The monks of Westminster : being a register of the brethren of the convent from the time of the Confessor to the dissolution with lists of the obedientiaries and an introduction / by E.H. Pearce.
- Ernest Pearce
- Date:
- 1916
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The monks of Westminster : being a register of the brethren of the convent from the time of the Confessor to the dissolution with lists of the obedientiaries and an introduction / by E.H. Pearce. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![when the Abbots fell more and more into the hands of the Sienese and Florentine money-lenders. If the result during this early period is judged to be rather meagre, it may be pleaded that it is by no means final; but as Dr Scott and I have recently examined “ Domesday ” for this purpose and as the indexing of the acquittances draws near its completion, the chance of adding to our list of monks gets steadily smaller. Thus the nature of the materials in our possession for the period up to 1297-8 is such that the survival of names is conditioned by a large element of chance. A particular brother is sent by the Abbot into the City to make a tardy repayment to some Lombard financiers, and his name is perpetuated in‘the receipt; another is despatched to Rome upon important conventual affairs and we get to know him through the Chapter’s formal record of his proctorship; a third is allowed to visit some noble lady at a time of sickness taking with him an Abbey relic calculated to effect a cure, and comes down to us as Brother Henry [q.v.], because in her gratitude, which is also her lively sense of continued favours, she writes to ask that she may retain him and the relic a little longer; yet another, such as Warner [q.v.], goes at the Abbot’s bidding to perambulate, and so assert conventual possession of, a certain piece of land, and it is necessary for purposes of record that his identity should be recognised. The position roughly is that a claim may be put forward on behalf of anyone that he was of the order of St Benedict and a monk of Westminster during the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and our documents are not inclusive enough to enable us to resist the claim if we wanted to. But when we have proceeded no great distance round the corner of 1297-8, we come upon signs of a system, which, if only all the documents had survived, would enable us to give a complete list of all our members and to reject at sight the pretences of any unlawful claimant. Long before the last survivor of the 1297-8 and the 1303 lists—it would be John de Ryngstede or Robert de Beby—had passed to his rest, other sources of in¬ formation were sending forth a steady stream of names, and from their nature were bound to name all those who could rightly be included. During about thirteen years after 1303 we still have to depend upon the Infirmarer for information about the newcomers and for any idea of the pace at which death made room for them; and unfortunately we only have in that time the Infirmary lists of 1305-6 and 1309-11, and only twelve patients not hitherto known to us needed care during those three years. But in 1316 we come upon the adoption by the Chamberlain of methods that are of importance to our investigation and must therefore now be described, though they took some time to harden into a system. With three rather vague exceptions (Ralph; Geoffrey; Walter de Bure- ford) we know nothing of any Chamberlain of Westminster before Henry](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b31347162_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
