In the second half of the 9th century, there again began to be new monastic foundations
in France, for the first time in some 150 years. Many of these were founded not on the
outskirts of the old Gallo-Roman cities but in the countryside, although they quickly
became miniature civic centers in their own right, as small boroughs grew up around
them. The monks provided a living, whether by paying wages or buying goods, to a
whole group of laypeople established near their gates. Cluny, founded in 909 by the duke
of Aquitaine, is the best known of these late Carolingian foundations.
By the 9th and 10th centuries, although the fundamental monastic goals of humility,
obedience, common property, and separation from ordinary life remained, monks had
taken on a new and central role for broader society. Monastic schools were and continued
to be, until the 12th century, the chief places to receive an education, in spite of the
establishment of cathedral schools under Charlemagne. Increasingly, the manual work
that Benedict had recommended to his monks had been replaced by work copying
manuscripts in the scriptorium or by additional prayers and Masses. Monasteries became
intermedi-aries between the secular world and the supernatural. Monks prayed within the
cloister for the world outside the cloister walls. When laypeople gave the monastery gifts,
which they did with increasing frequency, they specified that they wanted to win the
friendship of the saint to whom the house was dedicated. This friendship was often made
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