bandoned that supervisorship in default of which neither right of
inspection, nor duty of inspection, nor power of inspection, was found
to be lodged in any quarter--_there_ it was, precisely in that
dereliction of censorial authority, that all went to ruin. All
corporations grow corrupt, unless habitually kept under the eye of
public inspection, or else officially liable to searching visitations.
Now, who were the regular and official visitors of the English
monasteries? Not the local bishops; for in that case the public
clamour, the very notoriety of the scandals (as we see them reported
by Wicliffe and Chaucer), would have guided the general wrath to some
effectual surgery for the wounds and ulcers of the institutions.
Unhappily the official visitors were the heads of the monastic orders;
these, and these only. A Franciscan body, for example, owed no
obedience except to the representative of St. Francis; and this
representative too uniformly resided somewhere on the Continent. And
thus it was that effectually and virtually English monasteries were
subject to no control. Nay, the very corrections of old abuses by
English parliamentary statutes had greatly strengthened the evil.
Formerly, the monastic funds were drawn upon to excess in defraying
the costs of a transmarine visitation. But that evil, rising into
enormous proportions, was at length radically extirpated by
parliamentary statutes that cut down the costs; so that continental
devotees, finding their visitations no longer profitable in a
pecuniary sense, sometimes even costly to themselves, and costly upon
a scale but dimly intelligible to any continental experience, rapidly
cooled down in their pious enthusiasm against monastic delinquencies.
Hatred, at any rate, and malignant anger the visitor had to face, not
impossibly some risk of assassination, in prosecuting his inquiries
into the secret crimes of monks that were often confederated in a
common interest of resistance to all honest or searching inquiry.
But, if to these evils were superadded others of a pecuniary class, it
was easy to anticipate, under this failure of all regular
inspectorship, a period of plenary indulgence to the excesses of these
potent corporations. Such a period came: no man being charged with the
duty of inspection, no man inspected; but never was the danger more
surely at hand, than when it seemed by all ordinary signs to have
absolutely died out. Already, in the days of Richard II.