display of banners, the journey is so easy that no obstacle can retard it. . . . When they have reached the church, they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual camp, and during the whole of the following night the army of the Lord keeps watch with psalms and canticles, tapers and lamps are lighted on each wagon, and the relics of the saints are brought for the relief of the sick and the weak, for whom priests and people in procession implore the clemency of the Lord and his Blessed Mother. If healing does not follow at once, they cast aside their garments, men and women alike, and drag themselves from altar to altar . . . begging the priests to scourge them for their sins.
At the close of the Angevin period there were in Normandy something like eighty monasteries and convents, not counting the numerous cells and priories, as, for example, the various dependencies of the great abbey of Marmoutier at Tours. These were chiefly Benedictine foundations, though the newer movements of the Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and Augustinians were well represented, the only distinctively Norman order, the Congregation of Savigny, having been early absorbed by the Cistercians. The oldest of these establishments were at the two extremes of the duchy, Mont-Saint-Michel at one end and Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille, Saint-Ouen and Fécamp at the other; but the distribution was speedily equalized, and the great abbeys of the centre, Bec and Caen and Saint-Évroul, were soon known throughout Europe. The conquest of England opened a new field for monastic influence: twenty Norman monasteries had received lands in England by the time of the
