The cathedral monasteries, with the peculiar constitution which made of them a class apart among the black monks, deserve a brief separate treatment.

As has been shown elsewhere, they owed their origin to the peculiar circumstances of the English Church in the tenth century and again after the Norman Conquest, when monks were in the forefront of ecclesiastical reform, and when the Primate and other influential bishops were monks. The intention of both Dunstan and Lanfranc and their colleagues was undoubtedly to establish in perpetuity a monastic community which should serve the cathedral and take the place of a chapter, and which was to be presided over by a bishop, himself a monk, who should stand in all things in loco abbatis. Of this scheme one part was realized, the other speedily proved unworkable. Before the end of the eleventh century secular bishops ruled more than one important monastic cathedral, and by 1150 the succession of monastic bishops had everywhere been interrupted.

This had inevitably dislocated the primitive harmony between head and members: while the monks strove to emancipate themselves in domestic affairs from the control of one who was not of their profession, secular bishops were rarely willing explicitly to abandon ancient rights, while monastic bishops, appointed after an interval, made every attempt to resume powers that might have fallen into abeyance. In the event, emancipation was achieved by the monks in various degrees and at different times, and when, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III set up a commission to report on current practice at cathedral monasteries as a basis for a proposed constitution for Glastonbury, no kind of uniformity was to be found.