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in the fields collecting sweet gale, from which our infirmarian brother brewed a medicinal tea, or collecting thistle cotton, with which our sempster brother would stuff pillows (our geese and swans provided ample down, but such a soft luxury in a monastery dorter was unthinkable). Another day I might spend in dropping a frantically shrieking and flapping hen down one after another of the abbey’s flues to clean them out, and then taking the dislodged soot to our dyer brother, who would boil it with beer to make a good brown tincture for coloring the monks’ robes.
    As I grew older, the brothers entrusted me with slightly more responsible tasks. The dairy-house brother, Sebastian, pouring cream into two pannier tubs slung across the back of our old draft mare, solemnly informed me, “Cream is the daughter of milk and the mother of butter.” Then he set me atop the mare and had me jog her at a shambling fast walk around and around the barnyard, until the cream did indeed magically turn into butter.
    On the day Brother Lucas, a carpenter, fell off a roof and broke his arm, the infirmarian, Brother Hormisdas, told me, “The comfrey plant is named for the comfort and curing it provides,” and he sent me out to the fields to find and uproot enough of those plants to fill several bustellus baskets. By the time I brought them back, the infirmarian had laid Lucas’s arm in a sort of wooden trough. Hormisdas let me help him mash the comfrey roots to a mucilaginous pulp, then he packed that around the broken arm. By the end of the day, the pulp had dried hard, like gypsum. The trough was removed and Brother Lucas was able to get up and get about, wearing the comfrey cast until his arm knitted, and he was as good a carpenter as before.
    I always hoped mightily that I might be asked by our vintner brother, Commodian, to tramp around in the grape-pressing vat with his assistant monks, all of them barefooted but heavily clothed so their sweat would not drip into the juice. To me, that work looked more merry than wearisome. But I never got to try it; I was not heavy enough to have been worth the room I would have taken up in the vat. But I was able to work the leather bellows for Brother Adrian, while he forged sickle and scythe blades, billhooks, bits for the local people’s horses and rimshoes for any of those horses that had to work on stony ground. I was especially happy whenever I was sent afield to take the place of some peasant shepherd who was ill or drunk or otherwise incapacitated, for I enjoyed being by myself in the green pastures, and the herding of sheep is no backbreaking job. Each time, I carried with me a wallet containing (for myself) a cantlet of bread, a wedge of cheese, an onion and (for the sheep) a box of broom-jelly with which to daub cuts, scratches and fly-bites. I also carried a crook for grabbing any sheep that needed treatment.
    Except when I was afield, my work—like that of every monk—had to be planned and arranged to accommodate all our religious obligations, for our every day, week and year was most rigidly regulated. We rose in the dark each morning for the cockcrow office of Vigil. Then we (or most of us) took a wash before the sunrise service of Matins. After breaking our fast with a bit of bread and water came the first-hour office of Prime. In midmorning came the third-hour office of Terce. In late morning, at the fifth hour, we had the prandium, our one hot and hearty meal of the day, then performed the sixth-hour office of Sext. After that, unless work called, we were allowed the sexta nap or rest. In midafternoon came the ninth-hour office of Nones, and at sundown came Vespers, after which almost all the workers, except the brothers who had to tend animals, were free to take care of private business: reading, mending, bathing or whatever. At almost any hour of the day, though, if a monk had an unoccupied moment, he could be found kneeling and doing private, silent, lip-moving devotions,