114 SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 



visited his manor-house rarely, and then only in order to 

 consume its products, and whose periodical audit formed 

 almost the only break in the uneventful year of the medieval 

 peasant, the small farmers and peasantry were brought in 

 contact with no one of rank superior to themselves, except 

 perhaps the parish priest, when he happened to be resident, 

 and was not, as was very frequently the case, a pluralist who 

 resided at the court, or even abroad, and whose duties were 

 performed by some ordained monk from a neighbouring 

 monastery. 



We can indeed only guess at the condition of the upland 

 folk, and understand the power they had of procuring the 

 conveniences of life, from the price at which such objects 

 were accessible to the mass of the people. 



Nor do we know much more of the habits of those who, living 

 under a common roof and from common funds, represented a 

 vast and characteristic order in the centuries which preceded the 

 Reformation. There must have been, we know, some facili- 

 ties for study in the great monasteries, for we owe to these 

 establishments almost all that has been preserved from ancient 

 learning, and the greater part of the information which we 

 possess of political events. The Chroniclers were monks, 

 who, trained to some erudition, and living in establishments 

 which were frequently tenanted for a time by travellers, got 

 possession of such rumours and stories as were current, and 

 recorded among the events of the year, public occurrences, 

 absurd legends, and satirical rumours about the conduct, and 

 occasionally about the death and judgment, of popes, monarchs, 

 and nobles. It is true that the great mass of the monks was 

 occupied in acts of devotion, and occasionally in manual 

 labour, but there were persons among them who devoted 

 themselves with some success to letters. The chronicler, 

 that is, the lettered monk, becomes a rarer personage after 

 the Great Plague of 1348. 



Without accepting as certain the numbers given for the 

 students at Oxford during- the first half of the fourteenth 



