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Updated: May 31, 2025
Not a date could I pump up from the drained depths of my recollection, and in the end I had to accept ignominiously from the Boy such crumbs as he had collected from a guide-book larder. What was it to us, I contended, that the monastery was said to have been built in 1125? What did it matter that it had originally been the home of Cistercians?
The great order of the Cistercians, established for more than four centuries at Mellifont, at Monastereven, at Bective, at Jerpoint, at Tintern, and at Dunbrody, were the first expelled from their cloisters and gardens. The Canons regular of St. Augustine at Trim, at Conal, at Athassel and at Kells, were next assailed by the degenerate Augustinian, who presided over the commission.
Here the hardships suffered by the monks in their maintenance of the strict Benedictine rule and the entire mastery over his bodily senses obtained by their young abbot built up a reputation which reacted on the whole body of the Cistercians, and soon made them the most revered and widespread of all the monastic Orders.
But John had no mind to give up his plan because it had not been sanctioned by the prelates in general assembly, and he proceeded, apparently by way of individual consent, doubtless practically compulsory as usual, to collect the same tax from the whole clergy, the Cistercians alone excepted.
The new settlers showed a measureless cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests.
"Therefore, most honoured and revered friend," wrote the Superior of the Cistercians, "his most esteemed worship does not see his way to himself suggest opposition to this course in our Town Council, or in our Provincial Council, and the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not either see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal and onerous thing for either council to express or suggest in their assembly views antagonistic to those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most honoured and reverend friend, it will not be in my power farther to press this matter, and I fear also that your parish of Ruscino, being isolated and sparsely populated, and its chief area uncultivated, will be possessed of but one small voice in this matter, the interests of the greater number being always in such a case preferred."
There was one of the Spanish Orders, however, which was not connected with the Cistercians. The Knights of St. James of Compostella originated in 1161 for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of Compostella. Their rule was confirmed by Alexander III in 1175, and the Order of Santiago became the most famous of the military Orders in the Peninsula.
Instead I would that I might see England before the fall, England of the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century, England of my heart, with all her great cathedrals still alive, with all her great monasteries still in being, those more than six hundred houses destroyed by Henry, and not least this house of the Cistercians in Beaulieu.
The custom of the school is, that on the 12th of December, the Founder's Day, the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of Fundatoris Nostri, and upon other subjects; and a goodly company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this oration: after which we go to chapel and hear a sermon; after which we adjourn to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches are made.
If any one considers his description of the Cistercians; of the desert life wherein they love their neighbour by expelling him; of their oppression whereby they glory not in Christ's Cross but in crucifying others; of their narrowness who call themselves Hebrews and all others Egyptians; of their sheep's clothing and inward ravening; of their reversals of Gospel maxims and their novelties; he will see that the lash for Cistercians must have fallen a good deal also upon Carthusian shoulders.
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