The fifteenth century gave birth in England to no one who might continue the line of spiritual and mystical writers that had given such distinction to the previous age. Margery Kempe, whatever judgement may be passed on her, and however great her familiarity with the English mystical writers, is clearly of another vintage. Yet there is abundant evidence, from the Book of Margery Kempe, from the survival of manuscripts, and from incidental references, that the three great writers of the fourteenth century—Richard Rolle, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and Walter Hilton—continued to form the standard reading of those who desired instruction in the ways of the spirit. It is, however, remarkable that, with few exceptions, all the surviving manuscripts of these authors come either from the libraries of the Carthusians and Bridgettines, or from the collections of devout lay folk. It is as if the monasteries of black and white monks clung to the traditional writers of the past, Cassian, Bernard, the Victorines and the rest, even though the devotional climate of the age had changed so greatly.

Of the spiritual life of the older orders and friars, indeed, we know next to nothing in this century. There is, however, one somewhat enigmatic manifestation which deserves mention: the race of Westminster recluses. Here, at the heart of what must always have been one of the most distracted and least secluded of communities, provision was by long tradition made for a recluse who had been and indeed still was, a monk of the house.