The Monastery: A Romance

The Monastery: a Romance (1820) is a historical novel by Walter Scott, one of the Waverley novels. Set in the Scottish Borders in the 1550s on the eve of the Scottish Reformation, it is centred on Melrose Abbey.

Scott had been contemplating The Monastery before August 1819, and it seems likely that he started writing it in that month while the production of Ivanhoe was at a standstill because of shortage of paper. He had determined on the title by the middle of the month. It also seems likely that he took up composition again shortly after finishing Ivanhoe in early November. He made good progress, and the third and final volume was at the press by the end of February 1820. Originally the story was intended to include Mary Queen of Scots, but a decision to reserve the later material for a second novel (The Abbot) was probably made before composition resumed in November.

Scott was intimately familiar with the history and topography of the Border region, and there is no evidence that he was following any formal written histories in detail. But two publications were useful to him for particular aspects of the novel. For sixteenth-century monastic life he was indebted to British Monachism; or, Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England by Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke, of which he owned an enlarged edition published in 1817. Shafton's euphuistic speech owes something to Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) by John Lyly, though affected speeches in the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare were more consistently mined.

The first edition of The Monastery, in three volumes, was published in Edinburgh by Archibald Constable and John Ballantyne on 23 March 1820, and in London by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown on the 30th. The print run was 10,000 and the price £1 4s (£1.20). As with all the Waverley novels before 1827 publication was anonymous. There is no reason to suppose that Scott was involved with the novel again until the beginning of 1830 when he revised the text and added an introduction and notes for the 'Magnum' edition, where it appeared as Volumes 18 and 19 in November and December that year.

The standard modern edition, by Penny Fielding, was published in 2000 as Volume 9 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels: it is based on the first edition with emendations mainly from the manuscript; the Magnum material is included in Volume 25b.

The action is centred on the Monastery of Kennaquhair, probably based on Melrose Abbey in south east Scotland, on the River Tweed. At this time, circa 1550, the Scottish Reformation is just beginning, and the monastery is in peril.

A love story is interwoven as the Glendinning boys fall in love with Mary Avenel. Edward ends up becoming a monk, and Halbert finally marries Mary, after service with the Earl of Murray.

In the many conflicts between England and Scotland the property of the Church had hitherto always been respected; but her temporal possessions, as well as her spiritual influence, were now in serious danger from the spread of the doctrines of the Reformation, and the occupants of the monasteries were dependent on the military services of their tenants and vassals for protection against the forays of Protestant barons and other heretical marauders. Dame Elspeth's husband Simon had fallen in the battle of Pinkie (1547), and the hospitality of her lonely tower had been sought by the widow of the Baron of Avenel and her daughter Mary, whose mansion had been seized and plundered by invaders, and subsequently taken possession of by her brother-in-law Julian. While confessing the baroness on her death-bed, Father Philip discovered that she possessed a Bible, and as he was carrying it to the Lord Abbot, it was, he declared, taken from him by a spectral White Lady, a character resembling the Undine, which Scott borrowed from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine. Disbelieving the sacristan's tale, the sub-prior visited the tower, where he met Christie of the Clinthill, a freebooter, charged with an insolent message from Julian Avenel, and learnt that the Bible had been mysteriously returned to its owner. Having exchanged it for a missal, he was unhorsed on his return by the apparition; and, on reaching the monastery, the book had disappeared from his bosom, and he found the freebooter detained in custody on suspicion of having killed him. The White Lady was next seen by Elspeth's son Halbert, who was conducted by her to a fairy grotto, where he was allowed to snatch the Bible from a flaming altar.