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Building Modern
Web Applications
with
ASP.NET Core Blazor
Learn how to use Blazor to create powerful,
responsive, and engaging web applications
Brian Ding
www.bpbonline.com
Copyright © 2023 BPB Online
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the
accuracy of the information presented. However, the information
contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.
Neither the author, nor BPB Online or its dealers and distributors, will be
held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly
or indirectly by this book.
WeWork
ISBN 978-93-55518-798
www.bpbonline.com
Dedicated to
My beloved parents:
Zhong Ding
Yi Hu
&
My wife, Haoran Diao
About the Author
This book would not exist without the help of many people, mostly
including the continuous support from my parents and my wife's
encouragement for writing the book. They've taken most of the housework
so that I can focus on writing the book — I could have never completed
this book without their support.
Chapter 2: Choose Your Hosting will discuss WebSocket and compare the
difference between WebSocket and HTTP. Will introduce SignalR, a .NET
library that implements WebSocket and can fallback to long polling for
compatibility. This chapter will introduce the basic structure of a Blazor
application and compare three different Blazor hosting models, Blazor
Server, Blazor WebAssembly, and Blazor Hybrid.
Chapter 6: Serving and Securing Files in will explain one of the most
important mechanisms in ASP.NET Core, middlewares. Middles work as
pipelines handling the requests from clients. We will cover serving static
files and dynamic files in Blazor framework, and a few basic security
rules you will apply to protect servers from attacks.
Chapter 7: Collecting User Input with will cover web forms which are
generally used when data input is required from application users. Will
explain the default data validation implemented in the source code and
how to customize validation rules and error prompts. Will cover some key
events and concepts in Blazor forms, including submission, context, and
state.
Chapter 10: Connecting to the World with will cover the most famous
HTTP protocol, and the separation of front-end and back-end services.
HTTP protocol is mostly used between the front-end and back-end. Will
cover the limits and risks come with the CORS when applications are
connected using HTTP protocol. Will explain built-in types HttpClient
and HttpClientFactory that will be used when communicating with the
outside world with the source code. Will cover RPC and gRPC, an
implementation of RPC from the Google with code examples.
Chapter 11: Data Persistence with EF will cover data persistence with
EntityFramework Core and compare 2 key concepts, stateless and stateful.
EntityFramework Core is popularly used in .NET Core project to store
data in a selected database. Will explain the design ideas behind
EntityFramework Core and analyze its source code to learn the patterns
supporting different databases. Will cover key concepts in
EntityFramework Core including entity, context, query, and migration
with detailed examples.
https://rebrand.ly/i1gakbz
The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at In case there’s
an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We have code bundles from our rich catalogue of books and videos
available at Check them out!
Errata
We take immense pride in our work at BPB Publications and follow best
practices to ensure the accuracy of our content to provide with an
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Exploring the Variety of Random
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their meals, thinking their own uninterrupted thoughts. They sat in the
cloister, where the wind and the sun played in the grass, and were altogether
undisturbed. It was not so much a penitential as a protective silence, good
for the soul, and restful.
There was even a bit of quiet pleasure in the midst of these silent
labours. In the south walk of the cloister, between the dormitory stairs and
the refectory, was the warming house, the abbey fireside. Here, in the cold
weather, the monks came to warm their hands. The abbot had a fire-place of
his own; the cellarer had one in his office; and the infirmary and the guest
houses were cheerfully warmed; but the common brotherhood had but this
one hearth. Here was concentrated all the heat of the place, in the huge fire-
places. One of these great openings is now blocked, having been disused
before the suppression, when the number of monks was growing smaller,
but the other is still ready for a load of logs, whose smoke would pour out
of the tall chimney. Two large openings in the west wall gave some heat to
the refectory. Here, in the warming house, in Advent, the brothers kept a
“solemn banquet” of “figs and raisins, cakes and ale,” of whose celebration
at Durham it is said that there was “no superfluity or excess, but a
scholastical and moderate congratulation amongst themselves.” A door in
the south-west corner opened upon a little court; the woodhouse stood in
the eastern part of it, and a wooden bridge, from the refectory corner, led
across the river. Over this bridge came the stout brothers in their gowns of
brown or white, their arms full of wood. At Durham, near the warming
house, there was a garden and a bowling alley.
