st any sacrifice or hope to see them witness without
disgust almost any enormity.

Moreover, the great monasteries were each severally tricked. The one
was asked to surrender at one time, another at another; the one for
this reason, the other for that. The suppression of Chertsey, the
example perpetually recurring in these pages, was solemnly promised to
be but a transference of the community from one spot to another; then
when the transference had taken place the second community was
ruthlessly destroyed. There is ample evidence to show that each
community had its special hope of survival, and that each, until quite
the end of the process, regarded its fate, when that fate fell upon
it, as something exceptional and peculiar to itself. Some, or rather
many, purchased temporary exemption, doubtless secure in the belief
that their bribe would make that extension permanent. Their payments
were accepted, but the contracts depending upon them were never
fulfilled.

When the Dissolution had taken place, apart from the private loot,
which was enormous, and to which we shall turn a few pages hence, a
methodical destruction took place on the part of the Crown.

In none of the careless waste which marked the time is there a worse
example than in the case of Reading. The lead had already been
stripped from the roof and melted into pigs; the timbers of the roof
had already been rotting for nearly thirty years, when Elizabeth gave
leave for such of them as were sound to be removed. Some were used in
the repairing of a local church; a little later further leave was
given for 200 cartloads of freestone to be removed from the ruins. But
they showed an astonishing tenacity. The abbey was still a habitation
before the Civil Wars, and even at the end of the eighteenth century a
very considerable stretch of the old walls remained.

Westminster was saved. The salvation of Westminster is the more
remarkable in that the house was extremely wealthy.

Upon nothing has more ink been wasted in the minute research of modern
history than upon an attempted exact comparison between modern and
mediaeval economics.

It is a misfortune that those who are best fitted to appreciate the
economic problems and science of the modern world are, either by race
or religion, or both, cut off from the mediaeval system, and even when
they are acquainted with the skeleton, as it were, of that body of
Christian Europe, are none the less out of sympathy with, o