We can imagine them
in the cells of Coxyde copying and copying for hours together,
or bending over the exquisitely coloured drawings which are still
preserved in the museums of Flanders.
But their most useful work was done on the lands which lay round
the Abbey. There were at Coxyde in the thirteenth century no fewer
than 150 monks and 248 converts engaged at one time in cultivating
the soil.[*] They drained the marshes, and planted seeds where
seeds would grow, until, after years of hard labour on the barren
ground, the Abbey of the Dunes was surrounded by wide fields which
had been reclaimed and turned into a fertile oasis in the midst
of that savage and inhospitable desert.
[Footnote *: Derode, _Histoire Religieuse de la Flandre Maritime_,
p.86.]
When St. Bernard was preaching the Crusade in Flanders he came to
Coxyde. On his advice the monks adopted the Order of the Cistercians,
and their first abbot under the new rule afterwards sat in the
chair of St. Bernard himself as Abbot of Clairvaux. Thereafter
the Cistercian Abbey of the Dunes grew in fame, especially under
the rule of St. Idesbaldus, who had come there from Furnes, where
he had been a Canon of the Church of Ste. Walburge.
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