se as high as two
hundred: besides that, other punishments were used, such as fasting on
bread and water, psalm-singing, humble postures, and long times of
silence.

[75] Part I., p. 150.

Still, however, Benedict's rule was that by which the greater part of
the Western monks were governed. But, although they were under the same
rule, they had no other connexion with each other; each company of monks
stood by itself, having no tie outside its own walls. There was not as
yet, in the West, anything like the society which St. Pachomius had long
before established in Egypt,[76] where all the monasteries were supposed
to be as so many sisters, and all owned the mother-monastery as their
head. It was not until the tenth century that anything of this kind was
set on foot in the Western Church.

[76] See Part I., p. 62.

(1.) In the year 912, an abbot named Berno founded a new society at
Cluny, in Burgundy. He began with only twelve monks; but by degrees the
fame of Cluny spread, and the pattern which had been set there was
copied far and wide, until at length more than two thousand monasteries
were reckoned as belonging to the "Congregation" (as it was called), or
Order of Cluny; and all these looked up to the great abbot of the
mother-monastery as their chief. The early abbots of Cluny were very
remarkable men, and took a great part in the affairs both of the Church
and of kingdoms: some of them even refused the popedom; and bishops
placed themselves under them, as simple monks of Cluny, for the sake of
their advice and teaching.

The founders of the Cluniac order added many precepts to the rule of St.
Benedict. Thus the monks were required to swallow all the crumbs of
their bread at the end of every meal; and when some of them showed a
wish to escape this duty, they were frightened into obedience by an
awful tale that a monk, when dying, saw at the end of his bed a great
sack of the crumbs which he had left on the table rising up as a witness
against him. The monks were bound to keep silence at times; and we are
told that, rather than break this rule, one of them allowed his horse to
be stolen, and another let himself be carried off as a prisoner by the
Northmen. During these times of silence they made use of a set of signs,
by which they were able to let each other know what they wanted.

This congregation of Cluny, then, was the first great monkish order in
the West, and others soon followed it. They were mostly ver