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RELIGIOUS LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 405
and only at Lewes, Thetford, Much Wenlock, and one or two
other priories could they have presented the spectacle of a
strictly ordered community following a rich liturgical life that
was Cluny's 'message' to the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Following the monks came the regular canons, the Austin or
'black* canons as they were called, having as their code the
short Rule ofSt. Augustine and importing the customs ofsome
great church in northern France or Flanders, and propagating
their observance all over England. Notable among them were
the houses deriving from the celebrated centre of St. Victor at
Paris. They too were introduced by the new landowners in
small groups to leaven the mass of the country clergy, though
in fact they did little or no apostolic work, but served their
churches with the liturgical offices ofa semi^monastic life. Like
the black monks, the black canons were isolated, autonomous
communities.
All these, however, were but spies
to the battalions that were
to come. Chief among the new orders were the Cistercians or
'white* monks, professedly an austere and militant reform, who
aimed at following the Rule of St. Benedict to the last dot (ad
apicem litterae). Their earliest plantations were at Waverley in
Surrey and Rievaulx in Yorkshire; thenceforward they spread
with phenomenal rapidity over England and, later, over Wales,
waste land in remote and uncultivated districts.
asking only
The Cistercians restored agricultural work to honour for
monks, but the tasks ofclearing forests, draining marshes, over'
seeing flocks and crops in wild and desolate places, were be'
yond the powers of unaided choir monks; the Cistercians, by
recruiting cottars and small freeholders as lay brethren, opened
the religious life to classes hitherto excluded from it, and created
a labour force of great economic potentiality that for a century
did much to further the contemporary extension of the limits
ofcultivation and to add to the bulk ofthe profitable wool clip
ofthe land.
In the wake of the Cistercians came the Premonstratensian
or 'white* canons, who had originated as an apostolic preaching
institute but had felt the pull of St. Bernard and the Cister^