Accordingly, the lay brothers of Fountains were so named not to distinguish them from their brethren in priests’ orders, but to mark a difference between them and the cloister brothers. The _conversi_, as they were called, were divided from the _monachi_ not by a barrier of ordination, but by a barrier of education. They were monks who could not read. When the Cistercian Order began, there were many such persons, some of good birth, many of good ability, but ignorant of letters. It was characteristic of the Cistercians that they made a place for the piety of these men. Unable to read, they could not take part in the regular offices of monastic devotion. But they could work. They could plough and spade, they could brew and bake, they knew how to work on a farm or in a mill; at the humblest, they could fetch and carry. And these acts, the Cistercians taught, may be as religious as the recitation of a litany. So there were the lay brothers, like St. Christopher at the ford of the river, consecrating their hands and their feet, their strength and their obedience, to God. They were sanctifying the homeliest tasks by doing them as the servants of Heaven. The lay brothers were in the department of the cellarer, to whom they were responsible, as the cloister brothers were to the prior. They attended to the secular side of the common life. Having to work hard, they did not rise so early as the others; in summer, not till dawn. But they said prayers at night, coming down into the nave, where their stalls were ranged along on either side against the great pillars. In the day, they might recite their appointed offices, stopping in the midst of their work in the mill or in the field. When it was possible, however, they had their service in the church, chanting softly in the nave while the other monks were singing in the choir, and having forms of their own which they had learned by heart. III. THE CHURCH The essential purpose for which Fountains Abbey was founded was the pursuit of religion. The prevailing interpretation which was put upon religion made it to consist, in great measure, of the saying of services. Out of the confused noises of the common street, the monks had retired into the quiet of the monastery in the hope of meeting God. And they sought God in the church. The church had a western porch, a dozen feet in width, extending along the whole front. Part of the porch floor was made of gravestones, beneath which lay the dust of devout laymen, who had begged the privilege of being buried at the door of the house of prayer. The porch roof touched the base of the great window, which was filled with the glorious colours of the inimitable glass of the middle ages. Over the window, in a niche, was a figure of the Mother and Child. Abbot John Darnton had this made, and inscribed his name upon the supporting corbel: an eagle, the symbol of the fourth evangelist, to mean _John_, perched on a cask or _tun_, with a scroll beneath marked _dern 1494_.