Cluniac houses were introduced into England under the Conqueror. The first foundation was at Barnstaple; the second at Lewes by William de Warenne, in 1077, and it counted as one of the “Five Daughters of Cluny.” In quick succession followed Thetford, Montacute, Wenlock, Bermondsey, and in Scotland, Paisley; a number of lesser foundations were made, and offshoots from the English houses; so that the English Cluniac dependencies in the 13th century amounted to 40. It is said that in the reign of Edward III. they transmitted to Cluny annually the sum of £2000, equivalent to £60,000 of our money. Such a drain on the country was naturally looked on with disfavour, especially during the French wars; and so it came about that as “alien priories” they were frequently sequestered by the crown. As the communities came to be composed more and more of English subjects, they tended to grow impatient of their subjection to a foreign house, and began to petition parliament to be naturalized and to become denizen. In 1351 Lewes was actually naturalized, but a century later the prior of Lewes appears still as the abbot of Cluny’s vicar in England. Though the bonds with Cluny seem to have been much relaxed if not wholly broken, the Cluniac houses continued as a separate group up to the dissolution, never taking part in the chapters of the English Benedictines. At the end there were eight greater and nearly thirty lesser Cluniac houses: for list see Table in F. A. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life; and Catholic Dictionary, art. “Cluny.”
The history of Cluny up to the death of Peter the Venerable may be extracted out of Mabillon’s Annales by means of the Index; the story is told in Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1792), v. cc. 18, 19. Abridged accounts, with references to the most recent literature, may be found in Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. § 20; Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (ed. 3), art. “Cluni” (Grutzmacher); and Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon (ed. 2), art. “Clugny” (Hefele). The best modern monograph is by E. Sackur, Die Cluniacenser (1891-1894). In English a good account is given in Maitland, Dark Ages, §§ xviii.-xxvi.; the Introduction to G. F. Duckett’s Charters and Records of Cluni (1890) contains, besides general information, a description of the church and the buildings, and a list of the chief Cluniac houses in all countries. The story of the English houses is briefly sketched in the second chapter of F. A. Gasquet’s Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries (the larger ed., 1886).
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CLUSERET, GUSTAVE PAUL (1823-1900), French soldier and politician, was born at Paris. He was an officer in the garde mobile during the revolution of 1848. He took part in several expeditions in Algeria, joined Garibaldi’s volunteers in 1860, and in 1861 resigned his commission to take part in the Civil War in America. He served under Frémont and McClellan, and rose to the rank of general. Then, joining a band of Irish adventurers, he went secretly to Ireland, and participated in the Fenian insurrection (1866-67). He escaped arrest on the collapse of the movement, but was condemned to death in his absence. On his return to France he proclaimed himself a Socialist, opposed militarism, and became a member of the Association Internationale des travailleurs, a cosmopolitan Socialist organization, known as the “Internationale.” On the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1871 he set to work to organize the social revolution, first at Lyons and afterwards at Marseilles. His energy, his oratorical gifts, and his military experience gave him great influence among the working classes. On the news of the communist rising of the 18th of March 1871 he hastened to Paris, and on the 16th of April was elected a member of the commune. Disagreements with the other communist leaders led to his arrest on the 1st of May, on a false charge of betraying the cause. On the 24th of the same month the occupation of Paris by the Versailles troops restored him to liberty, and he succeeded in escaping from France. He did not return to the country till 1884. In 1888 and 1889 he was returned as a deputy to the chamber by Toulon. He died in 1900. Cluseret published his Mémoires (of the Commune) at Paris in 1887-1888.
CLUSIUM (mod. Chiusi, q.v.), an ancient town of Italy, one of the twelve cities of Etruria, situated on an isolated hill at the S. end of the valley of the Clanis (China). It was according to Roman tradition one of the oldest cities of Etruria and indeed of all Italy, and, if Camars (the original name of the town, according to Livy) is rightly connected with the Camertes Umbri, its foundation would go back to pre-Etruscan times. It first appears in Roman history at the end of the 7th century B.C., when it joined the other Etruscan towns against Tarquinius Priscus, and at the end of the 6th century B.C. it placed itself, under its king Lars Porsena, at the head of the attempt to re-establish the Tarquins in Rome. At the time of the invasion of the Gauls in 391 B.C., on the other hand, Clusium was on friendly terms with Rome; indeed, it was the action of the Roman envoys who had come to intercede for the people of Clusium with the Gauls, and then, contrary to international law, took part in the battle which followed, which determined the Gauls to march on Rome. Near Clusium too, according to Livy (according to Polybius ii. 19. 5, ἐν τῆ Καμερτίων χώρᾳ, i.e. in Umbria near Camerinum), a battle occurred in 296 B.C. between the Gauls and Samnites combined, and the Romans; a little later the united forces of Clusium and Perusia were defeated by the Romans. The precise period at which Clusium came under Roman supremacy is, however, uncertain, though this must have happened before 225 B.C., when the Gauls advanced as far as Clusium. In 205 B.C. in the Second Punic War we hear that they promised ship timber and corn to Scipio. The Via Cassia, constructed after 187 B.C., passed just below the town. In the first civil war, Papirius Carbo took up his position here, and two battles occurred in the neighbourhood. Sulla appears to have increased the number of colonists, and a statue was certainly erected in his honour here. In imperial times we hear little of it, though its grain and grapes were famous. Christianity found its way into Clusium as early as the 3rd century, and the tombstone of a bishop of A.D. 322 exists. In A.D. 540 it is named as a strong place to which Vitiges sent a garrison of a thousand men.
