Perhaps the one spot in all England more than another that would cure the man who talks flippantly of the lazy, indulgent life of our mediæval monks in their comfortable quarters is the rarely-visited site of the once great mitred Benedictine Abbey of St. Benet of Holme, amid the Norfolk Broads. To visit such a place, particularly in wet or lowering weather, with the waters swirling round the still well-defined precincts, the wide dykes filled to the brim, the land oozing with moisture over hundreds of acres all round--and then to picture the courage necessary to enable scores of men to give their lives and pass their days in a continuous round of worship and of battling with the elements in such a desolate spot as this--cannot fail to shatter any honest man’s belief in the ease-seeking nature of an English Benedictine of mediæval days. Such a man, after visiting St. Benet’s, Holme, might say, “What a fool,” but he could no longer sneer at the monk as a poor, lazy beggar. More particularly, too, would this be the case did he know some of the stories, as yet unknown to print, of the monks of this swamp. How, for instance, on one occasion (in the winter of 1287-8) the waters overflowed the lands and outbuildings to such an extent that only the church, on the highest ground, was unflooded; and how, within the nave, after much anxious thought, it was considered true charity to stable the horses to save them from drowning. Or if perchance the thought should arise that these monks were sustained by good fare against the damp and chills of their surroundings, the truth as to their usual meagre dietary, with exact details, can be learnt from various obedientiary rolls that are still preserved among the stores of the Bodleian. But more anon as to monastic fare.