ABSTRACT
We have seen how bishops arranged with monastic communities to settle in or near their episcopal sees in the dioceses of Roskilde and Lund, and probably Slesvig and Ribe, how the Danish king laid the foundations of monastic life in Odense, the Norwegian king in Selja and Bergen, the Swedish king in Vreta, and how a man in high royal service founded Nidarholm near Trondheim. One could be tempted to ascribe the synchronism of this early monastic movement to special Scandinavian conditions. Strikingly enough, however, this development is synchronic to that of one of the north German dioceses, the very archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen that even in the 1070s still pretended to control all Christian mission in Scandinavia. In the middle of the eleventh century the rich development of Saxon monasticism reaching as far north as to St Michael's abbey in Lüneburg in the diocese of Verden - thus in the church province of Mainz - still had no counterpart in the Hamburg-Bremen archdiocese. Religious congregations there were, but they were communities of secular canons without vows, like Reepsholt in the north-western part of the old Bremen diocese or, further south, Wildeshausen on the Hunte, a western tributary of the Weser.
