For students of the last fifty years of monastic life in England the deplorable lack of any intimate or personal records of the lives and fortunes of the white monks continues from earlier times. There is no domestic chronicler or annalist, and no Cistercian has left familiar letters or biographical material. Glimpses, however, can be obtained of the overhead organization of the order from the collection of letters received from English correspondents by the abbot of Cîteaux, and from the scattered references to this country in the acts of general chapter, while the domestic life of the abbeys is fitfully revealed by rare visitation documents, and evidence of prosperity and changing habits is afforded by records or remains of monastic building activity.

Throughout the period the Cistercians in England, Wales and Ireland were governed by the original constitutional machinery of the Carta Caritatis, modified in practice by the executive powers acquired by the abbot of Cîteaux more than a century earlier and by the practice, begun during the Great Schism and maintained by the virtual isolation of England from the Continent, of entrusting the oversight of the English, Welsh and (intermittently) Irish abbeys to two or more abbots-commissary, with full powers of visitation and reform. By these means the primitive vertical descent of authority, which made each mother-house responsible for the discipline of daughter-foundations, was in large part abrogated, and a system of centralized national control was set up which had resemblances both to the regional ‘circary’ of the Premonstratensians and to the province of the mendicant friars.