The muniment room at Studley Royal contains among its treasures a
Fountains Abbey.
From the South West.
Photo. Frith. Art Repro. Co.
book of accounts of the bursar, kept in the time of Abbot Grenewell (1442-
1471). There it appears that they had “a pair of clavichords” at the Abbey—
the pianoforte of the Middle Ages. This would seem to imply domestic
music. Somebody must have played, while the brethren stood about and
sang. There are also various records of fees paid to persons who went about
the country from abbey to castle, from manor-house to market-square, for
the entertainment of their neighbours. Minstrels came from Beverley, with
those of Lord Arundell, of Lord Beaumont, of Lord Fitzhugh, even of the
King; who not only sang but acted as conjurers, gymnasts, contortionists,
and variety showmen. Sometimes the audience of the Abbey was given to a
story-teller—fabulator—“the story-teller of the Earl of Salisbury”; with
selections from the Hundred Merry Tales or the Gesta Romanorum. Players
came from Thirsk and Ripon. Sometimes the entertainer was a jester, or, as
they said, a fool. One of the bursar’s items shows a payment of fourpence
“to a fool called Solomon (who came again).” These diversions would
perhaps be given on the cellarer’s terrace; that is, in the space to the west of
the cellarium, which was once enclosed within a wall, from the church
porch to the cellarer’s office.
One of Abbot Grenewell’s purchases was a great clock, made by John
Ripley, and probably set in the south transept of the church. In the middle of
the hot day in summer, after the service of sext, and late in the afternoon in
winter, after nones, when the clock pointed to the proper hour, a bell in the
cloister rang for dinner; either a bell or a board struck with a mallet. Outside
the refectory door, on either hand, were stone troughs with running water
from the river. In the middle of the cloister is a great stone bason. When that
welcome sound was heard, the brothers washed their hands in the troughs or
in the bason, wiping them on a roller towel which hung beside the door.
Then they entered their noble dining-hall, lofty as a church, with ceiling of
wood and floor of stone, wainscoted above the height of a man’s head, and
having down the midst a row of marble pillars. At the end opposite the door,
and along the wall on both sides, were stone benches, and in front of them
were tables of oak, covered with linen cloth. The prior commonly presided,
the abbot dining in his own lodgings. All stood in silence till the prior was
in his place, and remained standing while he rang a little bell during a time
sufficient for the saying of the fifty-first psalm. When the bell stopped, the
priest of the week said grace, and they all sat down.
In the fair gallery of stone in the west wall, deeply recessed and lighted
by great windows, reached by a short flight of stone steps, the reader stood
to accompany the silent meal with words of Holy Scripture and of ancient
authors. The kitchen adjoined the refectory on the west, having its great
ovens in the middle of the room, and entered from the refectory by a service
door which had a round revolving shelf across the middle of it. Between the
door to the gallery and the door to the kitchen there was perhaps a
sideboard; and in the corners toward the cloister were cupboards for cups
and plates and spoons, each provided with a sink. There were forty-five
silver spoons here when the inventory was made, but only three small cups
or mazers, and one big one, of silver. This would appear to indicate that the
cups and plates were of some cheap material and not worth counting.
The bill of fare showed bread and vegetables and fruit and fish.
Sometimes there was meat, but this was cooked in the kitchen of the
infirmary, and served in the misericord, or House of Merciful Meals. No
flesh which had ever walked about upon four feet was dressed in the
cloister kitchen or served in the cloister refectory. But fowls were eaten, and
eggs were a staple of monastic diet. The monks had wine and beer for drink,
according to the custom of the country. In the book of signs—De Signis—
which shows how the monks of Ely indicated their wishes at the silent
table, four gestures are set down to mean beer: signifying good beer, bona
servisia, small beer, mediocris servisia, smaller beer, debilis servisia, and a
very common beer called skagmen. In the “Mirroure of Our Ladye,” the
sister of Sion House who desired an apple was directed to “put thy thumb in
thy fist, and close thy hand, and move afore thee to and fro”; for milk,
“draw thy left little finger in the manner of milking”; for mustard, “hold thy
nose in the upper part of thy right fist, and rub it”; for salt, “philip with thy
right thumb and his forefinger over the left thumb”; for wine, “move thy
forefinger up and down upon the end of thy thumb before thine eye.” A
dinner to the accompaniment of these cheerful communications, while one
read aloud from a good book, may well have been a pleasant meal.
