In another way also the hospitality of every monastery was bound to be exercised in proportion to its size, and that was in the entertainment of travellers of whatever degree. The custumals insist, in differing terms but with much explicit detail, on the due discharge of this obligation with all courtesy and kindness. According to the very wording of St. Benedict’s rule, guests were to be received as if they were Christ Himself. None were to be refused admission; all were to be made welcome, but more especially monks, clergy, poor, and foreigners. Every custumal enjoins on the hosteler or guest-master the primary duties of having everything ready, clean, and sweet in the guest-house or the appointed chambers, such as wood for the fire, straw for the beds, water for the jugs and basins, rushes for the floor, and candles for lighting. Guests were to be supplied, if possible, with better food than the ordinary monastic commons. Well-to-do guests, using the house as a convenience on their travels, would doubtless, from time to time, make presents to the convent treasury, but such offerings would be quite the exception. In almost every English episcopal register of the fourteenth century occur petitions from monasteries asking the Bishop’s sanction to the appropriation of churches or rectories, of which they already held the advowson. In such cases it is generally found that the main reason given for asking the favour is that the stress of hospitality on the particular house is so great--owing very often to increase of traffic on a neighbouring highway--that the income is insufficient. There certainly were several objections that can readily be urged to this removal from a parish of the greater part of the income arising from tithe and glebe; but it may be remarked _en passant_ that in pre-Reformation days there was, broadly speaking, much more security for the just administration of the Church revenues of an appropriated parish rather than of one that remained a rectory. If there is any one thing certainly established by the study of episcopal Act-books, it is that the best of mediæval Bishops were practically powerless to prevent the evils of lay patrons appointing youths in minor Orders to rectories and of the frequent non-residence of even older rectors. Consequently the rectories were far too often merely served by parochial chaplains removable at will. In the case of ordination of vicarages, the vicars were perpetual, and their residence insisted on; whilst the income from the greater tithes was, as a rule, fairly used for good purposes by the religious house to which it was appropriated, a certain portion of it being definitely assigned to the poor of the particular parish.