Hitherto only one monastic order had influenced religious life in Belgium, namely, the Benedictines. In the twelfth century other orders were born--the Cistercians and the Norbertins or Premontrés. The Cistercians, founded by St. Bernard in France, played the part, mainly, of clearers of wild land and of colonizers; they introduced new economic and agricultural methods and exerted a deep influence in economic life. The Premontrés were canons, rather than monks, who passed their time in study and in administering the parishes. But they, too, did much for the colonization of the country, and they transformed into fruit-bearing land the barren soil of the Antwerp Campine. The number of parishes increased in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. New chapels were founded in cases where the nearest parish church was too far removed, or where a number of people sufficient for the formation of a new parish were to be found dwelling close together. Sometimes the establishment of a new parish was ordered at the instance of a wealthy landlord, and a chapel constructed on the domain of his manor, in order to gratify his desire for better opportunities for attending church. Each chapel was ordinarily granted the right to have its own parish priest, to whom was granted permission to baptize infants and bury the dead in the parish cemetery. [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF TOURNAI] As for the economic organization, in ante-feudal times there existed an important difference between the country south and that lying north of a line drawn through Boulogne, Saint-Omer, Douai, Mons, and Maestricht. North of this line we find the system of isolated farms; south of the line the system of villages. But during the tenth century the landlords extended their possessions in farm lands as well as in the villages, and the same economic organization, directed by the same principles, prevailed throughout the country. Each domain was divided into two parts: a central part, including the manor of the landlord and that portion of the land exploited by himself by means of unfree “serfs” or agricultural laborers; and another part, surrounding the central domain, divided into small lots, given to free farmers. The domain of the ecclesiastical landlords, bishops or abbots, was exceedingly well administered and the conditions of life of the people depending upon these landlords were very favorable; the ecclesiastical “serfs” frequently asserted that they preferred their servitude to freedom, as less burdensome than freedom itself. The ecclesiastical “serfs” were grouped in families, _familiae_, within whose limits justice was administered by the mayor of the community in the name of the abbot.