St. Gildas the Wise (A.D. 570) decreed, “If any one (that is, a monk) through drinking too freely gets thick of speech, so that he cannot join in the psalmody, he is to be deprived of his supper.”[218] No very severe penalty that; for he would probably be all the better for the abstinence. The year previously (A.D. 569), synods were held by St. David, and amongst the decrees we find the following, which refers to priests:—“He that forces another to get drunk out of hospitality must do penance as if he had got drunk himself. But he who out of hatred or wickedness, in order to disgrace or mock at others, forces them to get drunk, if he has not already sufficiently done penance, must do penance as a murderer of souls.”[219] The reverend author whom we are quoting explains that the Anglo-Saxon monasteries were sometimes villages or towns with many hundred inmates, many of whom were laymen, and to them he is disposed to attribute the drunkenness. Besides, of the monks he says, that after their days in which long fasting was joined to manual labour, “it is no wonder that, when the refreshment hour came, the beer got into the heads of some.”[220] Other very conscientious writers do not, however, endorse this view, and, as we have already said, they charge the monastic orders with great excesses. One of these says that in early Anglo-Saxon times both nunneries and convents were places in which the worst vices were practised. It was the fashion, he says, for nobles and others to purchase crown lands upon pretence of founding a monastery; upon which they made themselves abbots, collected a convent out of expelled monks (a proof that in some monasteries at least dissolute monks were not tolerated), and led a life perfectly secular, bringing their wives into the monastery, and being husbands and abbots at the same time. Nor were the nunneries, at least some of them, any better. The nuns of Coldingham are said to have spent their time in feasting, drinking, and gossiping. “They also employed themselves in working fine clothes, dressing themselves like brides, and acquiring the favour of strange men.”[221] Against such places the Anglo-Saxon synods preached and remonstrated. They forbade all the practices referred to, and advised the abbots and monks to set a good example themselves, to be vigilant against theft, and to inculcate reading both in monks and nuns; monasteries were not to be made the receptacles of ludicrous arts, of poets, harpers, fiddlers, and buffoons, such as we have described in connection with the festivals of the laity. “They were not to be houses of gossiping and drunkenness;” and “abbots and abbesses were to be chosen of approved life, not stained with the crimes of child-getting, homicide, or theft, but leading regular lives in their cloisters.”[222]