The religious Orders are, together with the Catholic Church, the oldest political institutions in the West and the only ones to have developed without any break in continuity. St Benedict, the ‘Father of Europe’, founded his first monastery when the Angles, Jutes and Saxons were invading Britain. The Benedictine rule still exacts obedience from thousands today. The Camaldolese and the Vallombrosians existed before the battle of Hastings, the Carthusians date from the same time (1084): both live today by the same rule, according to the same constitutions, clothed in the same habit as their distant predecessors. Exactly one hundred years before Magna Carta, the system of supranational parliamentary assembly was in operation – a system which still governs the monks of citeaux and which, in one form or another, has served as a model for all the religious institutes which have followed.