No More Learning

William modelled his
reform directly upon Cluniac principles; Ulrich's edition of the custonis
of Cluny, compiled at his request, was dedicated to him; some of his
monks were sent to Cluny to learn regular observance, and the customs
OH. XX.


## p. 664 (#710) ############################################

664
Odilo of Cluny
of Hirschau were compiled from their report. The German congregation,
however, owed no allegiance to the monastery to which it was thus in-
debted. Similarly, the reform of Farfa, achieved by the Abbot Hugh
whose purchase of his office in 997 was the unpromising beginning of a
praiseworthy career, followed the Cluniac methods which the monastery
had rejected at an earlier date. The customs of Farfa, compiled shortly
after Hugh's death in 1039, belong, like the Ordo Cluniacensis of Bernard
and Ulrich's Antiquiores Consuetudines, to the main group of authorities
for Cluniac practice, and include a most valuable description of the
arrangements of a model Cluniac monastery. But Farfa remained out-
side the Cluniac order.
Odilo's rule at Cluny was distinguished by the intensive application
of Cluniac customs to a congregation of dependent houses. Roving
commissions to administer the affairs of foreign monasteries became less
frequent; we hear more, on the other hand, of gifts of monasteries to
Cluny, which were affiliated directly to her as their parent and mistress.
The biographer of Odilo enumerates some of the principal churches
which he ruled and enriched with possessions, buildings, and ornaments-
Payerne and Romainmôtier in the diocese of Lausanne, Saint-Victor at
Geneva, Charlieu and Ambierle near Lyons, Ris, Sauxillanges, Souvigny,
la Ferté-Hauterive, and Saint-Saturnin in Auvergne, the priory founded
by Mayeul at Pavia, and la Voulte-sur-Rhône, founded by Odilo himself
in the last years of his life. He adorned the cloister of Cluny with
marble columns, shipped from distant places down the Durance and the
Rhône, so that he was wont to boast that he had found Cluny of wood
and left it of marble.
It may be said with equal truth that he left Cluny, hitherto merely a
spiritual power among Benedictine houses, the head of an order, as distinct
from a mere congregation of monasteries, within the Benedictine system.
Each house of the order owed absolute obedience to the sovereign abbot.
Odo had acquired for Cluny the privilege of exemption from any authority
but that of the Pope. Her priories, members of the mother-house and
incapable of independent action apart from her, were similarly exempt
from control by diocesan bishops or secular princes; in whatever country
they were founded, they were subjects of Cluny, amenable only to the
decrees of the annual chapter at which the priors of the order were
gathered together under the presidency of the abbot. The title of abbot,
accorded to the head of an old house like Vézelay, which had been drawn
within the Cluniac system, did not imply independence of the central
government. Certain houses had an honorary pre-eminence, la-Charité-
sur-Loire, Saint-Martin-des-Champs at Paris, Souvigny and Sauxil-
langes, and Lewes, the first Cluniac foundation in England, established
in 1077. For visitatorial purposes, the order was divided into ten
provinces, for each of which two visitors and other officers were appointed
at the general chapter. The provincial organisation, however, did


## p. 665 (#711) ############################################

Cluny and the Papacy
665
not imply local autonomy; the visitors were responsible to the central
autocracy.
This constitutional machinery was perfected during the long rule of
Odilo's successor Hugh (1049–1109). His abbacy, glorious as it was in
the continual addition of monasteries to the order and in the foundation
of the splendid abbey church of Cluny for the 300 or 400 monks for
whom the old buildings were insufficient, was in some respects the turn-
ing-point of the history of the Cluniac movement. It covered the period
of the struggle between the Emperor Henry IV and the Papacy which
his father had taken action to reform. In this conflict Cluny was naturally
in sympathy with the Pope. Its exemption from local authority made a
strong Papacy essential to its undisturbed existence. Its early success
had been largely due to its geographical position in a district little af-
fected by the strife of the last days of the Carolingian Empire. But,
with the spread of the order over Europe, and with the growth of the
spirit of nationality, the safeguard of its central authority was, more than
in earlier times, the protection of the supreme spiritual power. On the
other hand, while the Papacy was menaced by the power which had re-
stored it, Cluny was surrounded by enemies of the reforms demanded by
Gregory VII. It is hardly surprising that its abbot preferred a cautious
neutrality to a whole-hearted espousal of the cause of Gregory, and to
the consequent risk of provoking the active enmity of Henry IV and the
prelates whose jealousy of Cluniac privileges was ready to take advantage
of Cluniac weakness. Tradition, founded upon the supposed association
of Hildebrand with Cluny, has represented the order as a chief instru-
ment of the policy which, as Pope, he sought to carry out. We may
assume with justice that he looked for support to the great influence of
the abbot. He found friendship and consolation; the fulness with which
he poured out the anxieties of his heart in his letters to Hugh admits of
no other interpretation of their spirit. But with these confidences was
mingled a tone of impatient reproach which shews that Hugh's regard for
him did not go to the length of overt action. The voice of the abbot was
not heard in the Pope's synods; Cluny was unprepared to throw its
weight into the scales upon his side. As Gregory complained, there were
occasions when the abbot's holiness shunned trouble, and when he was
slothful in answering the demands of serious business.
The days of Cluniac reform, in fact, were numbered with the settled
organisation of the Cluniac order. In a monastery which had increased
in power and riches, the mistress of some two hundred priories, piety might
still be found and the opus Dei still flourish; but its missionary energy
had been exchanged for concentration upon internal polity. The patriarchs
of Cluny had insisted upon a strict observance of the Rule, upon silence
in church and cloister, upon the banishment of meat from the convent
table, upon eradication of the nequissimum vitium of private property.
While this was so, the success of Cluny as an agent of reform was obviously
CH. XX.


