before God each night, the other carried on the repeated recollection of the words of God every night which he had had to preach the following day to the people who had no faith. For Simon used to know the primer by heart through his wakefulness in prayer; he also knew the Psalter and the other prayers; he said them one after another through the night without a break, with readiness and devotion, and was not forgetful of his creator’s love and his commandments. And so, without doubt, he was on account of these things believed to please the Author on High, especially if what was reported to his secretaries by other servants of the bedchamber was true, nay rather because it was true. That is, \that/ every \that/ day and night he was dressed in a hair shirt, and his self-denial in food was of praiseworthy parsimony, his manner of clothing commendable; for ‘he did not exercise himself in great matters, nor in things too high for him;’¹ but among his household servants he was happy in clothes of russet-cloth; among the great men of the land, he was rarely in rich attire. In fact he was often dressed in a garment of bluet or burnet so that it might be less easily suspected that he was wearing a hair shirt underneath, talk about which had maybe got about among men, as he himself feared. Again, what may I say about his sparing self-denial—praiseworthy for one who lived among abounding riches and overflowing luxuries—except that his self-denial has to be compared to the very meagre subsistence of Simon Peter? And his clothing too ought to be compared to the Simon Peter’s humble garb, whose food was just bread with olive /\ ; and only rarely was it his practice to have bread with vegetables; and Peter’s clothing was only a tunic with a cloak, and these two were enough for him, as he himself would say. These things concerning Peter are to be had in the eighth book of the History mentioned above, towards the beginning of the book. Let us now see what kind of self-denial there was in Simon the knight. It should be known that self-denial is of this nature: it makes a habit of taking neither too little nor too much food, but always holds the middle way between the two, that is, between too much and too little. Since he did not consume either food or drink beyond his accustomed measure of frugality, Simon therefore deserves to be called frugal; this is drawn out of his behaviour, since he always rose early, and because of this he got into the way of saying Vigils, as it has been said, whereas those who slept along with him did not rise like that, but spent nearly the whole night asleep; but they all got up at different times, supplied with a full amount of sleep. Like Simon [Peter], our Simon did not feel the lack of a full amount of sleep. For Simon his sleep-requirement was small since \his/moderation was great and sparing at the same time. And so we find Simon compared to holy moderation, for in him temperance in sleep accompanied temperance in diet, as it is said by the most holy Bernard. We have shortly before this had an illustration of the moderation of Simon Peter; for, to continue the extract which I have already made from his own words, ‘We (that is, I and my brother Andrew), from the time that we were boys, were always in a state of poverty.’ Observe here, the moderation of Peter commences with the early dawn of poverty, which was afterwards adorned in the school of Christ