232 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



officer, citizen in business, or workman, to enter the cloisters, 

 declaring that he would not consecrate to idleness subjects 

 that might be useful. 



To support now these throngs of people that assumed the 

 cowl, it was necessary for the monks to devote themselves 

 to agriculture and horticulture, and this they did in a most 

 successful manner. "It is impossible to forget," says the 

 great historian of the monks, "it is impossible to forget the 

 use they made of so many vast districts (holding as they did 

 one fifth of all the land in England), uncultivated and unin- 

 habited, covered with forests, or surrounded with marshes. 

 For such, it must not be forgotten, was the true nature of 

 the vast estates given to the monks, and which had thus the 

 double advantage of offering to communities the most inac- 

 cessible retreats that could be found, and of imposing the 

 least possible sacrifice upon the munificence of the giver." 

 Kings and barons vied with each other in their eagerness to 

 save their souls from hell and pave the way to heaven by 

 giving to these poor monks land the most desolate and un- 

 fertile, land no other human beings would inhabit, land cov- 

 ered with sand or rock or buried in water for the greater 

 part of the year. 



How man or woman born could live in such unwholesome 

 and unproductive spots and thrive seems absolutely mi- 

 raculous, but these patient toilers of the church surmounted 

 all the difficulties which stared them in the face, of begin- 

 ning the cultivation of a new country. 1 The forests were 

 cleared, the marshes made wholesome or dried up, the 

 soil irrigated or drained, according to the requirements 

 of each locality, while bridges, roads, dykes, havens, and 

 1 Montalembert, Monks of the West. 



