This brings us to an extremely important part of our subject. How much did the medieval peasant owe to the Churchman, and especially to the monk, as setting him an example of honest work, creating for him an improved agriculture; and reserving for the actual labourer his fair share in the lands won from the waste?

Manual labour is insisted upon in St Benedict's Rule. The Augustinians were no less definitely pledged here than the Benedictines, since St Augustine wrote a treatise on manual work for his disciples. The reformed Benedictines and Augustinian canons, of whom the best known are Cistercians and Praemonstratensians, made the return to labour one of the pivots of their reforms. The Franciscans sometimes began even as hewers of wood and drawers of water; they did their own housework and kitchen-work, just as the early monks had done. All this, as has been constantly pointed out, was very valuable in a society which, like medieval feudalism, still retained a great deal of the barbarian's contempt for steady work. Nobody doubts that the monk, in his earlier missionary stage, worked with his own hands, adding practical experience to superior intelligence, and that this is one of his most serious contributions to civilization. But, in post-Conquest England, and in the Europe of that time, only a very small fraction of the monastic population had remained at that missionary stage, or brought themselves back to that stage.