The Cistercian Order Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Cistercian Order

It is impossible to say whether an effective monastic discipline was kept up in any English monastery at the beginning of the tenth century, although the secularising movement must have gone less far in some than in others. But after the victories of Alfred had given comparative peace to the country, and things social and ecclesiastical were getting back again into their natural order, there were men who were dissatisfied with what they found, and sought for something better. And it was then that the rule of St. Benedict was first imposed upon English monasteries. This was a reform, and it is associated with the name of St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and himself a monk, who was the chief promoter of it.

The real history of the monastic orders in England begins with the establishment of the Benedictine rule here in the middle of the tenth century. It was so generally accepted that all Old English monasteries that survived as monasteries until the end of the next century had become Benedictine. The others were and professed to be secular, and the attempts made with varying success by some bishops as late as the twelfth century to replace them by regulars, were a continuation of the policy begun by Dunstan.

Besides the Older monasteries, such new monasteries as were founded here up to nearly the end of the eleventh century were Benedictine. But then such foundations ceased, and the later ones belong to the reformed Benedictines, who used other names to distinguish themselves; to the orders of Regular Canons, black and white, and then to the various orders of friars and some others each in its turn, according to the fashion of the day, for it is evident by the dates of the foundations that fashion had much to do with them.

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