We may now pass from the general to the particular, and try to obtain such glimpses of actual recorded village life as shall enable us, little by little, to construct a coherent picture.

Let us take an abbey estate, as rather favourable, on the whole, to the peasant's well-being. Monastic charity was heavily counterbalanced by monastic conservatism; but the reader will probably conclude with me, if his patience will follow me to the end, that there was a slight balance of prosperity, on the whole, in favour of the peasant on Church lands; such a balance, perhaps, as there is nowadays in favour of government service. We will take, then, a great and famous English abbey like Glastonbury, with its many manors of varied soil, but more fertile than the average.

The abbot of this house was in every sense a great lord; and one of the latest of the long series, Richard Beere, drew up a terrier in 1516 which describes minutely four of his ten manorhouses and parks. He may, indeed, have had more than ten; the abbot of Bury had thirteen. With this wealth at his disposal, and this baronial dignity, he could do much even in the royal courts; for instance, abbot Whethamstede of St Albans notes in his memoranda how he expended, within a few weeks, something like £300 modern upon two judges and a sheriff.