The Children's Story of Westminster AbbeyTroutbeck, G. E. (Georgina E.)
History
The Children's Story of Westminster Abbey
Troutbeck, G. E. (Georgina E.)
Westminster Abbey
The Abbey, as we already know, was dedicated to St. Peter from the
earliest days. The monks belonged to the great Benedictine order. That
order, which had spread over all Europe, “from Poland to Portugal, and
from Cumberland to Calabria,” was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth
century after Christ. St. Benedict was born in Italy about the year 480,
during a very restless and troubled time, just after the last Emperor
had been driven out of Rome. Benedict very soon determined to live the
life of a monk, and when he was quite a boy he went away from Rome to a
place in the mountains near. From this place he went to a yet more
remote and lonely one, the wild and beautiful Subiaco, where the Emperor
Nero had once had a “villa” or country house.
There are two famous Benedictine monasteries at Subiaco, and it is an
interesting thing to remember that the first books printed in Italy were
printed at one of these monasteries, just as in England many of Caxton’s
books were printed under the shadow of the Benedictine Abbey of
Westminster.
Again, when St. Benedict built his great monastery at Monte Cassino, he
built it on the site of a Temple of Apollo, just as King Lucius is said
to have done in those far-off days at “Thorney,” or Westminster.
St. Benedict directed that the monks of his order should divide their
time between the services in the church, study, and manual work of some
kind. It should never be forgotten that it is largely to the monasteries
that we owe the preservation of learning, and our inheritance of the
great writings of the Greek and Roman world.
The idea of making monasteries places of study and learning did not
begin with St. Benedict, but Western Europe owes him a great debt for
having insisted that study should be an important part of a monk’s work.
This was a great service to mankind and to civilisation in those wild
days of barbarian invasion and almost constant war.
It should be remembered, too, that the clergy and monks were the chief,
if not the only, teachers during several centuries. If we want to see
and understand this we can find an example in what our own countryman,
Alcuin of York, did for education under the patronage and with the help
of Charlemagne.
The Chapel dedicated to St. Benedict in the Abbey has already been
mentioned two or three times. This Chapel is just at the entrance of the
South Ambulatory.
On the south side of the Abbey Church, and protected by it from the cold
north, lies the beautiful cloister where the monks and their pupils
spent a great deal of their time. The Cloister-walks form a quadrangle,
with a large grass plot in the middle. Under that peaceful grass plot
many of the Westminster monks are resting, and many people are buried in
the Cloister itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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