experience. The traditional way had been through the monastic life, the retreat from the world. \We faye seen how the Benedictine system had changed this impulse into a vast and highly productive social instrument, which became one of the pillars of the Dark Age culture and economy: monasticism and the Church were almost coextensive. So successful was the Benedictine rule that all other forms of monasticism were absorbed into it; by 1050 it was the norm. Thereafter, however, and in conjunction with the expansion of the clerical class, literacy, population, wealth, towns and social complexity, new forms of the regular religious life came into existence. The Cistercians, as we have seen, were in part a return to primitive Benedictine severity, in part a development of monastic economic techniques. About the same time emerged the regular canons of St Augustine, who operated in the new suburbs which had grown up around the walled cities of the Dark Ages: they lived in small, modest houses, on endowments a third the size of a Benedictine - it cost £3 a year to maintain an Austin canon, £10 at least for a Benedictine. They ran urban schools, leper-houses, hospitals, infirmaries and burial grounds. They served as confessors, chaplains and routine preachers; they baptized and said masses for the dead. They were ubiquitous and masters of all clerical trades, and flourished in enormous numbers; by the thirteenth century there were probably more Augustinian houses, albeit most of them small, than those of any other order. Early in the thirteenth century they were joined by the two chief orders of friars, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Both took vows of poverty and both, especially the Franciscans, claimed to live off what they could beg. But the Dominicans, like the Austin canons, were middle class (sometimes upper class) and highly literate; their main function was to provide efficient and orthodox preachers, who could be rapidly deployed in an area infected with heresy. The Franciscans were the only religious order recruited predominantly from the lower classes, and for a long time they had a high proportion of laymen (and illiterates). The friars were essentially urban; they were most prolific in southern France, Spain and Italy; but there were friaries wherever towns existed. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Dominicans had 600 houses, with a total of 12,000 friars, and the Franciscans 1,400 houses and 28,000 friars. Altogether, by this date, there were eight chief types of religious order, and about a score of subtypes. Most of them had corresponding organizations for women. About one-fifth of all the wealth of society passed through their hands. Much of it, of course, went back into society. They performed a wide variety of services, many of them free. And collectively they provided pious Christians with the chance to pursue almost every kind of religious life. They should have been an essential element in the strength of Christianity as the established, compulsory religion, and in the reputation of the clergy as a privileged class. In fact by the fourteenth century they were neither. On the contrary: at best they were a negative quantity, at worst an embarrassment, even a scandal. Why? In theory, discipline in all the religious houses, even the least rigorous, was very strict. The gospel of work was paramount; the time of the inmates was provided for in great detail; and there was ample provision for inspection and visitation. If anything, most rules were neurotically oppressive. There was a convention that monks, even in private, should not do anything to offend the sensitive tastes of the angels, believed to be very elegant beings. Hugh of St Victor, in his Rules for Novices, forbids listening with the mouth open, moving the tongue round the lips while working, gesturing, raising the eyebrows while speaking, rolling eyeballs, tossing the head, shaking the hair, smoothing garments, moving the feet unnecessarily, twisting the neck, pulling faces, grinning, wrinkling the nostrils and ‘all contortions of the lips which disfigure the comeliness of a man's face and the decency of discipline’. Again, for nuns, their bodily posture, for almost any activity, was laid down in detail. Both monks and mms were scourged for comparatively minor faults, especially for murmuring at correction. For the Brigittine nuns of Syon in Middlesex, corporal punishment was mandatory for any fault, however venial, which a nun failed to report herself, and which was later noted. Five lashes was the norm, ‘but the default be of the more grievous kind, or she or they show any token of 70