ds on the southern slope of
Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fish-ponds, the Frensham marshes
drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotes, all circled
the great Abbey round with the visible labors of the Order.

The Abbot's full and florid face shone with a quiet content as he
looked out at his huge but well-ordered household. Like every head of
a prosperous Abbey, Abbot John, the fourth of the name, was a man of
various accomplishments. Through his own chosen instruments he had to
minister a great estate and to keep order and decorum among a large body
of men living a celibate life. He was a rigid disciplinarian toward all
beneath him, a supple diplomatist to all above. He held high debate with
neighboring abbots and lords, with bishops, with papal legates, and even
on occasion with the King's majesty himself. Many were the subjects
with which he must be conversant. Questions of doctrine, questions of
building, points of forestry, of agriculture, of drainage, of feudal
law, all came to the Abbot for settlement. He held the scales of justice
in all the Abbey banlieue which stretched over many a mile of Hampshire
and of Surrey. To the monks his displeasure might mean fasting, exile to
some sterner community, or even imprisonment in chains. Over the layman
also he could hold any punishment save only corporeal death, instead
of which he had in hand the far more dreadful weapon of spiritual
excommunication.

Such were the powers of the Abbot, and it is no wonder that there
were masterful lines in the ruddy features of Abbot John, or that the
brethren, glancing up, should put on an even meeker carriage and more
demure expression as they saw the watchful face in the window above
them.

A knock at the door of his studio recalled the Abbot to his immediate
duties, and he returned to his desk. Already he had spoken with his
cellarer and prior, almoner, chaplain and lector, but now in the tall
and gaunt monk who obeyed his summons to enter he recognized the most
important and also the most importunate of his agents, Brother Samuel
the sacrist, whose office, corresponding to that of the layman's
bailiff, placed the material interests of the monastery and its dealings
with the outer world entirely under his control, subject only to the
check of the Abbot. Brother Samuel was a gnarled and stringy old monk
whose stern and sharp-featured face reflected no light from above but
only that sordid workaday world towa