nts since the Conqueror's ravages, or among
the swamps of Lincolnshire. A hundred and fifteen monasteries were built
during the nineteen years of Stephen's reign, more than had been founded
in the whole previous century; a hundred and thirteen were added to these
during the reign of Henry. In half a century sixty-four religious houses
were built in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone. Monastery and priory, in
which the decorated Romanesque was giving way to the first-pointed
architecture, towered above the wretched mud-hovels in which the whole of
the population below the class of barons crowded; their churches were
distinguished by the rare and novel luxury of glass windows, which, as
they caught the red light of the setting sun, startled the peasant with
omens of coming ill. Multitudes of men were busied in raising the vast
pile of buildings which made up a religious house,--cloisters, dormitories,
chapels, hospitals, granaries, barns, storehouses, whose foundations when
all else is gone still show in the rugged surface of some modern field.
Regular and secular clergy were alike spurred on in their work by jealous
rivalry. Archbishop Roger of York was at the opening of Henry's reign
building his beautiful church at Ripon, of whose rich decoration traces
still remain, while he gave scant sympathy and encouragement to the
Cistercian monks still busy with the austere mass of buildings which
they had raised at Fountains almost within sight of the Ripon towers.

We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the
founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms
and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of
these great preachers of labour. The whole water supply of a countryside
for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools
were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which
still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that
are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and
channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the
newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding
villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land
brought to the central storehouse. The new settlers showed a measureless
cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they
for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said t