The Customs of Old England | Page 5

encyclical, and so to notify,
sooner than would otherwise have been possible, the death of members
for whom they desired the prayers of the association.
Mortuary rolls, many examples of which have been found in national
collections--some of them as much as fifty or sixty feet in
length--contain strict injunctions specifying that the house and day of
arrival be inscribed on the roll in each monastery, together with the
name of the superior, the purpose being to preclude any failure on the
part of the messenger worn out with the fatigue, or daunted by the
hardships and perils, of the journey. The circuit having been completed,
the parchment returned to the monastery from which it had issued,
whereupon a scrutiny was made to ascertain, by means of the dates,
whether the errand had been duly performed. "After many months'
absence," says Dr. Rock, "the messenger would reach his own cloister,
carrying back with him the illuminated death-bill, now filled to its
fullest length with dates and elegies, for his abbot to see that the behest
of the chapter had been duly done, and the library of the house enriched
with another document."
One of the Durham rolls is thirteen yards in length and nine inches in
breadth. Consisting of nineteen sheets of parchment, it was executed on
the death of John Burnby, a Prior of Durham, in 1464. His successor,
Richard Bell, who was afterwards Bishop of Durham, and the convent,
caused this roll, commemorating the virtues of the late Prior and
William of Ebchester, another predecessor, to be circulated through the
religious houses of the entire kingdom; and inscribed on it are the titles,

orders, and dedications of no fewer than six hundred and twenty-three.
Each had undertaken to pray for the souls of the two priors in return for
the prayers of the monks at Durham. The roll opens with a superb
illumination, three feet long, depicting the death and burial of one of
the priors; and at the foot occurs the formula: Anima Magistri Willielmi
Ebchestre et anima Johannis Burnby et animæ omnium defunctorum
per Dei misericordiam in pace requiescant.
The monastery first visited makes the following entry: Titulus
Monasterii Beatæ Mariæ de Gyseburn in Clyveland, ordinis S.
Augustini Ebor. Dioc. Anima Magistri Willielmi Ebchestre et anima
Johannis Burnby et animæ omnium defunctorum per misericordiam
Dei in pace requiescant. Vestris nostra damus, pro nostris vestra
rogamus. The other houses employ identical terms, with the exception
of the monastery of St. Paul, Newenham, Lincolnshire, which
substitutes for the concluding verse a hexameter of similar import. It is
of some interest to remark that, apart from armorial or fanciful initials,
the standing of a house may be gauged by the handwriting, the titles of
the larger monasteries being given in bold letters, while those of the
smaller form an almost illegible scrawl. The greater houses would have
been in a position to support a competent scribe--not so the lesser; and
this is believed to have been the reason of the difference.
Almost, if not quite, as important as the roll just noticed is that of
Archbishop Islip of Westminster recently reproduced in Vetusta
Monumenta.
After the tenth century it appears to have been the custom in some
monasteries, on the death of a member, to record the fact; and at certain
periods--probably once a year--the names of all the dead brethren were
inscribed on an elaborate mortuary roll in the scriptorium, before being
dispatched to the religious houses throughout the land.
The books of the confraternities are divisible into two
classes--necrologies and libri vitae. The former are in the shape of a
calendar, in which the names are arranged according to the days on
which the deaths took place; the latter include the names of the living
as well as the dead, and were laid on the altar to aid the memory of the

priest during mass. Twice a day--at the chapter after prime and at
mass--the monks assembled to listen to the recitation of the names,
singly or collectively, from the sacramentary, diptych, or book of life.
The most famous English liber vitae--that of Durham--embraces entries
dating from the time of Edwin, King of Northumbria (616-633), and
was compiled, apparently, between the devastation of Lindisfarne in
793 and the withdrawal of the monks from the island in 875. In the first
handwriting there are 3,100 names, a goodly proportion of them
belonging to the seventh century. As has been already implied, various
degrees are represented in the rolls of the living and the dead--notably,
of course, benefactors, but recorded in them are bishops and abbots,
princes and nobles, monks and laymen, and often enough this is their
only footprint on the sands of time. The name of a pilgrim in the
confraternity book of any abbey signifies that he was