tter of St Benedict's rule. In the following year Robert was
compelled by papal authority to return to Molesme, and Alberic succeeded
him as abbot of Citeaux and held the office till his death in 1109, when
the Englishman St Stephen Harding became abbot, until 1134. For some
years the new institute seemed little likely to prosper; few novices
came, and in the first years of Stephen's abbacy it seemed doomed to
failure. In 1112, however, St Bernard and thirty others offered
themselves to the monastery, and a rapid and wonderful development at
once set in. The next three years witnessed the foundation of the four
great "daughter-houses of Citeaux"--La Ferte, Pontigny, Clairvaux and
Morimond. At Stephen's death there were over 30 Cistercian houses; at
Bernard's (1154) over 280; and by the end of the century over 500; and
the Cistercian influence in the Church more than kept pace with this
material expansion, so that St Bernard saw one of his monks ascend the
papal chair as Eugenius III.

The keynote of Cistercian life was a return to a literal observance of
St Benedict's rule--how literal may be seen from the controversy between
St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny (see Maitland, _Dark
Ages_, Sec. xxii.). The Cistercians rejected alike all mitigations and all
developments, and tried to reproduce the life exactly as it had been in
St Benedict's time, indeed in various points they went beyond it in
austerity. The most striking feature in the reform was the return to
manual labour, and especially to field-work, which became a special
characteristic of Cistercian life. In order to make time for this work
they cut away the accretions to the divine office which had been
steadily growing during three centuries, and in Cluny and the other
Black Monk monasteries had come to exceed greatly in length the regular
canonical office: one only of these accretions did they retain, the
daily recitation of the Office of the Dead (Edm. Bishop, _Origin of the
Primer_, Early English Text Society, original series, 109, p. xxx.).

It was as agriculturists and horse and cattle breeders that, after the
first blush of their success and before a century had passed, the
Cistercians exercised their chief influence on the progress of
civilization in the later middle ages: they were the great farmers of
those days, and many of the improvements in the various farming
operations were introduced and propagated by them; it is from this point
o