Such attempts, however, seem to have had little effect, and the next century was to see the Anchorites and Recluses, who lived apart from the monastic rule, and practised what they considered the highest form of asceticism, and the secular clergy, who had never come under the monastic rule, but were subject only to the general canon-law of the church, brought more together, a tendency to which indeed had probably already manifested itself in the end of the previous century, which the forty-second canon of the Council of Trullo was designed to check. For though nothing could be more opposed in spirit, than the secular life of the ordinary clergy on the one hand and the ascetic life of the anchorites on the other, forming, as it were, the opposite poles of the ecclesiastical system, yet they had one feature in common—that both lived separately, in opposition to the cœnobitical life of the monks. The new institution which thus brought them together was that of the secular canons, founded by Chrodegang, bishop of Metz, in the year 747. His rule was at first intended for his clergy of Metz alone, with a view of leading them to adopt a more regular life in the ecclesiastical sense of the term. This rule consists of thirty-four chapters. By the third he directs that the canon clerics shall live together in a cloister, and shall all sleep in one dormitory, with the exception of those to whom the bishop shall give permission to sleep separately in their own dwellings within the cloister; that no woman or layman is to enter the cloister without an order from the bishop, the archdeacon, or the ‘primicerius’; that they shall eat in the same refectory, that laics shall only be allowed to remain in the cloister as long as they have work, and that those living separately within the cloister must live alone and have no other cleric with them. By the ninth chapter he enjoins them to perform the bodily labours in common as well as in private. By the thirty-first he enjoins his clerics to give to the church what real property they have, retaining the income only, but gives them leave to reserve to themselves their moveable property, for almsgiving, and to dispose of it as they please by their wills.[454] [Sidenote: _Deicolæ_ brought under canonical rule.]