The Catholic Historical Review

The thirteenth century was witness to a variety of assaults on monastic privileges. Lay rulers attempted to restrict further accumulation of property by abbeys and to coerce the religious into deflecting their charity into paths that directly served the material interests of the Crown. Bishops relentlessly attacked the exemption of many individual monasteries and of whole orders from episcopal supervision and jurisdiction. The abbots fought back furiously and with modest success in the thirteenth century, but developments in the later Middle Ages and the early-modern period rendered even this partial success ephemeral.