File:The greater abbeys of England (1908) (14598602467).jpg

Identifier: greaterabbeysofe01gasq (find matches)
Title: The greater abbeys of England
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Gasquet, Francis Aidan, 1846-1929
Subjects: Abbeys
Publisher: New York, Dodd, Mead and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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d recreation in the garden or in the field; tohave long fasts and abstinences; to keep hours of silence;and to do all these things, not as an experiment, or for aday or a week, but for a lifetime, required a real callingand real enthusiasm. It was a life that could only belived at all in virtue of the help derived from the thoughtthat God had given the soul His personal summons toserve Him in this way. We may—no doubt many inthese days will—consider such a life very unnecessary andvery useless; but at least we may recognise that it was nota slothful life nor yet an idle one, and that years and cen-turies of such a life were passed without any record ex-cept that entered in the Book of Life. It is only thetrouble, the difficulty and the scandal that has found itsway into the pages of Register or chronicle; the dailyroutine of duty is passed by without a notice or com-ment. The last abbot of Rievaulx was Richard Blyton, ap-pointed when the clouds which portended the storm that (226)
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RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE RIEVAULX overwhelmed the religious houses in the sixteenth centurywere already gathering. There were, indeed, reportsand prophecies about the impending catastrophe rife inthe neighbourhood of Rievaulx, and men were thought tobe casting envious eyes upon the property of the monkslong before the end came. The following lines wereactually quoted in the abbey before the dissolution: Two men came riding over Hackney way,The one on a black horse, the other on a grey;The one unto the other did sayLook yonder stood Revess, that fair abbay. To these lines in the manuscript is appended the follow-ing note: Henry Cawton, a monk, some time of Revesabbey in Yorkshire, affirmed that he had often read this ina manuscript belonging to that abbey, containing manyprophecies, and was extant there before the Dissolution.But when he or any other of his fellows read it, theyused to throw away the book in anger, as thinking it im-possible ever to come to pass. Henry Cawton, a

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