## p. 666 (#712) ############################################

666
Influence of Cluny on monasticism
due in no small degree to its moderation and avoidance of extreme forms
of asceticism. It presented an ideal which it was possible for the ordi-
nary monk to follow. In spite of its remissness in the cause of Gregory VII,
it still sent out great men to champion the papal claims. Urban II, the
inheritor of the Hildebrandine policy, had been Prior of Cluny; Paschal II
who followed him in the papal chair was also a Cluniac monk. It was to
Cluny that Gelasius II, Paschal's successor, came to die, and the next
Pope, Calixtus II, was chosen in the abbey. Its fame suffered a temporary
eclipse under the rule of Pons, who succeeded Hugh in 1109 and was
obliged to resign in 1122; but the wisdom and devout learning of Peter
the Venerable, who compiled a revised code of statutes, kept its reputation
alive long after. Even so severe a critic as Peter Damian could refer to
Cluny in the days of Hugh as “a paradise watered by the streams of the
our Gospels, a garden of delights, a spiritual field where earth and heaven
meet, a ground of conflict, in which, as in a wrestling-school of the spirit,
the frailty of the flesh contends against the powers of the air. ” St Bernard's
quarrel with Cluny arose in the evil days of Pons, when his cousin Robert
was enticed from Clairvaux by specious arguments, and his condemnation
of the pride and magnificence of Cluny and its preference of the letter
to the spirit of the Rule was doubtless affected by this circumstance. Yet
this splendour and monastic luxury was not the growth of a few years
of misrule; for one point which Bernard attacked, the architectural
beauty of the churches and cloisters, with their profusion of ornament
and sculpture, we have abundant evidence from the time of Odilo onwards.
It was through the imperceptible effect of wealth and power upon a never
excessively rigorous system that the state of things arose in which, as
Bernard said, the welfare of the order and its observance of religious
discipline were held to consist in the magnificence of its feasts, its furniture,
and its buildings.
In these respects Cluny set the example to Benedictinism in general.
The great revival of monastic life in England which followed the Norman
Conquest was a revival of decent order rather than of stringent obser-
vance. Lanfranc, in issuing his ordinances to the monks of his metro-
politan church, had in view a well-ordered community, pursuing the life
of church and cloister with exemplary decorum and following the Rule
without extravagant professions of asceticism. The land-owning monas-
teries of Domesday, the churches whose monks formed cathedral chapters,
the splendid buildings which were in progress before the end of the
eleventh century, were certainly not homes of an excessively severe
discipline. Local instances of disorder, no doubt, occurred; and the
strife between William Rufus and Anselm had dangerous effects upon the
religious life, exposing monasteries to the intrusion of unworthy nominees
of the Crown. It is to be noticed, however, that such movements as that
which led in 1132 to the secession of the monks of Fountains from
St Mary's at York were due, not to any definite scandals but to the


## p. 667 (#713) ############################################

The Order of Camaldoli
667
failure of abbots and convents to live up to the stricter precepts of
the Rule.
Even in the days of the greatest activity of Cluny, sporadic efforts at
a high standard of asceticism are noticeable outside the main movement.
In Italy the traditions of the austerities practised by the hermits and
anchorites of the East were never dormant. Fonte Avellana in the diocese
of Faenza, founded shortly before the year 1000, was a monastery of
bare-footed anchorites. Some forty years later, under the guidance of
Peter Damian, its strict practices were introduced into other houses, and
daughter-monasteries were founded. The mortifications of the community
provoked such criticism that the ardent abbot himself felt bound to
restrain them. The enthusiasm of Peter Damian, which contributed so
much to the revival of the papal authority in Italy, was fostered by the
example of Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese order. The life of
Romuald is an extraordinary romance of spiritual fervour. He settled in
one hermitage after another, imbuing disciples with his own enthusiasm,
establishing communities of hermit-monks, but constantly disappointed
by their failure to reach his own almost unattainable standard. The
Emperor Otto III found in him a visionary after his own heart, and placed
him in charge of the abbey of Sant' Apollinare in Classe near his native
city of Ravenna; but here his attempt to impose his severe discipline upon
the convent forced him to resign. He was, in fact, wholly unadapted for
the cenobitic life; and such success as he achieved was found in solitude
and desert places. After abandoning, owing to a sudden illness, a mission-
ary expedition to Hungary, he settled at Camaldoli, near Arezzo, about
1012. Here, on a desolate mountain, he and a few brethren lived in
separate cells, attending common offices in their oratory, but passing the
rest of their time in silent prayer and meditation, and working on the
barren soil for their living. Romuald himself left Camaldoli after a time,
migrating to Sitria, near Sassoferrato, where he attracted so many
followers that Sitria, says his biographer, became another Nitria, full of
hermits, some living in their cells as in tombs. He died in 1027 at
Valdicastro, near Camerino, where he had founded a hermitage at an
earlier date.
Camaldoli survived the departure of its founder, and became the head ·
of an order of hermit-monks, which received papal approval in 1072. The
original severity of the order was modified in the direction of humanity
by successive priors of Camaldoli, its permanent generals. An important
step was taken in 1102 by the foundation of the monastery of Fontebuono,
at the foot of the mountain of Camaldoli, a cenobite establishment which
ministered to the wants of the hermits and gave them a place of retirement -
in case of sickness. Henceforward the double element, hermit and ceno-
bite, existed in the order; and one of the congregations into which it was
eventually divided, that of San Michele at Murano,was exclusively cenobite.
CH. XX.


## p. 668 (#714) ############################################

668
La Cava, Vallombrosa, and Grandmont
Other hermit orders and congregations came into being during the
same period. La Cava, near Salerno, was famous as the retreat of
St Adalferio, who, falling ill at the monastery of Chiusa in Piedmont,
devoted his life to God and made his profession to Odilo at Cluny. His
monastery at la Cava, however, was on the hermit model; after his death
in 1050, the mountain, covered with establishments of hermits, became
a second Mount Athos. Large bodies of monks were sent out to form
new colonies, one of which, Monreale in Sicily, became within a few years
of its foundation the seat of an archbishop and a monastic chapter. The
offshoots of Cava thus reverted to the normal Benedictine model. Vallom-
- brosa, on the other hand, founded in 1038 or 1039 by St John Gualbert
on the model of Camaldoli, became the source of another distinctively
hermit order. The enthusiasm of the founder was equal to that of
ald; but his temper was more gentle, and his power of administration
probably greater. In the mingling of the cenobite with the recluse element
which was characteristic of Vallombrosan houses, an advance is noticeable
upon the distinction between them which was preserved by the Camaldo-
lese. At Vallombrosa also we find the first specific mention of the
conversus who afterwards became a marked feature of Cistercian organi-
sation, the permanent lay brother whose part in the monastic scheme
was the exercise of his craft as distinct from the occupation of the monk.
The Camaldolese and Vallombrosan orders had little success outside
Italy. In France, the hermit movement developed upon individual lines,
and one order, French in origin, spread its branches throughout Europe.
- The first distinctively French order, that of Grandmont, was inspired
from Italian sources. Its founder, St Stephen, as a boy accompanied his
father on a pilgrimage from their home in Auvergne to the shrine of
St Nicholas at Bari in Apulia. Taken ill on the return journey, he
remained in Italy under the care of the Archbishop of Benevento. The holy
conversation of some Calabrian hermits impelled him to imitate their life;
and, upon his patron's death, he returned, armed with the papal blessing,
to his native country. Here he took up his abode on the hill of Muret,
near Limoges, where, in 1076, he renounced the world for a life of solitary
abstinence and poverty. The usual band of disciples gathered round him,
to whom he prescribed a life entirely separate from worldly distractions,
avoiding the acquisition of property, and depending upon the voluntary
alms of the faithful. After his death, the desert in which he had settled
was claimed by a convent at Limoges; and the new prior migrated, to
avoid disputes, to a neighbouring solitude at Grandmont. The rule
founded upon the counsels of St Stephen, and approved by Hadrian III
in 1156, was that of a cenobite community with common buildings. Each
house of the order was divided into clerici and conversi, the first busied
entirely with divine worship and contemplation, the second with the
temporal care of the cell, the name applied collectively to the habitation
of each convent. The dependent cells, few in number when the rule was


