IN THE FAR PAST 9 



back to the establishment of religious houses for 

 the early fostering of the gardening art. 



From the very nature of its circumstances, the 

 monastery became the focus of arts and crafts as 

 well as of learning; and the mother-art of all 

 others is the art of husbandry. In the first days 

 of all, gentle hearts, and too often, alas ! maimed 

 bodies, wearied, sickened, and unfit to cope with 

 the fierce clash of arms and rapine and cruel blood- 

 shed of that savage age, longing for the peace and 

 rest denied by the world, fled to the only refuge 

 that was then open to them, donned the monk's 

 habit, and settled down in company with a few 

 kindred spirits to a life of rule and prayer, and 

 this, not seldom, in such poor dwellings as their 

 own efforts enabled them to construct. Here, in 

 the days before prosperity laid its withering finger 

 upon such communities, the best and holiest of 

 the brotherhood, in a daily round of prayer and 

 manual labour, looked upwards, and not in vain, 

 for the vision of God. In what better way could 

 men of this turn of mind employ their hours of 

 leisure than in making the barren acres which 

 fenced about their sanctuary to yield some fruits 

 of increase, while they endeavoured to instruct the 

 untutored churls in their vicinage, whose huts 

 clustered about the minster foot, in the tillage of 

 their land, and the softening of their rude manners. 

 By slow degrees, orchards took the place of tangled 

 brake and noisome marsh. Vineyards crept up 

 the sunniest slopes. Within the precincts of the 

 monastery itself, no longer by that time built of 

 wattle and daub as erstwhile, but solidly walled 



