The benefactors of Cava varied widely, from great aristocrats and prelates down to minor local landowners, prosperous peasants or sometimes tradesmen or artisans, the latter mainly from the town of Salerno. But all these were persons of some wealth or property, with land or a house, and enough wealth to make a donation. The charters of any religious institution are always unlikely fully to represent the social gradations of the population. With rare exceptions, such as unfree (or perhaps semi-free) peasants who were given to the monastery, the poor are conspicuous by their absence.

That said, one can note considerable differences between those who patronised the mother house and the benefactors of most of its dependencies. In rare cases the latter might be closely associated with local nobles, perhaps the family who had founded the church, as with St Peter of Olivola and the descendants of Rainulf the Constable (who was probably a Breton by origin), or like St Peter at Tramutola which from the mid-twelfth century became favoured by the family of the counts of Marsico, the dominant local lord. But these instances were exceptional. Nor did such links always continue. King Roger forced the grandson of Rainulf the Constable to exchange his lordship of Sant’Agata for a smaller and less valuable holding in coastal Apulia in 1133, and thereafter the patrons of the church of St Peter resembled those of most Cava dependencies: minor local landowners, occasionally knights, more usually prosperous peasants. Between 1133 and 1188, when the sequence of documents breaks off, St Peter of Olivola received twenty-four gifts and made thirteen purchases (ten of the latter after 1184). All but one, or perhaps two, of these donors and vendors were inhabitants of Sant’Agata. Similarly, although Count Henry of Monte Sant’Angelo gave St James, Lucera, to Cava in 1083, and he and his brother William made further benefactions to this house thereafter, and also gave Cava two churches on Monte Gargano, the latter’s death c. 1104/5 saw the extinction of their line, and the end of aristocratic patronage of this house.