274
HISTORY OF PRINTING.
and. jiie sorrow -striken? May the peasant take his penny to the abbey and bring away seven flaggoiis of home-brewed beer for it? Are tithes less rigorously exacted by the lay impropriator* of tlie present day, as in the days of the monks ? Are the burgesses of towns and the freemen of the dale free as they were before the reformation, from poor rates, or other private taxes ? The cup of reviling has been poured from many sources ; but one ingredient — knowledge — has been wanting, or the bitter draught would have been sweetened. The men who establish soup kitchens for the relief of hunger and poverty, give clothes and blankets for the comfort of the aged and infirm, endow almshouses for the de- serving poor, and erect hospitals and dispensaries for the cure of sickness, and the removal of those iniinnities which flesh is heir to, such men are the active, useful, avowed monks of the present day. If then, the moral culture, the corporeal comfort, and the political dignity of the mass of the people be not cared for by those who enjoy that property which was left oistinctly for their use, than they were in the days of the children of " darkness, ignorance, and superstition," titles we too often hear the monks branded with, surely, it is time to enquire, how the good of the old system raigh t Ite restored and engrafted on the good of the present system, while Uie evils of both were rigidly uprooted.
In tuiling through books and manuscripts, not in expectation, but with a bare hope of discover- ing a few facts respecting manners in the olden time, the mind glooms on the supposition that stores of information perished with the destruc- tion of the religious houses in the reign of Henry VIII. He who " neither spared man in his ruge, nor women in his lust," spared not the literary collections in the libraries of the church. For though it appears that Henry directed a
- tt might have been reasonably expected that, at the
time of the dissolution of monasteries, the clergry wonld have received hack those revenues which, being ori^ally Tested in them for religious purposes, had been subse- quenth appropriated by the monies. When Henry VIII. supi>n ed the monasteries, their incomes from the great tithes \iTe seized npon by his courtiers ; and these per. sons nnit their successors, by Inheritance or purchase, constitute the 7597 lay impropriators, who make a traffic of these ecclesiastical concerns.
On the subject of tithes, the following Informatiou will be i>f servlee to the reader ;— For the flrat 800 years of the Christian era, tithes were given purely as alms. We are informed by Saint Jerome, Bernard, Chrysostom, Wlelif, Hus, and many ancient historians, who uniformly a^ree. that tithes at first were piwely voluntary,
111 1.1 ids' Ecclaittttical Law is the following :— About the ye 794, Oifa, King of Mercla, ^the most potent of all the .Sh n Itings of his time in this island,) made a law, whcrclr. he gave unto tJie church the tithes of all his king, dom ; which was done to expiate for the death of Ethel- bert, kill' of the East Angles, whom, in the year preceding, he haii < :iu8ed to be murdered."
Otlioi say, that tithes on all the land in England were granted 10 the clergy, in 8SS, by Ethelwolfe, on his return from 11 1 ilsTlmage to Rome.
St. A 1 1 [ustine says, '• If we (the bishops) do possess any thlDfr prifately which doth suffice us, the tithes, or alms, are nut ours, but the goods of the poor, whose stewards we arc ; except we do challenge to ourselves a property, by some damnable usurpation.
Eusihias says, "If thou dost possess anything more than e\ t leme necessity doth require, and do not help the needy, tlum ait a tUef and a robber,"
commission to Leiand, the antiquary, to searcl for and preserve such works belonging to the dissolved monasteries and colleges, as might rescue remarkable English events and occur, rences from oblivion, and though Leiand ac- quainted Henry, that he had " conserved man] good authors the which otherwise had been lyk< to have peryshed, to no small incommodite ol good letters ; of the which," he tells him, " pan remayne in the most magnificent lybraryes of your royal palaces; part also remajrne in my custodie;" yet he expressly recites, that one oJ his purposes was to expel " the crafty colourt^ doctryne of a rowt of Romayne bysshopps ;' which too pliunly indicates that he " conserved' hut little concerning ancient customs. Strype who praises Henry's commissioners to Leiand, afterwards breaks out, saying, " But great pitj it was, and a most irreparable loss, that notwith- standing this provision, most of the ancient manuscript histories and writings of learned British and Saxon authors were lost."
Libraries were sold by mercenary men for any thing they could get, in that conmsion and de- vastation of religious houses. Bale, the anti- quary, makes mention of a merchant that bought two noble libraries about these times for forty shillings ; the books whereof served him for no other use but for waste paper ; and that he had been ten years consuming them, and yet there remained still store enough for as many years more. Vast quantities and numbers of these books, banished with the monks and friars from their monasteries, were conveyed away and car- ried beyond seas to booksellers there, by whole ship loadings ; and a great many more were used in shops and kitchens. It is not surprising, then, that so little remains from those immense collec- tions, or rather it is wonderful that so much should have escaped the general devastation. Yet, in the economy of the Reformation, the ruthless deed was, perhaps, an essential pre- paration for the mighty Knowledge that sub- merged the superstition of a thousand years.
In England, as the reformation gained ground, and the Bible was permitted to be publicly read, mysteries and moralities gradually yielded to the purer and more rational instruction of the scriptures themselves,as rendered accessible to the people by vernacular translations. The incon- sistent Henry VIII. in the same law by which he forbade Tindall's English Bible, decreed that the kingdom should be purged and cleansed of all religious plays, interludes, rhymes, ballads, and songs, which are equally pestiferous and noysome to the peace of uie church. We have already adverted to the mytteriet and moralitiet, as illustrative of English manners and the state of knowledge among the people, and we cannot do better in the present place than take another example as marking the spirit of the age. The church of Rome now began to " totter to its fall," and the heads of the monastic establish- ments discovered that some sort of concession was necessary to enable them to retain their influence over the people. This was, to a cer-
