The Trappists are the strictest branch of the Cistercian family, and they exist because one seventeenth-century abbot pressed the ideal of austere observance to its limit.
The reform of La Trappe
The common name attaches to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which grew from the reform imposed by Armand-Jean de Rance on the abbey of La Trappe in Normandy from the 1660s. Rance restored a severe regime of manual labour, penance, plain diet and near-total silence, reacting against what he judged the laxity of the Cistercians of his day. The life is contemplative and enclosed, ordered by the round of communal prayer and work under the ancient motto of prayer and labour, and the reputation of the Trappists for silence, though the popular idea of an absolute vow of silence is a simplification, reflects the real restriction of unnecessary speech.
A separate order
The strict-observance houses were formally constituted as a distinct order in 1892, separating from the common-observance Cistercians. The Trappists have remained a small and rigorous body, known in the wider world through the writings of members such as Thomas Merton and, incidentally, through the beer and produce by which many abbeys support themselves. They stand at the austere end of a long series of reforms, the Cistercian correction of the Benedictines and the Trappist correction of the Cistercians, each a return toward a simplicity the previous generation was felt to have lost.