profess to have examined myself, but it obviously lies with the apologists of the monks to show that they fail to support the charges which are founded upon them, if, indeed, they do so fail. At present these gentlemen seem to rest their case mainly upon the allegations which they are enabled to make against the personal character of some of Cromwell's commissioners. These allegations are many of them probably true, but they are not always relevant, and at the best they serve to remind us of the Old Bailey practice on certain occasions of 'abusing the plaintiff's attorney,' and, like it, to suggest that the advocate who resorts to it has in reality 'no case.' And in truth the advocates of the pre- Reformation clergy have no case. The evidence comes thick and from every source imaginable, from the grave records of Morton and his successors, from the fierce denunciations of Colet and other preachers, from the unimpassioned entries in Court records and law-books, no less than from the perpetual and constantly-repeated libels of the poets and lampooners from Walter de Map to Chaucer, from Chaucer to Simon Fish; and yet even the latter productions, little as they may be worth as evidence, cannot go for nothing. Our forefathers can hardly have listened, generation after generation, to an endless repetition of the same jokes and the same scurrilities, if in very deed they never had any point; and it is the coincidence of the reports of Cromwell's commissioners with, not one of the above, but with all of them, which serves to vindicate the truth and even the moderation of their statements, notwithstanding the occasional holes which a critic can pick in the individual characters of some of them.
There is one somewhat minute point which may not be unworthy of notice. The commissioners are constantly referring to the fact that they can get no evidence, though they are sure that irregularities exist; and this is naturally pointed to by the advocates of the monks as showing the determination of the visitors to tind the evils which they were sent to seek. It maybe so to some extent, but it is surely as well explained by the very simple facts that, as these visitors had no commission from any authority whom the monks acknowledged, the latter had every facility—and, as they might themselves fairly consider, every right, over and above the natural instinct of self-preservation—to conceal as much as they could; and the case of St. Alban's[1] rather suggests the probability of this explanation, since there the commissioners 'found little,' though, as we know, in the very same monastery,
- ↑ Gasquet, vol. i. p. 328.
