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 the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to give your land to the saints. But this meant that you neglected your worldly duties, such as defending your country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place, that the best thing they could do was to get out of it as quickly as possible. The Popes of Rome, who had about this time made themselves supreme heads of all Western Christendom, encouraged this view; and the monks were always devoted servants of the Popes. But there were other priests who were not monks, and these usually served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly grew up in England; they were always rather jealous of the monks.

Human love and common sense were too strong to be taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this more intelligently than most people; and so the monasteries became very rich. I think it is to the monks that we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers. And also our love of fishing; the Church said you were to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on other ‘fast-days’, and so every monastery, however far from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old monks, in their thick black woollen frocks with their sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I hope they were always strictly truthful as to the size of the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks