He was also quietly enjoying the business in hand, which was, as they paced up and down between two beds of vegetables, to inculcate, in the kindest way, some much-needed common sense into the young novice who walked respectfully beside him.

People often came to Brother Adam for advice, because he was calm and clever, yet always approachable. He never offered advice unless asked - he was far too shrewd to do that - but it might have been noticed that whatever the problem, after a troubled person had discussed it with Brother Adam for a while, that person nearly always started to laugh, and usually went away smiling.

'Don't you ever rebuke people?' the abbot had once asked him.

'Oh, no,' he had replied with a twinkle. 'That's what abbots are for.'

The present talk, however, was not entirely comforting. Nor was it meant to be. Brother Adam had given it before. He called it his 'Truth about Monks' catechism.

'Why', he had asked the novice, 'do men come to live in a monastery?'

'To serve God, Brother Adam.'

'But why in a monastery?'

'To escape from the sinful world.'

'Ah.' Brother Adam gazed around the abbey precincts. 'A safe haven. Like the Garden of Eden?'

In a way it was. The site the monks had chosen was delightful. Parallel to the great inlet from the Solent water that lay to the east of the Forest a small river ran down, forming a small coastal inlet, about three miles long, of its own. At the head of this inlet, where King John had kept a modest hunting lodge, the monks had laid out their great walled inclosure. It was modelled on the order's parent house in Burgundy. Dominating everything was the abbey church - a large, early Gothic structure with a squat, square tower over the central crossing. Though simple, the building was handsome, and made of stone. There was no stone in the Forest; some of it had been brought across the Solent water from the Isle of Wight; some, like the best stone in the Tower of London, from Normandy; and the pillars were made of the same dark Purbeck marble, from along the south coast, as had been used in the huge new cathedral up at Sarum. The monks were particularly proud of their church's floor, paved with decorative tiles they had painstakingly made themselves. Beside the church was the cloister; on its southern side the various quarters of the choir monks; along the whole of its western side the huge, barn-like domus conversorum - the house where the lay brothers ate and slept.

The walled inclosure also contained the abbot's house, numerous workshops, a pair of fish ponds and an outer gatehouse where the poor were fed. A new and grander inner gatehouse had also just been begun.