GREGORY THE GREAT 163 scripts; their main business was prayer, praise, and devo- tion; but they usually did their other work well, since they did it not for a lord, but for the Lord. The Rule did not I explicitly encourage monks to engage in literary or artistic jwork; it merely prescribed a good deal of hard manual labor
- and a little reading. Cassiodorus, however, had in his old
age, at about the time of Benedict's death, established a monastery to which he gave his own large library and where the monks gave much time to study and the copying of manuscripts. And as time went on many Benedictine monks i devoted more time to such pursuits and less to outdoor work than their Rule prescribes. The abbot, who was I usually a man of superior training and intellect, would em- ploy the best methods of agriculture and husbandry upon his estates, or see to it that intelligent copying and painting were done in his scriptorium. Thus the monks did better agricultural and industrial work than most laymen in the world about them, and, while at first they did not do much educational or literary work, they did much more than any one else at that time. The monks were, therefore, of great importance in the economic and intellectual development of the early Middle Ages. Almost the only records of real- estate and business transactions which have come down to us from that time are those of the monasteries, which, it is true, outlived most private houses and families, but whose abbots would seem to have been more systematic business men than their contemporaries. Almost the only records of contemporary events that we have for the period are the monastic annals and chronicles. They are meager and unsatisfactory records — a sentence or two per year where to-day we have a huge file of three hundred and sixty- five newspapers. But if we can scarcely call the monk- ish chronicler a journalist, he was at any rate the only annalist that the age knew. Besides, society had grown stagnant and there was probably not much more to re- cord in a whole year then than happens in the course of a modern day. The monks were preeminently the missionaries of the