At Ely, during the week beginning August 5, 1336, the brethren of the
monastery had on Sunday eggs, chickens, pigeons and dripping; on
Monday, pottage and cod; on Tuesday, fresh meat and mutton; on
Wednesday, fresh fish, white herring and cod; on Thursday, fresh meat,
white herring and cod; on Friday, white herring and cod; and on Saturday,
dripping, milk, white herring and cod.
When Abbot Grenewell went to attend the assizes at York, as he did in
1455, at the March session of the court, he dined the first day on fish alone;
on the second day, having guests at his table, he added salt and mustard to
the fish; on the third day, fish was served with figs, raisins and gingerbread;
the fare of the fourth day was like that of the second, and the fifth day
followed the third. With this were bread and beer and wine.
Monastic meals, though monotonous, were wholesome; and there was a
good deal of variety in the preparation of the fish. St. Bernard, in his day,
complained of the ingenuity with which eggs were cooked in religious
houses. “Who can describe,” he cries, “in how many ways the very eggs are
tossed and tormented, with what eager care they are turned over and under,
made soft and hard, beaten up, fried, roasted, stuffed, now served minced
with other things, and now by themselves! The very external appearance of
the thing is cared for, so that the eye may be charmed as well as the palate.”
As the monasteries increased in wealth, there would be a constant
temptation to dine more abundantly. Eating is not only one of the earliest
but one of the most universal of arts, and no cook nor convert could
completely resist its allurements. For the most part, however, the abbey fare
was fit food for soldiers, for men in training for a war with Satan.
Thus the silent meal progressed, the level voice of the reader at his desk
in the gallery, accompanying the cheerful sounds of honest eating and
drinking. No brother was permitted to leave until the meal was ended, nor
walk about while his companions were eating. Neither was he allowed to
wash his cup with his fingers, though he might wipe it with his hand. He
was forbidden to wipe either his hands or his knife on the table-cloth,—
until he had first cleansed them on his bread. When he helped himself to
salt it must be with his knife; when he drank, he must hold the cup with
both hands. “Eyes on your plates, hands on the table, ears to the reader,
heart to God”: thus ran the rule. Then the prior rang a sharp note on his bell.
If the great mazer of silver with a gilt band, which is mentioned in the
inventory, was a grace cup, then it was at this moment that it went its round,
each brother lifting it to his lips, holding its two handles. Then, two by two,
they marched into the church and said the miserere psalm.
Out of the cloister, in the south-east corner, between the parlour and the
day-stairs to the dormitory, a passage led to the buildings which lay beyond.
The beginning of this passage crossed a long room which extended to the
south, whose central line of pillars upheld the dormitory floor. The ceiling
was low and the windows were at the south end, so that its use is not
apparent. It may have been the chamber of the novices; it may have been
the tool-house. It may have been an office or checker, wherein the master of
the warming house kept his hogshead of wine, and his spices, figs and
walnuts, with which to mitigate the austerities of Lent. Or the chamberlain
may have used it, whose charge was to furnish the brethren with linsey-
woolsey for their shirts and sheets; in which case, the tailor may have sat in
the light of the south windows, mending frayed scapularies and darning
holes in cowls and gowns.
The passage led into a gallery, with open arcading of stone on either
side, and a second storey over. Out of the gallery, to the right, opened the
abbot’s lodgings, where a long hall gave entrance into several rooms.
Beside the door a stairway rose to the upper chambers, which appear to
have been large and light, with comfortable fireplaces, and oriel windows
looking out to east and south over the river. In one of these rooms, or in the
misericord which was connected with this building by a hall, the abbot
dined with visitors of state. Here, at the time of the inventory, were two
gilded basins of silver, three silver ewers, eight “standing pieces” with
covers, nine “flat pieces,” all of silver, with a goblet and some spoons: so
that the abbot’s table must have presented a shining and sumptuous
appearance. The open space bounded by the dormitory basement on the
west, the arcaded passage on the north, the rere-dorter or necessarium on
the south, and the abbot’s lodgings on the east, may have been the abbot’s
garden, his hortus inclusus. Somewhere, at a convenient distance, must
have been the abbot’s stable for his six horses—sex equi ad stabulum
domini abbatis,—in charge of his boy, whose russet suit cost fifteen pence.
