Not only had learning and book-making been kept alive in these great religious houses, but the art of Agriculture. Within their walled courts were grown all manner of fruits and vegetables known to their climate; these monks knew and followed the best rulings of Cato, and Crescenzius (who just now has written on this subject in Northern Italy, and is heard of by way of Padua). They make sour wine out of grapes grown against sunny walls: they have abundant flocks too--driven out each morning from their sheltering courts, and returned each night; and they have great breadth of ground under carefullest tillage. Of such character was Tintern Abbey--in the valley of the Wye--now perhaps the most charming of all English ruins. Such another was Netley Abbey, on Southampton water, and Bolton Priory, close by that famous stream, the Wharfe, which you will remember in Wordsworth’s story of the “White Doe of Rylstone.” Fountain’s Abbey, in Yorkshire, was yet another, from whose ruin we can study better perhaps than from any other in England, the extent and disposition of these old religious houses. Melrose was another; and so was Dryburgh, where Scott’s body lies, and Abingdon, close upon Oxford--where was attached that Manor of Cumnor, which Scott assigns for a prison to the sad-fated Amy Robsart, in the tale of “Kenilworth.” Glastonbury was another: this too (once encircled by the arms of the river Brue), was the “Isle of Avalon” in Arthurian romance; “Where falls not hail, or rain or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly.” Here (at Glastonbury) is still in existence the abbot’s barn of the fourteenth century, and here, too, a magnificent abbot’s kitchen--thirty-three feet square and seventy-two feet high: Think what the cooking and the meats must have been in a kitchen of that style! Now, these shrewd people who lived in these great monasteries, and built them, and enjoyed the good things kept in store there--made friends of the vassals about them; they were generous with their pot-herbs and fruits; they were the medicine-men of the neighborhood; they doled out flasks of wine to the sick; they gave sanctuary and aid to the Robin Hoods and Little Johns; and Robin Hood’s men kept them in supply of venison; they enlivened their courts with minstrelsy. Warton says that at the feast of the installation of Ralph, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, in 1309, seventy shillings was expended for minstrels in the gallery, and six thousand guests were present in and about the halls. Many abbeys maintained minstrels or harpers of their own; and we may be sure that the monks had jolly as well as religious ditties.