Besides these meagre annals the monasteries had other books more curious than their record of public affairs. These were their Leiger-books, of which some have escaped among the few reliques of the universal dissolution of the monasteries. In these registers or diaries they entered all matters relating to their own monastery and its dependencies. As time never pressed on the monkish secretary, his notabilia runs on very miscellaneously. Here were descents of families, and tenures of estates; authorities of charters and of cartularies; curious customs of counties, cities, and great towns. Strange accidents were not uncommon then; and sometimes, between a miracle or a natural phenomenon, a fugitive anecdote stole in. The affairs of a monastery exhibited a moving picture of domestic life. These religious houses, whose gate opened to the wayfarer, and who were the distributors of useful commodities to the neighbouring poor--for in their larger establishments they included workmen of every class--did not, however, maintain their munificence untainted by mundane passions. Forged charters had often sealed their possessions, and supposititious grants of mortuary donations silently transferred the wealth of families. These lords of the soil, though easy landlords, still cast an "evil eye" on the lands of their neighbour. Even rival monasteries have fought in meadows for the ownership; the stratagems of war and the battle-array of two troops of cudgelling monks might have furnished some cantos to an epic, less comic perhaps than that of "The Rape of the Bucket." In the literary simplicity of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, while every great monastery had its historian, every chronicle derived its title from its locality; thus, among others, were the Glastonbury, the Peterborough, and the Abingdon Chronicles: and when Leland, so late as the reign of Henry the Eighth, in his search into monastic libraries, discovered one at St. Neot's, he was at a loss to describe it otherwise than as "The Chronicle of St. Neot's." The famous Doomsday Book was originally known as "Liber de Winton," or "The Winchester Book," from its first place of custody. The same circumstance occurred among our neighbours, where _Les grandes Chroniques de Saint Denys_ were so called from having been collected or compiled by the monks of that abbey. An abstract notion of history, or any critical discrimination of one chronicle from another, was not as yet familiar even to our scholars; and in the dearth of literature the classical models of antiquity were yet imperfectly contemplated.