The tenth century, which saw the widest diffusion and the most elaborate development of black monachism, witnessed also a series of endeavours on the part of men who, in Italy and France, desired to find complete solitude and extreme austerity of life. These endeavours, as has been recounted, resulted at the very end of the century in the establishment at several centres (of which Molesme-Cîteaux was the most celebrated) of new monastic or canonical institutes alongside of the old which spread widely but which, while remaining at least for some generations stricter and more observant than the old monachism, nevertheless abandoned by degrees much of their primitive intransigence and exclusiveness, and modified their original aims. A few, however, of the earliest families belonging to the movement of return to the desert succeeded in establishing organizations which, though never attaining great numerical strength, changed little if at all from their original scheme of life. Such were the hermits of Camaldoli and the monks of Vallombrosa in Italy, who sent no colonies as far north as England; such, in southern France, were the poor brothers of God of the Chartreuse who, alone of the quasi-eremitical companies of the eleventh century north of the Alps, developed into a widespread order which, though never numerous, has never seriously threatened to decline from its first fervour, still less to become extinct. These came late to England, and during the period covered by these pages were settled only at a single spot, and that a remote one far from the centres of national life.