A branch of the Order came to England about 1128, and their first house was founded at Waverley in Surrey. Very shortly after (about 1134) the Abbey of Stratford Langthorne, in Essex, was founded by William de Montfichet, who endowed it with all his lordship in West Ham.
It was not until two centuries afterwards that the second Cistercian house in the immediate neighbourhood of London was founded. This was the Abbey of St. Mary Graces, East Minster or New Abbey, without the walls of London, which Edward III. instituted in 1350 after a severe scourge of plague (the so-called Black Death.)
The two great military Orders—the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem and the Templars—followed the Augustinian rule, and both were settled in London. The Knights Hospitallers were founded about 1092 by the merchants of Amalfi, in Italy, for the purpose of affording hospitality to pilgrims in the Holy Land. The Hospital or Priory of St. John was founded in 1100 by Jordan Briset and his wife, Muriel, outside the northern wall of London, and the original village of Clerkenwell grew up around the buildings of the knights. A few years after this the Brethren of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, or Knights of the Temple, came into being at the Holy City, and they settled first on the south side of Holborn, near Southampton Buildings. They removed to Fleet Street or the New Temple in 1184, when, as Spenser terms it, ‘they decayd through pride,’ and the Order after much persecution was suppressed in England, as it had been in other countries, by command of the Pope. The house in Fleet Street was given in 1313 by Edward II. to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, at whose death, in 1323, the property
passed to the Knights of St. John, who leased the New Temple to the lawyers, still the occupants of the district.