[In the following essay, McLane shows that other representatives of the Church besides Cardinal Wolsey are the targets of attack in Collyn Cloute, and claims that the poem reveals Skelton to be deeply conservative in his attitude toward the English religious orders.]

Although bishops and one particular bishop (Wolsey, the main exemplar of arrogance, ambition, pastoral neglect, and theological and spiritual insufficiency) are the main objects of satiric attack in Colyn Cloute, nuns, monks, and friars, as well as the secular clergy, also are surveyed. And as we might expect, since Skelton was a secular priest, monks, and nuns are treated much more sympathetically than friars.¹

Skelton's closest associations (at least from 1512 to his death in 1529) seem to have been with the Benedictine monks at Westminster Abbey, in whose precincts he largely resided and where he found the exceptional sanctuary that his satiric poems demanded.² Nevertheless, monks are mentioned in only two passages in Colyn Cloute. In the first passage (ll. 364-367), Wolsey is clearly the culprit. He so oppresses the monks through his extortions and visitation levies that monks get the piles from lack of proper housing:

By taxyng and tollage,
Ye make monkes to have the culerage
For [want of] coverynge of an olde cottage.(3)

In a longer later passage, (ll. 376-388) Colin Clout, Skelton's spokesman, laments that monks are being tempted by perverse and unreasonable regulations to abandon their religious vows and abodes and to turn to secular pursuits and rewards; as apostates they must roam from place to place, forsaking the rules and observances of their orders, namely those of

blacke monachorum,
Aut canonicorum,
Aut Bernardinorum,
Aut Crucifixorum.(4)

Skelton here was no doubt adverting to the severe new reforms imposed by Wolsey on the monks—and particularly on the Benedictines—in the quadrennial chapter summoned at Westminster in 1520, about two years before the composition of Colyn Cloute.⁵

A single long passage (ll. 389-433) deals with the nuns. They are being driven from cloister and choir out into the world; convent life and observances are eliminated, the monastic buildings themselves destroyed, and the abbey is reduced to a bare grange. What particularly bothers Colin is the extinction of religious foundations in which the last testaments of the dead are being ignored, the prayers and masses for the founders' souls completely forgotten.

Here Skelton was undoubtedly showing his anger at the suppression of two Benedictine nunneries which occurred in late 1521. Both suppressions were thoroughly justified, even though Skelton apparently did not think so. In the first, Bishop Fisher (Rochester) procured the suppression of the priory of Higham or Lillechurch in Kent, a priory which was indeed in a bad state. At the time of the suppression in October 1521, only three nuns remained, two of whom were convicted of gross immorality by the testimony of several witnesses. In October 1522, the King granted the priory and all its possessions to St. John's College, Cambridge.⁶ The priory of Bromhall (in Berkshire, within the limits of Windsor Forest) was dissolved by Bishop Audley (Salisbury) in September 1521. The prioress and two nuns, likewise evicted “for such enormities as was by them used,” left the priory “as a profane place.” In October 1522, the possessions of this priory were transferred by the Crown to the “masters, fellows, and scholars of St. John's College, Cambridge.”⁷ Certain details, especially the water-mill of this priory, are referred to in Colyn Cloute (l. 420).⁸ Skelton was probably aware of the accusations against the nuns of these two priories, for his spokesman, Colin Clout, uses language more plainly here than anywhere else in the poem. Regretfully, the nuns

Must cast up theyr blacke vayles,
And set up theyr fucke sayles

outside the cloister. But the charge is so monstrous that an imaginary auditor, or Colin as the poet, is impelled to object: “What, Colyne, there thou shales” [goest awry, stumbles].⁹

The friars are mentioned in two passages of Colyn Cloute. In the first (ll. 740-759) the friars are used as a contrast to the lettered clerks and scholars—seculars, of course—who, as the substitutes of bishops in pulpits, expound scripture well, and are masters of arts, doctors of law, learned in theology, or possessing some other degree from the university. On the other hand, the friars are smugly complacent over their abilities to comment on a “kyry,” to quote scripture, or promote learning, but this complacency is sheer dotage. Colin pretty well covers the orders four by his mention of Friar Dominic, Augustinus, Carmelus, the gray friar (regular or Conventional Franciscan), the Observant Franciscan (“order / Upon Grenewyche border, / called Observaunce”), the Bonhommes (“frere of Fraunce”),¹⁰ and even of the friar from the popular Franciscan friary of Babwell “besyde Bery” (i.e., just outside Bury St. Edmunds).

