heir marrow-bones before them." But let us give the devil his due; and
let us not act worse by these Roman Catholics (who by the by were our
forefathers) than we are willing to act by the devil himself. Now then
here were a set of monks. None of them could marry, of course none of
them could have wives and families. They could possess no private
property; they could bequeath nothing; they could own nothing but that
which they owned in common with the rest of their body. They could
hoard no money; they could save nothing. Whatever they received as rent
for their lands, they must necessarily spend upon the spot, for they
never could quit that spot. They did spend it all upon the spot; they
kept all the poor. Beaulieu and all round about Beaulieu saw no misery,
and had never heard the damned name of pauper pronounced as long as
those Monks continued.

"You and I are excellent Protestants; you and I have often assisted on
the 5th of November to burn Guy Fawkes, the Pope and the Devil. But you
and I would much rather be life holders under Monks than
rackrenters...."

St Thomas Aquinas has told us that there were three things for a sight
of which he would have endured a year in Purgatory, not unwillingly:
Christ in the flesh, Rome in her flower, and an Apostle disputing.
Christ in the flesh, I would indeed I might have seen, and Rome in her
flower were worth even such a price, but for me an Apostle disputing
would, let me confess it, have little attraction. Instead I would that
I might see England before the fall, England of the thirteenth,
fourteenth or fifteenth century, England of my heart, with all her
great cathedrals still alive, with all her great monasteries still in
being, those more than six hundred houses destroyed by Henry, and not
least this house of the Cistercians in Beaulieu. And if I might see
that, I should have seen one of the fairest things and the noblest that
ever were in the world.

From Beaulieu I set out in the afternoon across the Forest, and at
first over the western part of Beaulieu Heath for Brockenhurst. The
road across the heath is not in itself of much beauty, but it affords
some glorious views both of the Forest and the sea. As I drew nearer to
Brockenhurst, however, I came into the woods, and the sylvan beauty of
the vale, through which the Lymington River flows southward, was
delicious. Brockenhurst itself is charmingly embowered and is
surrounded by some of the loveliest of the woodlands