The Abbeys of Fulda, in Hesse, and of Corvey, in Westphalia, the latter founded by Benedictine monks from the Abbey of Corbie, in Picardy, were in their day the chief centres of learning in Germany.
In England St. Alban's Abbey, in Hertfordshire, was built in 1077 by a disciple of Lanfranc, the illustrious abbot of the famous Abbey of Le Bec, in Normandy. A large number of monasteries were
founded later on by various orders, notably the Benedictines—Croyland, Malmesbury, Bury St. Edmund's, Peterborough, Salisbury, Wimborne, Wearmouth, Westminster, etc., not to mention the abbeys and priories which had existed in Ireland from the sixth century.
136. ABBEY OF ST. ÉTIENNE AT CAEN. FAÇADE
The mother abbey of Citeaux gave birth to four daughters—Clairvaux, Pontigny, Morimond, and La Ferté.
The importance of Clairvaux was much increased in the first years of the twelfth century by the fame of her abbot, St. Bernard, that most brilliant embodiment of mediæval monasticism. His influence was immense, not alone in his character of reformer and founder of an important order, but as a statesman whom fortune persistently favoured in all enterprises tending to the increase of his great reputation.
St. Bernard distinguished himself in the theological controversies of his century at the Council of Sens in 1140, and in successful polemical disputations with Abélard, the famous advocate of free will, and other heterodox philosophers who heralded the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Somewhat later he took an active part in promoting the hapless second Crusade under Louis VII., and in 1147, a few years before his death, he entered vigorously into the Manichæan controversy as a strenuous opponent of the heresy which was then agitating the public mind and preparing the way for the schism which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, brought about the terrible war of the Albigenses, and steeped Southern France in blood.
The monastic fame of St. Bernard was established not only by the searching reforms he instituted at Clairvaux among the seceding monks of Cluny and Solesmes, but by the success of the Cistercian colonies he planted in Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark, to the number of seventy-two, according to his historians.
137. ST. ALBAN'S ABBEY (ENGLAND)