The section of Orderic's Historia ecclesiastica that has become known as his ‘Treatise on the New Orders’ is a valuable insight into the great wave of change that had swept through Western monasticism in his lifetime. At the time he was writing the Cistercians were emerging as the strongest voice in what Marjorie Chibnall described as the ‘great debate on the interpretation of the Rule’. While Orderic begins his consideration with the Cistercians, he has important things to say about other monastic initiatives too. He provides, for example, an account of the foundation made at Tiron in the forests of the Perche in the first decade of the twelfth century. Little has been written about the monks of Tiron, although they were during Orderic's lifetime one of the most successful of the new approaches to monasticism, if success is to be measured by the settlement of Tironensian monks all over northern France, Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, Burgundy, Scotland, England and Wales. Orderic's is an early and independent account of the rise of the Tironensian congregation, and it is important because the history of the Tironensians has always been dominated by the life of the founder, Abbot Bernard, the Vita beati Bernardi Tironensis (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina no. 1251). Orderic captures the stories that had gathered around the founding figure some twenty years after Bernard's death and, as such, is a witness to what can be described as the ‘Bernard of Tiron narrative’, before that narrative reached its fullest expression in the Vita. In considering Orderic's treatment of events at Tiron, then, our understanding of one of the more obscure of the so-called new monastic orders will be increased. Another look at the treatise in a Tironensian context will also be helpful in providing a new perspective on the sources Orderic used in the composition of the Historia ecclesiastica.

Orderic's record of the events that led up to the foundation of Tiron starts with the departure from Poitou of the abbot of Quinçay, Bernard, who left his house because he was unwilling to accept that it should be subject to Cluny.