Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/180

 humble but useful labours. And if human infirmities had gradually relaxed somewhat of its pristine rigour, infirmities are at all times too common to justify in us any excessive severity of censure. As no document exists alleging any grave charge against them, and as it is no uncommon thing for the innocent to be involved in the punishment of the guilty, we are at liberty to conclude, what it is far pleasanter to conclude than the contrary, that our canons fell a sacrifice to the general determination to suppress all conventual societies, rather than to any especial faultiness of their own.

But in the absence of any memorial of Michelham transactions, I may perhaps be allowed to present the reader with a lively picture of monastic life, applicable more or less to all such institutions, left us by Ælfric Archbishop of Canterbury, 994, and preserved in the British Museum, MS. Cotton, Tib. A. 3.

It purports to be a colloquy carried on in Latin for the purpose of teaching that language to Saxon boys, with an interlinear version in their own tongue. The interlocutors are a master and a young monk, accompanied by certain labourers and artizans attached to the monastery, who are all successively interrogated as to the nature and utility of their several pursuits. The novice in his part of the dialogue gives us a minute insight into the manner in which he spent the day and the discipline he was under.

Being asked what was his occupation, he answers, "I have professed the monastic life and sing every day, at the seven assemblies (synaxes) with the brethren, and am occupied with reading and chanting; but yet I could wish to learn how to reason in the Latin tongue." When it is further inquired what he had done that day? he replies, "Many things have I done to-day. In the night as soon as I heard the signal, I rose from my pallet and went out to the church and there sang the night-song (nocturnam) with the brethren, next we sang of all the saints and the matin lauds, after this prime, and the seven psalms, with the litanies and early mass, then (we sang) the third laud (tertiam) and performed the