The chalice, paten and cruets which were in the abbot’s house would seem
to mean that one of the rooms was an oratory, with an altar. Under the
abbot’s lodgings were the cells for offenders.
From the north-west corner of the second story, over the entrance, a
passage opened into the upper course of the long gallery. Here was a hall
with many windows, warmed here and there with fire-places, extending east
to the infirmary, north to the chapel of nine altars, and west to the
dormitory. Here the abbot could walk; here, in the oriel which projected
into the chapel, he could say his prayers and hear mass quite by himself. He
was the only member of the monastic family who had the privilege of
privacy.
The gallery is almost entirely ruined, but a comparison with the
arrangements of other monastic houses suggests that the upper storey of the
western part, next to the dormitory, was the library or the writing-room.
Here, where there was plenty of light, the records and accounts may have
been kept. Here the books may have been copied which were used in the
choir, and in the cloister and in the school. The completed records,
especially such as related to the abbey lands, may have been stored in the
room over the warming house, now used as a museum for fragments of
pottery and broken carvings found in the ruins. This room, reached by the
day stairs to the dormitory, had a bar at the door by which the occupant
could lock himself in. This bar is a perplexing fact, and nobody has as yet
explained why any official of the abbey should need to defend himself
against intrusion in this peremptory fashion. If this was the muniment room,
it held the great books of the Chartulary of Fountains, of which the volume
A to C is in the British Museum. D to J is at Ripley Castle, and K to M is in
the library of the late Sir Thomas Phillips. The remaining volumes are not
yet traced. Here were kept the bundles of title-deeds, now at Studley Hall;
with pendant seals, which show that there were neighbouring farmers who
attested their signatures with impressions of Roman gems which their
forefathers had turned up with the plough. The President Book would be
kept here, with its dated list of abbots up to 1471; and the Coucher Book,
with its register of the dealings of the monks with their manors. These two
probably lay by the abbot’s side as he sat in his place in the chapter house at
business meetings. They are now preserved in the muniment room at
Studley Hall.
The long corridor, which connected the cloister with the infirmary,
passed, as we have seen, the abbot’s lodging on the right and the entrance-
way to the chapel of the nine altars on the left. Opposite the chapel entrance
there was an opening into the coal-yard. Coal was found here when the
recent excavations were made. In the south-east corner of this yard lay the
abbey rubbish heap, the materials of which were apparently shovelled out
from the window beside it, whose sill shows the marks of this daily
exercise. Here were found various broken dishes, a sickle blade, a copper
can, bushels of oyster shells, and bones identified as belonging to beef,
mutton, pork and venison, together with a great quantity of ashes.
The room out of which this refuse was thrown is reached by a passage
which opens out of the long corridor close by the infirmary door. Here,
according to Mr. Walbran, stood the reservoir, fed by a lead pipe from a
spring on the high bank.
The meat bones in the rubbish heap suggest the near neighbourhood of
the House of Merciful Meals. This is the room which lies to the south of the
reservoir and the coal-yard. A screen extended across the east end of the
misericord, and there was a dais for the high table at the west end. Along
the north wall are still remains of one of the stone benches. Tables stood
here, as in the refectory of the cloister.
The long corridor ended at the door of the infirmary. This was a noble
group of buildings, now ruined almost to the ground. There was a great hall,
one of the finest in the kingdom, with two rows of stately pillars. It had a
fire-place at each end, and the aisles were divided by partitions into small
rooms, some having fire-places of their own. Back of it, to the east, reached
by broad stone steps, eight of which remain, stood a two-storied structure,
with vaulted basement probably for domestic stores, and with upper
apartments which may have served for the entertainment of guests of
unusual distinction. Up these stairs, then, attended by officers of the Abbey,
went the Nevilles, the Marmions, the Mauleverers, on their visits to the
monastery. In the chamber above slept the abbot of Clairvaux, when he
came on his round of inspection of the Cistercian houses. Adjoining this
lodging, on the south, was the chapel, into which a flight of narrow stairs
descended from this guest-room. The base of the altar is still in situ. Next
the chapel, with a yard between, was the spacious kitchen, whose great
round ovens are still in place. Here, was cooked the food for the infirmary,
for the misericord, and for the occupants of the lodging. A staircase beside
the chapel-door seems to have led from the kitchen to the guest-room, over
the arch of the entrance.
