ABSTRACT
Cistercian building plans were specially adapted to house the conversi and preserve social apartheid between them and the choir monks. The use of the conversi as wardens of granges and warehouses as well as manual workmen enabled the choir monks to devote themselves to study and the observances of the Rule without getting involved in the distractions and responsibilities of estate management. The business of the visiting abbot was simply to see that the Rule and the statutes of the general chapter were being observed. Before the advent of the friars in the thirteenth century, the Cistercian general chapter and its imitators were the only international assemblies known to Europe, apart from general councils of the Church, which were extremely rare events. A new European intelligentsia was emerging, and it looked to other forms of religious life for the fulfilment of its ideals.
