ABSTRACT
The history of the Cistercian Order after the end of the thirteenth century is even today a much neglected subject. Indeed, thanks partly to still widespread assumptions about 'monastic decay' in the later middle ages, partly to the diminished distinctiveness of the Cistercian movement as it became much like any other rurally based monastic order, few aspects of the white monks' record have aroused much interest among scholars. If, on the one hand, the very existence of Cistercian communities as independent entities was subject to erosion by the growth of the power of external authorities, notably the papacy, and, on the other, by that of the secular power, historians have pointed to the decay of the international structures of the Order generally by the end of the thirteenth century. Yet it might well be argued that the really damaging pressures on the trans-European organisation of the Cistercians came only a century later. 1
