Sometimes it is said contemptuously that the monks of the Middle Ages chose beautiful sites on which to found luxurious homes. Certainly they selected as a rule the neighbourhood of rivers and lakes, water being a prime necessity of life, and in such neighbourhoods raised chapels and monasteries that have become the architectural wonder of the world. Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a reclaimed marsh, and it was the labour of the followers of St. Benedict that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms.
Where the barbarian or feudal anarchist burned and destroyed, the monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pasturage or tillage; and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his obligation to God, so from the produce of his labours he provided for the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister schools supplied the ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries were centres of mediaeval life, not, like the castles, of death. In his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian; the copyist reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts; the illuminator made careful pictures of his day; the chemist concocted strange healing medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colours.
‘Good is it for us to dwell here, where man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more quickly, treads more cautiously, rests more securely, is absolved more easily, and rewarded more plenteously.’ This is the saying of St. Bernard, one of the later monastic reformers; and his ideal was the general conception of the best life possible as understood in the Middle Ages. To the monasteries flocked the devout seeking a home of prayer; but also the student or artist unable to follow his bent in the turbulent world, and the man who despised or feared the atmosphere of war. Even the feudal baron would pause in his quarrels to make some pious gift to abbey or priory, a tribute to a faith he admired but was too weak to practise. Sometimes he came in later life, a penitent who, toiling like his serf, sought in the cloister the salvation of his soul. ‘In the monasteries,’ says a mediaeval German, ‘one saw Counts cooking in the kitchen and Margraves leading their pigs out to feed.’