LETTER XIV.
“In the year 1373 Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, held a visitation of his whole diocese; not only of the secular clergy through the several deaneries, but also of the monasteries, and religious houses of all sorts, which he visited in person. The next year he sent his commissioners with power to correct and reform the several irregularities and abuses which he had discovered in the course of his visitation.
“Some years afterward, the bishop having visited three several times all the religious houses throughout his diocese, and being well informed of the state and condition of each, and of the particular abuses which required correction and reformation, besides the orders which he had already given, and the remedies which he had occasionally applied by his commissioners, now issued his injunctions to each of them. They were accommodated to their several exigencies, and intended to correct the abuses introduced, and to recall them all to a strict observation of the rules of their respective orders. Many of these injunctions are still extant, and are evident monuments of the care and attention with which he discharged this part of his episcopal duty.”*
Some of these injunctions I shall here produce; and they are such as will not fail, I think, to give satisfaction to the antiquary, both as never having been published before, and as they are a curious picture of monastic irregularities at that time.
The documents that I allude to are contained in the “Notabilis Visitatio de Seleburne,” held at the priory of that place, by Wykeham in person, in the year 1387.
This evidence, in the original, is written on two skins of parchment; the one large, and the other smaller, and consists of a preamble, thirty-six items, and a conclusion, which altogether evince the patient investigation of the visitor, for which he had always been so remarkable in all matters of moment, and how much he had at heart the regularity of those institutions, of whose efficacy in their prayers for the dead he was so firmly persuaded. As the bishop
* See Lowth’s Life of Wykeham.
