Stephen Harding
An Englishman who became third abbot of Cîteaux, lawgiver of the Cistercian order and the man who received Bernard of Clairvaux.
- Middle Ages
- United Kingdom
- Feast day March 28
- c. 1059 – 1134
- Monk
- Founder
- Confessor
Listen to the life 0:38
An English monk who had passed through Rome and Molesme, Stephen Harding followed Robert into the wilderness of Cîteaux in 1098 and became its third abbot in 1108 or 1109. He wrote the Charter of Charity, a constitution of rare economy that bound the abbeys to one another without subjecting them to any single house: it made Cîteaux an order rather than a monastery. In 1113 he received a young Burgundian named Bernard, arriving with some thirty companions. At his death the order numbered seventy-five monasteries.
