In the first half of the 13th century English monarchism was at its best; the 12th century was emphatically the reformation age of British monarchism. All the many schemes for starting new orders with improved _Rules_, and all the efforts to improve the discipline of the religious houses and fan the fire of devotion among their members, assumed that the monasteries were then living institutions with vast powers for good; and institutions which needed only to be reformed to make them all that the most earnest and ardent enthusiast claimed that they ought to be, and might become. In the fifty years preceding the accession of King John, more than 200 monasteries had been built and endowed--some of them munificently endowed, and the only purely English order (that of St. Gilbert of Sempringham) had been founded, and in little more than fifty years could count no less than fourteen considerable houses. Englishmen believed in the monastic system as they have never believed in anything else since then; never have such prodigious sacrifices been made, never has such lavish munificence been shown by the _upper classes_ as during the century ending with the accession of Edward I. In the next hundred years they were chiefly the townsmen and traders, not the landed proprietors, who emptied their money-bags into the lap of the Begging friars. Certainly the great religious houses at the end of the 13th century had the entire confidence of the country, and it is impossible to understand the long reign of Henry III. unless we are fully awake to the fact that then, too, the monasteries were not only thriving and powerful, but were institutions on whose help and power the people leant with an assured confidence, because they were pre-eminently the people's friends. But between the old foundations which had a history and the new houses that were springing up in every shire, some feeling of jealousy and soreness was sure to arise. The old abbeys, with a history that looked back into a past all clouds and mist, but none the less glorious for that, affected a supercilious tone towards the mushrooms that had of late sprouted into vigorous life. A man need not be an old man who can remember when the Eton and Winchester boys at the Universities affected an air of contempt for all the 'modern' places of education, and disdained to number such institutions as Cheltenham or Clifton among the 'public schools.' These were all very well in their way, but where were their traditions? So with the older and grander Benedictine monasteries, with charters from Saxon kings, let alone anything else. Glastonbury, where men said two of the Apostles had built themselves a house of prayer, and where St. Patrick and St. Dunstan lay entombed; Canterbury, where Augustine, the English apostle, found a home; Malmesbury, where St. Aldhelm preached to the barbarous people, and when they tired of his sermon played to them upon his harp, and, anticipating Mr. Sankey, sang