=Summary.=--Town houses were often rebuilt, owing to the fact that fires were common, and townsmen had more money to spend on building. They consisted of a cellar of stone, a shop, a room or rooms above, and a big attic. All the work was done in the shop, and there the men and apprentices slept at night. The wooden fronts of these houses were often very handsome, and specimens of those built in the fifteenth century may be seen at Chester, Shrewsbury, and Ludlow. All the building of those days was not equally good, but some of the best has lasted. Wealthy townsmen were as well housed as kings and nobles. The poor were not crowded in the towns. It was a work of mercy to look after the poor, and the poor were kept very largely by the places to which they belonged. Strangers were not admitted into the towns, and so many wanderers were kept away. CHAPTER XXV LIFE IN THE TOWNS OF THE MIDDLE AGES 1. Disease was one of the great dangers always lurking in a town. Plague of some kind or other was never very far away, and it frequently made its presence felt. People had not realized the sinfulness of dirt. 2. The best-drained buildings were the monasteries and colleges. Near the ruins of every big monastery, from time to time, underground passages have been discovered, many of them big enough for a man to walk along upright, and leading nobody knows where. When these were found, people shook their heads and said: "Ah, those old monks; you don't know what they were up to. They made these secret passages, going for miles and miles underground, so that they might get in and out of the monastery, and be up to all sorts of mischief, without anyone being the wiser." 3. Many wonderful tales have been told about these underground passages; but, as a matter of fact, most, if not all of them, have turned out to be =sewers=, which the monks made from their monasteries to some water-course, so that the sewage might be safely carried away. The monks were usually in advance of the townsmen of those days in sanitary matters. No doubt a sanitary engineer of the present day would be able to point out how much better the drainage-works could have been carried out; but the monks set an example in this matter which, bit by bit, the rest of the nation began to follow.