In 1408 the Austin Friars of Canterbury obtained licence from King Henry IV to reconstruct their houses and buildings, rent them to outsiders and apply the proceeds for the maintenance of their monastery. At the time of suppression of the Canterbury friars in 1538, they had seven such tenements within its enclosure which were rented for £54 a year.
The Canterbury City Council paid an annual 2s (two shillings) for the use of the friars' boarde house (boarding house). The Austin Friaries at Lynn and Newcastle were so large that they could play host to the king and his retinue on several occasions. Most noticeable, however, was the change in London, where earls and dukes from the countryside had their regular London living quarters, where the ambassadors of France and Spain dwelt and where Italian bankers transacted their business.
The available accommodations also brought the craft guilds within the monastic confines, where they could rent a hall and other rooms for their requirements. The Austin Friars, of course, were not alone in this endeavour. In 1537 the 1,031 beds available for visitors to the City of York were found almost exclusively in religious houses, the four mendicant houses among them.
In the year 1378 the English Province had forty-six communities, with over 700 members in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Numerically, the English Province most likely occupied the second place in the Order after the Province of Bavaria.
The Austin Friars began a house in Dublin some time before 1280 and at four other Irish centres before 1300 within the territory controlled by the English kings. By the time of the English Reformation there were twenty-two houses in an almost independent Irish vicariate, staffed with Irish-born members. In 1348 (i.e., just before the Black Death) there had been just over 700 members in the Province, but in 1538 there were only 300 members. The decline happened during the 150 years before the English Reformation, when the Province actually established no new communities in England.
Some of this difficulty arose from the increasing isolation of the English Province. The Hundred Years' War (1339-1453) made the English Crown suspicious of foreign members of the mendicant religious orders.
Photos (at left). Picture 1: Priory and Church at St Augustine's, Hammersmith, London.Picture 2: St Augustine's Priory, Hammersmith, London. Pictures 3 & 4: Augustinian priest chats at St Augustine's Parish. It also became difficult for foreign Augustinians to study at Oxford and Cambridge. It is no coincidence that there were no new Augustinian priories founded in England during the fifteenth century.
The English Parliament passed a law in 1402 forbidding mendicant Orders - still attempting to regain numbers lost during the Black Death - to accept boys as candidates before the age of fourteen. Originally the antagonists had demanded a minimum age of twenty-one and their supporters in Parliament had even described the admission of younger boys as kidnapping. In the case of the Austin Friars, the law would have been unnecessary if both Canon Law and the Constitutions of the Order had been observed, but the need for vocations motivated local superiors to ignore these regulations.
The outcry in Parliament was partially justified since boys at the age of ten did not only receive the habit (clothing) of a religious order but also made their solemn profession without sufficiently appreciating the obligations involved, and in many cases without a real vocation to priesthood and community life. On the other hand, the new law seems to have greatly decreased the elementary training of boys and thus hurt the monastic schools which supplied vocations. A decade later we hear repeated complaints about the dearth of members in the houses of the Austin Friars at London, Oxford and Cambridge, Rye and Northampton.
A further cause for the decline of new foundations lay in the financial difficulties of both king and noblemen due to the huge financial losses in France and the ruinous Wars of the Roses (1455-1485). With few exceptions, kings and noblemen had been the only founders of Austin Friaries in England, and money was no longer available from them for such religious and philanthropic purposes. This lengthy and unsettling period of warfare within England also affected the growth of the population and even more so good morale and high ideals, the necessary foundations of religious vocations. The weakening of the moral fibre among the people should not be overlooked in an analysis of the decrease of vocations and the lower standard of those who knocked at the monastry gate for admission.
In 1402 there was an incident involving William Heydok, a priest in the Diocese of Norwich, England, who had entered the Austin Friars at the age of ten and made profession when only eleven. A year and a half later he obtained leave from the superior of his Augustinian house (its name was not mentioned) to go to a university. In ignorance of the law he left off his habit and had himself ordained priest. Heydok claimed that he had made his Augustinian profession against the will of his relatives and friends, and stated that he would never have made it had he previously attained the age of reason. His request to Rome that he might remain a secular priest was granted. Over and above the effects upon the Austin Friars of the four decades of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) and the heresy of John Wyclif, a bitter dispute started within the English Augustinian Province to separate the Irish limit from the mother province. Its cause lay in the centuries-old dislike of the two nations rather than in the presenting petty grievances, which were blown up into major issues.
Image below: St Monica’s Church, Hoxton, London. A sign outside the church states: "Designed by E W Pugin, the priory was completed in 1864, the church in 1866, for the Augustinian (Austin) Friars. Unusual for a Pugin church, the pillars, reredos and altar are made of wood. St Monica's became the first Augustinian priory in England after the Reformation.”
On 30 September 1402 the Great Parliament of Westminster demanded that no mendicant friar should go beyond the sea without licence of the Sovereign, that infants not be received into any mendicant Order without the consent of their parents or relatives. The Commons had demanded the twenty-first year as a minimum age for their reception. The king, however, issued a decree that insisted only on the fourteenth year, to which document the four mendicant Provincials added their signatures. The Schism was not yet resolved when the spirit of disunity, which like an epidemic filled the whole world, took hold of the English brethren themselves. It led to a sharply contested election which gave them in 1419 two provincials and split the Province into two warring factions. Thus the English Augustinians fully reflected the state of divided Christendom.
Dark as these shadows may have been at the time, this very same period was also one of highest honour for the English Province. One of its members, Robert Waldeby, was appointed Archbishop of York, the second highest episcopal see of the land; eight other Austin Friars were consecrated bishops for regular dioceses. John Bannard O.S.A., a theologian, became the chancellor of Oxford University and in 1417 Henry Stockton O.S.A. the vice-chancellor of Cambridge. The minimum age for entry to a religious order was still very low, a consequence of Orders' attempting to regain their previous number of members after the effect of the Black Death that had begun fifty years previously. On 2nd January 1435 a creative incentive for the recruitment of novices was offered. It stated, "Special favours are to be granted to the Priors of large houses gaining give novices and the Priors of lesser houses obtaining three. This must be done in five, respectively three, successive years." The results of this initiative are unknown.
Not only was the very young age of entrants to the Order a problem throughout Europe, but also the failure to conduct Provincial Chapters regularly was another serious concern. On 25th May 1453 Pope Martin V (pope from 1417 to 1431) had issued a decree that each Prior Provincial of the Order of St Augustine was bound to hold a Provincial Chapter every year, and that no one could retain the office of Provincial longer than three years successively if a master in theology, or longer than two years successively if not.
Afterwards Pope Eugene IV (pope from 1431 to 1447), after he had ratified the said ordinances (upon being informed by the Prior General of the Order that the said letters had never been authentically intimated to him or his predecessors and had, therefore, not been observed by the Priors Provincial, especially in the ultramontane Provinces on account of their extent and the very great distance of the houses apart, the said chapters could not he conveniently held as above), modified it.
Seeing that, as he had since learned, in the Provinces of Bavaria, Hungary, the Rhine, Saxony, Cologne, France, England, Spain, Catalonia, Provence, Narbonne, Toulouse and Candia (Crete) on account of their extent and fewness and great distance of their houses apart, the said Provincial Chapters cannot be held even every two years, Pope Eugene IV decreed that in the above Provinces the said Provincial Chapters be held every three years. He also stated that the Priors Provincial, whether masters of theology or not, may retain their office for three years, namely from one Provincial Chapter to the next; in the other Provinces of the Order the said Provincial Chapters were to be held every year.
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For the Augnet photo gallery on the Augustinians in parts of England (including the above pictures), click here.