We may gain some faint idea of the amazing stir and industry which the founding of these monasteries implied by following in our modern farms and pasture lands the traces which may even now be seen of the toil of these great preachers of labour.  The whole water supply of a countryside for miles round was gathered up by vast drainage works; stagnant pools were transformed into running waters closed in by embankments, which still serve as ditches for the modern farmer; swamps were reclaimed that are only now preserved for cultivation by maintaining the dykes and channels first cut by medieval monks; mills rose on the banks of the newly-created streams; roads were made by which the corn of surrounding villages might be carried to the central mill and the produce of the land brought to the central storehouse.  The new settlers showed a measureless cunning and industry in reclaiming worthless soil; and so eager were they for land at last, that the Cistercians were even said to desecrate churchyards, and to encroach on the borders of royal forests.  They grew famous for the breeding of horses according to the exacting taste of the day, learned in the various species of palfreys and sumpter horses and knight’s chargers and horses for ambling or for trotting.  They thanked Heaven for the “blessings of fatness and fleeces,” as foreign weavers sought their wool and the gold of Flanders was poured into their treasure-houses.  The same enterprise and energy which in modern days made England the first manufacturing country of the world was then, in fact, fast pressing her forward to the place which Australia now holds towards modern Europe,—­the great wool-growing country, the centre from whence the raw material for commerce was supplied.  In vain the Church by its canons steadily resisted the economic changes of a time when wealth began to gather again and capital found new uses, and bitterly as it declaimed against usury and mortgages, angry complaints still increased “that many people laying aside business practised usury almost openly.”

Nor were the towns behindhand in activity.  As yet, indeed, the little boroughs were for the most part busy in fighting for the most elementary of liberties—­for freedom of trade within the town, for permission to hold a market, for leave to come and go freely to some great fair, for the right to buy and sell in some neighbouring borough, for liberty to carry out their own justice and regulate the affairs of their town.  They were buying from the lord, in whose “demesne” they lay, permission to gather wood in the forest, right of common in its pasture, the commutation of their services in harvest-time for “reap-silver,” and of their bondage to the lord’s mill for “multure-penny.”  Or they were fighting a sturdy battle with the king’s justices to preserve some ancient privilege, the right of the borough perhaps to “swear by itself,”—­that is, to a jury of its own or its freedom from the general custom of “frank-pledge.”  As trade