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Updated: June 30, 2025
The state of discipline in these various institutions varied considerably according to circumstances, but although serious attempts were made to introduce reforms especially in the houses of the Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans, it cannot be contended for a moment that the Scottish monasteries and convents were free from the gravest abuses.
An extern school grew round the old almost monastic foundation, which subsists still with its middle-age costume and usages and all Cistercians pray that it may long flourish.
The Cistercians at first declared that they were not bound to respect it, but they were after a time forced by the pope to conform.
Thus, without looking too minutely into the matter, we find that when the thirteenth century opens, or if you will, when Henry III. came to the throne in 1216, there were three great orders of monks in England the old Benedictines, who had held houses and lands for centuries; the Cluniacs, who were the reformed Benedictines; and the Cistercians, who may be styled the reformed Cluniacs.
"True," said Richard, who was a humorist, "and I leave my avarice to the Cistercians, my luxury to the Gray Friars, and my pride to the Templars." History has fewer sharper sayings than this, every word of which told like a cloth-yard shaft sent against a naked bosom. Richard certainly never quarrelled with the children whom he thus left to his friends.
In England the arrival of the Cistercians and the new style introduced or rather developed by them seems almost more than anything else to have determined the direction of the change from what is usually, perhaps wrongly, called Norman to Early English, but in Portugal the great foundation of Alcobaça was apparently powerless to have any such marked effect except in the one case of cloisters.
But inasmuch as the architectural and other reforms among the Cistercians were many and peculiar, it will again be advisable to pass by these peculiarities without remark. The constitution of every convent, great or small, was monarchical. The head of the house was almost an absolute sovereign, and was called the Abbot.
I uncovered and louted as I passed thinking that he might be a holy man at his orisons, but he called to me and asked me if I had heard speak of the new indulgence in favor of the Cistercians. 'Not I, I answered.
There is an old Hall, a beautiful specimen of the architecture of James's time; an old Hall? many old halls; old staircases, passages, old chambers decorated with old portraits, walking in the midst of which we walk as it were in the early seventeenth century. To others than Cistercians, Grey Friars is a dreary place possibly.
To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among the swamps of Lincolnshire.
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