At the close of the Angevin period there were in Normandy something like eighty monasteries and convents, not counting the numerous cells and priories, as, for example, the various dependencies of the great abbey of Marmoutier at Tours. These were chiefly Benedictine foundations, though the newer movements of the Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and Augustinians were well represented, the only distinctively Norman order, the Congregation of Savigny, having been early absorbed by the Cistercians. The oldest of these establishments were at the two extremes of the duchy, Mont-Saint-Michel at one end and Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille, Saint-Ouen and Fécamp at the other; but the distribution was speedily equalized, and the great abbeys of the centre, Bec and Caen and Saint-Évroul, were soon known throughout Europe. The conquest of England opened a new field for monastic influence: twenty Norman monasteries had received lands in England by the time of the Domesday survey, and the number was considerably greater when the holdings of alien priories were confiscated at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Mont-Saint-Michel, for example, had a priory in Cornwall as well as one at LeMans, and its lands in Maine, Brittany, and various parts of England did not allay its desire for more whenever opportunity offered. For a period of five years, from 1155 to 1159 inclusive, we have a record of the activity of its abbot, Robert of Torigni, in relation to the monastery’s property, and a very instructive record it is. It takes him to England and the Channel Islands, to the king’s assizes at Gavrai, Domfront, Caen, and Carentan, to the courts of the bishops of Avranches, Coutances, and Bayeux, and to that of the archbishop at Rouen; proving his rights, compromising, exchanging, purchasing, receiving by gift or royal charter; picking up here a bit of land, there a mill, a garden, a vineyard, a tithe, a church, to add to the lands and rents, mills and forests, markets and churches and feudal rights which he already possessed. There are also various examples of loans on mortgage, for the monasteries were the chief source of rural credit in this period, and as the land with its revenues passed at once into the possession of the mortgagee, the security was absolute, the annual return sure, and the chances of ultimate acquisition of the property considerable. With the resources of the monastery during his administration of thirty-two years Abbot Robert was able to increase the number of monks from forty to sixty, to enlarge the conventual buildings, in which he entertained the kings of England and of France, and to add a great façade to the abbey-church, a contribution to the massive pile of the Marvel which we are no longer privileged to behold. He also labored for the intellectual side of the monastery’s life, restoring the library and enlarging it by a hundred and twenty volumes, and composing a variety