36 THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE MIDDLE AGES
of the collegia who were integrated into monasteries. While their for-
mer status had vanished, they were better able to survive corporatively,
preserving their practices and traditions and even their rites and secrets,
which allowed them to form veritable schools whose influence often
radiated quite far.
The expansion of monachism appeared in the East toward the end
of the third century. In the West it dates from the time of Jean Cassien
(d. 432), founder of two monasteries in Marseilles; Saint Cesaire
(470-543), a monk of Lerins, then bishop of Aries, who set down a rule
for the monasteries of his regions; and especially Saint Benoit
(480-547), abbot of Vicovaro and founder of Monte Cassino, whose
rule was imported into Gaul by his disciple, Saint Maur.
The development of monasteries in sixth century Gaul, which gen-
erally followed the rule of Saint Benoit, gradually moved from the cen-
ter of the country to the north. At that time, either bishops or kings
founded them. Monks were always lay individuals.
During the seventh century, the high nobility (dukes and counts)
multiplied their founding of monasteries. A regular clergy to attend
them appeared by order of Pope Gregory I, with abbots serving as their
heads despite the opposition of the bishops. Many abbeys, which had
become quite wealthy, were the greatest landowners in the kingdom. In
Paris, the domain of Saint Germain des Pres covered 50,000 hectares
and numbered some 25,000 inhabitants.
Population centers grew around the monasteries as people settled
near them in search of both protection and the possibility of a liveli-
hood. Agriculture and all trades were practiced there and builders were
numerous, working primarily for the monks. In this world where social
and legal constraints imposed immobility and attachment to a fief, the
status of the Church allowed an escape from this servitude. For builders
it included a precious right, one that was indispensable to the practice
of their trade: the right of circulation, the freedom to travel.
The most famous of the ecclesiastical architects of the Merovingian
era, for his science and his virtue, both connected to his education and
his role in the monastic movement, is Saint Eloi. He was born in 588 in
Cadillac, near Limoges, where he took lessons from a teacher named
Abbon. He then moved to the kingdom of the Franks, where he became