At the end of these pages, looking back over three centuries from a date which, though marked by no great catastrophe, is yet in a real sense a moment of division, a watershed which separates the epoch of religious and intellectual awakening in Europe from that of the maturity of medieval culture, it is permissible to gather up the threads of the preceding chapters into a single pattern, and to look at the monastic life of England as it lies spread out before us, from the early manhood of Dunstan to the death of Innocent III.

Between those two dates the numerical increase and diffusion of the monastic body in England and Wales had been truly prodigious. In 943 there was in existence scarcely a single fully regular monastic community; in 1216 there were over a hundred large monasteries of black monks, some seventy abbeys of Cistercians, and a multitude of lesser communities and groups, to say nothing of the quasi-monastic families of the regular canons, themselves almost as numerous as the monks. In default of any reliable data it is impossible to hazard a precise estimate of the total population of these houses; it probably attained its maximum c. 1150 and had already sensibly declined by 1216; but in the latter half of the twelfth century the number of black monks in the country cannot have been less than some figure between four and five thousand, while that of the white monks, including lay brethren, may well have been almost as great.