The second attack on the friars is prefaced by a statement by Colin that he is not objecting to those who have true learning, doctors of theology, or holders of a bachelor's degree from the university (ll. 791-796). But he does censure the ignorant and arrogant pseudo-doctors and other stupid and drunken clerical incompetents that “can nothyng smatter / Of logyke nor scole matter,” yet try to improve on the gospel (ll. 797-829). Then Colin gets down to a long analysis of the friars (ll. 838-888).

Colin paints a rather traditional picture of the mendicant friar who “Preches for his grote, / Flatterynge for a newe cote,” or begs food for his friary. He emphasizes how friars “theyr tonges fyle, / And make a pleasaunt style” in provoking simple parishioners (particularly women) to withold their religious obligations from their curates, even murmur against these curates. Such friars claim superior priestly powers, being able “To shryve, assoyle, and reles / Dame Margeries soule out of hell.” But if a friar falls in a well he cannot pray himself out and needs the assistance of Christian Clout. Friars even tell tall stories about how Friar Fabian and other friars were permitted to leave Paradise; Colin ironically asks how they can get back in, and ironically also defends their shameless flattering and feigning, for “nede hath no lawe.”

As a secular priest, Skelton, particularly while he was an active rector of Diss (between 1504 and 1511), undoubtedly had many an encounter with itinerant friars. But we notice that Colin makes none of the more serious charges sometimes directed against friars, such as moral laxity in their relations with convents of women subject to their control.¹¹ Instead, the friars are accused of being presumptuous and poor in interpreting scripture; they have flattering ways, tell fantastic stories, and exaggerate their sacerdotal powers.

The friars of Skelton's day had indeed slipped badly from those of Chaucer's time in their apostolate to carry religion to the urban populations and the poor throughout England.¹² They had become the weakest and most vulnerable of all the English religious orders and in the early sixteenth century were in general quite undistinguished. The bishops, of course, were openly hostile to the friars. In the General Council that ended in 1517, only the personal intervention of the pope, Leo X, saved the friars, who were self-governing corporations outside the jurisdiction of the local bishop, subject only to the pope. Their exempt status and the many privileges heaped on them by the various popes caused, the bishops thought, many great evils: “too often the Friars lived undisciplined lives, … [and] their sermons [were] a medley of superstition and money-grubbing.”¹³

About the only friar in England worthy of note between 1505 and 1520 was Henry Standish, warden of the London Franciscans, who was famous as a court preacher and as a participant in the celebrated controversy over clerical privilege with Abbot Kidderminster in 1515. But as an opponent of clerical privilege and of Kidderminster—the most distinguished monk in England at this time—and an advocate of the anticlerical, anti-papal party, Standish, in spite of his abilities as a popular speaker, would probably not have been highly regarded by Skelton. With England torn with strife in 1515 over the Hunne case and with the Common's determination to re-enact the law depriving those in minor orders of benefit of clergy, Skelton would undoubtedly have felt that Standish was a dangerous troublemaker who had sold out to the anticlericals.¹⁴

Skelton's attitude toward nuns and monks in Colyn Cloute is fairly clear. He no doubt realized that the two suppressed nunneries were not typical, that a vast majority of nunneries had no serious shortcomings,¹⁵ and that if, in a few cases, they were in a state of decay, their property should not be appropriated by the Crown but should be annexed to other religious houses where the prayers and masses and intentions of the original founders could be observed or followed. Also Skelton no doubt realized that Wolsey's reform statutes of 1519-21 were unduly severe, and if they were strictly followed, monks would leave in droves and (as the Benedictine letter of protest of 1520 indicated) only the few houses of the Carthusians, Observant Franciscans, and Bridgittines—all noted for their strict observance—would be left.¹⁶ But Wolsey became too busy with other things, and the reform statutes (on the whole praiseworthy—if severe) were not enforced.¹⁷ Skelton, as a friend to Abbot Islip and other black monks at Westminster, would certainly have been disturbed by Wolsey's being made abbot in commendam of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Albans—one of the richest abbeys in all England—in 1521. For a bishop not an abbot, to be given an abbey in commendam was an extraordinary abuse, but perhaps no worse an abuse than Wolsey's simultaneous holding of the archbishopric of York, the see of Bath and Wells, and his “farming” of Worcester for its absentee Italian bishop—all this by 1522, the generally accepted date of the composition of Colyn Cloute.

Skelton, then, is decidedly conservative in his attitude in Colyn Cloute toward the religious orders of England. Nuns, monks, and canons he apparently revered; and he regarded the religious foundations established to support them as sacred trusts, and their extinction, even when provoked by decay or anarchy in certain houses, as morally and legally wrong.¹⁸ His attitude toward friars, characteristic of the average trained or literate secular priest, found expression in a form of satire traditional since the time of Chaucer—though free of the meaner charges against them. He was also apparently an avid believer in clerical privilege and certainly would have been on the side of Abbot Kidderminster and Bishop Fitzjames and Convocation in the contest over clerical privilege and in the Hunne case. He was genuinely disturbed by the growing (if not rampant) anticlericalism of the period that threatened to forge a link between the old heresy of Lollardy and the new heresy of Luther, an anticlericalism that could provide a lever by which the old orthodoxy could be shaken down.

