"To speak truth," remarks Udalric, "the work which I saw done most often was to free the beans of the leaves which retarded their growth, to pluck the ill weeds from the garden, and sometimes to knead the bread in the bake-house." Manual work, however, remained always part of the strict rule. "Then will you be monks," said St. Benedict, "when you live by the work of your hands, after the example of the holy preachers of the monastic law." Bitter must it have been to Pierre le Vénérable, the last of the great abbots, to have to write as he did of the growing decadence:--"Idleness is the enemy of the soul: and do we not see the greater part of the brothers ... both within and without the cloister, in a state of absolute inactivity. How few are they who read, still fewer they who write! Do not the greater number sleep, leaning against the walls, or do they not waste their day from dawn to sunset in vain and idle, or in what is yet worse, malicious conversation." But, in the earlier years of Cluny, the rule was not easily broken, nor broken with impunity. A continuous surveillance, day and night, was exercised so regularly, by monks called "circateurs," that scarcely the least fault could be committed unseen, and punishment, inflicted in grave cases by the abbot himself, followed hard upon the offence. Sometimes the delinquent was condemned to solitary confinement, or to stand, all day long, at the door of the church; sometimes he was flogged, in full chapter, by his brother monks, or, if the fault had been publicly committed, the whipping was administered before all the people. It was customary, also, to expose certain delinquents before the door of the basilica, at the hour of mass, while one of the servants of the abbey announced the cause of his penance to the worshippers as they entered. The sinner was denied all participation in the solemnities and in Christian communion; he was denied the kiss also. If he revolted against his punishment, the outraged monks would drag him voluntarily to a fearful dungeon, without door or window, into which he must descend by a ladder. And over all their day of toil, of silence, of fasting, and of prayer, hung a shadow, dark as those that fell from the vaulted nave, or lingered at sunset in the cool cloister galleries--the shadow of ever-present death. When a brother died, each monk, with his own hand, must sew stitches in the winding-sheet, whose clinging folds should recall vividly to his spirit that all flesh is as grass, and that the way of life is the way of death. The monks' day was divided between work, prayer, and psalmody; the latter sub-divided into the office and the mass, thus fulfilling literally the words of the psalmist;[86] "Seven times in the day have I celebrated Thy praises, and I rose in the middle of the night to confess Thy Name."