## p. 669 (#715) ############################################

St Bruno and the Grande-Chartreuse
669
composed, were entirely subordinate to the prior of Grandmont, to whose
election each sent two proctors. Thus, in general character, Grandmont
closely resembled Vallombrosa; while, in its congregational organisation,
the method of Cluny was followed. At no time was the order large, and,
during its early years, it passed almost unnoticed. But it spread beyond
France: small Grandimontine houses were to be found in remote places in
England, at Grosmont on the Yorkshire moors and at Craswall on the
slopes of the Black mountains in the Welsh march. Its rule underwent
various modifications at the hands of the Popes of the thirteenth cen-
tury; and in 1917 John XXII raised the prior to the dignity of an abbot.
The founder of the Carthusian order was Bruno, a native of Cologne,
who, at the time of his conversion to the hermit life, was canon of Rheims
and master of the cathedral school there. In 1084, after spending some
time in a hermitage near the abbey of Molesme, he and six companions,
four clerks and two conversi, besought Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, to grant
them a place of settlement in his barren and mountainous diocese. Hugh
amply satisfied their ambition for solitude. The desert of Chartreuse,
entered by a cleft in the rocks at the top of a steep ascent, inhabited only
by wild beasts and generally covered with snow, was, in the bishop's words,
more like a prison or purgatory than a human dwelling-place. Bruno and
his companions built their church and little cells near the summit of the
site, round a spring which gave them their daily drink. The founder
himself, called away to Rome by Pope Urban II, sought the congenial
society of the hermits of southern Italy, and died in a monastery which
he founded at la Torre in the diocese of Squillace. His departure seems
to have been followed by the temporary desertion of Chartreuse, which he
commended in his absence to the Abbot of la Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne;
but it was restored to one of the original inmates, Landoin of Lucca,
before Bruno's death in 1101.
The recognition of the Grande-Chartreuse as the head of an order
was not fully achieved before 1176; but daughter-houses had come into
existence by 1128, when Guigues du Châtel, prior from 1110 to 1137,
drew up the Consuetudines Carthusienses, at the request of three priors of
dependent convents. The essential points in the constitution of the
Grande-Chartreuse, as in that of Grandmont, were isolation from worldly
affairs and complete poverty. Beyond the bounds of the desert, which
surrounded the monastery and afforded some scanty pasturage for a
limited number of sheep and cattle, the acquisition of property was for-
bidden. Any temptation to further possession was checked by the
limitation of the conventual body to a prior and twelve monks, sixteen
conversi, and a few hired servants, shepherds, and herdsmen. As at
Camaldoli, the monastery consisted of two distinct parts, the hermitage
proper with its separate cells, and the lower house, tenanted by conversi
and administered by a proctor chosen from among the hermits. Dressed
in habits of coarse white cloth, with hair-shirts next their skins, the
CH. XX.


## p. 670 (#716) ############################################

670
The Carthusian Order
brethren abstained wholly from meat, fasting three days a week on bread,
salt, and water, and on other days eating only vegetables, with the
occasional addition of cheese or some milk-food, and drinking watered
wine. Not even the sick were permitted the use of meat; gifts of fish
were allowed, but not its purchase. The lesser hours were said privately
by the monks in their cells; only certain hours were said in church, and
in the early days of the monastery mass seems to have been celebrated
only on Sundays and feast-days, when the monks left the cells to eat
together in the refectory. The life of solitary prayer, varied only by
work on the plots of ground adjoining the cells, was the ideal long main-
tained by the Carthusian community. Guests were merely tolerated. The
monastery was founded in the desert to afford refreshment to men's souls,
not to their bodies; its site furnished no conveniences for visitors and
horses; as for alms to the poor, it was better to send surplus food to
neighbouring towns than to attract a crowd of beggars.
The spirit of the Carthusian customs and statutes is a rigorous deter-
mination to maintain the strictest self-denial. Those who framed them
kept in view all the dangers which beset a nascent order. The novice was
warned of the hardness of the life; if its demands were too onerous for
him, he was not encouraged to persevere. The poor and compulsorily
small monasteries were unattractive homes for men who wished to retire
from the world with a certain degree of comfort. From the beginning,
Carthusian monks recognised that their life was fit only for the few.
They refused to affiliate large houses to their order. When Stephen of
Obasine consulted Guigues with a view to uniting his house to some strict
order, he was told that the Carthusians had no room for it, and was
advised to join the Cistercians, who kept the royal road and whose
statutes led to all perfection. The hermit Carthusians admired but had
no desire to emulate the rapid growth of cenobite reform under the
Cistercians. Their humility and rejection of ambition met with its reward
in the later Middle Ages, when, amid the decay of the cenobite orders,
they still preserved their pristine zeal.
Another order of a somewhat novel type was developed from experience
gained in hermitages. Robert of Arbrissel, a Breton, was, like Bruno,
a learned theologian, who left his lectures at Angers to become an
anchorite in the forest of Craon, where he was joined by a crowd of
imitators. The place was too strait for them all, and they parted to form
distinct bands in neighbouring forests. Their leaders seem to have learned
by experience that the solitary life in separate cells could not be of the
same profit to all. Robert himself founded a monastery for those who
- preferred a cenobite life. One of his principal followers, Vital, a canon of
Mortain, founded the cenobite congregation of Savigny, afterwards merged
in the order of Cîteaux; another, Bernard of Abbeville, was the founder
of the congregation of Thiron. Robert, however, called upon by Urban II
to join in preaching the Crusade, conceived the idea of founding a house


## p. 671 (#717) ############################################

Fontevrault
671
of prayer for those who, smitten with penitence but unable to take part
in the holy war, might compensate for their disability by devoting them-
selves to God. From the first this house, established at Fontevrault about
1100, was intended to include women as well as men. Nunneries had
played a very small part in the recent history of monasticism. The great
abbeys ruled at an earlier date by women, such as Whitby and Chelles,
had disappeared; others, like Remiremont in the Vosges, seem to have
lost their regular character early, and developed as houses of secular
canonesses. In 1028 Fulk the Black of Anjou had founded a nunnery at
Ronceray, to which he attached four clerks or canons as chaplains: an
arrangement which we find repeated in the canonries annexed to the
important nunneries in the south of England, which owed their origin to
the royal house of Wessex and, whatever decline they may have suffered
during the period before the conquest, recovered their vigour under the
Norman kings. With the approach of the twelfth century, nunneries
began to assume a larger part in religious organisation. The existence of
communities of women, however, raised special problems. Nunneries,
without adequate protection, were exposed to the risk of secular violence;
they needed the ministrations of priests in spiritual things, of manservants
in temporal. Thus there grew up, in more than one order, those double
monasteries in which a cloister of clerks and lay brothers existed side by
side with a cloister of nuns.
The symbolic idea of the double community at Fontevrault, whose
patrons were St Mary and St John, was the care which the beloved
disciple bestowed upon the mother of our Lord. The abbess was supreme
over the monastery. The women, of whom there were 300 in the largest
cloister alone, were consecrated to prayer; the men were charged with
the temporal needs of the house. Cloisters, dedicated to St Lazarus and
St Mary Magdalene respectively, were set apart for the diseased and the
penitent. The Rule of St Benedict was stringently enforced; the use of
meat was forbidden, and the community was ordered to receive no gifts
of parish churches or tithes. In 1106 the new order was approved by
Paschal II, and in 1113 it received the privilege of exemption. Daughter
houses soon grew up in Anjou, Touraine, Berri, and Poitou; and the
success of the order was so great that in 1145 there were said to be more
than 5000 nuns at Fontevrault itself. Nuns were brought from it into
England by Henry II to reform the abbey of Amesbury; others were
settled at Nuneaton and at Westwood in Worcestershire; and the church
of Fontevrault became the chosen resting-place of the Angevin royal
family.
Hitherto, none of the organised congregations which had arisen since
the days of Cluny had produced a far-reaching effect outside certain
localities. Their reforms, moreover, had for the most part pointed away
from the cenobite ideal. The qualified approval which St Benedict had
CH. XX.


