In the libraries, which composed the principal wealth of the religious houses, the _cartularies_ of the diocese were preserved with great care. The charters of institution, and the patrimonial titles of the chief abbeys, are both the proof and the reward for the services rendered to civilisation by the monastic establishments: one abbey was given a domain on the condition that it put the waste lands into cultivation; another received its lands with the understanding that it opened asylums and places of hospitality for the poor and sick, for pilgrims and for strangers; while a host of documents taken from the cartularies relate to the instruction of the clerks, the education of the novices, the splendour of public worship, and the duty of the ecclesiastical vassals when the suzerain raised the _ban_ and the _arrière-ban_, &c., together with all the details of monastic life which are connected with the various social movements of each territorial district (Fig. 247). Outside the abbeys there lived a population whose manual labour was necessary to their inmates, and profitable to the material interests of the house. Women, even when doing penance, and under religious vows, were strictly forbidden to enter the monasteries. The aged mother of an eminent monk, John of Gorze, unwilling to separate herself altogether from her son, took up her abode just outside the walls of his abbey, where she spent her time in making cloaks for the monks. It was around the abbatial close, perhaps beneath the shelter of a second walled enclosure, not so strong nor so high as the first, but still capable of resisting the attacks of the marauders which were so frequent in those days of feudal disorder, that were built the shops, the stalls, and the sheds which served for the sale of the crops, the cattle, and the agricultural and other produce of the abbatial domain (Fig. 248). On the anniversary of the festival of the saint to whom the monastery was dedicated there was a fair--sometimes several--which attracted large crowds.