St. Bernard, the holy abbot of Clairvaux, had been a great admirer of the Templars.

If he entered a monastery, he might pass from office to office until as a mitred abbot he would become the master of ten thousand acres, the counsellor of kings, the equal of that proud baron in whose service his father spent his abject life.

Many considerable abbots shared the same fate: Egelwin, Bishop of Durham, fled the kingdom: Wulstan, of Worcester, a man of an inoffensive character, was the only English prelate that escaped this general proscription

Slighting then the warnings of the elders, and forgetting that the heart is lifted up before a fall, he said respecting the letter he had received, "I wonder what has induced my lord Serlo to write me in this strain, for I really believe he is a worthy abbot and respectable old man.

Meanwhile the jealous abbot of St. Denis succeeded in establishing a claim to the lands of the convent at Argenteuil,of which Héloïse, long since famous not only for learning but also for saintliness, was now the head,and she and her nuns were violently evicted and cast on the world.

"My vow of poverty," said another of these lordly abbots,who generally rode on mules with gilded bridles and with hawks on their wrists,"has given me ten thousand crowns a year; and my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.

There was present every coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere abbots of misrule.

For when Robin Hood caught a baron or a squire, or a fat abbot or bishop, he brought them to the greenwood tree and feasted them before he lightened their purses.

Under his successors, St. Aidan and his friends went south to Lindisfarne to convert Northumbria in England; and the ninth abbot of Iona was the saintly Adamnan, whose biography of St. Columcille has been declared by competent authority to be the best of its kind of which the whole Middle Ages can boast.

The pious abbot of Aberbrothock Had placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock; On the waves of the storm it floated and swung, And louder and louder its warning rung.

Joyfully they proclaimed that St. Francis had saved the life of their sainted abbot.

" "Worn by the thong by which it was attached to the girdle of successive abbots through centuries," he declared.

Eustace, (Father), or "Father Eustatius," the superior and afterwards abbot of St. Mary's.

But his intellect was as remarkable as his piety, and his monastery became not only a model of monastic life, to which flocked men from all parts of Europe to study its rules, but the ascetic abbot himself became an oracle on all the questions of the day.