Such ruffling of the peace and quiet of conventual life was, there is reason to believe, not uncommon. But inside the cloister itself there was not always a holy calm. When the abbot died there came all the canvassing and excitement of a contested election, and sometimes a convent might be turned for years into a house divided against itself, the two parties among the monks fighting like cat and dog. Nor did it at all follow that because the convent had elected their abbot or prior unanimously that therefore the election was allowed by the king, to whom the elect was presented. [Footnote: See a notable instance in Carlyle's "Past and Present."] King John kept monasteries without any abbot for years, sequestrating the estates in the meantime, and leaving the monks to make the best of it. Sometimes an abbot was forced upon a monastery in spite of the convent, as in the case of Abbot Roger Norreys at Evesham, in 1191--a man whom the monks not only detested because of his gross mismanagement, but whom they denounced as actually immoral. Sometimes, too, the misconduct of a prior was so abominable that it could not be borne, and then came the very difficult and very delicate business of getting him deposed: a process which was by no means easily managed, as appeared in the instance of Simon Pumice, Prior of Worcester, in 1219, and in many another case. Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to relieve the monotony which it has been too readily assumed was the characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent, was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look after them, it was assumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?