## p. 672 (#718) ############################################

672
Foundation of the Cistercian Order
given to the hermit life was supplanted by a theory which regarded the
cenobite system as a concession to human frailty rather than as the
normal school of God's service. It was only natural that the devout
reformer, face to face with the splendour of Cluny or Saint-Denis, should
contrast it unfavourably with the naked simplicity of Camaldoli or the
Grande-Chartreuse, and question the spirituality of the system which it
represented. But the greatest of the twelfth century reforms was instituted
upon strictly cenobite lines; and only in one outstanding detail did it
depart from the spirit of the Rule of St Benedict. Even in this, its
adoption of the congregational principle, it differed widely from the
Cluniac system of centralised government under a single head.
The institution of the order of Cîteaux marks the third great epoch
in the history of medieval monachism. The reforms of Benedict of Aniane
had been short-lived; the purity of Cluny had become alloyed by customs
out of keeping with the intention of its founders. In 1098, Robert, Abbot
of the Benedictine house of Molesme in the diocese of Langres, with six
of his monks, dissatisfied with the imperfect observance of the Rule in
their monastery, migrated, with licence from the papal legate Hugh,
Archbishop of Lyons, to Cîteaux, a desolate place covered with thick
woods and thorn-bushes in the diocese of Chalon. Here, on Palm Sunday,
21 March 1098, the birthday of St Benedict, the Cistercian order took
its beginning. The new monastery was approved by the local diocesan,
and the expenses of its wooden buildings were defrayed by Eudes, Duke
of Burgundy, who proved a good friend to the struggling community.
Robert himself was recalled to Molesme within a year of the foundation ;
and it was his successor, Alberic, who obtained papal approval of the
literal observance of the Rule of St Benedict to which he and his monks
devoted themselves. But the monastery was as yet insignificant; during
the first years of its existence, its promise can hardly have seemed to
contemporary observers as great as that of Fontevrault or Savigny. Its
legislator arrived in 1109, in the person of the third abbot, the Englishman
Stephen Harding. It was not, however, until 1113 that the event took
place which was, within a few years, to raise Cîteaux to a position of
unrivalled influence in the Church at large. In that year St Bernard,
with thirty companions, including his brothers, made his profession to
Abbot Stephen ; and in the same year Cîteaux, enlarged in numbers, sent
out its first colony to la Ferté-sur-Grosne.
By the time of the promulgation of the Carta Caritatis, which was
confirmed by Calixtus II at Saulieu on 23 December 1119, the wide
expansion of the Cistercian order was a certainty. The foundation of
la Ferté was followed by that of Pontigny in 1114. Clairvaux, with
Bernard as its abbot, and Morimond, both in the diocese of Langres,
were colonised on 25 June 1115. To the abbots of these four houses
special pre-eminence was given in the councils of the order ; from them
and from Cîteaux proceeded those generations of abbeys which in quick
1


## p. 673 (#719) ############################################

The Charter of Charity
673
succession rose all over Europe. At the date of the confirmation of the
Charter of Charity, the order possessed twelve monasteries, of which seven
were daughters of Cîteaux, two of Pontigny, and two of Clairvaux. As
yet, it had not extended far beyond the bounds of Burgundy and Cham-
pagne; but its circle of influence was beginning to widen, and one house,
Cadouin in the distant diocese of Sarlat, which owed its foundation to
Robert of Arbrissel, had been affiliated to Pontigny.
The Charter of Charity was drawn up to ensure mutual peace and
love between the houses of the order. As a constitutional document, its
essential point is the position of Cîteaux as the head of the family. The
autocracy of Cluny was not copied. Reverence and obedience were due
to Cîteaux as a parent; but a certain degree of autonomy was necessary
for each house. The order was not composed of an abbot and a crowd
of completely dependent priors. Each monastery was ruled by its own
abbot, whose responsibility to his superior was purely spiritual. The
Abbot of Cîteaux had the cure of souls of the order; but he might levy
no temporal exactions upon his spiritual children. In the primitive inter-
pretation of the Rule, in divine service, and in customs, uniformity on
the pattern of Cîteaux was to be kept ; a monk of one house would find
nothing strange or unfamiliar in another. In all houses of the order, the
abbots gave place to the Abbot of Cîteaux, if he happened to visit them.
On the other hand, the visitatorial power of the Abbot of Cîteaux
was limited. If he practically took charge of a daughter-monastery during
his visitation, he might alter nothing without the consent of its abbot
and the convent, and the advice of the abbot was necessary to his cor-
rection of faults. He might not receive guests in the guest-house, unless
the abbot was away. Further, the visitation of each monastery, once a
year, belonged to the abbot of the house which was its immediate parent.
Thus, among the twelve abbeys existing at the end of 1119, Pontigny
and Clairvaux were subject to visitation from Cîteaux, but the Abbot of
Pontigny was the visitor of Bouras and Cadouin, and the Abbot of Clair-
vaux of Trois-Fontaines and Fontenay ; and, within a short time, the
abbots of these daughters of Pontigny and Clairvaux were exercising the
same right over daughters of their own.
The order spread in this way
by a closely connected system of affiliated houses, each descending in a
regular line of pedigree from Cîteaux, the mother of all. At Cîteaux the
yearly chapter-general of the order was held, with the abbot as president;
at such assemblies and elsewhere where they met, the precedence of abbots
was determined by priority of foundation. Measures, however, were taken
for holding the power of the Abbot of Câteaux in check. He himself was -
subject to visitation by the four prime abbots of the order; if he was
unsatisfactory, they were charged with special powers of correction, short
of deposition or excommunication, which were reserved to the decision of
the chapter-general. Similarly, the settlement of controversies between
abbeys belonged to the Abbot of Cîteaux, but not without the choice of
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XX.
43


