During the greater part of the twelfth century the administration, financial and economic, of the English monasteries had been progressively decentralized. The economy of the Rule of St Benedict, by which the cellarer controlled all temporalities under the immediate supervision of the abbot, had been dislocated both by the exigencies of the feudal system, which led to a division between the barony of the abbot and the possessions of the monks, and by a universal devolution in the course of which many of the estates and revenues, presented or allocated to particular uses, came to be administered by the officials concerned acting in complete independence and with full initiative. This state of things, which has been called the ‘obedientiary system’, attained its maximum of development and diffusion between 1150 and c. 1200. On the material side it was largely due to the ‘cell economy’ of the scattered and parcelled estates held by the early Anglo-Norman landowners; on the social and monastic side it was one of the symptoms of the centrifugal, almost anarchic process which came near to dissolving the external bonds of discipline in Western Christendom in the half-century before the Fourth Lateran Council.

However plausible the reasons for such devolution may have seemed, it affected medieval monasticism permanently and adversely. Economically, it rendered a uniform policy impossible and stood in the way of ‘high’ farming and the concentration of crops, flocks of sheep and dairy herds upon favoured areas with a view to catching the market with produce.