An Abbot, chosen by the holy, is the elect of God.

The abbot was a very great noble, held his house "in chief" and sat in Parliament.

I swear by the Virgin that I have neither money nor food in my inn, and the good Father Abbot, who is starving upon my doorstep, will be witness to it.' 'Indeed, sir,' said the Capuchin, in excellent French, 'what this worthy man says is very true.

The Abbot and the Abbess are the subjects of the next two cuts.

When you came and showed me in a book that the last abbot of Marney was a Walter Gerard, the old feeling stirred again, and though I am but the overlooker at Mr. Trafford's mill, I could not help telling you that my fathers fought at Agincourt.

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 abbot of Monte Cassino was duke and prince, and chancellor of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

St. Antony the abbot is a favourite saint in pictures painted for the Augustine hermits.

At one time there were seven hundred Benedictine abbeys in England, some of which were enormously rich,like those of Westminster, St. Albans, Glastonbury, and Bury St. Edmunds,and their abbots were men of the highest social and political distinction.

It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in ample possessions, and their churches rivalled cathedrals in size and magnificence, and their abbots were lords and princes,the palmy age of monastic institutions, chiefly of the Benedictine order,that Saint Bernard, the greatest and best representative of Mediaeval monasticism, was born, 1091, at Fontaine, in Burgundy.

In 1535, on the eve of the Suppression, Battle Abbey was visited by the infamous Layton who reported to Thomas Cromwell that "all but two or three of the monks were guilty of unnatural crimes and were traitors," adding that the abbot was an arrant churl and that "this black sort of develish monks I am sorry to know are past amendment.

It then aspired to political influence, and the lord abbots became the peers of princes and the ministers of kings.

"By a vow of poverty and penance, by closing his eyes against the visible world, by the refusal of all ecclesiastical dignities, the abbot of Clairvaux became the oracle of Europe and the founder of one hundred and sixty convents.

It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in ample possessions, and their churches rivalled cathedrals in size and magnificence, and their abbots were lords and princes,the palmy age of monastic institutions, chiefly of the Benedictine order,that Saint Bernard, the greatest and best representative of Mediaeval monasticism, was born, 1091, at Fontaine, in Burgundy.

During this period of prosperity, when the vast abbey churches were built, and when abbots were great temporal as well as spiritual magnates, quite on an equality with the proudest feudal barons, we notice a marked decline in the virtues which had extorted the admiration of Europe.

Their abbots became great personages, being chosen from the ranks of princes and barons.