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The Cluniac Order
The Cluniac Order was founded by a Benedictine called Odo who believed that the strict rule of St. Benedict
was not being followed. He founded the abbey of Cluny in 910. In this order the daughter houses were all
dependant on Cluny itself for their funds and any money the daughter house received had to be sent back to
Cluny. When Cluny started using its funds to increase its own grandeur its daughter houses suffered and
popularity of the order began to wane. Monks in this Order dedicated so much time to prayer that they had
to employ workers to tend the fields and gardens.
The Cistercians
Towards the end of the eleventh century several monks from the Benedictine abbey of
Molesme broke away and sited their new abbey at Citeaux. They were
unhappy at Molesme because the abbey had become too rich and the
monks there were not following the rules of the Benedictine Order strictly enough.
The monks wanted to get back to the strict rule of the order.
Lead by Abbot Robert of Molesme the monks built a wooden monastery
and chose to live an extremely hard life. Robert was replaced first by
Alberic and then, when he returned to the abbey at Molesme, by Stephen Harding .
Stephen Harding was an Englishman born at Sherborne in Dorset and one
of the original founding monks. Before Stephen died he had transformed
a very poor monastery into to the centre of one of the most powerful
monastic Orders of the time. The name given to the Order was the
Cistercian Order. Although already popular, the success of the Cistercians was to
increase with the arrival of Bernard of Fontaines who joined the
order in 1112. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, as he is now known, was
very persuasive. He became the Abbot of Clairvaux in 1115.
By the time that Bernard died in 1153 there were up to 340 Cistercian abbeys in Europe.
From Citeaux the Cistercians spread across France and then in
1128 moved across the Channel to create its first abbey in Britain at Waverley in Surrey.
Location
In general the Cistercians built their monasteries in remote
places far from civilisation and refused to accept donations apart
from the land on which they built.
Affiliations
All Cistercian abbeys were descended from the mother church at Citeaux. For
a diagram showing the relationship between the abbeys click here: -
Affiliations of Britain's Cistercian Abbeys
The Carthusian Order
The Carthusians were founded in 1084 by Saint Bruno a La Chartreuse and
were descended from the Benedictines. In
England their houses were known as Charter-houses. The Rule that these
monks followed was possibly the most strict of all the orders. Being a
Carthusian monk meant that the ideal of leaving the world behind when
entering a monastery was taken literally. Each monk lived in solitude
in a small cell where he did his own cooking and slept. He had a small
area of garden in which to grow food and only meet his fellow monks once
a week. As the life was so strict and the order did not communicate with
the outside world the number of abbeys remained less than ten in number.
Only two Carthusian houses were founded before the middle of the fourteenth
century, those being Wilton and Nottinghamshire in around 1180 and Hinton and Somerset in around 1227.
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