For England, where the figures are known fairly accurately, the number of monasteries for men rose between 1066 and 1154 (the accession of Henry II) from just under fifty to about five hundred, and Christopher Brooke calculates that the number of monks and nuns rose seven- or eight-fold in just under a hundred years.77 The Cistercian order alone built 498 monasteries between 1098 and 1170.78
