nnales Cambriae_. These chronicles of course only became of
historical value when they become independent and contemporary. They
do not confine themselves to the monastery or local history, but
relate events of general interest--to the whole of Britain and to all
Europe--intermixed with notices of the burning of a monastic barn or
the death of the local abbot. Knowledge of the great world came to an
abbey through the travellers who stayed there; through political or
ecclesiastical assemblies held there; and through public documents
sent to the monks for safekeeping or to be copied. We generally do not
know who wrote these chronicles; they were rather the work of the
community than of the individual monks. "Every year (so runs a
regulation on the subject) the volume is placed in the _scriptorium_,
with loose sheets of paper or parchment attached to it, in which any
monk may enter notes of events which seem to him important. At the end
of the year, not any one who likes, but he to whom it is commanded,
shall write in the volume as briefly as he can what he thinks of all
these loose notes is truest and best to be handed down to posterity."
"Thus it was that a monastic chronicle grew, like a monastic house, by
the labour of different hands and at different times; but of the heads
that planned it, of the hands that executed it, no satisfactory record
was preserved. The individual is lost in the community."

Coming now to the Friaries in Wales, we find ourselves in a different
atmosphere. The friars were not troubled with questions of property:
they had none; they depended for their livelihood on the alms of the
faithful. Again, speaking generally, one may say that while the
Benedictine priory is found under the shadow of a castle, and the
Cistercian abbey in the heart of the country, the friaries were built
in the slums of the towns. As there were few towns in Wales, the
houses of the Mendicant Orders were not numerous or important. The
Dominicans (or Black Friars) had houses at Bangor, Rhuddlan, Brecon,
Haverfordwest, and Cardiff; the Franciscans (or Grey Friars) at
Cardiff, Carmarthen, and Llanfaes; the Carmelites (or White Friars) at
Denbigh; and the Austin Friars at Newport in Monmouthshire. It is
remarkable that the Dominicans had more houses in Wales than the
Franciscans; though the Franciscans--the mystic apostles of love--were
more in sympathy with the Celtic spirit than the Dominicans, the stern
champions of orthodo