Benedict's Rule succeeded because it is moderate. Compared with the Egyptian ascetics it is almost indulgent: adequate sleep, two cooked dishes, a hemina of wine a day with an apologetic note that monks really ought not to drink but the times being what they are, and a warning to the abbot not to break the vessels by scouring them too hard. Its real content is administrative — a timetable of prayer at fixed hours, manual work, reading, a chapter on how a community elects and corrects its head, and a chapter on receiving guests as Christ. That combination made monasteries economically viable, and viable monasteries preserved libraries, drained land, kept accounts, brewed, farmed and educated Europe for a millennium. The Cistercians, Carthusians and Trappists are all reform movements within it. It is worth adding that the same institutions accumulated enormous wealth and land, were repeatedly a political prize, and were dissolved wholesale in England in the 1530s, in France in 1790 and across much of Europe after — the pattern of reform, wealth, corruption and suppression is the Rule's own history in miniature.