At this same time the juniors and novices with their masters were permitted with leave to go out into the garden and other places to unbend in games and such-like exercises proper to their age. In this way they were assisted when young to stand the severe strain of cloister discipline. Without the rational relaxation intended by such amusements, to use the simile constantly applied to these circumstances, "as bows always bent" they would soon lose the power of "aiming straight at perfection."
The monk, it must be remembered, was in no sense "a gloomy person." There is hardly anything that would have interfered more with the purpose of his life than any disposition to become a misanthrope. His calling was no bar to reasonable recreation. In fact, the true religious was told to try and possess _angelica hilaritas cum monastica simplicitas_. Thus at Durham we read of the greensward "at the back of the house towards the water" where the younger members of the community played their games of bowls, with the novice-master as umpire. On the stone benches, too, in the cloisters at Canterbury, Westminster, Gloucester, and elsewhere, traces of the games played centuries ago by the young religious may still be seen in the holes and squares set out symmetrically, and oblongs divided by carefully-drawn cross-lines. Sometimes we read of hunting, contests of ball, and other games of chance. Archbishop Peckham was apparently somewhat shocked to find that the prior of Cokesford, in Norfolk, at times indulged in a game of chess with some of his canons. In other houses he found that dogs were kept and even stranger pets like apes, cranes, and falcons were retained in captivity by the religious. It is difficult to draw the exact line by passing which monastic gravity is supposed to be injured, and so there was, no doubt, constant need for regulation on all these matters. But some such amusements were necessary, and by them, the tension of long-continued conventual exercises was relieved. The monastic granges to which from time to time the religious went for a change of scene and life were most useful in this regard and enabled them to recreate their strength for another period of service.