Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

He was not always especially nice about it: the brothers at Cluny were harshly punished for such tiny errors as failing to gather up and eat the crumbs from their plates at mealtimes. Most importantly, however, Odo began to export Cluny’s high standards to other monasteries. He visited Benedictine houses in central France as a sort of freelance standards inspector, advising them on improving their communal life. This almost always meant reverting to the first principles of hard physical labor and constant prayer. Odo was a stickler for silence unless absolutely necessary, and insisted on a rigorously policed diet, free from all meat. He was punctilious about dress code. His chief interests, in the words of his biographer, John of Salerno, were “contempt for the world, and after that, zeal for souls, the reform of monasteries, and of the clothes and food of monks.”