This spirit of improvement, however, varied according to the different <g>Orders</g> of which the great monastic brotherhood was composed. To those who--in imitation of the <g>Baptist</g>--desired to limit their physical wants to a diet of “locusts and wild honey,” or to whatever the unaided hand of Nature might place within their reach, were content to consume their days in fasting and prayer. And observing--as he probably did--that whenever wealth and luxury had increased in religious houses, strict discipline had as certainly relaxed, the Monk of <g>Llanthony</g> appears to have preferred the desert to any of those “seductive landscapes” into which it might have been, in some degree, converted by means of industry and manual labour. He had also before his eyes the baneful effects produced by the luxurious indulgences of New Llanthony upon the minds of the absent brothers, whose piety, that had preserved its fervour amongst rocks and glens, became vapid and lukewarm when transplanted to the rich landscapes of the Severn. Where riches abounded, “pride and license did much more abound.” It was better to continue a poor but pious friar on the banks of the Honddy, than become a luxurious wine-bibbing canon in the Vale of Gloucester. The space, therefore, in which the most distant resemblance to ancient cultivation can be traced is comparatively small. It was, perhaps, under a strong conviction of great piety and great property being in their very nature antagonistic, that the “Province of Berkeley,” which the King had offered to the Canons of Llanthony, was so firmly declined. The vineyards, which it is understood were then common on the banks of the Severn, were not likely to fortify the mind against temptation, or reconcile the brotherhood to the abstinence and austerities of conventual life. But when he speaks of the tract as a “province,” we can easily imagine that, fertile as the native soil undoubtedly was, only a small portion of it was under cultivation; so that the annual revenue bore an exceedingly small proportion to its extent in acres. And so it was with the almost innumerable tracts of Church lands in every part of the kingdom; for until they were brought into cultivation and crop, their value was merely nominal. And how much is due to the skill and perseverance of the monks in the encouragement of agriculture? There is scarcely a hill or valley in the kingdom, from which their judicious exercise of plough, and spade, and mattock, did not produce its annual return in the necessaries of life. And hence the revenues, that in the course of years and centuries flowed in upon them, were the legitimate result of a liberal and vigilant economy. We are too apt to forget, whilst reckoning up the vast territories bequeathed from age to age to the church by penitent benefactors, that these same tracts were, in many instances, of little or no current value to their original owners; and