42 Malmeslury Alley in its Best Days. 



merits : for the world is really under great obligation to the monks. 



Now, as to their having too much land. It would not be difficult 

 to allege objections against any particular class of men acquiring a 

 preponderance in land. In the case of the monks more particularly, 

 there was this element of political embarrassment : viz. : that they did 

 not consider themselves subjects, in all respects, to the supreme 

 authority and government. But looking at the question merely as 

 one between landlord and tenant, one might perhaps say, that no 

 one could well have too much land who shewed himself a good land- 

 lord. Now, as landlords, the monks were, undeniably very good ones. 

 It is certain that their rents were low, their leases long, and their 

 fines moderate. Had it been otherwise, we should have not heard of 

 them what old J ohn Aubrey tell us : " The leases were almost as good 

 to the tenants as if they had been fee-simple : and perhaps lasted 

 longer with them, than if they had been their own. Sir William 

 Butler told me/' says Aubrey, " that Alton Farm had been held by his 

 ancestors from the Abbey of Winchester, about four hundred years. 

 The Powers of Stanton St. Quintin held that farm in lease three 

 hundred years, and my ancestors, the Danverses held West Token- 

 ham for many generations, of the Abbey of Broadstock." That 

 would not have been the case if the monks had been hard and exact- 

 ing landlords. Upon some of their estates, they held a certain 

 quantity of land in their own hands, farming it themselves for purposes 

 of maintenance. Indeed some of their lands were given to them for 

 some special and particular object of the kind : some to maintain 

 one office, others for another. There were lands for the abbot 

 alone : lands for the dispensary : lands for the kitchen. 



Again, we may judge by what remains of the buildings on their 

 estates that they certainly did not spare money in that kind of out- 

 lay. Many an old farm-house there still is within a few miles of 

 Malmesbury that belonged to the Abbey, which still shews solid 

 marks of its former ownership — stout rafters — church-like windows 

 — noble garden or orchard walls with heavy stone cappings : none 

 of your skimpy lathe and plaster houses, none of your fine painted 

 gates and gate-posts that rot in the ground before they have been 

 in it a dozen years : but the old monks used solid oak and massive 



