The commissariat of a large abbey must have required administrative ability of a very high order, and the cost of hospitality was enormous. No traveller, whatever his degree, was refused food and shelter, and every monastery was a vast hotel, where nobody need pay more than he chose for his board and lodging. The mere keeping the accounts must have employed no small number of clerks, for the minuteness with which every transaction was recorded, almost passes belief. Those rolls I spoke of--the sacrist's, cellarer's, and so on--were, it must be remembered, periodical balance-sheets handed in at audit day. They deal, not only with pence and half-pence, but with farthings and half-farthings, and were compiled from the tablets or small account-books posted up from day to day and hour to hour. They give the price of every nail hammered into a wall, and rarely omit the cost of the parchment on which the roll itself is written. The men must have been very busy, or, if you prefer it, very fussy--certainly they could not have been idle to have kept their accounts in this painfully minute manner, even to the fraction of a farthing. * * * * * * * In the natural course of events, as a monastery grew in wealth and importance, there was one element of interest which added great zest to the conventual life, in the _quarrels_ that were sure to arise. First and foremost, the most desirable person to quarrel with was a Bishop. In its original idea, a monastery was not necessarily an ecclesiastical institution. It was not necessary that an abbot should be an ecclesiastic, and not essentially necessary that any one of his monks should be in holy orders. Long before the thirteenth century, however, a monk was almost invariably ordained, and being an ordained person, and having his local habitation in a bishop's diocese, it was only natural that the bishop should claim jurisdiction over him and over the church in which he and the fraternity ministered; but to allow a power of visitation to any one outside the close corporation of the convent was fraught with infinite peril to the community. Confessing their faults one to another, and asking pardon of the Lord Abbot or his representative, the prior, was one thing; but to have a querulous or inquisitive or even hostile bishop coming and intruding into their secrets, blurting them out to the world and actually pronouncing sentence upon them--that seemed to the monks an absolutely intolerable and shocking condition of affairs. Hence it seemed supremely desirable to a convent to get for itself, by fair means or foul--and I am afraid the means were not always fair means, as we should consider them--the exemption of their house from episcopal visitation or control. I believe that the earliest instance of such an exemption being granted in England was that of the Conqueror's Abbey of Battle. The precedent was a bad one, and led to all sorts of attempts by other houses to