Starting in the final years of the 8th century, however, a number of ruined or deserted
monasteries were refounded or reformed, usually at the initiative of kings or bishops. The
scholar Alcuin, at Charlemagne’s court, advocated monastic renewal, and the monk
Benedict of Aniane promoted adoption of the Rule of St. Benedict. This Rule, which had
been slowly spreading through France for three centuries, was ordered adopted at all
Frankish houses at the Council of Chalon in 813. Louis the Pious even hoped that the
monastery of Inde, near Aix-la-Chapelle, would become a royal “model” monastery,
which monks from every monastery in the Frankish kingdom would visit, to promote
regularity and uniformity. Although his plan was ultimately unsuccessful, the
commentary on Benedict’s Rule composed for Inde by Benedict of Aniane was widely
imitated. A house’s consuetudines would spell out additions and modifications to St.
Benedict’s slim set of regulations.
Between the 5th and the 9th centuries, French monasticism underwent key changes,
from being a form of religious life established in tiny houses at the margins of a
predominantly urban society, to being the carriers and continuators of Roman culture in
large, agriculturally oriented communities. Benedict’s Rule had assumed that a monastery
would be a family, of maybe a dozen or a score of monks, but by the 9th century it was
not uncommon for a monastery to have a hundred or more monks and many servants, and
the abbey church to be surrounded by a whole complex of workshops, guest houses, an
infirmary, administrative offices, rooms for laborers, and the like. Such a monastery
might become one of the largest landowners in its region. Although houses that had
adopted Benedict’s Rule continued to follow its chief outlines, in stressing humility,
obedience, and common property, such French houses were no longer the small,
withdrawn group of brothers that Benedict had envisioned but rather important economic
entities in their own right.
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