A short rule for monks in seventy-three chapters: the community under its abbot, the daily round of prayer, work and reading, and the arrangements (dormitory, refectory, guest house, infirmary, novitiate, gate) that the buildings of every Benedictine house were made to serve.
Benedict wrote for his own community at Monte Cassino, drawing on older monastic rules. Under the Carolingians, and above all after the reform synods of Aachen in 816–817, it became the rule of almost every monastery in the West, and so the brief for monastic building for a thousand years.
The Rule is not a building programme, but it implies one. All the monks sleep in one place, with a light burning (ch. 22). The sick have a room of their own and a brother to serve them (ch. 36). Guests are received as Christ, with a kitchen of their own so that their arrival at odd hours does not disturb the brothers (ch. 53). Novices live, eat and study apart (ch. 58). A wise old monk keeps the gate from a cell beside it, and the monastery, if possible, holds within its enclosure everything it needs (water, a mill, a garden, workshops), so that monks need not wander outside (ch. 66).
The book, part by part
I Chapters 22, 36, 53, 58
The dormitory; the sick; guests; novices.
Rules: One dormitory, next to the church · Guests received as Christ, with a kitchen of their own · The sick and the novices apart
II Chapter 66: the porter and the enclosure
Everything necessary within the walls.