Though it was the glory of the English Church in the most stringent times of feudal tyranny to call to Holy Orders those who were specially freed from among her own villeins for the purpose, and though many of the lowliest birth attained to, then as now, high and responsible position in the hierarchy, the other side of the shield must not be forgotten. Columns might readily be filled with the names of those in England who were members of good families, and did distinguished service for the Church, though trained in cloistered seclusion. It may suffice here to mention two or three of considerable mark in early days. Winfrid of Crediton, who, after years of careful seclusion in the Hampshire monastery of Nursling, became the renowned apostle of Germany, under the title of Boniface, was the eldest child of wealthy and noble parents. Biscop, who at the age of twenty-five gave himself up to the monastic life, and became the celebrated abbot of the North of England, so well known as St. Benedict Biscop, was of good birth and position, and the owner of a considerable estate. “He despised,” says Bede, “a temporal wealth that he might obtain that which is eternal; he refused to be the father of mortal children, being fore-ordained of Christ to educate for Him in spiritual doctrine immortal children in Heaven.” St. Alphege, the saintly Archbishop martyred by the Danes in 1011, was born to high position and wealth, the only son of a family of distinction; but he forsook all in favour of a Benedictine monastery. When the time of the Conquest is passed, the evidence of those of high birth seeking the cloister is fully maintained. The first two Archbishops of Canterbury who ruled in the earlier Norman days, Lanfranc and Anselm, men of great wealth and culture, the one of senatorial rank and the other of noble origin, made considerable temporal sacrifices to follow the Benedictine rule. Or once again, the founder of the remarkable Order of the Gilbertines--who did so good and pure a work right up to their dissolution, the only Order founded by an Englishman--was Gilbert of Sempringham, the eldest son of a wealthy Norman knight, who sacrificed his considerable estates to further his conception of the monastic ideal. Now all these men, and many others almost equally distinguished, entered the religious life without any idea of afterwards emerging from the cloister and attaining to high spiritual rule or administration; they were but examples of hundreds of others of equal birth and self-sacrifice, who served God as faithfully in their limited circles, though their acts remain unwritten on the annals of mere human records.