Franz Coudenberg and Jan Hinckaert, friends of Ruysbroek's, were near kinsmen, and each of them occupied a canon's stall at Saint Gudule's. They sympathised with the aspirations of the people, had, perhaps, been mixed up in one of their abortive attempts to obtain liberty, and on this or some other ground, early in the year 1343, Coudenberg was accused of treason to Duke John III., who, with a view, perhaps, to ridding the town of a dangerous agitator, offered him a tract of land in the Forest of Soignes at a place called Groenendael, which for the last forty years had been the site of a hermitage now occupied by Coudenberg's friend Lambert, a solitary whose family name is not recorded, on condition that he should build a monastery there for five brethren, of whom at least two should be priests. Perhaps the offer was one which Coudenberg was not free to refuse, perhaps it was tantamount to a sentence of exile, which included within its scope Hinckaert and Ruysbroek as well. In any case, Coudenberg did not refuse it, and when early in the following year he withdrew to Groenendael, these men went with him. It was not, however, till five years later that the new community was regularly organised and that the brethren adopted a definite rule. On the 10th of March 1349 Pierre de Clermont, Bishop of Cambrai, clothed them with the habit of canons regular of the Order of Saint Augustine, and shortly afterwards they chose Jan van Ruysbroek for their prior. Not only did he know how to maintain discipline in his own monastery, but he was able to restore order in a host of others, and so great was his influence outside the cloister that within a few years of the founding of Groenendael a whole group of new religious houses sprang up--Rouge Cloître, Corsendonck, Sept Fontaines, Bethléem, Ter Cluysen--which owed their origin to one or other of his disciples, and though they were not at first submitted to Groenendael, observed the same rule and were intimately associated with it by ties of the closest friendship: for the brethren of every one of them Ruysbroek was 'the master.'