The death of Henry I was taken in a previous chapter as a convenient date for ending a period in the history of the black monks of England. Under the Conqueror and his sons they had enjoyed and profited by a protection, a sheltering, which had no parallel in the rest of Europe. The isolation in which the Norman kings had maintained their dominions, together with the encouragement given to what was best and purest in the religious life, had made of England a garden enclosed; the vigorous young Norman monasticism, grafted upon the old English stock or planted to grow alone, had been sheltered from attack and protected from the danger of being choked or strangled by other growths. With the death of Henry I all this was changed. The cessation of his firm rule left the garden exposed to the inroads of all kinds of enemies, the lowering of the barriers that separated England from Europe allowed the entrance of new seeds, and, to carry the simile to the end, the original plantation, left to itself, began to grow irregularly and in some cases to revert to the wild. Such metaphors, and the ideas that lie behind them, must not be pressed too rigidly. The year 1135 is a convenient date, no more; the processes of change had begun before, and did not fully develop till years after, nor were the black monks, as a body, bound by a single law or measure.