We may disagree with Gibbon in seeing religion as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire but never-theless agree with him that the late Roman period saw “the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity,” that “the Church, and even the State, were distracted by religious factions,” and that “the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods.” We may deny that “the sacred indolence of the monks was undoubtedly embraced by a servile and effeminate age,” but it is clear that monasticism was a major issue from the fifth century onwards. We can also go further than Gibbon in emphasizing the economic impact of the rise of the Church. This would not be reversed until the Reformation and the subsequent secularization of ecclesiastical property. In a sense the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries mark the economic formation of western Christendom, and the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth its de-formation (and not just its Reformation). Whether the endowment of the Church in the sixth and seventh centuries meant any more than the transfer of property from secular to ecclesiastical hands is surely a question that needs to be asked. Did the exploitation of land change in the immediate post-Roman period because of the new clerical landlords? Or did Church property simply replicate the landholding of the secular aristocracy of the Later Empire, some of whose lands were scattered across vast areas, just as the holdings of the great monasteries and bishoprics came to be? Peter Brown has pointed to the rise of the managerial bishop, interested in model farming. Did such men change the economy? In the West, at least, we know a good deal more about ecclesiastical property in the seventh century than we know about secular estates three centuries earlier. From Merovingian St. Martin's at Tours we have an extraordinary accounting document that provides a glimpse of payments required from the peasantry. Can we just read back from the known to the less known? Or should we hypothesize some significant change? A priori, the need to feed large monastic communities and to provide them with light changed distribution and demand, if not production. A community of monks did not move, whereas a Roman aristocrat with a comparable spread of estates could have progressed, and no doubt often did, between the major centres of his or her property, as we know did medieval kings.