ABSTRACT
At the end of the eleventh century, at the height of its magnificence, Cluny was the head of a huge monastic empire containing many hundreds of dependencies and associated houses spread throughout western Europe. Before Pope Leo IX ascended the papal chair at the end of 1048 and made Rome the headquarters of the so-called Gregorian Reform Movement, it was to Cluny that men looked for spiritual leadership and religious inspiration. Cluny began to penetrate England after the Norman Conquest, though the initiative came from the king and the Anglo-Norman nobility and not from Abbot Hugh, who showed no great eagerness to extend his monastic family across the Channel. The foundation of Lewes priory, the first of the English Cluniac houses, was the result of an initiative by William de Warenne, the first Norman earl of Surrey.
