and creative times. Those who are
acquainted with the Burgundian blood will not think it fantastic to
imagine the vast reputation of Cluny to have been based upon rhetoric.
It was perhaps the sonorous Burgundian facility for expression and the
inheritance of oratory which belonged to Burgundian soil till
Bossuet's birth, and which still belongs to it, that gave Cluny a sort
of spell over the mind of Western Europe, and which made Cluny a
master in the century which preceded the great change of the Crusades.
From Cluny as a mother house proceeded communities instinct with the
discipline and new life of the reformed order, and though it has been
remarked that these communities were not numerous, in comparison to
the vigour of the movement, yet it should also be noted that they were
nearly always very large and wealthy, that they were in a particular
and close relation to the civil government of the district in which
each was planted, and that their absolute dependence upon the mother
house, and their close observance of one rule, lent the whole order
something of the force of an army.

The Cluniac influence came early into the Thames Valley. By the
beginning of the twelfth century, and within fifty years of the
Conquest, this new influence was found interpolated with and imposed
upon the five centuries that had hitherto been wholly dependent upon
the three great Benedictine posts. This Cluniac foundation, the first
of the new houses on the Thames, was fixed upon the peninsula of
Reading.

It was in 1121 that the son of the Conqueror brought the Cluniac order
to the little town. From the moment of the foundation of the abbey it
attracted, in part by its geographical position, in part by the fact
that it was the first great new foundation upon the Thames, and in
part by the accident which lent a special devotion or power to one
particular house and which was in this case largely due to the
discipline and character of the Cluniac order, Reading took on a very
high position in England. It had about it, if one may so express
oneself, something more modern, something more direct and political
than was to be found in the old Benedictine houses that had preceded
it. The work it had to do was less material: the fields were already
drained, the life and wealth of the new civilisation had begun, and
throughout the four hundred years of its existence the function of
Reading was rather to entertain the Court, to assist at parliamen