## p. 674 (#720) ############################################

674
The Cistercian Constitution
such assessors as he might think fit. The removal of other abbots was
delegated to the abbot of the parent house with others to help him ;
while a similar committee presided over the elections of abbots and guided
the decision of the convents concerned. To sum up, each house of the
order had its place in an hierarchy at the apex of which was Câteaux ;
each was under some degree of supervision exercised by the abbot from
whose monastery it took birth. The primacy of the whole order was
secured for Cîteaux, which had the immeasurable advantage of being the
regular seat of the chapters-general; but the monarchy of the Abbot of
Cîteaux was limited by necessary safeguards, and his autocracy was im-
possible without complete subversion of the constitution.
To Stephen Harding, who thus gave the order its constitution, are
ascribed also the earliest of its institutes. In enforcing uniformity of
custom, he aimed at the removal of all superfluous splendour of furniture
and ritual. Gold and silver ornaments were forbidden; only the vessels
of the altar were to be of silver or silver gilt. Crosses were to be of
painted wood, candlesticks of iron, censers of copper or iron. The vest-
ments were of the most simple kind and material; copes, dalınatics, and
tunicles were banished, and the altar coverings were of plain linen without
embroidery. The series of Cistercian statutes of which the text has been
preserved to us represents a growth of many years and successive codifi-
cations from the time of Raynard, who succeeded Stephen in 1134. The
body of Cistercian statutes, approved and added to by successive chapters-
general, formed no Rule; one essential precept of the order was the
uniform interpretation of and loyalty to the Rule of St Benedict. The
systematic arrangement of the statutes under inclusive headings was
begun in 1203, and the Institutiones, revised in 1240 and again in 1256,
give a more detailed and comprehensive view of Cistercian customs than
the earliest series. Even at the later date, the puritanism of the order
and its avoidance of all ostentation were strongly maintained. The choice
of remote sites for abbeys, the abstinence from superfluous and curious
ornament, were still insisted on. Stained-glass windows and stone bell-
towers were forbidden as non-essentials; wooden bell-towers must not be
of immoderate height. It is possible to trace some modifications in the
later statutes; the prohibition of gold and silver crosses was confined to
crosses of large size, and the limitation of the use of meat to the infirmary
buildings was not accompanied by its specific limitation to infirm persons.
In the dignified simplicity of the services, for which elaborate regulations
existed in the early Liber Usuum, there was no important change. In
theory, at any rate, the Cistercian of the thirteenth century still adhered
to the example bequeathed to him by Stephen Harding and Bernard.
The regulations for the foundation of new abbeys implicitly prevented
the growth of subordinate priories. When a new house was founded to
the honour of St Mary, to whom, in memory of the beginnings of the
order in St Mary's at Molesme, all its monasteries were dedicated, the


## p. 675 (#721) ############################################

Cistercian lay-brothers
675
head of the thirteen monks sent out to colonise it was the abbot. Each
monastery had its granges, divided from one another by specified mini-
mum distances; but every care was taken that the grange should not
become the permanent abode of a small body of religious. No monk save
the cellarer, the temporal officer of the abbey, might have charge of it.
If monks went, as in harvest-time, to work at the granges, they might
pass the night there only in cases of absolute necessity. No churchyards
were to be made or burials take place at granges. Such places, in fact,
were intended for the support, not for the residence of the community;
and their care was entrusted to the conversi or lay-brothers.
The conversus or laicus barbatus was by no means a peculiarly Cistercian
institution ; but it was in this order that his position was most clearly
defined. In a self-supporting community, far from populous places, it
was necessary to have workmen on the spot. Although the Rule prescribed
manual labour to its followers, the prime duty of a monk was prayer and
his proper place was the cloister, not the field or workshop. Thus, when
Alberic undertook the rule of Citeaux, he and his monks decided to
receive conversi, whom they would treat as themselves in life and death,
save that they were not to be admitted as monks. The hire of workmen,
however, was also contemplated; and hired artificers and labourers are
mentioned in the early statutes. We have no means of estimating how
many conversi Cîteaux supported at first, or how many were sent out to
la Ferté in 1113. It is certainly probable that this consecration of labour
received some stimulus from non-Cistercian sources. The community of
Thiron, established in the diocese of Chartres about 1114, consisted
largely of men who were encouraged by Bernard of Abbeville to exercise
in their monastery the trades to which they had been trained ; and the
enlistment of these tirones in the service of God appears to have given
Thiron its name. But there can be no doubt that, with the rapid develop-
ment of Cistercianism after the foundation of Clairvaux and Morimond
in 1115, conversi entered the order in large numbers. They were admitted
purely as labourers; they took the vows, but were prohibited from learning
to read or write. They were lodged in the cellarer's building on the west
side of the cloister, which frequently, as at Fountains, Ourscamp, and
Vauclair, testifies to the very ample accommodation which their numbers
required. Their simple offices, consisting of repetitions of prescribed
prayers, were said in the nave of the church, before they went out, early
in the morning, to the workshops and granges. At the granges, they had
intervals at the canonical hours for devotions, led by their appointed
overseers. Their chapter-meeting was held every Sunday by the abbot or
his deputy. From the early Usus Conversorum, which prescribes their
manner of life, it is clear that they were intended mainly for field-work,
and that batches of them resided temporarily on the granges; while the
directions for their habit had field-work mainly in view. There can be
little doubt, however, that they made themselves useful in the various
CH. XX.
43-2


## p. 676 (#722) ############################################

676
Growth of Cistercianism
offices and workshops which, as at Clairvaux, filled the outer court of the
monastery ; and, if Cistercian architecture, the natural consequence and
appropriate expression of the devotion of the order to ideals which excluded
all Aattery of the senses, cannot be proved to owe anything to the brain
of the conversus, it was certainly aided by his hands.
One principle, laid down in the preamble to the Charter of Charity,
was the necessity of episcopal consent to the establishment of a Cistercian
house in any diocese. In this, no doubt, the collisions between the exempt
Cluniacs and the ordinary authority were remembered. The order, how-
ever, was exempted in process of time from diocesan authority; and the
later statutes uphold its freedom from episcopal visitation. Relations
between bishops and Cistercian monasteries were generally friendly: the
Cistercian abbot received benediction from the local diocesan or his suf-
fragan, and bishops on their primary visitation tours claimed the right
of a night's hospitality as guests in the houses where they could not sit
as judges. The secluded sites of Cistercian abbeys brought them seldom,
in the ordinary course of things, into conflict with parochial authorities.
Their own churches were entirely reserved for the purposes of their com-
munities; the parish altars, found in many Benedictine and Augustinian
churches, had no place in their naves. The examples of St Benedict gave
no precedent for the possession of appropriated parish churches or tithes,
and the founders of the order rejected such gifts. Although their suc-
cessors abandoned this principle, the appropriation of churches and tithes
was less eagerly sought by the Cistercian order than by others; and, at
the suppression, Fountains, the best endowed of English Cistercian houses,
derived a mere fraction of its income from this source.
The call of the Cistercian order to men to save their souls by retire-
ment from the world to a life of voluntary abstinence and prayer in
uninhabited valleys had an extraordinary power. Cîteaux, by virtue of
its compact organisation, and with the aid of the missionary zeal and
ubiquitous energy of St Bernard, outstripped all other congregations in
the rapidity of its growth. In 1120 it set foot in Italy, at Tiglieto in
Liguria, founded from la Ferté; while Morimond made its first step
eastwards to Bellevaux in Franche-Comté. In 1123 and 1127 Morimond
established two important colonising centres in Germany, Camp in the
diocese of Cologne and Ebrach in Franconia ; from Camp the movement
spread into the central and north-western districts of Germany, while the
first daughter of Ebrach was Reun in Styria. Meanwhile, in 1128, through
l'Aumône in the diocese of Chartres, a daughter of Cîteaux, the Cistercians
reached England at Waverley in Hampshire ; and the same house in 1131
sent another colony to Tintern, quickly followed in 1132 by Rievaulx, of
the family of Clairvaux. In the previous year Clairvaux had established
houses in Franche-Comté and the dioceses of Geneva and Mayence. In
1132 she founded Moreruela in the kingdom of Leon, the earliest monas-
tery of the order in Spain. Rievaulx in 1136 became the mother of the


