The beginning of the monastic revival in England, which set in being a life that was destined to endure till the Dissolution of the monasteries six hundred years later, may be dated from the year c. 940, when King Edmund, after his narrow escape from death on the cliffs of Cheddar, set Dunstan, still a young man, as “abbot” in the church of Glastonbury. From that moment till the final suppression in 1539 an unbroken series of generations lived the regular life and formed a sequence of tradition which, while accepting elements from without, remained in its essentials one and the same. That moment, therefore, has been chosen as the starting-point of the narrative of these pages.

In order to understand the significance of Dunstan's life at Glastonbury and its consequences it is necessary to know how far, if at all, monastic life was in existence at that time there or elsewhere in England. Historians of the last century were commonly agreed that at the epoch of Dunstan's boyhood and the reign of Athelstan monasticism was wholly extinct in England and that the renaissance under King Edgar was modelled wholly upon lines borrowed from abroad. More recently there has been a tendency among those who have done so much to increase our knowledge of the later Saxon period to question or modify both these general judgments. In the case of the second, we may with certain reserves accept such a revision; the sources of our knowledge, when carefully considered, make it clear that the revival had run a fruitful course for a number of years before men or ideas from overseas exercised a direct influence upon it.