THE CONGREGATION OF Tiron was an integral part of the religious reformation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict (hereinafter the Rule) was widely adopted because of its flexibility and balance of prayer and study, manual labour and rest, and Charlemagne (742– 814) and his successor Louis the Pious (b. 778, r. 814– 840) mandated Benedictine monasticism throughout Europe. The terrifying Viking, Magyar, and Saracen invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries nearly destroyed continental monasticism and separated the Celtic church from the religious developments in Rome. The devastated monasteries were impoverished by heavy wartime taxation, plundered by raiders, and awarded by local rulers to loyal laymen. Lawrence notes that before 900 “regular monastic observance had almost disappeared from western Gaul and England.” The monasteries could be restored only when order was restored in the tenth and eleventh centuries. A revival of monasteries under the rule of Saint Benedict of Aniane (747– 821) occurred in Aquitaine, Flanders, and Lorraine in the early tenth century. Cluny, founded in 909 by Duke William I the Pious of Aquitaine (875– 918), had an unusual charter that protected the monastery from laymen and bishops, ensured independent abbatial elections, and placed the monastery under the protection of the papacy. Cluny became an “empire” of about a thousand monasteries with economic and social ties to their communities and donors. Subordinate only to the pope and centralized under the authority of the abbot, Cluny was an “international” religious order.

By the mid-eleventh century royal leadership was established under Edward the Confessor (r. 1042– 1066) and William I “the Conqueror” (r. 1066– 1087) in England, Malcolm III “Canmore” (r. 1058– 1093) in Scotland, and the Capetians: Robert II (r. 996– 1031), Henry I (r. 1031– 1060), and Philip I (1060– 1108) in France. The reform of the church was also underway, challenging royal and imperial control. Pope Gregory VII (1073– 1085) issued decrees against simony and clerical marriage (nicolaitism). He fought for the liberty of the church by forbidding lay investiture: the right of kings and lords to make (or sell) appointments to church offices. He upheld the freedom of the church, libertas ecclesiae: the freedom of churchmen to obey canon law and to have no control or interference by lay persons. The reform was carried out in various ways.