The Monks and their Missionmy Work 351 carelessly, with little heart and less understanding. But, with the The monks great loss of manuscripts due to the destruction of libraries and preserve the the general lack of interest in books, it was most essential that ^^^^" authors new copies should be made. Even poor and incorrect ones were better than none. Almost all the books written by the Romans disappeared altogether during the Middle Ages, but from time to time a monk would copy out the poems of Virgil, Horace, or Ovid, or the speeches of Cicero. In this way some of the chief works of the Latin writers have continued to exist down to the present day. The monks regarded good hard work as a great aid to salva- The monks tion. They set the example of careful cultivation of the lands materS de^- about their monasteries and in this way introduced better farm- yeiopment of ■' Europe ing methods into the regions where they settled. They enter- tained travelers at a time when there were few or no inns and so increased the intercourse between the various parts of Europe. The Benedictine monks were ardent and faithful supporters The " regu- of the papacy. The Church, which owes much to them, ex- "secular" tended to them many of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy. *='^gy Indeed, the monks were reckoned as clergymen and were called the " regular " clergy, because they lived according to a regida, or rule, to distinguish them from the " secular " clergy, who con- tinued to live in the world {saeculum) and did not take the monastic vows described above. The home which the monks constructed for themselves was Arrangement called a monastery or abbey. This was arranged to meet their astery particular needs and was usually at a considerable distance from any town, in order to insure solitude and quiet.-^ It was mod- eled upon the general plan of the Roman country house. The buildings were arranged around a court, called the doister. On The cloister all four sides of this was a covered walk, which made it possible to reach all the buildings without exposing one's self to either the rain or the hot sun. Not only the Benedictines but all the orders which sprang up in later centuries arranged their homes in much the same way. 1 Later monasteries were sometimes built in towns, or just outside the walls.
