MONK AND NUN the monk, Nicolas Breakspeare, from St. Alban's Abbey and promoted him to be Papal legate at the Court of Denmark, which led eventually to his becoming Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever reached that dignity. The elevation does not seem to have improved his character, as his abominable cruelty to the above-mentioned Arnold of Brescia indicates. Eugenius, however, is not responsible for this, and at Gilbert's request he instituted a new order in which monks following the rules of St. Augustine were to live under the same roof with nuns following the rules of St. Benedict. Their distinctive dress was a black cassock with a white hood, and the canons wore beards. What possible good Gilbert thought could come of this new departure it is difficult to guess. Nowadays we have some duplicate public schools where boys and girls are taught together and eat and play together, and it is not unlikely that the girls gain something of stability from this, and that their presence has a useful and far-reaching effect upon the boys, besides that obvious one which is conveyed in the old line
"Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros;"
but these monks and nuns never saw one another except at some
very occasional service in chapel; even at Mass, though they
might hear each other's voices in the canticles, they were parted
by a wall and invisible to each other, and as they thus had no
communication with one another they might, one would think,
have just as well been in separate buildings. Gilbert thought
otherwise. He was a great educator, and especially had given
much thought to the education of women, at all events he believed
that the plan worked well, for he increased his houses
to the number of thirteen, which held 1,500 nuns and 700 canons.
Most of these were in Lincolnshire, and all were dissolved by
Henry VIII. Gilbert was certainly both pious and wise, and
being a clever man, when Bishop Alexander moved his Cistercians
from Haverholme Priory to Louth Park Abbey, because
they suffered so much at Haverholme from rheumatism, and
handed over the priory, a chilly gift, to the Gilbertines, their
founder managed to keep his Order there in excellent health.
He harboured, as we know, Thomas à Becket there in 1164,
and got into trouble with Henry II. for doing so. He was over
80 then, but he survived it and lived on for another five and
twenty years, visiting occasionally his other homes at Lincoln,