Here, in the infirmary, were gathered the old men, who had been monks
for fifty years. Here the sick were cared for. Here regularly, in groups, a
fourth part of the brethren at a time, came all the monks in succession for
the periodical minutio, or letting of blood, according to the medical
discipline of the time. In this comfortable seclusion they regained their
strength. The doors of the infirmary were shut against the harsher
regulations of the monastic life. Fires blazed on the hearth and roared up the
great chimneys, and there were good things on the table at dinner time. The
place was both a hospital and an old men’s home. The buildings extended
over the river, which flowed in four tunnels beneath. To the north, beside
the chapel of the nine altars, lay the cemetery. In this quiet place, remote
from even the peaceful stir of the cloister, the monks expected to end their
days. Their longest journey out of this blessed haven was when they crept
along the corridor, and the nine-altars chapel, and the presbytery aisle, to
their place on the stout oak bench against the back of the rood screen, to
hear mass on some high festival. They awaited only one longer journey,
when they should be carried out of the infirmary chapel to the green
cemetery.
When the time for that last journey drew near, the abbot came to
administer the sacrament, with all the brethren assembled. Then a cross of
ashes was traced upon the floor, with a merciful covering of straw upon it
and a quilt on that; there the sick man was laid. When the brother’s breath
grew faint and difficult, and it was plain that the moment of his departure
was at hand, a board in the cloister was struck repeated blows with a mallet,
and all the monks hastened to their brother’s side. Thus he closed his eyes,
amidst the prayers of his friends, and passed from the peace of the
monastery to the rest of paradise.
This quiet end of life was continually symbolised in the quiet ending of
the monastic day. Late in the afternoon, the office of vespers was said in the
church, somewhat elaborately, with much singing and organ-playing. After
vespers, in the twilight, the monks sat in the cloister, about the refectory
door, and somebody read aloud from a good book, preferably the Collations
of Cassian. On Saturday afternoons during the reading, the brothers by turns
sat in a row on the stone benches which were over the lavatory troughs on
either side of the refectory door, and had their feet washed in the running
water by the cooks of that week and of the week to come. Then the
compline prayers were said, in the summer about seven o’clock, in the
winter about eight. And at the end of the service, every monk pulled his
cowl over his head and went to bed.
CHAPTER IV
THE SUPPRESSION
For two hundred and fifty years—from the time of Abbot John of Kent,
whose day ended in 1247, to the time of Abbot John, called Darnton, whose
day began in 1479—no notable additions were made to the fabric of the
Abbey. The energies of the brethren were directed to the diligent living of
their daily life.
In Craven, the Abbey owned a hundred square miles within a ring fence;
in the neighbourhood of Ripon, their lands ran in one direction for thirty
uninterrupted miles. The monks of the daughter house of Kirkstead had
farms in Lincolnshire, forty thousand acres of pasture land in Wildmore
Fen, and property in Boston, Lincoln and London. They had tithes of the
deer in Kirkstead Chase and the swans on Witham river. They sold wool in
Flanders. They maintained several large mills and an iron works. And
Fountains was much richer than Kirkstead. These possessions brought
heavy responsibilities, and made a great demand on the monks’ time. There
were tenants and title-deeds to be looked after, collections to be made,
markets to be considered, with buying and selling, and the care of sheep and
cattle.
In addition to these cares, the abbot was the official visitor of eleven
other abbeys—the eight daughter houses, with three which had grown out
of the first—and went about among them on journeys of inspection and
encouragement and counsel. Also, as late as the fourteenth century, he had a
seat in Parliament, where he wore his mitre and discussed the affairs of the
wide world. Early in the fifteenth century he attended the Council of
Constance, where he heard Wyclif condemned and saw Hus burned. Late in
the same century, when Henry VII., the last of the mediæval kings, kept St.
