Between the age of Alfred and the opening of the twelfth century the history of monasticism in England is the record of a series of impacts from neighbouring countries across the Channel which brought different interpretations of a single way of life which had its roots deep in the medieval past. The impulses from Fleury and Ghent under Dunstan, from Normandy at the Conquest and from Cluny shortly afterwards were each a wave of a single tide. With the end of the century this tide reached its high-water mark; within a few years a confused mass of waters was seen to be approaching from a new sea, the flood tide of the European renaissance of the twelfth century.

Hitherto, since the decline of the ancient civilization, the spiritual and intellectual revivals in the West had been regional in origin and scope; even that under Charlemagne is scarcely an exception to the rule. In England, the ages of Alfred and of Edgar are examples of such a rebirth, but the most striking of all is also the last in point of time, the intense development within the ring-fence of the Norman territories. This, indeed, which has too often been studied in isolation, could only have reached such a perfection because the minds of the men who moulded it belonged to a new age, and the very decades which witnessed the evolution of this last great self-sufficient, self-contained Landeskirche saw also the growth of a new culture which transcended the bounds of kingdoms and duchies, and of minds capable of grasping and applying principles of wide and unified government.