosses of Blessed Au"gustine." Close by the site thus connected in local legend with the preaching of England's apostle, the wandering monks of Stanlaw settled down, leaving, however, a few of their brethren behind a a rare event in Cistercian annals-to maintain divine service in their half-ruined minster. But it seemed for some years as if the brethren were to find no fixed home in Whalley; the abbot and monks of Sawley, eight miles away, in the 24 John Lyndelay, 1347-De Statu Blagborneshire. |