The Conquest did much to promote church interests and introduced a higher standard of religious thought throughout the country. Cathedrals and abbey churches were rebuilt. Norman landowners founded and endowed new monasteries, and monasticism, as a whole, was extended and reformed. New orders sprung up at the latter end of the 11th century, including the military orders, formed in response to the Crusaders and known as the Knights Templar and Knights of St John; also regular orders representing reforms of the Benedictine order. In 1077 the Cluniacs came, but being entirely dependent on the Mother house at Clugny, were regarded as foreigners and did not meet with much encouragement. On the other hand, the Cistercians, or “white monks,” in spite of their rigid rules and extreme austerity, found favour with the people and set up their first English house at Waverly in Surrey in 1129. The rules of the Carthusian monks were not popular--absolute silence, among other severities, was observed by the brethren, and only nine houses of the order were erected in this country. The Black Canons Regular of St Augustine with their branches of the Præmonstratensian and Gilbertine orders established many monasteries which flourished throughout the land. This extension of monasticism, which reached its culminating point in the middle of the 12th century, is thus vividly pictured by Mr Wakeman:-- “The monasteries sprang up all over England with a life of their own, concentrated and exclusive, but rich and vigorous, bringing into the stagnant waters of rural society a profusion of high thoughts and noble aspirations previously inconceivable. Art, worship, devotion, learning often in the highest form at that time attainable, were brought to man’s very doors. If he had in him anything which would correspond to their magnetic touch, and would submit himself to the chastening of discipline, the open portals of the nearest monastery set him upon the lowest rung of the ladder which would lead, did he choose it, to heaven.... There was hardly a district in England where monastic influence was unknown and its power unfelt.... For a century and a half after the Conquest all the best men in the English Church came from the monasteries.” Deterioration in monastic life, however, set in at the opening of the 13th century.