er settled by St. Athanasius at Milan and Triers,
during his banishment into the West; by St. Eusebius of Vercelli, in
his diocese, and by St. Hilary and St. Martin in Gaul, was founded
upon the plan of the Oriental monasteries: being brought by those
holy prelates from Egypt and Syria. The same is to be said of the
first monasteries founded in Great Britain and Ireland. After the
coming of St. Columban from Ireland into France, his Rule continued
long most in vogue, and was adopted by the greater part of the
monasteries that flourished in that kingdom. But it was customary in
those ages, for founders of great monasteries frequently to choose
out of different rules such religious practices and regulations, and
to add such others as they judged most expedient: and the Benedictin
Rule was sometimes blended with that of St. Columban, or others. In
the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Debonnaire. for the sake of
uniformity, it was enacted by the council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 802,
and several other decrees, that the Rule of St. Benedict should
alone be followed in all the monasteries in the dominions of those
princes. F. Reyner, a most learned English Benedictin, in his
Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia, has, with profound erudition,
produced all the monuments and authorities by which it can be made
to appear that St. Gregory the Great established the Rule of St.
Benedict in his monastery of St. Andrew at Rome, and was settled by
St. Austin and the other monks who were sent by St. Gregory to
convert the English in all the monasteries which they founded in
this island. These proofs were abridged by Mabillon, Natalia
Alexander, and others, who have judged that they amount to
demonstration. Some, however, still maintain that the monastic rule
brought hither by St. Austin, was a compilation from several
different rules: that St. Bennet Biscop, and soon after St. Wilfrid,
introduced several new regulations borrowed from the Rule of St.
Benedict; that St. Dunstan established it in England more perfectly,
still retaining several of the ancient constitutions of the English
monasteries, and that it was not entirely adopted in England before
Lanfranc's time. This opinion is warmly abetted by Dr. Lay, in his
additions to Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, and Tanner's
Pref. to Notitia Monas