house to keep in with the mighty. Abbot Littlington of Westminster also kept greyhounds, and in 1368 offered the waxen Image of a falcon at the altar for the recovery of his best hawk. Bishops charged with visiting monastic houses made little attempt to correct this abuse. Indeed, if the abbey was in good country, they took the opportunity to hunt themselves. Some bishops and abbots conscientiously refrained from hunting: virtually all, as members of the possessing class, upheld the hunting laws, paradigms of the social system, In all their severity. In 1376, for instance, we find Thomas Hatfield, Bishop of Durham, on behalf of his friend Sir Philip Neville, ordering all clergy in his diocese to pronounce sentences of excommunication against those who had stolen Sir Philip's favorite hawk; and two years later he excommunicated the 'sons of iniquity, name unknown,’ who 'to the grievous peril of their souls. . . have stealthily abstracted from our forest of Weardale certain birds called Merlin-hawks in the vulgar tongue’. If the bishops would not enforce the canons, who would? By the thirteenth century, Benedictine abbeys had virtually ceased to be spiritual institutions. They had become collegiate sinecures reserved very largely for members of the upper classes. The abbot and his expenses took up about half the revenue; sometimes much more - at St Gallen in 1275 he took 900 marks out of 1042. New endowments had contracted sharply in the twelfth century. The abbeys, by and large, had now lost their pioneering economic role, and their incomes remained static. Hence there was a contraction in the numbers of monks. Christ Church, Canterbury, which had 120 monks in 1120, had less than 80 in 1207. The big German abbeys fell even more steeply, Fulda from 200 in the tenth century to 20-30 in the thirteenth and fourteenth; St Gallen and Reichenau from 100 to 10, or less. At the last, Benedict XII complained that ‘none are received as monks unless they are of noble birth on both sides of the family’. Of course such aspirants brought ‘dowries' with them. A place in a 'good' Benedictine monastery became very hard to get. For anyone outside the nobility it needed contacts, push and money. Full Benedictine monks were hardly ever working-class, and rarely middle-class, in the later Middle Ages. Numbers were kept low deliberately. Besides Canterbury, at least three other Benedictine houses had over 100 monks in the early twelfth century; by around 1500, Canterbury was still the largest with 70, but the six next largest had 60 or less - three under 50. Evesham, which had 67 in 1086, fell to 38 in 1416, and had 33 at the Dissolution. These monks had their own rooms, offices and servants. They lived like university dons or estate administrators. They hardly ever did manual work, and by the thirteenth century they found it increasingly difficult to keep up the full routine of services: there were not enough monks, and they had more mundane things to do. Attempts at reform, sometimes vigorous, came to grief on the fact that the Benedictine monastery had changed completely as an economic and social (and therefore spiritual) institution. There is a very full account of Mont St Michel, part of a survey of monastic property undertaken by Benedict XII in 1338. By this time the monks had moved out of highly concentrated domanial farming and were merely administering properties as rentiers. They might be busy, but they had lost their role. Of the ninety monks, fifty were scattered, usually in twos, to look after twenty-two priory estates. They lived like celibate country gentry, though comparatively cheaply, costing £40 a year each. The bulk of the monastic income, totaling £9,000 a year, went on the splendor and hospitality of the main house including £1,700 on food, £500 on clothing, £460 on repairs, £500 on taxes, £300 on lawsuits and £120 on fuel. The largest single item was wine: £2,200. By this time, the Benedictine ideal had disappeared almost entirely. Monks had private rooms, the dormitories having been partitioned. They took their meals in their rooms, the food being brought from the kitchens by the abbey servants. They entertained. They were paid stipends. Rules about silence and diet had virtually disappeared. They took holidays with pay at one of the abbot's country houses; or they went to stay with families and friends. Most of them were un-enterprising, upper-class parasites. It was almost impossible to reform them effectively. As Benedict XII had noted, ‘because of the power of their relatives, these monks cannot be restrained from unlawful acts, nor can they be compelled to observe the rules of the if