The continuous round of work with head or hand, blended with the frequently recurring services of prayer and praise by night as well as by day, regularly practised by those who were leading well-ordered, disciplined, and chaste lives, served to produce not a few of the finest characters that the world has ever known. Such as these were brought into prominence by some adventitious circumstances, and were but samples of thousands of others of equally pious life and conversation, but unknown outside their own precincts or the area to which their relief of the poor extended. The general attachment and devotion of the religious to their own houses, wherein they found so deep-seated and genuine a joy, and so true a knowledge of the higher life in the midst of evils and turmoils that rent the world around them, is not infrequently expressed in terms of almost ecstatic delight by chroniclers who wrote from within the walls with no idea of publicity. The genuineness of their utterances, after making due allowance for the flamboyant exuberance of the Latinity of the day, is amply shown by the freedom with which they at the same time commented on the occasional littleness displayed by superiors, or still rarer lapses from virtue. Thus, a fourteenth-century Cistercian monk who wrote glowingly of the general peace and happiness within his cloisters, and how the lives of his predecessors and contemporaries had made the whole district into a valley odorous with the sweet flowers of virtuous living, told a quaint tale of a recent abbot who would have his own name stamped on the silver spoons given to the community by a predecessor. There can indeed be no doubt that the great majority of the religious of mediæval England led a well-occupied and busy life, and found therein some measure of the true happiness they sought.