Page:The Saxon Cathedral at Canterbury and The Saxon Saints Buried Therein.djvu/32

THE SAXON CATHEDRAL AT CANTERBURY

common refectory for their food, nor from the common dormitory for their bed. This Charter therefore, executed at a time mid-way between the era of St. Austin and the Conquest, is of considerable interest in this connection.

The comments of Stubbs^[1] in regard to this matter are worth quoting at length:

"It is to be observed that with the exception of the mention of the rule of monasterial discipline compelling the use of a common refectory and dormitory, there is no expression in the document that would lead us to consider the clergy as monastic, whilst there is much that is inconsistent with Benedictine rigour. It seems natural to conclude that the inmates of the Monastery, all of whom are spoken of as Clerks, now retained scarcely even the name of monks, and were in a condition far more resembling that of Canons."

… "The name of Canons as applied to Cathedral Clerks has not yet occurred in documents of English origin; and yet the custom of monachism has apparently become extinct in this, their original seat, for although the Canterbury tradition (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Anno 870) placed their extinction under the pontificate of Ceolnoth (833), they are evidently obsolete under Wulfred (813). We are unable to say whether the Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury originally contained both monks and secular priests, the latter of whom may have gradually edged out the former; or, all the inmates, clerical and lay, were monks, in which case the decay of monastic discipline proceeded from internal causes simply, but it is clear from the advice of Alcuin to the brethren (in 797) as to dress and behaviour, that the spirit of monachism, if not the name also, was rapidly vanishing; whilst the canonical rule, except so far as may be gathered from the charter of Wulfred, met with no acceptance."

There appears to be little doubt, that soon after St. Austin had built the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, the monastic element would be settled in the monastery, under the appointed Abbot; and that the community at St. Saviour's, or Christ Church, at the Cathedral would continue as a community of Clerks under the Archbishop as their Abbot, with whom they lived a common life, as it would have been an entire innovation at that time for monks to have formed the familia of a Cathedral Church.^[2]

1. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, Vol. III, p. 576.
2. See also Margaret Deansley, The Familia at Christ Church, Canterbury, 597-832, in "Essays in Mediæval History presented to T. F. Tout" (Manchester, 1925).

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