Let us consider the actual life of a monk, a Benedictine monk. To begin with, it is a great mistake to suppose that an Abbey was always and for choice planted in some remote and secluded spot. As the people of the eleventh and twelfth centuries no more acted without good and sufficient cause than we their descendants, there must have been a very good reason to justify the foundation of so many Religious Houses within and without the walls of the City of London. Dear to many were the quiet meadows beside the rushing stream, beneath the hanging woods, far from the noise of men, of Tintern, of Fountains, of Dryburgh, or of Blanchland: dearer to others the thought of the life close to those walls, which held so much of violence, passion, ambition, and crime, which their very presence would calm and shame and admonish; of the men broken and ruined, of the women disgraced, to whom these quiet cloisters offered a resting-place; why, to the very worst, the most hardened of murderous ruffians, to such as Chaucer’s shipman, pirate and murderer, the daily prospect of these walls, the ringing of the bells, the voices chanting Litany and Laud, the sight of the friars going about among them, the knowledge that these men and women lived in abstinence from all that the world called pleasure; that they possessed no property; that they desired none of the things which the world desires; this reflection, the obtrusion of these facts, acted as a continual admonition and call to repentance. Of course there was the danger, the continual danger, always present in human affairs, of the relaxation of the Rule; the loss of the first enthusiasm; the decay of the first intention. A Benedictine who rides abroad dressed like a knight with hawk and hound, for whom a hundred manors send up their rent, their wheat and their game; who keeps a splendid table; who admits to his order only young men well born; to whom the place is like the College of All Souls, a House of Fellows with no duties, ceases to be regarded with reverence on account of reputed piety. When not even the memory is left of the early piety; when the air is thick with stories of incontinence and greed; when the land is everywhere parcelled out among the religious; then they become intolerable, and must be swept away. We shall have to return to this subject. Meantime let us consider the monastic life at a time when the monasteries were at their wealthiest, and when the ancient Rule, although very far relaxed, had not yet become an object of common contempt, when the monks and friars had not yet quite fallen from their ancient reputation. The time chosen for this view of the monastic life is that before the Wars of the Roses, which greatly impoverished the Religious Houses and at the same time deprived them of novices. Just as the first incursions of the Danes emptied the Anglican and Saxon Monasteries, so the long Wars of the Roses called out the younger as well as the elder sons to the wars.