English Monasteries and the Continent in the Reign of King Stephen

For at that time when all the vitality of the king's power had waned, the powerful men of the kingdom were setting up fortifications as best each could to defend their followers or to invade the territory of others. So while evils sprouted and abounded in this way through the laxity of King Stephen, or rather through the malice of the devil who always nurtures disagreements, the wise and salutary provision of the great King over-flowed, and was splendidly in evidence. To overcome the king of pride, the King of peace is known to have built for himself at that time more intensively than usual fortifications befitting him. In short, many more monasteries of servants and handmaids of God are known to have been founded in England during the brief period when Stephen reigned – or rather, held the title of king – than in the hundred years previously. THIS PASSAGE was written by William of Newburgh in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum , compiled in the 1190s at the Augustinian priory of Newburgh in Yorkshire. William was not the only one to notice the outburst of monastic foundations in Stephen's reign and to link it to the chaos of the period. It is often the Cistercians, who arrived in Britain in the last years of the reign of Henry I, who attract attention, but this was indeed a notable period of expansion for other groups: the congregation of Savigny, the Augustinian canons, and, often unnoticed in this context, houses of religious women.