for many years; till, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, a great plague occurred. The poor people then betook themselves to the ruins of the monasteries, and finding many good rooms remaining, began to settle there, until at length they were put out by those to whom the grant of the leases and lands were made. This record proves how fearful English people were, until long after the dissolution, to meddle with consecrated buildings; a fact, as we observed before, distinct from that theory of fate or ill-fortune attending on the inhabitants or premises, as to which the volume we have cited contains so much curious information.

One by one Spelman records the history of the twenty-five monasteries in question, and of the illfortunes that attended their possessors. For this we must refer the reader to his book. The editors add a long list of similar details in other countries. Two appendices contain lists, as complete as could be compiled at the time of the publication of the work, first of the mitred abbeys of England, which were twenty-eight in number, then of the abbeys not mitred, amounting to 243; and, lastly, of twenty-one mitred abbeys and priories in Ireland; with the fate of the first possessor of each. Of these eleven mitred abbeys in Ireland, which are all of which records have been found, not one family of the original grantees remains in possession of the estate, with one exception in the direct, and one in a female line. Among these the fate of the great house of Desmond is the most striking. James, fourteenth Earl of Desmond, was the grantee of the Abbey of St. Mary's, Dublin. The family dated its honours from 1329. Gerald, son of Earl James, engaged in the rebellion of 1582. Reduced to extremities, he was hunted like

a wild beast; and once he and his Countess only escaped by standing up to their chins in water. Finally the earl's head was cut off, sent to England, and exposed on a pole in London. Among the grantees of the English houses, the descendants of William Stump, grantee of Malmsbury Abbey, value £803, now exist as labourers near Malmsbury. The Cromwells, grantees of monastic estates producing an annual income of from £80,000 to £90,000 a year, came to reduced circumstances in the third generation, that of the father of the Protector. Richard Andover was grantee of half the property of no fewer than fourteen abbeys. Nothing appeared to have remained in his family, of which, either from indigence or extinction, all traces are now lost. Signal misfortunes, even among the misfortunes common to these families in general, pursued the lines of Wriothesley, Audley, Cobham, Dacre, Dudley, Meautis, Northampton, Northumberland, Ramsden, Russel, Somerset, Suffolk, Talbot, and Tyrwhit In seventy instances of the descent of church lands since the spoliation, in Kent, Essex, and Warwickshire, cited by the editor, individual possession averaged about seventeen years, and family possession about thirty-five years. In the same counties in non-church lands an average is found of more than twenty-three years individual possession, and seventy years of family ownership. This is a mere comparison of the one item of length of possession, and maintenance of lineal descent, quite apart from any consideration of misfortunes of any other nature than those which afflict the regularity of pedigrees.

It is well to put on record Sir Henry Spelman's statement here: "The axe and mattock ruined almost all the chief and most mag

nificent ornaments of the kingdom, viz., 374 of the lesser monasteries, 186 of the greater sort, 90 colleges, 110 religious hospitals, 2374 charities, and free chapels. All these religious houses, churches, colleges, and hospitals, being above 3500 little and great, in the whole did amount to an inestimable sum, especially if their rents be accounted as more improved in these days; and yet the prophetical speech that the Archbishop of Canterbury used in the Parliament 6 Henry IV., seemed performed, that the king would not be one farthing the richer the next year following."

But

We must remember the wise caution not to confound post hoc and propter hoc. And in the case of many of the names above cited, the student will remember that the owners, in the stormy times of our history, were often men among whose misdeeds the spoliation of monasteries would neither be the only nor the blackest crimes. even this view of the case is hardly adequate to explain such a case as that of the family of Seymour, which presents a most remarkable contrast in the consanguineous lines one tainted, and the other untainted, with what Sir Henry Spelman calls sacrilege. Sir Edward Seymour, afterwards Duke of Somerset, the great church spoiler, who was beheaded in 1552, had two sons: Edward, by his first wife, and another Edward, by his second. The title was unprecedentedly and unjustly given in remainder to the younger son, issue male from whom failing, to the elder. Seven knights, each bearing the name of Edward, regularly succeeded in the elder line, the last, the eighth Edward, counting Somerset himself, became Duke of Somerset in 1750. In the other, which Spelman calls the sacrilegious branch, the grand

son, and the great-great-grandson of the first duke, each died in the lifetime of their respective fathers. The third, fourth, fifth, and five sons of the sixth, duke died childless. The seventh duke, Algernon, the only married son of Charles, the sixth duke, had an only son, who died unmarried in his father's lifetime; and on Duke Algernon's death this branch of the house became extinct. The contrast between an uninterrupted descent of seven generations, from father to son, and a succession only passing from father to son twice, in seven successions, and the utter extinction of the ducal branch in 214 years, is extremely remarkable.

