It was, then, not only in horror of the world, but in reproach of the Church herself that the monk turned to the idea of separation from man and communion with God. In the earliest days of monasticism each hermit followed his special theory of prayer and self-discipline; he would gather round him small communities of disciples, and these would remain or go away to form other communities as they chose, a lack of system that often resulted in unhealthy fanaticism or useless idleness. [Sidenote: St. Benedict] In the sixth century an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia (480-543), compiled a set of regulations for his followers, which, under the name of ‘the rule of Benedict’, became the standard Code of monastic life for all Western Christendom. Benedict demanded of his monks a ‘novitiate’ of twelve months during which they could test their call to a life of continual sacrifice. At the end of this time, if the novice still continued resolute in his intention and was approved by the monastic authorities, he was accepted into the brotherhood by taking the perpetual vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, the three conditions of life most hostile to the lust of possession, turbulence, and sensuality that dominated the Middle Ages. To these vows were added the obligation of manual labour--seven hours work a day in addition to the recitation of prayers enjoined on the community. The faithful Benedictine at least could never be accused of idleness, and to the civilizing influence of the ‘regulars’, as the monks were called because they obeyed a rule (_regula_), in contrast to the ‘secular’ priests who lived in the world, Europe owed an immense debt of gratitude. Sometimes it is said contemptuously that the monks of the Middle Ages chose beautiful sites on which to found luxurious homes. Certainly they selected as a rule the neighbourhood of rivers and lakes, water being a prime necessity of life, and in such neighbourhoods raised chapels and monasteries that have become the architectural wonder of the world. Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a reclaimed marsh, and it was the labour of the followers of St. Benedict that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms. Where the barbarian or feudal anarchist burned and destroyed, the monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pasturage or tillage; and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his obligation to God, so from the produce of his labours he provided for the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister schools supplied the ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries were centres of mediaeval life, not, like the castles, of death. In his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian; the copyist reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts; the illuminator made careful pictures of his day; the chemist concocted strange healing medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colours.