George’s Day in state at York, it was the Abbot of Fountains who read the
epistle at high mass in the Minster.
This abbot was John Darnton, who resumed again the old enthusiasm for
making the Abbey beautiful. He put new windows in the place of the plain
old ones, in the west end of the nave, and in the chapel of the nine altars,
east and north and south. After him, on the very eve of the Suppression,
looking forward to centuries more of prosperity and peace. Abbot
Marmaduke Huby built the noble tower.
About this time the Abbey bought a map—“a paper map of the world”—
for which the bursar paid eight pence. There it hung upon the parlour wall,
that all the monks might see what sort of place they lived in—a small
world, whose centre was at the altar of St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But
while the new glass was being put in the big new windows the tidings came
that a new world had been found across the sea; and to this expansion it
soon became necessary to readjust the horizons both of maps and of ideas.
In the process of this readjustment the Abbey came to an end.
When the Reformation began, the abbeys were all against it. To the men
of the cloister, living by rule and wonted to silence, the bold ideas of the
robust prophets of the new time had a harsh and forbidding sound. Rumours
of the current sayings and doings found their way into the Abbey—the
farmer made report to the cellarer when he brought in his beets and onions
—and the brethren shuddered to hear them, as men shake and shiver upon
whom the cold wind blows around the corner after a day spent by the warm
fire. In the quickening contention between the old learning and the new the
monks held with the past.
Thus it was also in the increasingly embittered politics of the time. At
Jervaulx Abbey, on a July Sunday in 1536, a monk sharply interrupted the
preacher who was maintaining that the king was the head of the Church.
The monk said that he neither would nor could take the king’s highness for
to be the only and supreme head of the Church of England. He affirmed that
the Pope was the head of the Church, and not the king. And his brethren
agreed with him. That was what they held at Fountains. On one side were
the king and the bishops, on the other side were the Pope and the monks.
The contrast between abbey and cathedral—between the monks’ church and
the bishops’ church,—is of like significance with the contrast between the
castles of Kenilworth and Warwick. The two castles took different sides in a
great national division; and Kenilworth, which chose the side of Charles,
and lost, is a battered ruin, while Warwick, which chose the side of
Cromwell, and won, is a stately inhabited mansion. The abbey and the
cathedral made their choice in an earlier division. It needs but a glance to
tell which chose the side that was defeated.
Fountains, like the other monasteries, was ill prepared for the heavy
storm. The convent had decreased in numbers. One of the fire-places in the
warming-house, one of the ovens in the refectory kitchen, had been blocked
up as being no longer needed. The partitions down the rows of pillars in the
nave had been removed, for there were no lay brothers to sit in the long
lines of stalls. Men were asking menacing questions as to the practical value
of these vast establishments which were withdrawing from the general life
of the nation so much wealth and strength. Parliament suppressed nearly
four hundred of the lesser monasteries, partly on the ground that they were
places of evil living, partly on the ground that their revenues were needed
for the better benefit of the people; and there were few complaints. Though
the greater abbeys were expressly exempted at that time from the
accusations of immoral conduct, even they could not escape the charge of
rendering but a scanty and uncertain service to the community.
It was the misfortune of Fountains, at this critical time, to have an
incompetent and unworthy abbot; though even a saint could not have saved
the place from the hand of the spoiler. In 1530, the Earl of Northumberland
appealed to Cardinal Wolsey, in behalf of the brethren of Fountains, to
remove the abbot. Abbot Thirsk, he said, doth not endeavour himself like a
discreet father towards the convent and the profit of the house, but hath,
against the same, as well sold and wasted the great part or all of their store
in cattle, as also their woods in divers countries, neither does he maintain
the service of God like to the ancient custom there. The King’s
commissioners, Layton and Legh, said worse things about him. They
declared that he was defamed a toto populo. They complained that there
was no truth in him, one day denying and the next confessing various sins
laid to his charge. They were especially indignant because one night he took
secretly out of the sacristy or treasure room a gold cross adorned with
stones, and in company with a jeweller, who had come from London, whom
he took into his lodgings, did abstract from the cross an emerald and a ruby,
which the London jeweller bought of him, cheating the abbot badly. It is
plain that the poor man was at his wit’s end, sorely badgered by these
insistent visitors, seeing the ruin of his holy house, and trying, if possible, to
save something out of it. Finally, he resigned his office into the hands of the
commissioners, who assigned him a scanty pension. He took refuge in the
Abbey of Jervaulx, where he became involved in the revolutionary
proceedings of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and atoned for such misdeeds as he
may have committed by being hanged at Tyburn.