Not less appalling is the evil fate which dogged the two Royal lines of Valois and of Stuart. We may hesitate to attribute, with Sir Henry Spelman, that heritage of disaster to the punishment of the specific crime of sacrilege. But we must remember that the crime of stabbing Sir John the Red Comyn before the high altar of the Minorites Church of Dumfries, was one for which Robert Bruce himself vowed a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in expiation; and that not being able to fulfil his vow, he charged the Earl of Douglas to carry his heart thither. The heart, however (which is still borne in the Douglas arms), came back to Scotland, without having been carried further than Spain. Robert Bruce died of leprosy at fifty-four. His son, David II., was an exile in France for some time, and was then taken prisoner by the English at the battle of Neville's Cross, and kept in prison for eleven years. He was twice married, but died childless, being divorced from his second wife. With him terminated the male line of Bruce. Robert the Second succeeded, son of Marjory, daughter of Robert

Bruce, by Walter Stuart. He was nearly blind, and lived in retirement. He was succeeded by his son, Robert III., who was lamed from the kick of a horse. The eldest son, the Duke of Rothesay, was starved to death by his uncle, the Duke of Albany. James I., second son of Robert III., was taken prisoner by the English on his way to France, and his father died of a broken heart. James I. was a captive in England for eighteen years, and was murdered by his own subjects. His son, James II., constantly vexed by rebellion and civil war, was killed by the bursting of a cannon at Roxburgh. James III., his son, flying from the arms of the Homes and the Hepburns, his own subjects, at thirty was thrown from his horse, and stabbed on his bed, at the age of thirty-six, by a pretended priest. James IV., his son, slain at Floddan, died excommunicated, and was never buried until, years after his death, his remains were interred in a charnel house in St. Michael's, Wood-street. James V., two years old at the death of his father, died at thirty-one years of age of a broken heart after the rout at Solway. His two sons died before him; his daughter and heiress, Mary (born when he was dying), was murdered on the scaffold. The same fate befel his grandson; and royalty passed from the members of the family with the son of that grandson, still carrying the sad dowry of misfortune to the heads of the House of Stuart, down to the dethroned Duke of Modena, and the dethroned Emperor of Austria, in our own time. Here, again, we have a history of stormy times, and of a family of which the weakness and the violence appear to have been alike uncontrolled and disastrous. We may admit this much, and

call Robert Bruce superstitious. Still, it cannot be said that Sir James Spelman refers to romance for his facts.

More germane to the argument are the records of the disastrous history attaching to places; such places being disestablished abbeys, monasteries, or nunneries. Among these, attention is especially called by the editors of the work cited, to the cases of Sion House, Newstead Abbey, and Abbotsford. Of these the first was kept by Henry VIII., in his own hands, on the dissolution; having been, with the exception of Shaftesbury, the most important nunnery in England. Here Queen Catherine Howard was confined for three months, leaving the house only for the scaffold. Here Henry's body lay in state, and Father Peto's prophecy was fulfilled, by the dogs licking his blood. Edward VI. granted the place to the Duke of Somerset, who perished on the scaffold. The ill-omened property reverted to the Crown, and Lady Jane Grey was there persuaded to accept the fatal title of Queen. In 1557 the ruins were reinstated, and two sides of the monastery were rebuilt. On the re-dissolution, by Elizabeth, Sion House came again to the Crown, and passed with that dignity to the House of Stuart, no grandchild of Henry VIII. having been born. James I. granted the place to. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, whose misfortunes were signal, including fifteen years' imprisonment. In the time of Earl Henry's son, Sion was used as a prison for the children of King Charles. Earl Jocelyn, the fifteenth Earl of Northumberland, and third possessor of Sion House, died without issue male. Lady Elizabeth, the heiress of six of the oldest baronies in England, was twice a wife and twice a widow before she was sixteen. After the murder of

her second husband she married Charles "the Proud" Duke of Somerset. One son only survived his father, and the male line again failed. The property came by marriage to the Smithson family, who assumed the name of Percy; but irregularity of lineal dissent has not ceased to accompany the title.

