From it we find that certain officers (obedientiaries was their technical name) were charged with providing certain articles out of the revenue of the office. The prior, to whom no mean share of the revenues was assigned, had to provide the parchment that might be required for business purposes or for legal instruments and all other materials for the scriptorium, except ink. The manciple was to pro-vide all wine and mead, the keeping up the stock of earthenware cups, jugs, basins, and other vessels, together with the lamps and oil. The precentor had to find all the ink used, and all colour required for illumination, the materials for book-binding, and the keeping the organ in repair. To the chamberlain were assigned certain revenues for providing all the clothing of the monks, it being stipulated that the abbot's dress was not to be paid for out of the fund. In the same way certain small tithes are apportioned for buying basins, jugs, and towels for the guests' chamber; while all rents levied from the various tenants paid not in money, but in kind--as, _e.g_., capons, eggs, salmon, eels, herrings, &c.--were to be passed to the account of the kitchener. Every monk bearing office was bound to present his accounts for audit at regular intervals, and the rolls on which these accounts were inscribed exist in very large numbers, and may still be consulted by those who are able to read them. It looks as if it were the policy of the Benedictines to give as many monks as possible some special duty and responsibility--to give each, in fact, a personal interest in the prosperity of the house to which he belonged--and the vacancies occurring from time to time in the various offices gave everybody something to look forward to. There was room for ambition, and, I am bound to add, room for a good deal of petty scheming, on the one hand, and truckling to the abbot, on the other; but it all went towards relieving the monotony of the life in the cloister--a monotony which has been very much over-stated by those who have never studied the subject. To begin with, it does not follow that what would be very dull to us would be dull and insipid to the men of the thirteenth century. Before a man offered himself for admission to a monastery, he must have had a taste for a quiet life, and in many instances he had grown tired of the bustle, the struggle, and all the anxious wear of the work-day world. He wanted to be rid of _bothers_, in fact; he was pretty sure to have had a fair education, and he was presumably a religious man, with a taste for religious exercises; sometimes, and not unfrequently, he was a disappointed man, who had been left wifeless and childless; sometimes, too, he was one whose career had been cut short suddenly by some accident which incapacitated him for active exertion and made him long only for repose and obscurity. Moreover, in those distant times the instinct of devotion was incomparably stronger than it is now, and people found a real and