souple, his hors in gret estat,
Now certainly he was a fayre prelat.
He was not pale as a forpined gost.
A fat swan loved he best of any rost.
His palfrey was as broune as is a bery."

Many were the efforts to reform the abuses which crept into the monastic
houses. Holy men grieved over the scandals of the times in which they
lived. Many monasteries remained until the end homes of zeal and
religion, and the unscrupulous tools of Henry VIII. could find naught
to report against them. The only charge they could fabricate against
one monastery was "that the monks would do evil, if they could."

The foundation of the various orders of monks shows the efforts which
were from time to time made by earnest men to revive the zeal and
religious enthusiasm characteristic of the early dwellers in
monasteries. The followers of St. Benedict and St. Columba were the
first monks of the western Church who converted the peoples of England,
Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia. The Benedictines had many houses in
England in Saxon times. In the tenth and eleventh centuries flourished
a branch of the Benedictines, the order of Cluny, who worked a great
religious revival, which was continued in the twelfth by the order of
the Cistercians, founded at Citeaux in Burgundy. Some of our most
beautiful English abbeys--Fountains, Kirkstall, Rievaulx, Tintern,
Furness, and Byland--all belonged to this order. In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries the new orders of preaching friars founded by St.
Francis and St. Dominic arose, and exercised an immense influence in
the world. They did not shut themselves up in the cloister, but went
everywhere, preaching in the market-places, and tending the sick, the
lepers, and the outcasts. At first they were immensely popular, but
the orders degenerated like their predecessors, and long before the
Reformation laid themselves open to the derision and the scoffs of the
more enlightened men of the age. Since the days of the Friars there
has been no building of monasteries in England. Wealth, luxury, and
corruption had destroyed the early piety of the monks, and rich men
preferred to give their wealth for the purpose of founding colleges
and hospitals, rather than in increasing the number of religious houses.

[Illustration: A MONK TRANSCRIBING]

We will now visit these monasteries, and try to picture them as they
stood in the days of their glory, and see the daily life which the monks
led. The rules of