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Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
Kings were my ancestors, strong in war and wise in council, who every day feasted in their hall more hundreds than thou canst number individual followers; whose names have been sung by minstrels, and their laws recorded by Wittenagemotes; whose bones were interred amid the prayers of saints, and over whose tombs minsters have been builded."
Edward only reigned four years; but during that time much that his father, King Edgar, had done towards establishing the monastic rule in England was set aside. In some instances "the monastic rule was quashed, and minsters dissolved, and monks driven out, and God's servants put down, whom King Edgar had ordered the holy bishop Ethelwold to establish."
But where are the old abbeys, and the York Minsters, and the lord mayors, and coronations, and the May-poles, and fox-hunters, and Derby races, and the dukes and duchesses, and the Count d'Orsays, which, from all my reading, I had been in the habit of associating with England? Not the most distant glimpse of them was to be seen. Alas!
The Norman Conquest had given a new aspect to the land. A foreign king ruled it through foreign ministers. Foreign nobles were quartered in every manor. A military organization of the country changed while it simplified the holding of every estate. Huge castles of white stone bridled town and country; huge stone minsters told how the Norman had bridled even the Church.
But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, men who had, when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and for the sins of their forefathers.
But dispelling these dismal reflections as well as I could, I pushed on my way, till I got to Chapel-street, which I crossed; and then, going under a cloister-like arch of stone, whose gloom and narrowness delighted me, and filled my Yankee soul with romantic thoughts of old Abbeys and Minsters, I emerged into the fine quadrangle of the Merchants' Exchange.
It will be noticed that the windows remaining in the portion spoken of are quite small and quite close to the floor. The changes that were made in the three great Norman minsters, Norwich, Peterborough, and Ely, were "made evidently for the purpose of introducing more light into the church." The walls were raised, the windows much enlarged, and the slope of the roof consequently much flattened.
And even worse, all the charters of the monastery perished, a loss which involved the monks thereof in centuries of lawsuits, and compelled them to become as industrious and skilful forgers of documents as were to be found in the minsters of the middle age. But Crowland minster had been rebuilt in greater glory than ever, by the help of the Norman gentry round. Abbot Ingulf, finding that St.
"'Look! the land is crowned with minsters, which your Grace's bounty raised; Abbeys filled with holy men, where you and Heaven are daily praised: YOU, my lord, to think of dying? on my conscience I'm amazed! 'Sure your Grace is strong and lusty, and may live this fifty year. "'Live these fifty years! the Bishop roared, with actions made to suit.
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