RELIGIOUS HOUSES themselves in the study of letters but are too fond of ease, and that the abbot has not pre- sented a balance sheet to the monks for many years. On the morrow of the exposure, the bishop ■compelled Abbot John to give up the adminis- tration of affairs and committed them to the charge of William Batell, one of the monies.^ It was arranged that the abbot should leave and reside at the manor of Downham Hall, according to the form and conditions upon which JohnNele lately held the manor, namely by paying £^ a year to the monastery. The £^ was to be deducted from the pension of the abbot. He was to receive each week for himself and three servants eighteen loaves of the best bread and eighteen loaves of ' Trencherd breede,' and eighteen flagons of ■customary ale, and every day a dish for dinner and another for supper of the better sort such as would serve for four monks in hall, and another dish not so good for his attendants. He was also to be supplied with candles and fuel, both for his chamber and kitchen, and other necessaries at the charge of the cellarer. If the abbot chose to live elsewhere than at Downham Hall, in any other honest quarters, he was to receive yj. t.d. a week in lieu of provisions. Each of the three servants was to receive 20s. a year. The abbot was also to have, at the charge of the monastery, four shod horses, with saddles and bridles, and to have his expenses when he rode on business ■of the monastery or for its defence in the spiritual or temporal courts. Possibly the bishop •consented to this liberal treatment of the exiled abbot as some kind of punishment to the convent at large, for so large a pension must have proved a heavy burden. It is noteworthy to observe that this businesslike agreement was drawn up on the Sunday. When it had been accepted by the abbot and convent, the bishop adjourned the visitation to the following day, and then again to the Thursday. Returning on the Thursday the bishop enjoined on the monks that none of them should dare to defame another, under pain of excommunication, and then further adjourned the visitation until the last day of the following May.^ By thus keeping the visitation open, the diocesan was entitled to return and use more extreme measures with the monks, if the case demanded it, without any dilatory preliminaries. When Bishop Nicke visited this house in June, 1 5 14, the condition of things was, if possible, more disgraceful than in 1492. The abbot, Thomas Chamberlain, stated that the monks had broken the cloister bolts, and that the prior and other monks had broken open the evidence chest. William Bury, the prior, made ' His accounts, as chamberlain, for 1491, are extant {Mini. Accts. Hen. Vll, No. 420) and show him to have been a good manager, as the receipts and expenditure exactly balance. '• Jessopp, Norw. Visit. (Camd. See), 20-23. a great variety of charges, divided into twenty heads, against those under his rule, serious and trivial, such as against Richard Cambridge for inveighing against the doctrine of the resurrec- tion, or John Cambridge for furtively hiding a cookery book in his cubicle. On the other hand there was much recrimination against tha prior, who seems to have acted occasionally like a madman, and was indeed charged with fits of lunacy. He was accused of drawing a sword on one monk, striking two others with a stone in the cloister, maliciously breaking John Hengham's claricord, and not attending mattins oftener than once a month. Other evidence proved general disorder and discomfort, such as bad language, two cases of drunkenness, the occasional presence of women, general neglect of mass and mattins, the revealing of confession, ruinous state of some of the buildings, and dis- graceful condition of the church vessels and ornaments. The immediate action of the bishop was the dismissal of the prior and an injunction to the convent to elect a successor within a month.' Before the record of the next visitation Wymondham had the good fortune to be ruled by an abbot of much learning and of high character. To Thomas Chamberlain in 15 17 succeeded John Bransforth, D.D., and in 1520 John Holt, titular bishop of Lydda, and a suffragan-bishop of the diocese of London, was elected. He was the tutor and friend of Sir Thomas More and the author of the first Latin grammar that was printed in England, about 1497.* He was an old man at the time of his election, but his influence for good over a notoriously unruly house must have soon made itself felt. When the sufFragan-bishop of Chalcedon and his brother commissioners visited Wymondham on 29 June, 1520, the abbot's only complaint was a neglect on the part of the monks to sing the Lady Mass for six or eight days. The prior, James Blome, stated that some of the windows of the church were broken, and that pigeons entered and defiled the books. William Bury, their prior, was then precentor, and charged one monk (Richard Cambridge) with absence from mattins, and another with drunkenness. Richard Cambridge said that they had not a washer- woman, a barber, or a clock. As compared, however, with the last two visitations, the con- dition of things was satisfactory. The injunctions made by the visitors ordered the glazing of the church windows, the rendering of an annual account by the abbot to the senior monks, the providing of two secular servants to see to the lighting and bell ringing, &c.* When the abbey was visited in July, 1526, the improvement begun under Abbot John was ' Ibid. 95-101.
- Wood, Athena (Bliss), i, 14.
' Jessopp, Nonv. Fiiit. (Camd. See). 341
