When a monastery was in for a great fight with a bishop, it was a serious matter for both parties. But it was much more serious for the bishop than for the convent. The bishop had always his state to keep up and his many houses to maintain, and his establishment was enormously costly. His margin for law expenses was small; and I suspect that a bishop in England during the thirteenth century who had no private fortune outside his mere episcopal revenues would have been likely sooner or later to find himself in serious difficulties. On the other hand, in a great monastery all sorts of expedients could be resorted to in order to effect a salutary retrenchment--as when the monks of St. Alban's agreed to give up the use of wine for fifteen years, and actually did so, that they might be able to rebuild their refectory and dormitory in the days of John the twenty-first abbot. Moreover, inasmuch as a corporation never dies, the convent could raise very heavy sums on the security of its estates, and take its own time to repay the loans. A bishop could not pledge his episcopal estates beyond his own lifetime, and the result was that, in the days when life assurance was unknown, a bishop who had to raise money for a costly lawsuit would have to pay a rate of interest which would make our blood run cold if we had to pay it, or our hearts leap for joy if we could get it in these days of two and three per cent. The bishop was always at a disadvantage in these appeal cases; he stood to lose everything, and he stood to win nothing at all except the satisfaction of his conscience that he was struggling for principle and right. And thus it came to pass that the monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely shrank from engaging in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a deputation from the convent to watch the case as it was going on, and there was all the delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a trip, in fact, to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.