The Monastic Revival

When the Normans arrived in England, monasteries had long been a feature of the social landscape. Thirty-five houses of Benedictine monks appear in the Domesday Survey as possessing land in the time of Edward the Confessor, and there existed upwards of nine nunneries. Many of these abbeys were endowed with great estates. A few of them, like Bury St Edmund's which had been founded by Cnut, were still relatively young establishments in 1066; but most of them traced their continuous history from the monastic revival inspired by Dunstan and Ethelwold a century earlier.