The privileges and immunities, granted to the Cistercian order in general, were very abundant; and those, to the Abbey of Furness were proportioned to its vast endowments. The abbot, it has been mentioned, held his secular court in the neighbouring castle of Dalton, where he presided with the power of administering not only justice but injustice, since the lives and property of the villain tenants of the lordship of Furness were consigned by a grant of King Stephen to the disposal of my lord abbot! The monks also could be arraigned, for whatever crime, only by him. "The military establishment of Furness likewise depended on the abbot. Every mesne lord and free homager, as well as the customary tenants, took an oath of fealty to the abbot, to be true to him against all men, excepting the king. Every mesne lord obeyed the summons of the abbot, or his steward, in raising his quota of armed men, and every tenant of a whole tenement furnished a man and horse of war for guarding the coast, for the border-service, or any expedition against the common enemy of the king and kingdom. The habiliments of war were a steel coat, or coat of mail, a falce, or falchion, a jack, the bow, the bill, the cross-bow and spear. The Furness legion consisted of four divisions:--one of bowmen horsed and harnessed; bylmen horsed and harnessed; bowmen without horse and harness; bylmen without horse and harness[5]." [5] "Antiquities of Furness." The deep forests, that once surrounded the Abbey, and overspread all Furness, contributed with its insulated situation, on a neck of land running out into the sea, to secure it from the depredations of the Scots, who were continually committing hostilities on the borders. On a summit over the Abbey are the remains of a beacon, or watch-tower, raised by the society for their further security. It commands extensive views over Low Furness and the bay of the sea immediately beneath; looking forward to the town and castle of Lancaster, appearing faintly on the opposite coast; on the south, to the isles of Wanley, Foulney, and their numerous islets, on one of which stands Peel-castle; and, on the north, to the mountains of High Furness and Coniston, rising in grand amphitheatre round this inlet of the Irish Channel. Description can scarcely suggest the full magnificence of such a prospect, to which the monks, emerging from their concealed cells below, occasionally resorted to sooth the asperities, which the severe discipline of superstition inflicted on the temper; or, freed from the observance of jealous eyes, to indulge, perhaps, the sigh of regret, which a consideration of the world they had renounced, thus gloriously given back to their sight, would sometimes awaken.