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.
[o] Thus, in Marca Hispanica, Appendix, p. 770, we have a grant from Lothaire I. in 834, to a person and his brother, of lands which their father, ab eremo in Septimaniâ trahens, had possessed by a charter of Charlemagne. See too p. 773, and other places. Du Cange, v. Eremus, gives also a few instances.
[p] Du Cange, v. Aprisio. Baluze, Capitularia, t. i. p. 549. They were permitted to decide petty suits among themselves, but for more important matters were to repair to the county-court. A liberal policy runs through the whole charter. See more on the same subject, id. p. 569.
[q] I owe this fact to M. Heeren, Essai sur l'Influence des Croisades, p. 226. An inundation in their own country is supposed to have immediately produced this emigration; but it was probably successive, and connected with political as well as physical causes of greater permanence. The first instrument in which they are mentioned is a grant from the bishop of Hamburgh in 1106. This colony has affected the local usages, as well as the denominations of things and places along the northern coast of Germany. It must be presumed that a large proportion of the emigrants were diverted from agriculture to people the commercial cities which grew up in the twelfth century upon that coast.
[r] Ingulfus tells us that the commissioners were pious enough to favour Croyland, returning its possessions inaccurately, both as to measurement and value; non ad verum pretium, nec ad verum spatium nostrum monasterium librabant misericorditer, præcaventes in futurum regis exactionibus. p. 79. I may just observe by the way, that Ingulfus gives the plain meaning of the word Domesday, which has been disputed. The book was so called, he says, pro suâ generalitate omnia tenementa totius terræ integrè continente; that is, it was as general and conclusive as the last judgment will be.
[] This of course is subject to the doubt as to the authenticity of Ingulfus.
[t] 1 Gale, XV Script. p. 77.
[] Communi plebiscito viritim inter se diviserunt, et quidam suas portiones agricolantes, quidam ad fœnum conservantes, quidam ut prius ad pasturam suorum animalium, separaliter jacere permittentes, terram pinguem et uberem repererunt. p. 94.
[x] 1 Gale, XV Script. p. 201.