The period that opens with the Lateran Council was, as regards legislation affecting the life of the black monk abbeys, very different from that which had gone before. Hitherto, as readers of a previous volume will be aware, there had been, strictly speaking, no legislative authority at all either within or without the monastic body in England. The papacy, prior to the Council, had never attempted to put forward any comprehensive body of decrees; the bishops had no authority to do so; the very great activity of Lanfranc had been due entirely to his personal prestige and the circumstances of the time; and later enactments of provincial councils were directed solely against individual abuses and were, it must be said, never regarded very seriously by the monks. Among the black monks themselves, no legislative body of any kind existed; the houses were entirely autonomous, and all rested with the abbot or prior who could do little to affect the customary life of the house, as expressed in the uses which had crystallized around the Rule, when once an equilibrium had been reached after the Norman Conquest. Nor, it may be added, did any widespread sense of a need for further legislation exist.

With the thirteenth century all this was changed. Reform and the making of constitutions was in the air. In Rome, from the pontificate of Innocent III onwards, a series of energetic popes took a personal interest in the cause of monastic reform, and were encouraged and assisted in their endeavours by the position accorded to the Papacy by the new highly organized and highly centralized orders of friars.