In an earlier chapter the forty years that elapsed between the death of Henry I and the return to something approaching to normality after the Becket controversy were characterized as a period of transition for the black monks, during which the most individual features of the Anglo-Norman monasticism grew less distinct, and the type of great religious corporation came into being that was to continue the same in its main lines throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages. In 1130 the black monk houses were still the only form available of the monastic life in England, and contained almost all that there was of fervour in the land; by 1175 they had become what they were to remain until the Dissolution, only one form among many, and that neither the most remote from the world nor the most austere. During the half-century that followed the Conquest a process of building and formation had gone forward on all sides; the monastic life of the country was remodelled and directed by a numerous group of able and spiritual abbots; it was a period of constant benefactions and not infrequent foundations. Such a state of change and development was, in the nature of things, only a phase; an equilibrium was gradually reached and a slow process of formalization began; the transition was rendered more speedy by the arrival of the new orders, and by the middle of the reign of Henry II the typical black monk house began to stand out primarily as a great corporation, an economic organization of great extent and complexity, a carefully graded society ruled by complicated custom in which everything tended, in the long run, to strike an average.