significance. The quotation from Tertullian above refers to the all-night vigil liturgy held at Easter. A similar liturgy came to be held in the night that led to any Sunday. By the fourth century this Sunday vigil had become a daily observance, but no longer lasted throughout the night. What had been an all-night vigil became a liturgy only from cockcrow to before dawn. Saint Benedict wrote about it as beginning at about 2 in the morning ("the eighth hour of the night") and ending in winter well before dawn (leaving an interval in which the monks were to devote themselves to study or meditation), but having to be curtailed in summer in order to celebrate lauds at daybreak. Matins The word matins is derived from the Latin adjective , meaning 'of or belonging to the morning'. It was at first applied to the psalms recited at dawn, but later became attached to the prayer originally offered, according to the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, at cockcrow and, according to the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, at could be calculated to be the eighth hour of the night (the hour that began at about 2 a.m.). Between the vigil office and the dawn office in the long winter nights there was an interval, which "should be spent in study by those [monks] who need a better knowledge of the Psalter or the lessons"; in the summer nights the interval was short, only enough for the monks to "go out for the necessities of nature". The vigil office was also shortened in the summer months by replacing readings with a passage of scripture recited by heart, but keeping the same number of psalms. Both in summer and in winter the vigil office was longer than on other days, with more reading and the recitation of canticles in addition to the psalms. Outside monasteries few rose at night to pray. The canonical hour of the vigil was said in the morning, followed immediately by lauds, and the name of "matins" became attached to the lengthier part of what was recited at that time of the day, while the name of "lauds", a name originally describing only the three Psalms 148−150 recited every day at the end of the dawn office (until excised in the 1911 reform of the Roman Breviary by Pope Pius X; see Lauds), was applied to the whole of that office,