Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/59

Rh linsey-wolsey shirts and sheets for the monks. He kept tailors at work, to make their woollen socks and underclothing; he was overseer over the dormitory, and kept it supplied with beds, linen, and towels; he found shoes and gowns for the monks; and provided for the accommodation of that ceaseless flood of guests who poured into monasteries in the ages before hotels.

The cellarer was a red-faced person, more busy with pots and pans than psalm-book or breviary; addicted to diving into subterranean cellars, and coming up repeating a holy text and wiping his blushing lips; he had charge of all the brimming granaries, bursting store-houses, and odorous cellars of the monastery. It was he who solemnly doled out flour to the bake-house, malt to the brewery, salt meat to the kitchen, cheese, wine, and beer to the refectory, hay to the stables, and wood to the ovens; and he had many obsequious, grumbling, and thirsty servants under him.

The hospitalarius (hostler) presided in the guest-hall, and attended to the wants of pilgrims, and, in deed, of all strangers.

To the almoner was confided the distribution of the loaves and other alms of the monastery to the jostling and quarrelling poor. Every cathedral was trustee for endless bequests of this kind. There was also the pittancer, who gave out all pittances or bequests for extra allowances and indulgences to the brotherhood, on the seven great festivals or the anniversaries of founders, when the convent held back its regular commons. To quote Mr. Valentine Green, the pittancer was, in academic phrase, "the furnisher of the gaudies." The pittancer had also a good deal of country riding, for all the live cattle of the convent were under his care.

The prior's chaplain had, besides his prayers, to act as steward to the prior. He received all the broad gold pieces paid to the prior by his tenants and purchased for him his fur robes, his pouches, shoes, and general raiment. He' had to look after the hall-furniture, and to see that the prior's servants were honest, diligent, and good-tempered. He sometimes kept the prior's plate and treasure, and, in such cases, always gave it out and personally received it again. He had the right to engage and pay off all the prior's gentlemen and yeomen, and it was his duty to discharge (when he could) all the prior's debts.

There was often attached to a monastery an officer who was called the master of the common room. His duty (in Durham Priory) was to provide figs, nuts, and spices to comfort and console the digestions of the monks when worn out by the prayers and austerities of Lent, and to keep constant fire in the common room, so that the brothers might warm themselves whenever they pleased. It was his duty to always have a hogshead of wine ready for the use of the brothers, especially for the "O Sapientia," or annual festival between Martinmas and Christmas, when the prior and convent were modestly feasted on cakes and ale.

But, leaving the farm-servants, the shepherds, the swineherds, the red-faced cooks, etc., we must pass to the convent barber. Whether he was as nimble, gossiping, and sly as Figaro; or whether he was subdued by the cloister gloom into a sort of mere humble ecclesiastic, quite chapfallen, without joke or jibe, except in surreptitious whispers to younger brothers, we know not, but this is certain, that all his avocations were not of the liveliest, for in some monasteries at least it was his province to act as undertaker and grave-digger to the whole convent. It was his special duty, we are told, for instance, when a grave and reverend prior died to put boots on the corpse and to wind it in a cowl. He had to remove the body, immediately after death, from the prior's lodgings to the terrible apartment in the infirmary called "the dead man's chamber." The night before a funeral, the barber with assistants helped to remove the body again from the dead man's chamber to a chapel opposite, where it was watched all night by the alms-children of the convent, who read David's Psalms over the waxen corpse, while the monks sat bowed at its feet mourning silently. The next morning there was a solemn funeral service in the chapter room, amid fumes of incense and waving censers, and then the sable procession moved on in funeral march, through the prior's parlour into the cemetery garth of the monastery, where many previous priors, good and bad, lay under their grand marble stones. The barber had to take due care to lay on the prior's cold breast a silver or wax en chalice, and his own bed was generally held over the body by four monks, up to the edge of the grave.

The tumbary had care of the tombs, and probably received and accounted for the offerings on the various shrines. This post was in the gift of the bishop.

The precentor or chanter was a very pope among the chorister-boys. He had the direction of the whole choral service. 