In his opening sentence of the third and most ambitious of the Cistercian exordia, the Exordium Magnum, Conrad of Eberbach makes two points. The first is that within the Cistercian tradition the impetus for the secession from Molesme was now firmly seen as the desire to bring monastic life back to the Rule of St Benedict. The second is that Cîteaux itself was the mother house of all Cistercian abbeys – in other words the head of an order. The close and tightly knit relationship among Cistercian houses has always been seen as one of the hallmarks of the Order. So, too, has the rapid spread of the reputation of the White Monks and, as a result of this, the equally rapid foundation of Cistercian houses throughout Europe. The received narrative of modern scholarship on the Middle Ages tells us that the novelty and the attraction of their way of life meant that the monks of the New Monastery were not left alone to enjoy the solitude: between 1113 and 1115 four daughter houses were founded; in 1119 the then abbot, Stephen Harding, drew up the Carta Caritatis, the ‘constitution’ of the Order; and over the next thirty years the Cistercians were so overwhelmed both by recruits seeking the ‘high road of supreme progress toward Heaven’ and by men and women wanting to found Cistercian houses that the congregation’s numbers exploded, and in 1152 a halt had to be called. The Order – theoretically but not in practice – had reached its fullest extent. Held together by common usages in all areas of monastic observance, the Cistercians continued to develop and became a powerful voice in ecclesiastical reform.