[362] Most of William's harsh measures can be justified on the ground that they were designed to promote the ultimate welfare of his people. This is not true, however, of his elaborate forest laws, which undertook to deprive Englishmen of their accustomed freedom of hunting when and where they pleased. William's love of the chase amounted to a passion and he was not satisfied with merely enacting such stringent measures as that the slayer of a hart or a hind in his forests should be blinded, but also set apart a great stretch of additional country, the so-called New Forest, as his own exclusive hunting grounds. CHAPTER XV. THE MONASTIC REFORMATION OF THE TENTH, ELEVENTH, AND TWELFTH CENTURIES 42. The Foundation Charter of the Monastery of Cluny (910) Throughout the earlier Middle Ages the Benedictine Rule [see p. 83] was the code under which were governed practically all the monastic establishments of western Europe. There was a natural tendency, however, for the severe and exacting features of the Rule to be softened considerably in actual practice. As one writer puts it, "the excessive abstinence and many other of the mechanical observances of the rule were soon found to have little real utility when simply enforced by a rule, and not practiced willingly for the sake of self-discipline." The obligation of manual labor, for example, was frequently dispensed with in order that the monks might occupy themselves with the studies for which the Benedictines have always been famous. Too often such relaxation was but a pretext for the indulgence of idleness or vice. The disrepute into which such tendencies brought the monastics in the tenth and eleventh centuries gave rise to numerous attempts to revive the primitive discipline, the most notable of which was the so-called "Cluniac movement."