Of pre-Roman or Roman buildings in the town itself there are few remains, except for some fragments of the Etruscan town walls composed of rather small rectangular blocks of travertine, built into the medieval fortifications. Under it, however, extends an elaborate system of rock-cut passages, probably drains. The chief interest of the place lies in its extensive necropolis, which surrounds the city on all sides. The earliest tombs (tombe a pozzo, shaft tombs) are previous to the beginning of Greek importation. Of tombe a fosso there are none, and the next stage is marked by the so-called tombe a ziro, in which the cinerary urn (often with a human head) is placed in a large clay jar (ziro, Lat. dolium). These belong to the 7th century B.C., and are followed by the tombe a camera, in which the tomb is a chamber hewn in the rock, and which can be traced back to the beginning of the 6th century B.C. From one of the earliest of these came the famous François vase; another is the tomb of Poggio Renzo, or della Scimmia (the monkey), with several chambers decorated with archaic paintings. The most remarkable group of tombs is, however, that of Poggio Gaiella, 3 m. to the N., where the hill is honeycombed with chambers in three storeys (now, however, much ruined and inaccessible), partly connected by a system of passages, and supported at the base by a stone wall which forms a circle and not a square—a fact which renders impossible its identification with the tomb of Porsena, the description of which Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxxvi. 91) has copied from Varro. Other noteworthy tombs are those of the Granduca, with a single subterranean chamber carefully constructed in travertine, and containing eight sarcophagi of the same material; of Vigna Grande, very similar to this; of Colle Casuccini (the ancient stone door of which is still in working order), with two chambers, containing paintings representing funeral rites; of Poggio Moro and Valdacqua, in the former of which the paintings are almost destroyed, while the latter is now inaccessible.
A conception of the size of the whole necropolis may be gathered from the fact that nearly three thousand Etruscan inscriptions have come to light from Clusium and its district alone, while the part of Etruria north of it as far as the Arno has produced barely five hundred. Among the later tombs bilingual inscriptions are by no means rare, and both Etruscan and Latin inscriptions are often found in the same cemeteries, showing that the use of the Etruscan language only died out gradually. A large number of the inscriptions are painted upon the tiles which closed the niches containing the cinerary urns. The urns themselves are small, often of terra-cotta, originally painted, though the majority of them have lost their colour, and rectangular in shape. This style of burial seems peculiar to a district which E. Bormann (Corp. Inscr. Lat. xi., Berlin, 1887, p. 373) defines as a triangle formed by the Clanis (with the lakes of Chiusi and Montepulciano, both small, shallow and fever-breeding), on the E., the villages of Cetona, Sarteano, Castelluccio and Monticchiello on the W., and Montepulciano and Acquaviva on the N. In Roman times the territory of Clusium seems to have extended as far as Lake Trasimene. The local museum contains a valuable and important collection of objects from the necropolis, including some specially fine bucchero, sepulchral urns of travertine, alabaster and terra-cotta, painted vases, stone cippi with reliefs, &c.
Two Christian catacombs have been found near Clusium, one in the hill of S. Caterina near the railway station, the inscriptions of which seem to go back to the 3rd century, another 1 m. to the E. in a hill on which a church and monastery of S. Mustiola stood, which goes back to the 4th century, including among its inscriptions one bearing the date A.D. 303, and the tombstone of L. Petronius Dexter, bishop of Clusium, who died in A.D. 322. The total number of inscriptions known in Clusium is nearly 3000 Etruscan (Corp. Inscr. Etrusc., Berlin, 475-3306) and 500 Latin (Corp. Inscr. Lat. xi. 2090-2593). To the W. and N.W. of Chiusi—at Cetona, Sarteano, Chianciano and Montepulciano—Etruscan cemeteries have been discovered; the objects from them formed, in the latter half of the 19th century, interesting local collections described by Dennis, which have since mostly passed to larger museums or been dispersed.