The Valliscaulian Priory of Beauly

Towards the end of the twelfth century the Carthusian monastery of Lugny or Luvigny, near Langres in Burgundy, contained a lay brother named Viard. In him the fire of religious enthusiasm burned so bright that he obtained leave from his abbot to retire into a cave in the Val des Choux—Vallis Caulium, the ‘Kail Glen’ as we call it in our homely Scottish speech—a sequestered glen amid the neighbouring wooded hills. Here he led a life of such austere devotion that his fame waxed great through the land of Burgundy, and in the end drew to his lonely hermitage Duke Odo III, then about to start on the Fourth Crusade. So impressed was the duke by his interview with the recluse that he vowed, should he return in safety from the Holy Land, to establish a monastery in the Kail Glen, and to place Viard at its head. In this way, shortly before 1200, was founded the monastery of the Val des Choux. Odo's first grant, making over the Kail Glen to the brethren, was made in 1203; and by 1206 the new order of monks—for such it was—had aroused the interest of Pope Innocent III, who by a Bull issued in that year recognized the Valliscaulian Order and confirmed their rule. It was one of exceptional severity. All the brethren, prior included, were to dine in the common frater, sharing the same fare, and abstaining from meat and gravy. They were not allowed to work, save in tending the monastic gardens, and were therefore enjoined to live off their own revenues. They were bound to silence, and prohibited from leaving the cloister save on the business of their Order. They were to wear hair shirts, and to sleep fully clothed and in their shoes, and on beds without a mattress. Small wonder that so drastic a rule was found untenable, and in 1223 a second Bull allowed the monks of the Kail Glen a considerable measure of relaxation.