Islip was only twenty-eight years of age and there were twenty-three monks senior to him in a community that numbered about fifty. It argues well alike for his personal popularity and for the esteem in which his administrative abilities must have been held by both Abbot and Convent that the choice for such high offices should have fallen upon him. Two attractive prospects were opened to him on his accession. As Monk-Bailiff he had separate apartments where his business could be transacted and where on occasion he could entertain friends. Accordingly we find in his diary for Sunday, February 10th, 1493, an entry which may be translated: _I was at the High Mass but I did not sit in the Refectory because John Butler of Warwickshire and Thomas Candysse dined with me in the Bailiff’s guest-room._ Still more alluring perhaps to one in whom the life of the cloister can never have stamped out the love of the open country was the necessary duty from time to time as Treasurer of making a tour of the various properties of the monastery. It is not surprising that this should have been found necessary in his first year of office. Acquaintance with these properties was certainly to be desired and there can have been no conflict between the call of duty which would take him again into the ways of men and the cloistered conscience which would shut him from them. St. Benedict himself indeed sanctioned occasional absence from the cloister so long as the Abbot’s leave was first obtained. The novice vowed faithfulness to the monastery of his profession but not complete or permanent seclusion within its walls, and if it be urged that such protracted absence as this of the new Treasurer would never have been contemplated by St. Benedict it might with equal truth be argued that St. Benedict could hardly be expected to foresee the acquirement of the scattered properties which made such absence necessary. In any case the Benedictine ideal of the monastery was the ideal of the self-contained family and would not be infringed in spirit at least by the necessary absence on family business of one member of it.