THE BEGINNING

The first Fountains Abbey was a forest tree. In the days of the simple beginning, the brethren ate and slept and said their prayers under an elm which stood in the middle of the valley.

The elm lived into the eighteenth century, and toward the end of its life was made to divide its honours with a group of venerable yews. Some said that the monks found their first shelter under the yews. But Serlo settled the matter, hundreds of years ago, in favour of the elm. Ulmus, he said, Ulmus erat vallis in medio, lignum frondosum. The yews were there, however, in the first days, and one or two of them are still surviving.

They are propped up on either hand, like an old man leaning on his staff;{2} but they live. The elm has wholly disappeared. Mr. Walbran’s maternal great-grandfather remembered “the stump of an enormous elm tree in the last stage of decay, which was called ‘the Fountain’s elm.’ ” It stood “between the river Skell and the stream from Stank’s pond, not far from the eastern boundary of the Abbey site.” But the smooth turf covers the place. Only the yews look down from their gentle hill upon the broken walls. There they were when the monks came, a little adventurous company, to begin their life of seclusion and prayer. Their leaves were green when the Abbey rose in splendour, and mitred abbots walked in their shadow. They saw the expulsion of the convent and the ruin of the monastery. They are a symbol of the persistence of the quiet, elemental forces amidst our human chance and change.

The monks of Fountains Abbey belonged to the Cistercian Order.{3}

In the twelfth century, when the Abbey began, this was the newest religious society. The Benedictines, after splendid services to civilisation, had encountered the temptations which accompany the praises and the gifts of grateful communities, and had been worsted. They had verified the wise saying, “When anybody does a good thing, all the neighbours join together to keep him from doing it again.” They had grown rich in the treasures which are subject to the invasions of moth and rust and thieves, but they were growing poor in the accounts of heaven. The purpose of the Cistercians was to return to primitive monastic simplicity. Gregory the Great had said that he who would see angels must have his head pillowed on a stone. The Cistercians believed it.

Stephen Harding, who founded the Cistercian Order, was an Englishman, from Dorsetshire. He spent his early years in the monastery at Sherborne.{4} Thence he went wandering, in the free fashion of the time, partly to see the sights, partly to save his soul, and made a pilgrimage to Rome. On his way back, in Burgundy, he chanced upon a little company of monks, who were encamped in a clearing in the midst of a thick forest. They had built a chapel with the trunks of trees, and around it had gathered a forlorn group of huts made of the boughs, and were freezing and starving to their hearts’ content. All this filled Stephen with devout envy. He joined this monastery, and thereafter saw England again no more.

But presently, the rule seemed to many of the brethren to be too hard for human endurance, and they relaxed it, and began to live more softly, so that Stephen was dissatisfied. And out he went, and a few like-minded brethren with him, in quest of hardship, which they found at Citeaux. This was a wild place in the dark woods, with a deep stream running{5} through the midst of it, the banks of which were the residence of beasts of prey. Here Stephen was made prior; the honest severity of Benedict’s laws was sought again; the brethren lived in holy simplicity.

And then friends appeared. This good life was appreciated by rich and powerful neighbours, and they brought gifts and built a church; and one of them was buried there. This was Odo, duke of Burgundy, whose son Hugh, with a company of friends, people of the court, took a fancy for going to church at the monastery chapel, so that the plain place shone with their silks and jewels, and the simple brethren were distracted in their prayers by the neighbourhood of all this fine array. The chapel was becoming a fashionable church. By this time Stephen was the abbot—abbot of Cistercium, which was the Latin for Citeaux. And Stephen stopped it. He turned all these gay worshippers out of doors, forbade{6} them ever to come in again, and shut the monastery gate in the face of all his influential friends.

Then he made the plain services more plain. He forbade that “in the House of God, in which they wished to serve God devoutly day and night, anything should be found which savoured of pride and excess, or can in any way corrupt poverty, that guardian of virtue, which they had chosen of their own accord.” There must be no gold or silver in the church, except a silver cup for the sacramental wine. A single candlestick must suffice for light, and that must be of iron and straight from top to bottom. Vestments must be of common stuff, no more of silk or cloth-of-gold. All the pictures must come down. The brethren said their prayers in a chapel as severe as a Puritan meeting-house. In the midst of a time of monastic splendour, when monks of St. Benedict and even monks of Cluny rode abroad like knights or{7} princes, Stephen Harding’s household were separate from the world in all sincerity.

Once, when the poverty which they invited came and lodged with them so long that the pantry was bare even of crumbs, one of the brothers went out to beg for bread, and came home with a great apronful. But when Stephen found that the bread had come from one who had made his money by dishonesty, he took it off the table, carried it into the fields and gave it to the shepherds. The brethren used to notice that in the evening, when the abbot went into the church, he often stopped, after he had shut the door, and pressed against it with his hand. And when they asked him what it meant, he said, “I am forced during the day to give free course to many thoughts for the ordering of the house; all these I bid remain outside the door, and tell them not to venture in, and to wait till the morrow, when I find them{8} all ready for me after Prime has been said.”

It seemed, for a time, as if this severity of discipline and this unworldliness of spirit would forever bar the door against new-comers. Brethren died, and nobody took their places. At last, however, all this good planting came to its proper harvest. One day, in the year 1113, thirty men appeared at the gates of Citeaux, asking to be received as novices. And their leader was a man whose character and strength made him presently the greatest churchman of his time. With the accession of Bernard, the Cistercian monastery grew speedily into the Cistercian Order; and the Cistercian Order came in due time into England.

Turstin, Archbishop of York, wrote to Bernard at Clairvaux, asking for Cistercian monks; and Bernard, being now, in Stephen’s old age, at the head of the Order, sent over a colony which settled in the valley of the Rie, at Rievaux.{9} There they lived their new life of simple devotion. And presently the fame of the sanctity of the monks of Rievaux began to vex the consciences of their neighbours.

The Benedictine abbey of St. Mary of York was a rich and vast establishment. It had received gifts from William the Norman, and from William his son. It was so fine that Richard the prior and a little company of sympathetic brethren, touched by the example of the simple manners of Rievaux, came to the conclusion that it was too good a place to be an appropriate residence for a Christian. They determined to leave it.

Richard the prior, Gervase the sub-prior, Richard the sacrist, Walter the almoner, and Robert the precentor were of one mind in the matter, and presently a sufficient number of devout conspirators was added to make thirteen. That was the required number for the beginning of a monastic colony. Together they{10} came to the old abbot and asked leave to go. But the abbot met them with a stout refusal. The malcontents were made to understand that they had asked a grievous thing; they had despised their order, and brought confusion into the holy house; they had attempted to break their solemn vows. To this, the prior made appropriate answers, but satisfaction w............