by such a title as ‘converts.’ It was indeed a special triumph of the established religious life that knights and other unruly men of violent passions should be moved to lead a docile and humble life within the abbey’s precincts, or working in the fields around; and such men when they joined a community and proved themselves amenable to discipline, occasionally joined the _conversi_, or converts, who were thus originally styled to distinguish them from those who from their youth had been dedicated to the cloister. It was but very rarely that such as these were admitted to the priesthood or became chapter or quire-monks; they only found entrance to the more menial position, and hence by degrees the term _conversi_ or converts became equivalent to lay-brothers. Just the same story is true of the quire-nuns and the working sisters of the other sex. It therefore follows that those jaundiced minds of Mr. Wishart’s cataloguing would after all, if they succeeded in gaining admission, find the way open to nought save the inferior position, and would not become, in any real sense of the term, either monks or nuns. Saving for the very few that were directly founded by kings or queens, every monastic house in England, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, was founded by men of large landed property, and, after the Conquest, by those of feudal power. It was in this way, from the very necessity of the case, that the religious houses obtained the endowments of land or tithe that were essential for their support. Not only did such as these found the monasteries, but they largely helped to fill them. There is not a single old feudal family known in English history but several of its members can be proved to have entered the ranks of the religious. Nor were such as these only drawn from the cadets of families of position or substance. Those who have tried to study the earlier history of the county families of any of our English shires will be quite familiar with cases in which the ordinary succession of primogeniture in manorial or landed descent is interrupted, because the eldest son had taken monastic vows. The idea current among certain superficial writers, that there was a perpetual warfare between the monastic and feudal system, cannot be maintained by true historical students either in Christendom at large or in England in particular. It is too often forgotten that the monasteries were very largely recruited from those who were themselves members of the feudal aristocracy. Particularly was this the case in the eleventh century, when the influence of Hugh the Abbot of Cluny, who was himself of high feudal birth, was so great. Lists or isolated names of the members of the priories or cells of Cluniac foundation in our own country of this period prove that these monks who settled on our shores were, many of them, members of the French aristocracy.