Note n — Chapter IX · [a] (continued 2)

"Of the Anglo-Saxon husbandry we may remark," says Mr. Turner, "that Domesday Survey gives us some indication that the cultivation of the church lands was much superior to that of any other order of society. They have much less wood upon them, and less common of pasture; and what they had appears often in smaller and more irregular pieces; while their meadow was more abundant, and in more numerous distributions." Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. p. 167.

It was the glory of St. Benedict's reform, to have substituted bodily labour for the supine indolence of oriental asceticism. In the East it was more difficult to succeed in such an endeavour, though it had been made. "The Benedictins have been," says Guizot, "the great clearers of land in Europe. A colony, a little swarm of monks, settled in places nearly uncultivated, often in the midst of a pagan population, in Germany, for example, or in Britany; there, at once missionaries and labourers, they accomplished their double service through peril and fatigue." Civilis. en France, Leçon 14. The north-eastern parts of France, as far as the Lower Seine, were reduced into cultivation by the disciples of St. Columban, in the sixth and seventh centuries. The proofs of this are in Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum Ord. Bened. See Mém. de l'Acad. des Sciences Morales et Politiques, iii. 708.

Guizot has appreciated the rule of St. Benedict with that candid and favourable spirit which he always has brought to the history of the church: anxious, as it seems, not only to escape the imputation of Protestant prejudices by others, but to combat them in his own mind; and aware, also, that the partial misrepresentations of Voltaire had sunk into the minds of many who were listening to his lectures. Compared with the writers of the eighteenth century, who were too much alienated by the faults of the clergy to acknowledge any redeeming virtues, or even with Sismondi, who, coming in a moment of reaction, feared the returning influence of mediæval prejudices, Guizot stands forward as an equitable and indulgent arbitrator. In this spirit he says of the rule of St. Benedict—La pensée morale et la discipline générale en sont sévères; mais dans le détail de la vie elle est humaine et modérée; plus humaine, plus modérée que les lois barbares, que les mœurs générales du temps; et je ne doute pas que les frères, renfermés dans l'intérieur d'un monastère, n'y fussent gouvernés par une autorité, à tout prendre, et plus raisonnable, et d'une manière moins dure qu'ils ne l'eussent été dans la société civile.