The abbey lands were ever the best tilled; the abbey tenants ever the happiest, the best clad, the richest, and the freest of the peasantry of England. The monks, those of Saxon race especially, were the country curates of the twelfth century; it was they who fed the hungry, who medicined the sick, who consoled the sad at heart, who supported the widow and the fatherless, who supported the oppressed, and smoothed the passage through the dark portals to the dying Christian. There were no poor laws in those days, nor alms-houses; the open gates and liberal doles of the old English abbeys bestowed unstinted and ungrudging charity on all who claimed it. The abbot on his soft-paced palfrey, or the prioress on her well-trained jennet, as they made their progresses through the green fields and humble hamlets of their dependents, were hailed ever with deferential joy and affectionate reverence; and the serf, who would lout sullenly before the haughty brow of his military chief, and scowl savagely with hand on the dudgeon hilt after he had ridden past, would run a mile to remove a fallen trunk from the path of the jolly prior, or three, to guide the jennet of the mild-eyed lady abbess through the difficult ford, or over the bad bit of the road, and think himself richly paid by a benediction. In such a tranquil tenor had been passed the early years of the beautiful young Guendolen; and while she learned every accomplishment of the day--for in those days the nunneries were the schools of all that was delicate, and refined, and gentle, the schools of the softer arts, especially of music and illumination, as were the monasteries the shrines which alone kept alive the fire of science, and nursed the lamp of letters, undying through those dark and dreary ages--she learned also to be humble-minded, no less than holy-hearted, to be compassionate, and kind, and sentient of others' sorrows; she learned, above all things, that meekness and modesty, and a gentle bearing toward the lowliest of her fellow-beings, were the choicest ornaments to a maiden of the loftiest birth. Herself a Norman of the purest Norman strain, descended from those of whom, if not kings themselves, kings were descended, who claimed to be the peers of the monarchs to whom their own good swords gave royalty, she had never imbibed one idea of scorn for the conquered, the debased, the downfallen Saxon. The kindest, the gentlest, the sagest, and at the same time the most refined and polished of all her preceptors, her spiritual pastor also, and confessor, was an old Saxon monk, originally from the convent of Burton on the Trent, who had migrated northward, and pitched the tent of his declining years in a hermitage situate in the glade of a deep Northumbrian wood, not far removed from the priory over which her aunt presided with so much dignity and grace.