 In its early days the community occupied themselves not only in traditional women's tasks such as weaving and embroidery, but also in tilling the fields, clearing the forest, and weeding the soil.The nunnery rapidly gained a great reputation and within a few years the community numbered nearly three hundred.A community this large was difficult to manage, and within a century of its foundation the abbey was forbidden by the Abbot of Clairvaux to take more novices until the number of nuns at Montreuil was reduced to one hundred, which figure was not in future to be exceeded.