Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/155

Rh benefactors, but the Courtenays, and Wests, and Salisburys, into whose hands the manor of Christchurch came.

Like most other ecclesiastical buildings, we hear but little of it till its dissolution. From its state we may be able to judge of the general condition of the monasteries, and how imperative was the change.

Leland tells us that the Priory possessed but one volume—a small work on the Old-English laws. Their own accounts show us that the rules of St. Augustine had long been forgotten. Drunkenness had taken the place of fasting; and instead of giving they now owed. Tradition, too, adds that the brethren were known in the town as the "Priory Lubbers." To this had the Austin Canons sank. So it was throughout England. Abbot and poorest brother were alike steeped in sensuality, and benighted in ignorance.

Of the last prior, John Draper, we catch some faint glimpse in a letter from Robert Southwell and four other commissioners to Cromwell, dated from Christchurch, the 2nd of December. He appears to have been a man who trimmed his course with 137