The student of English monastic institutions in the later centuries of the middle ages cannot afford to neglect the economic basis upon which the life of the monks rested. Whereas in an earlier period the black monks of the autonomous houses had taken little or no direct part in the exploitation of their estates, during the two centuries from c. 1200 onwards there was a very general tendency not indeed to work upon the land, as did the first Cistercians, but to direct and oversee the exploitation with interest and full responsibility. This direct intervention gave rise to a whole series of readjustments in the administrative and financial machinery of the monasteries, and determined the lines along which the lives of many of the ablest members of a community ran, giving to the outlook of the house and to the policy and occupations of its superior a character notably different from that of the preceding age. In other words, while in the old English and early Anglo-Norman monasticism the main care of the abbot and administrative officials had been to establish and secure the income, in money and kind, from their properties, in some such way as does a college bursar at the present day, and had only rarely undertaken the further task of directing the economic policy and supervising its execution, during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a change is noticeable; activities previously exceptional now appear more normal, and the monks become high farmers.