No. 4.] MONKS IN AGRICULTURE. 15 



they had sowed, they had reaped in order to preserve their 

 lives. But now agriculture becomes a part of their religion, 

 and the great St. Benedict enjoins upon his disciples three 

 objects for filling up their time : Agriculture, literary 

 pursuits and copying manuscripts.* He comes before the 

 world saying : " No person is ever more usefully employed 

 than when working with his hands or following the plow, 

 providing for the use of man. ... He bent himself to the 

 task of teaching the rich and the proud, the poor and the 

 lazy the alphabet of prosperity and happiness." Agricul- 

 ture was sunk to a low ebb. Marshes covered once fertile 

 fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned 

 the plow as degrading. The monks left their cells and their 

 prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The effort was 



magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but de- 

 cs 



spised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and 

 poverty. So well recognized were the blessings they brought 

 that an old German proverb among the peasants runs, "It 

 is good to live under the crozier." They ennobled manual 

 labor, which, in a degenerate Roman world, had been per- 

 formed exclusively by slaves, and among barbarians by 

 women. For the monks, it is no exaggeration to say the 

 cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over 

 a whole country. The abbots and superiors set the exam- 

 ple, and stripping off their sacerdotal robes toiled as common 

 laborers. Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in 

 the Prologue to the ' ' Canterbury Tales " : — 



This noble en sample unto his scheep he gaf 

 That first he wroughte and after that he taughte. 



When a papal messenger came in haste to consult the 

 Abbot Equutius on important matters of the church, he was 

 not to be found anywhere, but was finally discovered in the 

 valley cutting hay. Under such guidance and such example 

 the monks upheld and taught everywhere the dignity of 

 labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy and 

 intelligent activit}^ of freemen, often of high birth and 



* Weishardt, " History of Monasticism." 



