Yorkshire, England - 1539–1571
The reader who has been following the timeline in Teodor's library will have noticed the gaps. The 1540 to 1600 section is the thinnest in the collection - fewer documents, more secondary sources, more inference and less direct evidence than any other period in the record. I noted this early and spent years trying to understand it.
The gap is not an accident of survival. It is an accident of dispersal. The Dissolution of the Monasteries under Thomas Cromwell did not destroy the chain - nothing has destroyed the chain - but it scattered it in a way that took generations to reconsolidate. The period between 1540 and roughly 1620 is the record's most attenuated - the thread pulled thinnest, the chain most nearly invisible.
What follows is reconstructed from three sources: a letter from Prior Edmund Holt of Rievaulx to an unknown recipient, dated October 1539; a probate inventory from the estate of Richard Askham, wool merchant of York, dated 1571; and a brief entry in the household accounts of the Askham family covering the years 1540 to 1544. These three documents, read together, tell a story that none of them individually contains.
- T.M., 1961
Prior Edmund Holt had known since the previous spring that Rievaulx would not survive the year.
The signs had been clear enough for a man who was paying attention, and Edmund had spent his adult life paying attention. The smaller houses had gone first - the ones below the two-hundred-pound annual value threshold, dissolved by the first Act and their assets transferred to the Crown with an efficiency that suggested the process had been planned well in advance of the legislation that authorized it. The larger houses had watched and waited, most of them accepting the fiction that their size protected them, that Cromwell's commissioners were interested only in the small and the corrupt.
Edmund did not believe this fiction. He had read the reports from the smaller houses too carefully to believe it. He had watched the pattern with the attention of a man who had spent thirty years studying how institutions fall.
He had three weeks, he estimated, from the time the commissioners arrived in the district until the point at which the house's assets would be inventoried and its future determined by people whose determination was not in question. Three weeks to do what could be done.
He could not save the house. He had accepted this. What he could save was what the house had kept.
Rievaulx had held its portion of the record since 1387, when a prior three generations before Edmund had received a set of materials from a Cistercian house in Burgundy that had itself received them from sources the accompanying notes described only as reliable and ancient. The materials had been kept in the library under a classification system that Edmund had spent two years decoding when he first encountered them, and which he now understood as a version of the notation system that appeared in the marginalia of certain other documents he had managed to examine through careful correspondence with other houses.
He could not send the materials to another house. The houses were falling. He needed a layman - someone outside the institutional structure that was being dismantled, someone with the qualities the chain required, someone he could trust without the scaffolding of shared vows and shared governance that had always supported the trust before.
He had one name.
Richard Askham was a wool merchant in York whose family had been doing business with Rievaulx for two generations. He was not a scholar. He was not particularly learned. He was honest, careful, and possessed of a quality that Edmund had noticed in men who were good at their work regardless of what their work was: the ability to hold something carefully without needing to understand it fully. Edmund had seen this quality in the way Askham handled disputes about accounts - not with the urgency of a man who needed resolution but with the patience of a man who trusted that patient attention would eventually reveal the right answer.
He wrote to Askham in October of 1539. The letter, which has survived among the materials themselves, was careful in its language - no explicit mention of the chain, no description of what was being asked, just the request that Askham come to Rievaulx at his earliest convenience to discuss a matter of some importance relating to the safekeeping of certain materials.
Askham came in November.
The conversation in Edmund's study lasted most of an afternoon. Edmund told him what he needed to tell him - less than he had told Father Novák's predecessor in 1387, less than would have been possible in other circumstances, but enough. He told Askham that the materials had been kept for a very long time and needed to continue to be kept. He told him that keeping them required no particular learning, only care and discretion and the willingness to pass them on when the time came. He told him that the time would be made clear to him, as it had been made clear to everyone before him.
Askham asked one question: why him.
Edmund told him the truth: because he was trustworthy and because he was available and because the house was going to fall and the materials could not fall with it.
Askham thought about this for a while. Then he asked whether there was anyone he could contact if he had questions.
Edmund gave him a name - a priest in York, not himself, someone who would survive the changes that were coming. He told Askham that the priest knew enough to help with basic questions but that some questions would not have answers, and that the materials needed to be kept whether the questions had answers or not.
Askham said he understood. He took the materials. Edmund helped him wrap them in oilcloth against the November damp, and Askham carried them out to his horse and rode back to York.
The probate inventory of Richard Askham's estate, compiled in 1571 at his death, lists among the contents of his counting house: one parcel of old documents, origin unknown, value not assessed, noted as to be transferred to his son Robert with the instruction that they are to be kept and not sold.
The household accounts of the Askham family note, in the entries for 1540 to 1544, a recurring expense described as maintenance of certain papers, which appears to refer to the periodic inspection and rehousing of the materials as Askham learned, through trial and error, what keeping old documents required.
He got better at it. The accounts show the expense becoming smaller and more routine over time, which is the signature of a man learning a new skill with the practical attention he brought to everything else.
Rievaulx Abbey was dissolved in December of 1538. Prior Edmund Holt accepted the Crown's pension and retired to a house in the village below the abbey, where he died in 1546. His portion of the record survived him by four and a half centuries and counting, in the custody of a wool merchant's family who kept it because they had been asked to keep it and because keeping it seemed like the right thing to do.
The chain does not require understanding. It requires custody. These are different things, and the difference between them is, in its own way, a kind of grace.
The materials from Rievaulx are now in the Alton house, where they have been since 1968. They occupy approximately fourteen inches of shelf space in the third section of the east wall, organized by the event dates of the documents they describe, as is everything else in the library.
Richard Askham kept them for thirty-one years. His son kept them for forty-four. His granddaughter kept them for fifty-one, through the remainder of the Elizabethan period and into the Jacobean, at which point they passed to a family in Lancashire with whom the Askhams had a longstanding trading relationship.
And so on.
- T.M., 1961