The legislation of the Cistercian general chapter of 1152, forbidding further foundations, followed as it was in less than a year by the deaths of Bernard and Eugenius III, marked the end in England of the epoch of rapid expansion for the white monks, and the end also of their influence as a body upon the ecclesiastical life of the nation. From that date till the end of the century very few houses were founded in this country—only some half-dozen in all—and no Cistercian, save Baldwin, made any figure in public life. Later, at the beginning of the next century, King John's foundation of Beaulieu in Hampshire (1204), colonized directly from Cíteaux, was to bring a new and vigorous current of monastic life into England, and to become the mother of a small family which counted among its members the royal foundations of Hayles and St Mary Graces, London. But the history of these falls within another period.

There remained, however, in 1150, a large area of the island still almost entirely virgin soil to monasticism; in north and central Wales there were no houses of any kind of the black or white monks. Whereas in the south Brecon, Monmouth, Glamorgan, Carmarthen and Pembroke had in different degrees been brought under Norman rule and had received at first small colonies of black monks, and later some of the earliest plantations of the grey and white, and whereas in the Marches a few foundations had been made from Savigny, central and northern Wales, still wholly Celtic, contained no monastic foundations whatsoever save the lonely outpost of Cwm Hir (1143), a daughter of Whitland, in Radnorshire, and a few families of Celtic culdees who still survived on Bardsey, on Priestholm off Anglesea, and at Beddgelert under the shelter of Snowdon.