I should only confuse my readers if I dwelt more at length upon the buildings of a monastery. It is enough for the present that we should understand clearly that the essential buildings were (1) the church, (2) the cloister, (3) the dormitory, (4) the refectory, (5) the chapter-house. In these five buildings the life of the convent was carried on. Having said thus much we will pass on to the corporation itself--that which strictly was called the convent; and for convenience and distinctness it will be as well if we use that word _convent_ in the more accurate sense and employ it only as signifying the corporate body of persons occupying those buildings of which I have been speaking, and which in their aggregate were called a _monastery_. Once more I think it necessary to start with a caution. Not only do I propose to take no account here of that large class of conventuals which comprehended the mendicant order or friars as they are called, but I must needs pass by with little or no notice the various orders of regular canons-_i.e._, canons living under a rule. The friars came into England first in 1220. During the thirteenth century they were, so to speak, upon their trial; and from the first the monks and the friars were essentially opposed in the ideal of their daily lives. So with the very numerous houses of canons regular up and down the land. They and the monks did not love one another, and when I speak of monks and their houses it will be advisable to exclude from our consideration the friars on the one hand and the canons on the other, and, in fact, to limit ourselves to that view of conventual life which the great English monasteries under the rule of St. Benedict afford. At the time of the Norman Conquest it may be said that all English monks were professedly under one and the same Rule--the famous Benedictine Rule. The Rule of a monastery was the constitution or code of laws, which regulated the discipline of the house, and the Rule of St. Benedict dates back as far as the sixth century, though it was not introduced into England for more than a hundred years after it had been adopted elsewhere. Four hundred years is a very long time for any constitution or code of law to last unchanged, and though the English monasteries professedly were living according to the Benedictine Rule during all the Saxon and the Danish times, yet there is too much reason to believe that if St. Benedict could have risen from the dead in the days of Edward the Confessor and made a visitation of many an English house, he would have been rather astonished to be told that the monks were living according to his Rule.