Founder’s kin, Benefactor’s kin sometimes helped; generally it was by private interest that lads were admitted as novices. The monks were not, as a rule, anxious to enlarge their numbers: rather to keep them down, so that the revenues of the House should provide amply for all. Sometimes admission was obtained by gifts or the conveyance of land. I have said that during the Civil Wars the number of monks decreased enormously; at Westminster it declined from eighty to thirty; at Canterbury from a hundred and fifty to fifty-four; at Gloucester from a hundred to thirty-six. This decrease was due, no doubt, partly to the disastrous influence of the War on rents; partly to the demand for fighting men; partly, I believe, to an increasing distaste for the monastic life. The child fortunate enough to be appointed was formerly presented in the Church as a novice; his parents first cut off his curls, offering his long hair to the Abbey. They then placed the chalice and the Host in his hand and led him to the priest at the altar. Here they wrapped his hands in the pall of the altar, and heard read a written engagement that they would not tempt the boy from the House. After this the Abbot consecrated a hood for the boy and laid it on him. He was then taken out, shaved after the fashion of the Order, robed, and brought back, after which he was received with prayers. It took long years to break in a novice, to teach him obedience, to crush his will, to take the fighting spirit out of him, and the love instinct out of him; in fact, if stories are true, the success of the system was often incomplete in every point. The novice had to sit in silence for hours, with down-cast eyes; he was never left alone to play at freedom; he had to do everything in a manner prescribed by rule, even the lifting of a cup at meals, even the carriage of the hands when seated; things had to be said in a certain form; services were frequent, and the singing of Psalms went on all day long and half the night. The Church ceremonies were involved and elaborate. By the time the novice was admitted he already knew every Function in the book, and all the Psalms and Prayers by heart. By this time, also, the House was all the world to him. What went on outside he knew not, the House was everything—father, mother, brothers and kin; he had no ambition except to rise to monastic honours. He had completed his education. If he were a Benedictine, that education was liberal: he was taught grammar, logic, Latin, philosophy, writing and illuminating, music, singing, and the history of the Order. After his profession, the Benedictine theory was that he continued his studies. If he did they were, in most of the English Houses, sterile of results. At eighteen the novice made his profession. There was then no retreat possible for him, he was a monk for life. At first he was a Junior, and as such he read the Gospel and the Epistle for the day; he carried a taper in processions; he read the