French forests for the first time since the Merovingian period. Secular canons, small
groups of priests who had collectively served some urban churches or castle chapels,
began to be replaced by regular canons during the 1050s and 1060s. These regular
canons, often called Augustinian canons because their rule was based on a letter
originally sent by St. Augustine to his sister, combined the collective life and property of
monasticism with the dedication to improving the Christian life in the broader world of
parish priests and secular canons.
These new forms of the religious life continued to develop and spread throughout the
11th and 12th centuries; most small urban and suburban monasteries, many of which had
had no monks for several centuries, were taken over by regular canons, and in absolute
numbers they probably outweighed the Benedictines by the end of the 12th century. But
monasticism also continued to flourish. Houses like Cluny were still prosperous and
followed their rules and customs as closely as they always had. Some houses, like
Chaise-Dieu, founded in the middle of the 11th century on eremitical principles, ended up
adopting the Benedictine Rule. But for some people, both would-be religious and
laypeople who wanted to support the religious life, the Black Monks no longer
represented the fullest expression of spirituality. These people turned instead both to such
groups as the hermits and regular canons and to the new forms of monasticism.
French monasticism in the 11th and 12th centuries included both Benedictine monks
and, for the first time since the early 9th century, monks who followed a rule not based
on Benedict’s. Among the new foundations where Benedictine monasticism was
practiced were Tiron, founded in 1109, and Savigny, founded in 1112; both were in the
west of France. But the most influential of the new monastic orders of the high Middle
Ages was the Cistercian order, founded in a conscious effort to return to a more literal
observance of the Rule of St. Benedict. The Cistercians originated at Molesme, itself a
house founded in 1075 by monks seeking a rigorous form of monasticism. When Robert,
the abbot and founder, decided that even Molesme was not rigorous enough, he and some
of the brothers instead moved to the New Monastery of Cîteaux. From the time of
Cîteaux’s foundation in 1098, the monks deliberately set out to restore Benedict’s
simplicity in food and clothing and his inclusion of manual labor. While the Cistercians,
or White Monks, rejected many of the addi-tions that had been made to the Rule, such as
the consuetudines of Cluny or of Benedict of Aniane, especially the liturgical elaboration,
they also made modifications of their own. Cistercian customs forbade the reception of
children (oblates) and made provision for conversi, adult converts, mostly from lower
social classes, without the Latin education to be able to become full choir monks. These
conversi ended up doing a major part of the monks’ agricultural labor.
Additionally, the Cistercians created for the first time a truly permanent,
institutionalized form of affiliation among monasteries, in which all new Cistercian
foundations—and indeed any older houses affiliated with the order (as was Savigny in
1147)—became the daughter house of an already existing Cistercian monastery. The
abbots of the daughter house and of the mother house were supposed to visit each other
every year, and the abbots of the entire order met in an annual chapter general at Cîteaux,
where regulations were passed in the interests of maintaining unity among the houses.
The Cistercians proved enormously popular. Converts flocked to the order, and
knights and nobles made gifts, especially those lords lower on the social scale than those
who had supported the Benedictines. From five houses in Burgundy in 1115, the
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