In this context it did not greatly matter that many of their recruits were admitted by their parents as children, which was a boon to parents who could not otherwise provide for them without a risky diminution of their estate; nor that only a short noviciate was required, which was a boon to those who wished to become monks shortly before death in order to benefit from the prayers of the community. The wealth of an abbey's estates was justified by the size of community which it could support, the splendour of its buildings by the honour which they did to God and his saints, and by the manner in which they provided a proper context for reverence. When the monks of Cluny first celebrated the office in the third and greatest of their churches there, one of them described it as being 'like Easter every day'. In the twelfth century all these things came into question: the admission of children and the short noviciate because many unsuitable men thereby became monks, monastic wealth because it embroiled monks in unseemly disputes over property, great churches because they embodied the snares of this world rather than the flight from it. Such thoughts were not new, but in the twelfth century they came to attract and justify not small bands of hermits as hitherto but a monastic order which soon came to rival Cluny in size and eclipse it in influence. The Cistercian Order had its origins at Cîteaux, founded in 1098; by 1153 it comprised some 350 houses, spread throughout Europe. For the most part they were sited in relatively remote places; this at once suited the interests of benefactors, who could give land not as yet profitable, and those of the monks themselves, who sought to distance themselves from the world and its cares but at the same time wanted to reintroduce manual labour into the monastic life. The high ideals of the order, sometimes fairly described by its detractors as insanely conceited, necessitated a much tighter system of administration than Cluny had evolved; this took the form of a regular chapter-general for the order as a whole.

If Cluny had represented interests and ideals implicitly dangerous to the sacral position of kings, the Cistercians now developed them and combined them with fresh ideals of their

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