To dilate upon the various monastic orders, which were almost as numerous in the 13th century as the different religious denominations are in the 19th, would be out of place here. Suffice it to say that the English monasteries in Henry III.'s time counted by hundreds. But there were monasteries and monasteries. Some the homes of the scholar, the devout and the high-minded, the seats of learning and the resting-places of the studious and the aged, who hated war and tumult, and only longed for repose. Some that were mere hiding holes for the lazy and the incompetent, the failures among the younger sons of the gentry, who had not the power of pushing their way in the world, or whose career had been a disappointment. Such men, where all else failed, could get themselves admitted into some smaller religious house by the interest of the patron; sometimes bringing in a trifling addition to the common property, sometimes simply 'pitchforked' into a vacancy, it is difficult to say how. Then they became 'brethren' of the monastery, and sharers in most of the good things that it could offer; they were almost exactly in the same position as Fellows of Colleges were twenty years ago, holding their preferment for life, with this difference, that a Fellowship at the smallest College in Oxford or Cambridge always implied _some_ qualification for the post. A College Fellow, at the worst, must have had some claims to learning or culture; whereas in the smaller and more remote monasteries a man might be scandalously ignorant, and yet gain admittance as a brother of the house. Between the highest and the lowest of that great army of monks, dispersed through the length and breadth of the land, when English monarchism had declined from its earlier ideal, there was as great a distance as there is at this moment between the Fellows of Balliol or Trinity, and the poor brethren of the Charterhouse, or the bedesmen in the cathedrals of the old foundation.