reas in the smaller and more
remote monasteries a man might be scandalously ignorant, and yet gain
admittance as a brother of the house.

Between the highest and the lowest of that great army of monks,
dispersed through the length and breadth of the land, when English
monarchism had declined from its earlier ideal, there was as great a
distance as there is at this moment between the Fellows of Balliol or
Trinity, and the poor brethren of the Charterhouse, or the bedesmen in
the cathedrals of the old foundation.

In the first half of the 13th century English monarchism was at its
best; the 12th century was emphatically the reformation age of British
monarchism. All the many schemes for starting new orders with improved
_Rules_, and all the efforts to improve the discipline of the religious
houses and fan the fire of devotion among their members, assumed that
the monasteries were then living institutions with vast powers for good;
and institutions which needed only to be reformed to make them all that
the most earnest and ardent enthusiast claimed that they ought to be,
and might become. In the fifty years preceding the accession of King
John, more than 200 monasteries had been built and endowed--some of them
munificently endowed, and the only purely English order (that of St.
Gilbert of Sempringham) had been founded, and in little more than fifty
years could count no less than fourteen considerable houses. Englishmen
believed in the monastic system as they have never believed in anything
else since then; never have such prodigious sacrifices been made, never
has such lavish munificence been shown by the _upper classes_ as during
the century ending with the accession of Edward I. In the next hundred
years they were chiefly the townsmen and traders, not the landed
proprietors, who emptied their money-bags into the lap of the Begging
friars. Certainly the great religious houses at the end of the 13th
century had the entire confidence of the country, and it is impossible
to understand the long reign of Henry III. unless we are fully awake to
the fact that then, too, the monasteries were not only thriving and
powerful, but were institutions on whose help and power the people leant
with an assured confidence, because they were pre-eminently the people's
friends. But between the old foundations which had a history and the new
houses that were springing up in every shire, some feeling of jealousy
and soreness was sure to arise.