In September 1087, William the Conqueror died. His body was taken to his own foundation of St-Etienne in Caen whereupon ‘Dom Gilbert the abbot came out reverently in procession with all his monks to meet the bier, and with them came a great multitude of clergy and laity, weeping and praying.’ Allowing for the twelfth-century chronicler Orderic Vitalis's rhetorical flourishes, the burial of the duke of Normandy was an occasion for a great gathering of monks, clergy and laity. They assembled to bury their leader at the site of a significant monastic foundation, underlined by its magnificent architecture. It is this interaction of laity and religious within the context of sacred space that forms the basis for this consideration of space, gender and the religious life in central medieval Normandy.

Attempts by the Church to maintain a clear distinction between religious, clergy and laity form the backdrop to this discussion. In the wider historical context our period begins with the Gregorian reform: a movement which sought among other things to free the Church from lay control and, as far as possible, to define a separate sacred space within society. Reform of the institutional Church had wide-ranging ramifications for the relationship between the clergy and professed religious on the one hand and the laity on the other. Central to our understanding of this relationship is the use of sacred spaces, defined here to include churches, monasteries, leper houses and hospitals, along with their precincts.