against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was
one of the most prized privileges of the Cluniac Order. Something may
perhaps be allowed for exaggeration in this attack; but that there was
no serious overstatement is clear from the letters written some years
later by Peter the Venerable to St. Bernard, in answer to the
accusations made by the Cistercians in general. He justifies the
departure from the strict Benedictine rule partly on the ground of its
severity, partly because of its unsuitability to the climate; but his
defence clearly shows how far, even under so admirable a ruler, the
Cluniacs had fallen away from the monastic ideal.

[Sidenote: Cistercians.]

The Cistercian Order, no less than the Orders already mentioned, owed
its origin to the desire to revive the primitive monastic rule from
which the Cluniacs had fallen away. The wonderful success which it met
with made it the chief rival of that Order. The parent monastery of
Citeaux, near Dijon, was founded by Robert of Molesme in 1098 under
the patronage of the Duke of Burgundy. But the monks kept the rule of
St. Benedict in the strictest manner, and their numbers remained
small. In 1113, however, they were joined by the youthful Bernard, the
son of a Burgundian knight, together with about thirty friends of like
mind, whom he had already collected with a view to the cloister life.
At once expansion became not only possible but necessary, and the
abbot of the day, Stephen Harding, by birth an Englishman from
Sherborne in Dorsetshire, sent out four colonies in succession, which
founded the abbeys of La Ferte (1113), Pontigny (1114), Clairvaux and
Morimond (1115). The first general chapter of the Order was held in
1116: the scheme of organisation drawn up by Stephen Harding was
embodied in _Carta Caritatis_, the Charter of Love, and received