THE MONKS AS FARMERS 33 



lingered long. The same housewifely courses were followed by the 

 widowed Lady Berkeley, who administered the estates during her 

 son's minority in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and 

 died in 1564. At all her country houses she " would betimes in 

 Winter and Somer mornings make her walkes to visit her stable, 

 barnes, dayhouse, pultry, swine troughs, and the like." Her 

 daughter-in-law's tastes were different. She was a sportswoman, 

 delighting in buck-hunting, skilled with the cross-bow, an expert 

 archer, devoted to hawking, commonly keeping " a cast or two of 

 merlins, which sometimes she mewed in her own chamber, which 

 falconry cost her husband each yeare one or two gownes and kirtles 

 spoiled by their mutings." Well might the elder lady " sweare, by 

 God's blessed sacrament, this gay girle will begger my son Henry ! " 



Great ecclesiastics made their progresses from manor to manor 

 like the lay barons, and for the same reason. But in many instances 

 monks were resident landowners, and by them were initiated most 

 of the improvements which were made in the practices of mediaeval 

 farming. They studied agriculture in the light of the writings of 

 Cato, Varro, and Columella : the quaintly rhymed English version 

 of Palladius was probably the work of an inmate of a religious house 

 at Colchester ; the Rules for the management of a landed estate 

 are reputed to be the work of one of the greatest of thirteenth 

 century churchmen, Robert Grosteste, Bishop of Lincoln ; Walter 

 of Henley is said to have been a Dominican, and manuscripts of his 

 work, either in the original Norman French or translated into English 

 or Latin, found a place in many monastic libraries. Throughout the 

 Middle Ages, both in England and France, it was mainly the influence 

 of the monks which built roads and bridges, improved live-stock, 

 drained marshes, cleared forests, reclaimed wastes, and brought 

 barren land into cultivation. 



Large improvements in the mediaeval methods of arable farming \/ 

 were impossible until farmers commanded the increased resources f\ 

 of more modern times. There was little to mitigate, either for ^ 

 men or beasts, the horrors of winter scarcity. Nothing is more 

 characteristic of the infancy of farming than the violence of its 

 alternations. On land which was inadequately manured, and 

 on which neither field-turnips nor clovers were known till centuries 

 later, there could be no middle course bet\veen the exhaustion of 

 continuous cropping and the rest-cure of barrenness. The fallow 

 was un veritable Dimanche accords a la terre. As with the land, so 



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