This
"pleasant-witted gentleman," as Stow calls the royal mimus (which Percy
interprets "minstrel"), having, according to the legend, "diverted the
palaces of princes with courtly mockeries and triflings" for many years,
bethought himself at last of more serious matters, and went to do
penance at Rome. He returned to London; and obtaining a grant of land in
a part of the King's market of Smithfield, which was a filthy marsh
where the common gallows stood, there erected the priory, whose Norman
arches as satisfactorily attest its date as Henry's charter. The piety
of a court jester in the twelfth century, when the science of medicine
was wholly empirical, founded one of the most valuable medical schools
of the nineteenth century. The desire to raise up splendid churches in
the place of the dilapidated Saxon buildings was a passion with Normans,
whether clerics or laymen. Ralph Flambard, the bold and unscrupulous
minister of William II, erected the great priory of Christchurch, in his
capacity of bishop. But he raised the necessary funds with his usual
financial vigor. He took the revenues of the canons into his hands, and
put the canons upon a short allowance till the work was completed. The
Cistercian order of monks was established in England late in the reign
of Henry I. Their rule was one of the most severe mortification and of
the strictest discipline. Their lives were spent in labor and in prayer,
and their one frugal daily meal was eaten in silence. While other
religious orders had their splendid abbeys amid large communities, the
Cistercians humbly asked grants of land in the most solitary places,
where the recluse could meditate without interruption by his fellow-men,
amid desolate moors and in the uncultivated gorges of inaccessible
mountains. In such a barren district Walter l'Espee, who had fought at
Northallerton, founded Rievaulx Abbey. It was "a solitary place in
Blakemore," in the midst of hills. The Norman knight had lost his son,
and here he derived a holy comfort in seeing the monastic buildings rise
under his munificent care, and the waste lands become fertile under the
incessant labors of the devoted monks. The ruins of Tintern Abbey and
Melrose Abbey, whose solemn influences have inspired the poets of our
own age with thoughts akin to the contemplations of their Cistercian
founders, belong to a later period of ecclesiastical architecture; for
the dwellings of the original monks have perished, and the "