Notes

1. Friars were of course much more familiar to and popular with the urban population than were nuns and monks. In spite of the irony of Chaucer and later satirists, friars were probably much more popular than the parochial clergy, who exacted tithes and fees (such as mortuary dues) from their parishioners, whereas the friars lived on what they could beg. Of the approximately 130 houses of nuns in all England, most were small; and all nuns were contemplatives. The monks and regular canons, possessioner religious, lived often in remote places; to their neighbors they were sometimes viewed as landlords, rival traders, enclosers of land, and rack-renters. See, for instance, A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York, 1964), pp. 51-57; and Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England (London, 1950), I, 40-71.

2. See H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton (London, 1949), p. 178.

3. All citations from Colyn Cloute are from The Poetical Works of John Skelton, Alexander Dyce (London, 1843).

   In transcribing quotations from Skelton I observe the modern usage in regard to u and v and in capitalizing important words in titles; in my summary of his poetry, I also translate his Latin verses.

4. The Black Monks and Canons are respectively the Benedictines and Austin Canons. Because of the patronage of St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux in 1200, the Cistercians acquired the name of Bernardines. See OED, “Cistercian.”

   The Trinitarians (Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives) were also called Crossed Friars (Cruciferi or Crucesignati) because of the red and blue cross worn on their scapulars and capes. See The Victoria History of the Counties of England, Essex, II, 181; Warwick, II, 107; and Kent, II, 105. The Crossed Friars, popular with Londoners, had a house near Tower Hill; another at Thelsford, fairly close to Diss (where Skelton was rector); and other houses at Colchester and Mottenden.

5. See Hughes, I, 66.

6. VCH, Kent, II, 145.

7. VCH, Berkshire, II, 80. The transfer by the Crown of the properties and revenues of both priories to St. John's College probably had not yet taken place when Skelton wrote these verses. Skelton probably would not have been so bitter had he realized that the Crown did not intend to retain the properties and to use their revenues for courtly debaucheries.

   Dom David Knowles declares that the further dissolution of twenty-nine houses of monks, canons, and nuns by Wolsey (between 1524 and 1529) was also justified; and Wolsey's statement that “neither God was served nor religion kept” in them “may probably be accepted as reliable.” The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge, 1959), III, 162.

   In fairness, it should be pointed out that Bishop Fisher and Bishop Audley were mainly responsible for the dissolution of these two nunneries in 1521. Skelton, however, no doubt believed that Wolsey, as legate a latere and Chancellor, was directly responsible for (or at least permitted) almost everything that went wrong in the Church.

8. William Nelson first pointed this out. John Skelton, Laureate (New York, 1939), p. 188.

9. This, I think, is the only time in the poem in which an imaginary auditor interjects and accuses Colin of a direct lie or damnable exaggeration.

10. The Bonhommes, a reformed order of Franciscans, were so named by Louis XI in a conversation with St. Francis de Paule, their founder. This mendicant group came over to England in the thirteenth century: OED.

11. See Hughes, I, 69. At Diss, Skelton apparently had most trouble with Dominicans. See Peter Green, John Skelton (London, 1960), p. 22.

12. On friars, see Knowles, III, 52-55, 457, 463.

13. Hughes, I, 69.

14. Knowles, III, 91-95, 53-55, gives a good account of both Kidderminster and Standish.

15. For instance, in the episcopal visitations in the diocese of Norwich made between 1514 and 1520, there were no complaints made or faults found in nineteen out of twenty-six visitations of the eight nunneries involved, and the complaints when made were fairly minor. Hughes, I, 53.

16. For translation of the Latin letter, see Hughes, I, 67. These three groups form the notable exceptions to slackness in monastic discipline. The observants had seven houses (the one at Greenwich the most important); the Bridgettines had a single house at Syon, near Isleworth; and the Carthusians had nine houses, the London Charterhouse being the most famous. Dickens, pp. 56-57.

17. Although these particular statutes have not been recorded, those for other groups, no doubt much the same, are extant.

18. Skelton must have known monasteries that were in extremely bad shape. For instance, Eye, in Suffolk, only a few miles from Diss, was in a state of near anarchy when visited by Bishop Nix in 1514 and 1520: the prior was ruled by a female “adviser”; discipline was slack and study abandoned; buildings were ruinous, etc. See Hughes, I, 55.