ents
from the learned English Benedictin, Clemens Reynerus, in his
Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia. Others object that St. Gregory in
his epistles ordains many things contrary to the rule of St. Benedict,
and think he who has written so much concerning St. Benedict, would have
mentioned by some epithet the circumstance of being his disciple, and
would have called the rule of that patriarch his own. These antiquaries
judge it most probable that the monastery of St. Andrew had its own rule
prescribed by the first founders, and borrowed from different places:
for this was the ordinary method of most monasteries in the west, till
afterwards the rule of St. Benedict was universally received for better
uniformity and discipline: to which the just commendations of St.
Gregory doubtless contributed.

F. Clement Reyner, in the above-mentioned book, printed at Doway, in
folio, in 1626, displays much erudition in endeavoring to prove that St.
Austin, and the other monks sent by Saint Gregory to convert the
English, professed the order of St. Benedict. Mabillon borrows his
arguments on this subject in his preface to the Acts of the Benedictins,
against the celebrated Sir John Marsham, who, in his long preface to the
Monasticon, sets himself to show that the first English monks followed
rules instituted by their own abbots, often gleaned out of many. Dr.
Hickes confirms this assertion against Mabillon with great erudition,
(Diss. pp. 67, 68,) which is espoused by Dr. Tanner, bishop of St.
Asaph's, in his preface to nis exact Notitia Monastica, by the author of
Biographia Britannica, in the life of Bede, t. 1, p. 656, and by the
judicious William Thomas, in his additions to the new edition of
Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, (t. 1, p. 157.) These authors
think that the rule of St. Benedict was not generally received by the
English monks before the regulations of St. Dunstan; nor perfectly till
after the Norman conquest. For pope Constantine, in 709, in the bull
wherein he establishes the rule of St. Benedict to be followed in the
abbey of Evesham, says of it: "Which does not prevail in those parts."
"Quae minus in illis partibus habetur." In 747, Cuthbert archbishop of
Canterbury, in a synod held in presence of Ethelbaid, king of the
Mercians, at Cloveshove, (which town some place in Kent, others more
probably in Mercia, about Reading,) published Monastic Constitutions,
which were {581} followed by the English monks till t