THE CIVILIZING WORK OF THE MONASTERIES. No less important than the Church and its clergy was the work of the monasteries and their monks in building up a basis for a new civilization. These, too, were founded all over Europe. To make a map of western Europe showing the monasteries established by 800 A.D. would be to cover the map with a series of dots. [13] The importance of their work is better understood when we remember that the Germans had never lived in cities, and did not settle in them on entering the Empire. The monasteries, too, were seldom established in towns. Their sites were in the river valleys and in the forests (R. 69), and the monks became the pioneers in clearing the land and preparing the way for agriculture and civilization. Not infrequently a swamp was taken and drained. The Middle-Age period was essentially a period of settlement of the land and of agricultural development, and the monks lived on the land and among a people just passing through the earliest stages of settled and civilized life. In a way the inheritors of the agricultural and handicraft knowledge of the Romans, the monks became the most skillful artisans and farmers to be found, and from them these arts in time reached the developing peasantry around them. Their work and services have been well summed up by the same author just quoted, as follows: It was mainly by the monasteries that to the peasant class of Europe was pointed out the way of civilization. The devotions and charities; the austerities of the brethren; their abstemious meal; their meager clothing, the cheapest of the country in which they lived; their shaven heads, or the cowl which shut out the sight of sinful objects; the long staff in their hands; their naked feet and legs; their passing forth on their journeys by twos, each a watch on his brother; the prohibitions against eating outside of the wall of the monastery, which had its own mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious domestic economy (Figure 38); their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor exalted and ennobled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice to heaven--these were the things that arrested the attention of the barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. [14]