With regard to the visitations scattered throughout episcopal registers, the few who are acquainted with the whole series of these act-books will agree--and they only are competent to judge--(1) that only those cases where injunctions were issued are entered in any detail, in order that it might be seen whether the _reformanda_ were carried out; (2) that where injunctions on one or two points were required, it was usual for the Bishop’s official to introduce a variety of customary decrees, which were for the most part a summary of the salient points of the general rule, and which were considered suitable for the admonition of the religious all over the country; (3) that allowance must always be made for the stilted and hyperbolical phrasing of official ecclesiastical Latin--a fact universally admitted by all mediæval scholars; and (4) that incidental mention is made in these registers of a very great number of visitations taking place of which there is no detailed record, and in which it is but common sense to conclude there was nothing to redress. To these reflections may be added the caution that ought to be obvious to everyone of intelligence, that the object of a visitation is to detect laxity and possible evil, and not to record devoutness and good discipline. To judge of the bulk of the religious from a few given up to bad living, and who were heavily punished for their misdeeds, is as monstrous and childish as it would be to condemn the inhabitants of some given area by the actions of the minute minority who figure in the police-court records. So far as the visitation of monasteries by delegated ecclesiastics from the parent house is concerned, we are not aware of any general record of that character having come to light, either at home or on the continent, with regard to the Cistercians. As to the visitations of English Cluniac foundations, Sir G. F. Duckett did good service in printing a great amount of matter of the thirteenth century, together with some of later date, from the original records in the National Library at Paris. As these important visitations have recently been the subject of controversy, it is not necessary to allude to them any further, save by saying that it is best to consult Duckett’s two volumes in Latin, rather than the abbreviated English rendering; and that they cannot possibly fail to carry conviction to every unjaundiced mind of the good lives that were on the whole led by the monks under alien rule amid circumstances of peculiar difficulty.