In an earlier volume the reader was taken for a kind of circular tour of the black monk monasteries of England. The time was early in the twelfth century, when the old orders were still lords of the ascendant; monastic houses, though numerous, were yet not innumerable; and a well-informed cicerone was at hand in the person of William of Malmesbury. By 1300 much has altered. The new orders of monks, canons and friars far out-number the original followers of the Benedictine rule, and small houses of every kind have so multiplied, that a comprehensive tour, even if possible with our fragmentary records, would be tedious beyond words; moreover, we have no Malmesbury, alert and humane, to accompany us. Nevertheless, after considering at such length the changes within the monastic order, and the organization of institutes that were rival to it, it may not be out of place to glance for a moment at the history of some of the greater houses as it might have appeared to an elderly monk at the turn of the century. In a survey of this kind it is natural to begin with Canterbury. The cathedral monastery of Christ Church has already occupied space enough in these pages. As the strong rule of old Eastry drew to a close, it was in many ways the type of a prosperous, well-organized, extroverted corporation. The great lawsuits, the internecine strife were now old history, and though as recently as the days of Ringmer, and even under Eastry himself, there had been discord and bitterness, the general picture is not an unhappy one: