Abstract
The medieval British Isles were marked by a lively monastic presence throughout the entire period. Groups of monks, nuns, regular canons and canonesses, and friars established communities even in the furthermost reaches of the territory, and by doing so they came to play an important part in the life, culture, economy, and politics of the region. This paper will provide an overview of the arrival and spread of the different religious orders in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and by doing so, it will provide some comparative study of the different parts of the British Isles and examine how and when the spread and settlement of the various religious groups manifested itself across the islands, and what their impact was upon their localities and the society around them.
Highlights
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When Augustine and his fellow monks arrived in England from Rome, the island was by no means an empty stage as Christian monastic activity was concerned, though the earliest beginnings of cenobitic movements in the British Isles are difficult to reconstruct
The topic of monasticism in the medieval British Isles has been much treated by historians over time, both in terms of individual parts of the archipelago and collectively
Summary
When Augustine and his fellow monks arrived in England from Rome, the island was by no means an empty stage as Christian monastic activity was concerned, though the earliest beginnings of cenobitic movements in the British Isles are difficult to reconstruct. We know that religious houses in Anglo-Saxon England during the seventh century benefited from contacts with Rome and the Continent, thanks to the initiative of some early monastic founders, men like Benedict Biscop From what can be gathered, both from the written sources and from the surviving material remains, the monastic life in the British Isles thrived during the early period, both in terms of expansion and of cultural sophistication It is difficult to assess in any detail the state of monasticism in the British Isles during this period as the sources are scarce, but it seems that life according to the Rule of St Benedict, which had, in any case, not been followed exclusively in pre-tenth-century British religious communities, was disappearing from the surviving monasteries. The transition from early to Benedictine monasticism was already underway when the Normans arrived in the British Isles in the eleventh century and accelerated the process
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