When the religious houses were possessed of manors--and all save the smallest houses held at least one or two and frequently many--it was incumbent upon them to discharge the obligations that rested on manorial lords; nor was there any difficulty about this, for the technical obligations of presiding at courts and fulfilling other like duties were almost invariably discharged, even on secular manors, by the lord’s steward. Still the lord was responsible, and held responsible, in the same fashion as a modern landowner and his agent, and the difference between a good and a bad or careless landlord had even more striking results in the feudal and sub-feudal days than in our own. The tenants of the monastic estates were of every kind, from those who held under the obligation of military service to the Crown and so many knight’s fees, to the humblest customary tenants or villeins, who were tied to the soil. The abbot or prior had to carry out the obligations resting on landholders of the days in which he lived; he could not, if he would, have upset the land system, but by just and conscientious administration each manor might become a centre of comparative content. If the student of manorial records and customaries compares any considerable number of manors that were in monastic, or Church, hands, with those that were in lay control, it will be found, broadly speaking, that the lot of the tenants generally, and more especially that of the villeins, was decidedly superior when under monastic administration. True, tenants of ecclesiastical manors had their difficulties with the lord from time to time, and were, perhaps, all the more ready now and again to show dissatisfaction in a more marked way than they would have dared to do against the more severe secular lords; but the easy terms on which the assarts or clearings made by the monks and their lay-brothers were conferred on their tenants, the commuting of labour customs for quite small sums of money, the generally light character of the labour for the lord, the better harvest fare provided, and, more particularly, the far greater opportunity for manumission or freedom that pertained to the clerical estates, all these were noticeable in so many instances, that there can be no doubt it was as a rule far better for each class of tenants to be on a monastic rather than on a secular estate.