In 1431 an earthquake shook the walls of the small Augustinian priory of Roca Rossa in eastern Catalonia. The resulting damage only served to add to the deterioration of the monastic compound, part of which was already in a ruinous state even before the earthquake struck. In fact, in the years leading up to the disaster, complaints had been made regarding the state of the community and its buildings, which had previously been largely abandoned by its lay patrons and benefactors. The loss of patronage was a key factor that contributed to the eventual collapse of the priory, reminding us just how crucial patronal support could be for a medieval religious community.

While in the British Isles interest in the subject of monastic patronage has been gathering speed since the 1950s, in Iberia, the approach has to date been a different one, focusing less on the social history of the medieval church, that is the study of its social function, which is where I would mostly situate monastic patronage, and more on the institutional or economic history of religious communities. There are exceptions, of course, appearing in increasing numbers, which are contributing to a growing body of work on issues related to sociomonastic studies. The work of Nikolas Jaspert, Ursula Vones-Liebenstein, Paul Freedman and Jill Webster, among others, has done much to enhance our understanding of the intricate interplay between church and society in medieval Iberia, as have a series of (unfortunately often isolated) projects carried out in various research centres across the Peninsula, among them Flocel Sabaté's recent project at the University of Lleida on the Premonstratensian canons in medieval Catalonia, or the work by Reyna Pastor, Esther Pascua and others on the social networks of several Galician monasteries. But much more work remains to be done on the topic, and this paper aims to be a small contribution.

The relationship between a monastic patron and a religious community was a two-way liaison, in which the patron was the steward and protector of his community, while the monks, canons, or nuns, in turn, became the patrons and protectors of his soul and memory.

Monasteries and politics tend to be inseparable in medieval history. However close religious communities sought to get to a complete withdrawal from the clamours of the immoral and decadent world outside, ultimately they all sprang from this world and its society. And with this society, religious men and women, a few remarkable and much admired exceptions aside, continued to associate and be associated – and involved in its crises, be they social, economic or political.

Richard Southern once remarked that ‘the history of the medieval church is the history of medieval society’, explaining that

I want to focus here on the second and penultimate points, the family connections and what Southern calls the ‘secular functions’ of religious orders, or rather on certain aspects thereof, and I will do so by looking at two regions, which present an interesting case for comparison, particularly in the thirteenth century, namely Wales and Catalonia. I will look at ways in which religious communities might become drawn into the politics of their times and consider the consequences, both direct and indirect, this may have had for the lives of their members; lives according to certain rules and regulations and under certain vows, which in theory anticipated a very different response and commitment than we often find in practice.

By convening in Paris, the 2009 meeting broke with precedent: this was the first Thirteenth-Century England conference to be held outside the British Isles. We very much hope that this will set a precedent, and that in future other meetings, too, will reflect by their venue the degree to which England formed part of a larger cultural, political, religious, economic and social whole. In 2009, the specific occasion for crossing the Channel was the 750th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris, the agreement in which Henry III surrendered his claim to Normandy, Anjou and Poitou, and which inaugurated a period of relative and, though temporary, nonetheless largely unparalleled calm in dealings between the rulers of England and France. This context is reflected in the papers published here, many of which focus on dealings between the kingdoms of England and France and their inhabitants, with a separate group of papers specifically on the Treaty of Paris and its aftermath. Yet, in keeping with the traditions of the conference, the venue did not determine the range of topics discussed.

The papers on the Treaty of Paris, which sat at the heart of the conference and are published here as a self-contained group, reflect the variety of ways in which the Treaty and its associated history, especially its later history, can be addressed. Daniel Power considers the ways in which an Anglo-Norman aristocracy struggled to elide their dynastic ambitions with the machinations of high politics in this period. The movement of familial land and access to it was constrained by the claims of the separated English and French states; while the Treaty of Paris did not occasion a final rupture and in fact served to ease some cross-Channel management of family lands, the futures of English and French dynasties were frequently quite discrete by the later thirteenth century. This Anglo-Norman tension over rights and property is also evident in William Chester Jordan's paper, in which he discusses the significance of the dispute concerning the status of the small Gloucestershire priory of Deerhurst following its purchase by Earl Richard of Cornwall in 1250 from the French abbey of St Denis, of which Deerhurst had been a dependency since the days of Edward the Confessor.

In 2001 Joan Greatrex wrote in her chapter on recent developments in monastic history that ‘in the last twenty years there has been an impressive increase of interest in the study of monastic history’. The present volume is reassuring testimony that the developments so welcomed by Greatrex have not ceased since she applauded them some five years ago. On the contrary, monastic history continues to go from strength to strength: scholars continue to explore uncharted territories and they are reassessing the findings of earlier generations of historians such as Dom David Knowles through the use of previously neglected sources, documentary, literary, archaeological and artefactual. More attention has been paid to those ‘lesser’ religious houses, for which the surviving evidence does not always abound. Different kinds of questions have been asked by historians, whose primary interest is gradually shifting from a predominantly institutional approach to late medieval monasticism to an increasingly socio-cultural-economic one. In this context, the external relations and networks of religious communities, be they with patrons and benefactors or with other secular authorities including the Crown, have received particular consideration.

The fifteen chapters in this collection represent the proceedings of an international conference on ‘Monasteries and Society in the later Middle Ages’, organised by the History Departments at Aberystwyth and Lampeter and held in April 2005 at Gregynog Hall (Powys). The conference brought together scholars from different institutions working on diverse aspects of monastic history and focused on the wide range of contacts which existed between religious communities and the laity in the later medieval British Isles.

Advances in approaches to medieval monastic history are not solely a matter of investigating new and hitherto unexploited sources, valuable though that is for deepening our understanding of this central medieval phenomenon. It is clear that historians are now questioning some of the older assumptions about monastic life in the later Middle Ages, and setting new approaches and a new agenda. The present volume is in line with these developments in a number of ways. First of all, as the title indicates, the scope is not limited to England.