## p. 677 (#723) ############################################

Cistercian foundations in Europe
677
first Scottish house at Melrose. Clairvaux reached Flanders at les Dunes
and Portugal at Alofoễs in 1138, and founded Whitland in South Wales
in 1140. In 1142 Irish Cistercianism began at Mellifont, which, through
the friendship of Malachy O'Morgair for Bernard, joined the family of
Clairvaux; and in 1143 the same family was increased by two Swedish
houses, at Alvastra and Nydala. In 1144 Denmark was entered by Cîteaux
at Herrevad ; and in 1146 and 1147 two English monasteries of the line
of Clairvaux, Fountains and its daughter Kirkstead, colonised Lysa and
Hovedö in Norway. Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia received their earliest
colonists from monasteries of the line of Morimond in 1142 and 1143;
and in 1150 Clairvaux founded a house at Cabuabbas in Sardinia.
Many other monasteries were founded during this period; and, apart
from the great activity of Clairvaux and Morimond, the younger houses,
especially in England, were very prolific. Waverley and Rievaulx produced
large families; and Fountains, which, after its secession from St Mary's
at York in 1132, joined the order in 1135, owned no less than eight
daughters at the beginning of 1151. In Ireland also Mellifont owned
five daughter-houses within eight years of its foundation. Progress in
the German and Austrian provinces, through Morimond and its offshoots,
was remarkable. Throughout the Spanish peninsula the line of Clairvaux
spread, monopolising Portugal, Gallicia, and Leon ; while the Gascon
foundations of Morimond colonised Navarre and Castile, and shared
Aragon and Catalonia with the children of Clairvaux, who eventually
reached Valencia and Majorca, as the Christian arms advanced against
the Moors. In Italy progress was slower ; but all the chief houses estab-
lished their lines in various parts of the country, and that of Clairvaux
grew with fair rapidity. St Bernard himself was present at the foundation
of Chiaravalle in Lombardy in 1136, and the first abbot of the monastery
of SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio at Rome, Bernard of Pisa, was raised to
the Papacy in 1145 as Eugenius III. From 1145 to 1153 the Church
was virtually ruled from Clairvaux; and with the deaths of St Bernard
and Eugenius in 1153, the great age of Cistercian activity ended.
At the end of 1151 the order numbered 330 monasteries; and the
general chapter of 1152 passed a decree that no more were to be founded.
Nevertheless, at St Bernard's death on 20 August 1153, the number had
risen to 343. Three more were founded within the next month; and the
increase, though at a less phenomenal rate, was so steady that, by the
end of the thirteenth century, this total of 346 was more than doubled.
With the exception of Cîteaux itself, these houses had come into being
in little more than forty years. It should be remembered, however, that
the process of colonisation was aided by the accession of houses like
Fountains, which had begun life by initiating reform on their own lines.
The monastery of Savigny, soon after the time of its foundation about
1112, had become the head of a reformed congregation, much on the
lines of Cîteaux. In 1147 Savigny, with twenty-seven daughter-houses in
CH. XX.


## p. 678 (#724) ############################################

678
Canons regular
France and the British Isles, was united bodily to the Cistercian order and
affiliated to Clairvaux. In the same year the sinall congregation of Obasine
in the Limousin was united to Citeaux; and later, in 1162, the monastery
of Dalon in the same district, with six daughters, joined the line of
Pontigny. The wisdom of Cistercian polity was shewn in these cases by
the fact that the abbots of the chief monasteries of these affiliated con-
gregations remained the visitors of their daughter-houses, and some
indulgence was allowed to existing practices not in harmony with Cis-
tercian customs. Although, in the bull of Eugenius III which united the
Savigniac houses to the order of Cîteaux, they are identified with those
of the obedience of Thiron, Thiron and its daughters, among which were
Kelso and Arbroath in Scotland, remained apart, and eventually were
referred to habitually as Benedictine, differing only from Benedictine
monks in their grey habit. Similarly, the congregation of Val-des-Choux
in Burgundy, founded in 1193, had much in common with the Cistercians
and wore a white habit; but their customs were largely derived by their
founder, a conversus of the Charterhouse of Louvigny, from Carthusian
sources, and their priories were subordinated to the parent house on the
Cluniac model. Of some thirty priories, three were in Scotland; and the
beautiful remains of Pluscarden in the diocese of Moray shew considerable
influence, both in plan and architecture, from Cistercian houses.
The immediate influence of Cîteaux affected the movement which took
place during the first half of the twelfth century among regular canons.
The attempt to enforce a rule of life upon clerks, of which we have seen
the beginning, was hampered by the secular preferences both of themselves
and of the monks who sought to emulate their comparative freedom from
restraint. In 1059 Nicholas II, at the instigation of Peter Damian, held
a council at which the duty of the common life and the renunciation of
private property were made obligatory upon corporations of canons; and
in 1063 these principles were reasserted by Alexander II, who introduced
canons of the reformed congregation of San Frediano at Lucca into his
metropolitan church of St John Lateran. We have signs of the influence
of these reforms in England, in indications of provisions for the common
life at Beverley and Southwell in the time of the Confessor, and in the
establishment of the Lotharingian system of communal chapters at Exeter
and Wells. Mentions of the Rule of St Augustine begin to appear soon
after the council of 1063. This Rule, founded upon the famous letter of
St Augustine to a congregation of religious women, was supposed to
embody the principles upon which he had constituted the common life of
his clerks at Hippo. The English churches which have been mentioned
never received it; and the normal cathedral and collegiate chapters of
canons, both here and abroad, consisted of secular clerks, holding separate
prebends of varying value, possessing their own houses, and, if they chose
to reside in person, receiving additional allowances from the common


