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all their lives long, and have sired innumerable “nephews” and “nieces.”
    Most of the monks of St. Damian’s were natives of the surrounding Burgund lands, but we also had numerous Franks and Vandals, several Suevians and a few representatives of other Germanic nations and tribes. All of them, on entering the abbey, dropped their Old Language names and took the Latin or Greek names of saints, prophets, martyrs or venerable bishops of the past—a man named Kniva-the-Squint-Eyed becoming Brother Commodian, and Avilf-the-Arm-Strong becoming brother Addian, and so on.
    As I have said, every monk had a job to fill or a daily labor to perform, and Dom Clement did his best to assign each brother to a duty that was as near as possible to what the man had worked at in the outside world. Our infirmarian, Brother Hormisdas, had formerly been the medicus to a noble household in Vesontio. Brother Stephanos, who had been steward to some great estate, was now our cellarius, in charge of all our stores and provisions.
    Monks who were literate in Latin became preceptores, copying scrolls and codices in the abbey’s scriptorium, while any who had some artistic ability illuminated those works. Brothers who could read and write the Old Language were made responsible for the chartularium, where were filed all the records of St. Damian’s, plus the marriage, birth and death rosters, the land deeds and contracts transacted among the lay residents of the valley. Brother Paulus, who was amazingly adept and swift at writing in both languages, was Dom Clement’s personal exceptor, scratching onto wax tablets the abbot’s dictated correspondence, as fast as it was spoken, and then writing the missives on vellum in a fine hand. Within our abbey grounds were herb and truck gardens, barns and yards containing poultry, pigs and milk cows, and those were tended by monks who had formerly been farmers. But the abbey also owned, both inside and outside the valley, extensive tracts of farmland, vineyards, orchards and pastures of sheep and cattle. Unlike many monasteries, St. Damian’s did not possess slaves, but employed the local rustics to till those lands and manage those herds.
    Even the dullest-witted of all our brothers at St. Damian’s—he was a poor lout whose tonsure topped a head that was very nearly conical—was given some simple tasks to do, and he did them with great pride and self-satisfaction. That fellow had previously been called Nethla Iohannes—presumably on account of the shape of his head, for that name meant Needle, John’s Son—but he had assumed the even more ridiculous name of Brother Joseph. I say “ridiculous” because no monk, cleric, monastery or church has ever been known to name itself after St. Joseph—that personage being considered, if anything, the patron saint of cuckolds. On Sundays and other holy days, our Brother Joseph had the job of shaking the sacra ligna, the loud wooden rattles that summoned the valley and village folk to services in our abbey’s chapel. On other days, Brother Joseph stood as a scarecrow in this or that field of crops and rattled the sacra ligna to drive the scavenger birds away.
    My own duties, when I was very young, were almost as menial as those of Brother Joseph, but at least they were numerous and various enough so that no job ever got too tedious. One day I might assist in the scriptorium, giving sheets of new-made vellum their final polish—this was always done with a mole pelt, because mole fur has the peculiar property of lying smooth in whatever direction it is rubbed—and then abrading the sheets with pumice dust to make their surface suitably gripping for the preceptores’ swan-quill pens. Oftener than not, it was I who had earlier noose-trapped the moles to get those pelts, and I who had collected the oak galls from which the pens’ ink was made, and I who had suffered painful nips and buffetings while plucking the quills from the swans.
    Another day I might be