The misfortunes that seem, according to Sir Henry Spelman, to form the dowry of seized ecclesiastical property, consist not only in failure of heirs, but in the frequency of violent deaths, of strange and unusual accidents, and of detestable and enormous crimes. As to this, we must only refer our readers to the pages of Sir Henry Spelman. It would rather seem to be plausible to include spoliation, together with yet graver crimes, under some general law of evil inheritance of blood, than to attribute the latter to the influence of the former. It is in cases where accident is directly to be attributed to the occupation (or to the destruction) of abbey buildings, that the strongest cases are to be made out by those who believe in the abiding curse of sacrilege. Thus Netley Abbey was inhabited by the Marquis of Huntingdon, who converted the nave into a kitchen and offices. The materials of the church were sold, standing, to a builder of Southampton, of the name of Taylor, who commenced the demolition of the building. The objections raised to the procedure produced some effect on Mr. Taylor. He dreamed that he was taking down the Abbey, and that the keystone of the arch of the east window fell on him and killed him. He related his dream to the father of the well-known Dr. Isaac Watts, who advised him to have nothing to do, personally, with the work of demolition. Not heeding heeding this advice, in endeavouring to remove

some boards from the east window to admit air to the workmen, Mr. Taylor was struck by a falling stone which fractured his skull. The wound was not considered fatal, but Mr. Taylor died under the hands of the surgeon. The memory of this fatality still hangs around the ruins of the Abbey.

I must repeat that I do not write as either an advocate or an opponent of Sir Henry Spelman's view of sacrilege. But I urge the subject as one deserving of study, both as regards the pedigree of old lines and the architectural history of famous buildings. And it should not be forgotten that if any form of gift, dedication, or consecration, could be sanctioned and solemnised by the greatest care on the part of the grantors, such has been the case with the greater part of the property in question. Everything that man could do to insure the permanent application of the land and buildings to religious and charitable purposes was done. To the sanctity which the common warrant of Europe attaches to testamentary provisions was added the most formal, exhaustive, and solemn malediction on all those who should infringe them. The "tenor of the malediction" against the pervasores, latrones, et prædones rerum Fontanellæ, is given in the original Latin in an appendix to the work we have cited. It is not pleasant reading for anyone who can entertain a doubt, however slight, how far he or his may be affected by such a formula. For the public at large, I would rather turn attention to the charitable than to the ecclesiastical side of the question. The endowments of the religious houses were designed and applied to the relief of the poor, as directly as to the service of the Church. That great abuses may have occurred is very likely. Still, as matter of historic fact, it is the case that it

was on the final dissolution of the monasteries by Elizabeth that that terrible question of the support of a pauper population-a question that has assumed such colossal proportions in the United States since the close of the civil war-first came into prominent notice. If we regard the dissolution, not as the mature act of a national council diverting into a more appropriate channel funds already devoted to pious purposes, which had been perverted or abused, but as a gratification of private rapacity, or as secret service money paid for reasons not advisable to bring to light, it becomes striking to observe how the nation has had to pay the penalty. Whether abbey property brought evil fortune or no to those who became holders of a title originally stained with injustice, however innocently others may have succeeded, is matter for discussion. But that the sudden overthrow of all those ancient provisions for the solace of the poor has been bitterly paid for by the nation, will be evident to those who reflect that we are at this moment paying for the support of the indigent poor an annual sum equal toone-ninth of all the taxes voted by Parliament, or one-tenth of our national revenue, including the poor-rate.

One practical outcome of this curious inquiry may be suggested. The arguments of those who maintain the sanctity and permanence of the ecclesiastical or charitable title, once regularly given to an estate, and who hold that this permanence is sanctioned or vindicated by the occurrence of disaster to the spoliators and those who carry on their line or title, depend mainly on two considerations. First, it is thought that, as the donors imprecated such evils as a main guarantee or sanction of their gifts, it is probable, or at least pos

But

sible, that the imprecation may have some effect. Secondly, if we compare either the descents of lands from the Conquest to the time of Henry VIII., or the descents of lands in families unconnected with ecclesiastical property, from that date to the present, with the descents of spoliated property, the fact is in accordance with the presumption. We have seen that a strong prima facie case is made out by Spelman. What reply may be made has yet to be seen. the remaining point is this: All the imprecations pray for the blessing of the Most High, and the recompense of their good works, on those spoilers, or house of spoilers, who make restitution. Are there none of the heirless owners of ancient ecclesiastical property in England who will try to take the ancient donors at their word? We speak without any personality. It is not said whether the Fontanella in the remarkable malediction we have cited is Fountains Abbey, in Yorkshire, or some other of that not unusual name. But, if the most noble holder of that, or of any similar relic of the piety of our ancestors, were to make the experiment to restore, not broad lands to religious orders, but church or chantry to the rites of religion, and wonted dole to the deserving poor-in order to try whether healthy lineage, good fortune, and the blessings supposed to have been withheld from his detaining ancestors might return to the restoring descendants would it not be worth his while to make the trial? If no other good were to result, he would have done

a

charitable and self-denying action, and struck a heavy blow at an ancient and wide-spread superstition. Should the predicated good result, the visible recompense of one such action might induce many to imitate the example.