In the eleventh century a large number of monasteries had been built throughout Western Europe by monks of various orders, in imitation of the great monastic schools of Lérins, Ireland, and Monte Casino. Among the famous abbeys of this period may be mentioned "Vézelay and Fécamp, sometime convents for women, afterwards converted into abbeys for men; St. Nicaise, at Rheims; Nogent-sous-Coucy, in Picardy; Anchin and Annouain, in Artois; St. Étienne, at Caen; St. Pierre-sur-Dives, Le Bec, Conches, Cerisy-la-Forêt,[48] and Lessay, in Normandy; La Trinité, at Vendôme; Beaulieu, near Loches; Montierneuf, at Poitiers, etc."[49] [48] _L'Architecture Romane_, by Ed. Corroyer, chap. iii. part ii. [49] Anthyme St. Paul, _Histoire Monumentale de la France_. 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. [Illustration: 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.