Abbot Thirsk’s successor, Marmaduke Bradley, was selected by the
commissioners. They said that he was the wisest monk in England; and he
showed that he was even as wise, as the Bible says, as a serpent, by doing
what his masters bade him. In 1539, at their demand, he surrendered the
Abbey to the King.
The commissioners came down from London, late in the November of
that year, and called a meeting, probably in the chapter house. There they
assembled the abbot and the convent and the chief people of the
neighbourhood, to whom they duly declared “the godly determination of the
King’s majesty to alter and change that house, with many others, from an
unchristian life to a trade of virtuous and honest living.” The thirty-two
brethren were promised proper pensions. They were accordingly advised
“to submit themselves to his Majesty’s clemency and goodness, and by way
of surrender to yield up into his Grace’s hands their monastery, with all the
lands, possessions, jewels, plate, ornaments, and other things belonging to
the same.” The commissioners then took possession of the convent seal,
with all the keys, and made an inventory. Thus politely, and even piously,
was this royal robbery effected.
The abbot betook himself to Ripon, where he held a prebendal stall. The
prior and his thirty brethren were turned briskly out of doors to face the
approaching winter. Despoiled of their own garments they were given suits
of citizen’s clothes, and were set outside the gates of their fair paradise to
make their way, as best they could, over the strange roads of the cold world.
The gold and silver of the rich altars, with all things of value such as
could be moved, were put in waggons and sent to the king. Distant though
the Abbey was from any town, the rumour of these proceedings would
attract a crowd. And the crowd stole what they could. The servants of the
commissioners, who had a better chance, stole more, according to their
opportunity. They rode about in those days, from the wreck of one abbey to
the ruin of another, with rich copes for travelling cloaks and chasubles for
saddle cloths. The master thief was abroad, and it was a pity if the little
thieves could not have a share.
Then the windows were taken out, so carefully that but a handful of the
precious glass remained in all the ruins, and were disposed of, nobody
knows how or where. The bells were taken down and carried off; one to be
hung, tradition says, in the cathedral tower at Ripon. Finally, the roofs were
pulled off, and the lead brought into the dismantled church; and there
between the great pillars, betwixt the broken altars of St. Mary and St.
Bernard, in a fire whose fuel was the carved work of the choir stalls, it was
melted into convenient shape for the market.
An eye-witness has left a description of the spoiling of the dependent
house of Roche Abbey. “The sudden spoil fell,” he says, “the same day of
their departure from the house.... The church was the first thing that was put
to the spoil, then the abbot’s lodging, dorter and frater [i.e., dormitory and
refectory] with the cloister and all the buildings thereabout within the abbey
walls.... The persons that cast the lead into fodders plucked up all the seats
in the choir where the monks sat when they said
Fountains Hall.
Photo. Frith. Art Repro. Co.
service, which were like to seats in minsters, and burned them and melted
the lead therewith, although there was wood plenty within a flight-shot of
them, for the abbey stood among the woods.” Everybody was busy, he says,
pilfering what he could and hiding it among the rocks, “so that it seemeth
that every person bent himself to filch and spoil what he could.” At
Fountains, the ashes of such fires remained until the last century, amidst the
general wreck.
The place was sold within a few months to Richard Gresham, a
gentleman of London, who paid seven thousand pounds for it. In 1597, the
heirs of Gresham sold it to Stephen Procter, a courtier of Elizabeth, who
pulled down some of the buildings outside the cloister that he might get
materials for his fine new Fountains Hall, near the west gate. His affairs
falling into great confusion the place was again sold, and thereafter passed
from hand to hand until, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it came
into the possession of William Aislabie, the owner of the neighbouring
estate of Studley Royal. From whose granddaughter, Miss Lawrence, it
passed by will to the Earl de Grey, the uncle of the present owner, the
Marquess of Ripon.
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh
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