The Devil, naturally enough, was ever ready specially to tempt the monk, vowed to a limited dietary, to gluttony and drunkenness, and to do his work on insidious and gradual lines. Now and again, in some very rare cases, he succeeded; and occasionally a corrupt superior infected for a time his flock until sharply pulled up by a visitation. Such cases, though severely punished, could seldom be kept secret, and the worldling, whose own conduct was rebuked by the generally high level of the religious life, took an evil pleasure in retailing and exaggerating the news. But on the whole, in days when there was much proneness to coarse sins even among those of high position, the vowed religious of England led exemplary lives, and occupied a decidedly higher plane than the secular clergy. We do not take the rest of our history from scurrilous writers of either prose or verse; the student who attempted to do this would be laughed out of court; it is merely the innate and perpetual hatred of the world for Christ that has made many an historian, or writer of historical sketches, so ready to turn aside from any patient study of the lives of those who tried specially to deny themselves for the Master’s sake, and to accept cynical sneers in the place of sober facts. Perhaps a few plain statements with regard to the eating and drinking of England’s religious may tend to dispel views that are far too common even among those who have no desire unfairly to belittle the cloistered life. A diet roll for the year 1492 that has been printed _in extenso_, and was fully analysed by Dean Kitchin, yields interesting results as to the fare at a large Benedictine house in the days when they certainly fared better than in earlier periods. On Monday before Christmas Day there were placed on the refectory tables of St. Swithun’s for general consumption at the two meals, dishes of moile made from marrow and grated bread, tripe, beef, mutton, calves-feet, and 170 eggs. The cost of this food was 8_s._ 4_d._, or about £4 of our money. On Christmas Day the fare was only a very little better, and cost 9_s._ 6_d._; the dishes were seasoned vegetables, tripe, brose or bread soaked in dripping, beef, mutton, and stew or onion broth. On days of strict fast their fare that year was salt fish, relieved by dried figs or raisins as an extra, and mustard. “The charge for mustard, 1½_d._,” says Dean Kitchin, “runs through all the fast days; it would appear that during the time of a meagre indigestible fish diet the brethren needed something to warm and stay their poor stomachs.”