Agriculture was greatly improved in England under the early civilizers of the Anglo-Norman race. Immediately after the conquest, many thousand husbandmen, from the fertile plains of Flanders and Normandy, obtained farms, and employed the same methods of cultivation which had proved so successful in their native country. The ecclesiastics rivaled the secular ranks in this noble work. It was so much the custom of the monks to assist in open fields, especially at seed-time, the hay season, and harvest, that the famous á Becket, even after he was Archbishop of Canterbury, used to sally out with the inmates of the convents, and take part with them in all rural occupations. It was decreed by the General Council of Lateran, that "all presbyters, clerks, monks, converts, pilgrims, and peasants, when they are engaged in the labors of husbandry, shall, together with the cattle in their plows, and the seed which they carry into the field, enjoy perfect security; and that all who molest and interrupt them, if they do not desist when they have been admonished, shall be excommunicated." Nearly all the finest garden-lands in England were redeemed from the worst natural condition by the sagacious and industrious Benedictine religionists. The science they applied in cathedral building is wonderful to the wisest engineers of our own age, and their taste in landscape-gardening has ever been the best in the world. Their ruined abbeys stand in the loveliest positions, and all their great churches, and colleges, unlike the continental, are encompassed by trees, and exquisitely decorated grounds. Ingulfus, abbot of Croyland, supplies an early and characteristic instance of this general disposition. Richard de Rules, director of Deeping, he tells us, being fond of agriculture, obtained permission to inclose a large portion of marsh, for the purpose of separate pasture, excluding the Welland by a strong dike, upon which he erected a town, and rendered those stagnant fens a garden of Eden. Others followed their example, and divided the marshes among them; when some converting them to tillage, some reserving them for meadow, others leaving them in pasture, found a rich soil for every purpose.