Charlemagne, in the Capitularies, added the following excellent amendments to the rules of monastic institutions:--“Young men destined to monastic life must first pass their novitiate, and then remain in the monastery to learn the rules, before they are sent forth to fulfil their duties outside. Those who give up the world in order to avoid the king’s service shall be compelled to serve God in good faith, or else to resume their former occupation. All clerks shall be required to make their choice between clerical life in conformity with the canons, and monastic life in conformity with the regulations. The abbeys shall not receive too large a number of serfs, so that the villages may not be depopulated; no community shall have more members than can be properly looked after by one superior. Young women shall not take the veil until they are of an age to choose their own career in life. Laymen are to be disqualified for governing the interior of a monastery, nor shall they fill the post of archdeacon.” Charlemagne and Louis the Good-natured became members of the royal monastery of St. Denis under the title of “conscript brothers” (_fratres conscripti_)--an academical rather than a religious title, but one which nevertheless admitted them to certain liturgical privileges. The Emperor Lothair, in imitation of his father and ancestor, also got himself invested with this title by the monastery of St. Martin-lez-Metz. The Norman invasion, the feudal wars, the encroachment of the great vassals, and even of the kings, upon ecclesiastical domains and rights, impoverished the monastic orders, whose lands remained untilled for want of hands, and their schoolrooms often empty for want of teachers and scholars. While the Normans burnt and pillaged the monasteries, fortified though many of them were, in the country districts, the urban abbeys, nearly always protected by the diocesan power, preserved some remnants of their former splendour. [Illustration: Fig. 245.--Foundation of the secular abbeys of Mons, Maubeuge, and Nivelles. The canonesses meeting at Nivelles, where Walcand, Bishop of Liége (810 to 832 or 836), promises to give them a code of rules.--From the “Chroniques de Hainaut,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels.]