In the thirteenth century (and I shall as much as possible confine myself to the limits of that period), a monastery meant what we now understand it to mean--viz., the abode of a society of men or women who lived together in common--who were supposed to partake of common meals; to sleep together in one common dormitory; to attend certain services together in their common church; to transact certain business or pursue certain employments in the sight and hearing of each other in the common cloister; and, when the end came, to be laid side by side in the common graveyard, where in theory none but members of the order could find a resting-place for their bones. When I say "societies of men and women" I am again reminded that the other term, "convent," has somehow got to be used commonly in a mistaken sense. People use the word as if it signified a religious house tenanted exclusively by women. The truth is that a convent is nothing more than a Latin name for an association of _persons_ who have _come together_ with a view to live for a common object and to submit to certain rules in the ordering of their daily lives. The monastery was the common dwelling-place: the convent was the society of persons inhabiting it; and the ordinary formula used when a body of monks or nuns execute any corporate act--such as buying or selling land--by any legal instrument is, "The Prior and Convent of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity at Norwich;" "the Abbot and Convent of the Monastery of St. Peter's, Westminster;" "the Abbess and Convent of the Monastery of St. Mary and St. Bernard at Lacock," and so on. Bearing in mind, then, that the term convent has to do with a corporation of men or women united into an organized society, and that the term monastery can strictly be applied only to the buildings--the _domus_, in which that society has its home--it will be well at starting that we should endeavour to gain some notion of the general plan of these buildings first, and when we have done that that we should proceed to deal next with the constitution of the society itself and the daily routine of conventual life.