## p. 679 (#725) ############################################

Augustinian canons
679
fund. But the Augustinian reform had its result, early in the twelfth
century, in the frequent substitution of regular for secular canons in
churches where the canonical life had fallen into decay, and in the founda-
tion of communities of clerks on what was really a monastic basis, although
the Rule which they followed was lighter and admitted of a more liberal
interpretation than that of St Benedict. The Rule was enforced upon
all canons regular by Innocent II in 1139; but, before this date, houses
had come into existence in large numbers in England and France. In
France Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, who had received a monastic training at
Bec under Lanfranc, promoted the formation of such bodies. In England
canons regular of St Augustine seem to have appeared first in 1106 at
St Botolph's, Colchester; the order spread within the next few years, and
in 1133 the priory church of Carlisle was converted into the cathedral
church of a new diocese.
Augustinian, like Benedictine, houses were autonomous communities
following their own local customs. As among Benedictines, so here, certain
centres of activity, such as the famous house of Saint-Victor at Paris,
Saint-Ruf at Avignon, and the Holy Cross at Coimbra, which adopted
the customs of Saint-Ruf, formed local congregations with common
observances, and occasionally, as in the congregations of Saint-Victor
and Arrouaise, with distinctive habits. Some communities from the first
appear to have sought a quasi-monastic seclusion ; but one powerful
reason for the establishment of communities of clerks had been the forma-
tion of centres from which neighbouring parish churches could be served.
There is abundant evidence in Domesday Book of the presence in England
of small “minsters” of secular clerks on these lines. Some of these dis-
appeared, some were continued as secular colleges, and some in process of
time adopted the Augustinian Rule; the continuance of the system in
Augustinian houses is indicated by the number of parish churches which,
in many instances, formed a prominent factor in their early endowments.
In later times, ecclesiastical legislation leaned to the natural view that
the dispersion of canons in appropriated churches was incompatible with
the maintenance of divine service in their monasteries. From the begin-
ning of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century the practice,
although it survived in certain privileged cases, or where custom was too
strong to be checked by legislation, was largely discontinued and was
discouraged by diocesan authorities. It revived in England during the
dearth of priests caused by the great pestilence of 1349, and was very
general during the fifteenth century ; but by that time the distinction
between canons and monks was almost obliterated, and it is probable
that the institution of a canon to the vicarage of a church meant little
more than that the endowment of the vicarage was ear-marked for his
maintenance in his monastery, and that the cure of souls was served for
a small wage by a stipendiary chaplain. The privilege, however, of serving
parish churches, though generally withdrawn from Augustinians by Canon
CH. XX.


## p. 680 (#726) ############################################

680
The Premonstratensian Order
Law, was constantly maintained by the order of Prémontré, which laid
the strictest interpretation upon the Rule.
The founder of the Premonstratensian order, Norbert, a native of
Xanten, underwent the experience, so usual at that epoch, of sudden
conversion from a worldly life to evangelical penitence. As a secular canon
at Xanten, and afterwards as an inmate of regular houses, his austerities
and exhortations made him unpopular. Surrendering his benefices and
despoiling himself of worldly goods, he journeyed to Saint-Gilles in
Languedoc, and there obtained from Gelasius II a general licence to
preach repentance. Travelling northward again with a few disciples, he
found a friend in Bartholomew, Bishop of Laon, who offered him the
church of Saint-Martin in his episcopal city. The canons of Saint-Martin,
however, refused to conform to his strict way of life; and Bartholomew,
unwilling to lose his services, gave him his choice of a site in the diocese
on which he might found a new church. The place was found in 1120
at Prémontré, over which the Cistercian owners relinquished their claims.
Here he and his followers determined to adopt the Rule of St Augustine,
with a severity of observance strongly coloured by customs derived from
Cîteaux. The constitution of the new order was on the model of the
Charter of Charity, with its system of a limited monarchy, affiliated
houses, and chapters-general at the parent monastery. In the white habit,
in simplicity of dress, ritual, and architecture, in abstinence from flesh-
meat and in long fasts, it followed the Cistercian example. Norbert and
Bernard of Clairvaux, though not without differences of opinion, were
closely united in friendship; and, if Bernard rejected Norbert's views on
the reign of Anti-Christ as a present fact, they found common ground
in their opposition to the more obvious danger represented by Abailard.
Some twenty years after the order of Prémontré had come into being,
Laurence of Liège likened the two orders to the cherubim, spreading out
their wings in the midst of the tabernacle on either side of the mercy-seat,
and to the two witnesses of the Apocalypse, sent by God at the end of
the world, and clothed in the sackcloth of penitence. The repression of
the heresy of Tanchelin at Antwerp by Norbert brought the order into
the Low Countries ; and his promotion to the archbishopric of Magde-
burg in 1126 ensured its success in Germany. In 1127, when Honorius II
confirmed the order in its possessions, it had nine abbeys, Prémontré,
Saint-Martin at Laon, Saint-Michael at Antwerp, two in the diocese of
Münster, and one in each of the dioceses of Soissons, Liège, Mayence, and
Metz. By 1144, ten years after Norbert's death, the nine had grown to
seventy. Some nine years later, the order was to be found in almost every
country in Europe and had reached Palestine. The eventual number of
its houses is somewhat variously stated, and some estimates appear to be
extravagant. The first English monastery, Newhouse in Lincolnshire,
was colonised from Licques in the Boulonais in 1143; and eventually the
order could count some thirty houses in England and Wales. The estab-


## p. 681 (#727) ############################################

Double monasteries
681
lishment of dependent priories, a natural consequence of the connexion
of the canons with parish churches, marks a point of divergence from
Cistercian custom. There were also several cathedral churches with
Premonstratensian chapters, of which we have one British example at
Whithorn in Galloway.
In another respect also this order, in its early days, presented a
contrast to Cîteaux. The Fontevraldine experiment of monasteries
combining monks with nuns was never contemplated by the Cistercians.
Women, indeed, soon embraced the Cistercian interpretation of the Rule
of St Benedict; and Stephen Harding founded the first Cistercian nunnery
in 1120, at Tart in the diocese of Langres. Such nunneries took their
place in the line of affiliation; but abbesses were not admitted to chapters-
general, and, in time, the nunneries of certain countries held their own
general chapters. In England no affiliation between Cistercian nunneries
can be traced: these small and poor houses, like Benedictine nunneries,
sprang up independently; their connexion with the order was simply
their adoption of Cistercian customs ; and, like Benedictine nunneries
again, their visitors were the diocesan bishops. Where the original link
to the main order was closer, the alliance tended to become little more
than nominal ; and the difficulty of supervision is illustrated by the fact
that it was possible in 1210 for the Infanta Constance to usurp the
functions of an abbot in the nunnery of las Huelgas at Burgos, founded
by her father Alfonso VIII, blessing and instructing novices and hearing
confessions. It was perhaps to meet the problems of the effective super-
vision of nunneries and the proper provision for them of priestly ministra-
tions that the order of Prémontré, at its beginning, admitted women to
its houses. It may be noticed, however, that the statute of the general
chapter of 1138, which forbade the admission of women, appears to deal
primarily with lay-sisters or conversae, and refers to separate nunneries
of “ singing sisters. ” Be this as it may, the custom of receiving women
did not last long. Of the very few Premonstratensian nunneries in
England, Irford in Lincolnshire appears to have been always regarded
as a dependent cell of the abbey of Newhouse; and similarly the obscure
nunnery at Guyzance in Northumberland was under the charge of the
canons of Alnwick. The nuns of Swine in Yorkshire, regarded as a
Cistercian house, were served by Premonstratensian canons during a con-
siderable period.
The double system was also attempted by Augustinian canons. It is
found for a short time in one small Yorkshire house, Marton in the forest
of Galtres ; but here the nuns, who followed Cistercian customs, were
transferred to Moxby, not far away. Again, it played a part. in the early
constitution of the congregation of Arrouaise, which had some houses in
England, and preserved a separate, though somewhat nominal, existence
until the later part of the fifteenth century. In this instance, as in that
of Prémontré, the system was not long-lived. Its success, however, was
CH, XX.


