h, and eat in the refectory. They do not say mass save on
festivals and Sundays. They boil the vegetables served out to them in
their own dwellings, and never drink wine save with their food."
(Migne, _Patrol. Lat._ clxxxix. 943.)

In its broad outlines this description of primitive Carthusian life has
remained true, even to the present day: the regulations as to food are
not quite so stringent, and the habit is now an ordinary religious habit
of white serge. It was not until 1170 that the Carthusians were formally
constituted a separate religious order by papal act. Owing to its very
nature, the institute never had any great expansion: at the middle of
the 13th century there were some 50 Charterhouses; at the beginning of
the 18th there were 170, 75 being in France.

There was no written rule before 1130, when Guigo, the fifth prior of
the Grande Chartreuse, reduced to writing the body of customs that had
been the basis of Carthusian life (Migne, _Patrol. Lat._ cliii. 631);
enlargements and modifications of this code were made in 1259, 1367,
1509 and 1681: this last form of the statutes is the present Carthusian
rule.

The life is very nearly eremitical: except on Sundays and feasts, the
Carthusians meet only three times a day in the church--for the Midnight
Office, for Mass and for Vespers; once a week, on Sundays (and feasts)
they have their meal in the refectory, and once a week they have
recreation together and a walk outside enclosure. All the rest of their
time is passed in solitude in their hermitages, which are built quite
separate from one another. Each hermitage is a house, containing
living-room, bedroom and oratory, workshop and store-room, and has a
small garden attached. The monks are supplied with such tools as they
wish to employ in workshop and garden, and with such books as they need
from the library. The Carthusian goes to bed every evening at 7 and is
called about 11, when he says in his private oratory the _Officium B.
Mariae Virginis_. Towards midnight all repair to the church for Matins
and Lauds, which are celebrated with extraordinary solemnity and
prolixity, so as to last from 2 to 3 hours, according to the office.
They then return to bed until 5, when they again go to the church for
the daily High Mass, still celebrated according to the phase of
liturgical and ritual development of the 11th century. The private
Masses are then said, and the monks betake themselves to work or study.
A