In return they would be expected to engage in rounds of constant prayer and devotion, offering their hospitality to passing travelers and living in respectable chastity, obedient to the Rule of Saint Benedict—a code of monastic conduct drawn up hundreds of years previously in southern Italy by the sixth-century monk Benedict of Nursia. Popes would be their guardians. Berno would be their abbot. Their financial benefactors and physical protectors would be Duke William and his descendants.