## p. 682 (#728) ############################################

682
The Order of Sempringham. Military Orders
achieved in England, though upon a small scale, by the order of
Sempringham, which was founded for nuns in 1131 by Gilbert, rector of
Sempringham in Lincolnshire. He endeavoured without success in 1147
to induce the chapter-general of Cîteaux to receive his nuns into its order.
St Bernard and Eugenius III, however, interested themselves in his
venture; and it was with the aid of St Bernard that the Gilbertine
statutes were compiled. Canons, following the Rule of St Augustine, and
conversi, dwelling in a separate cloister, formed after this date an integral
portion of each convent. Before Gilbert's death in 1188, thirteen houses
had been founded, all in the dioceses of Lincoln and York. Subsequently,
the number grew to twenty-six; but, although the double constitution
of most of the earlier houses continued until the suppression, all but two
of those established after 1188 were for canons only. The prior of the
canons in each house, where they were limited to a maximum of thirteen,
was the head of the monastery, in direct contrast to the Fontevraldine
arrangement. The order was exempt from episcopal visitation and held
its chapter-general yearly at Sempringham ; but the office of master or
general was not attached to the headship of one particular monastery,
and might fall by election on any prior or canon who was placed on the
list of suitable candidates. Outside England, the order possessed no house,
with the exception of one short-lived establishment in Scotland ; and its
English houses were few outside Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Cistercian
nunneries to which conversi were attached were numerous in the same
districts; and there are indications that for some of these, like Swine,
already mentioned, a constitution resembling that of Sempringham may
have been intended. In some, a monk or canon was frequently put in
charge of affairs, with the title of master or warden.
At the Council of Troyes in 1128, St Bernard provided the initial
suggestions for the Rule adopted by the Knights Templars, a community
- established at Jerusalem ten years earlier for the defence of pilg
The older military order, the Knights of the Hospital of St John of
Jerusalem, had some years earlier adopted a Rule modelled on that of
St Augustine, which in 1114 had been introduced into the chapter of the
church of the Holy Sepulchre. Military orders, while adopting the three
substantial vows, were not strictly monastic; the business of the knights
was warfare against infidels and heathen, and the preceptories or com-
manderies in which they were dispersed in Europe and the East were
either castles or small manor-houses with little likeness to monasteries.
In 1147 the castle of Calatrava in Castile, captured from the Moors, was
given to the Templars. They were unable to hold it, and for some years
it was defended by Cistercians, chiefly conversi, from the Abbey of Fitero
in Navarre. This was the origin of the Knights of Calatrava, whose order
was approved by Alexander III in 1164, and in 1187 was submitted to
the visitation of the Abbot of Morimond. From Calatrava arose the


## p. 683 (#729) ############################################

Military Orders and Orders of canons
683
Knights of Alcántara, formed by the reconstitution on Cistercian lines of
an order founded earlier at Pereyro in the diocese of Ciudad Rodrigo.
The Portuguese order, known from 1181 as the Knights of Avis, was
under the visitation of the Cistercian Abbot of Tarouca; in 1213 it was
subordinated to Calatrava, but re-established its independence after the
victory of Aljubarrota in 1385. Two other Portuguese orders, those of
the Wing of St Michael and of Christ, the latter founded in 1317, were
under the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Alcobaça ; while the Valencian
Knights of Montesa in 1316 received their constitution from Calatrava
and were submitted to Cistercian abbots. On the other hand, the Knights
of Santiago, founded in 1171, adopted the Rule of St Augustine, which
was also the model for the northern order of the Teutonic Knights and
the order, which they absorbed, of the Knights of the Sword in Livonia.
Various congregations of hospitallers, which afforded lodging to pilgrims
on European roads, and in some cases had originally a semi-military
character, such as the canons of Saint-Antoine in the diocese of Vienne
and of Altopascio near Lucca, and the canons and knights of the united
hospitals of the Holy Spirit at Montpellier and Santo Spirito in Sassia
at Rome, followed the Augustinian Rule.
It may be noted here that the same Rule, applicable to many diverse
communities, was employed by St Dominic in the constitution of the order
of Friars Preachers, and was followed by the order of Hermits known
popularly as Austin friars. Some orders also, which are occasionally
reckoned among friars, were in practice hardly to be differentiated from
Austin canons. Such was the Trinitarian order for the redemption of
captives, founded at the close of the twelfth century by St John of Matha
and St Felix of Valois ; the minister and brethren of their chief English
house, St Robert's at Knaresborough, were regarded as Austin canons,
and were allowed to hold and serve parish churches. Likewise, the Bons-
hommes of Ashridge and Edington, of whose ultimate origin nothing is
known, were not friars, as is sometimes said, but Austin canons; their
name appears again in the fifteenth century in Portugal, with customs
and a blue habit derived from the secular canons of San Giorgio in Alga
at Venice, and was applied later to the Minims in France. Originally
they were apparently a congregation which, observing the Rule of
St Augustine, maintained a certain individuality in habit and customs.
From the days of Benedict of Aniane to the epoch of the Cistercian
movement, the ideal at which monastic reformers aimed was uniformity
of practice by means of the congregational system. In France and Italy,
at frequent intervals, the customs of individual monasteries had been
extended to others, until groups of houses, sometimes attaining to large
numbers, had been formed. To speak of such groups as orders is hardly
accurate; medieval references to the orders of Thiron or Arrouaise may
be found, but the term can only be loosely applied to congregations whose
CH. XX.


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684
Orders and Congregations
polity was incomplete and the members of which had no very binding
connexion with the house whose customs they followed. On the other hand,
the congregations of Cluny and Cîteaux, with their definite organisation,
became orders in the true sense of the word ; Prémontré, Sempringham,
the orders of hermits and anchorites who adopted the cenobite life in a
modified form, were more than ordinary congregations. The history of
the Cistercian order shews clearly how a body with a complete political
system was capable of absorbing congregations whose constitution was
less sharply defined. Nevertheless, these orders, governed by their own
statutes, had no actual rule of their own.