Some of the smaller religious houses were conducted on the same lines of strict ascetic discipline as the greater monasteries; but in many of them the life was little more "regular" or ascetic than that of an ordinary household--say that of a church dignitary--scrupulous in the attendance of all its members at the daily services in the oratory, and in the strict decorum of their daily life. This opened an easy door to abuse, and in a short time the discipline of many of the monasteries had become very lax.
One remarkable feature of these early monasteries is that many of them were hereditary properties, and the rule over them often descended from father to son and from mother to daughter. We have seen the successions in the Kentish monasteries and at Ely from sister to sister and from mother to daughter. Cedd bequeathed his monastery of Lastingham to his brother Chad. Benedict Biscop saw the danger of the custom, and declared that he would not transfer his monasteries to his own brother unless he was a fit person to be abbot. Whitgils built a small church and monastery at Spurnhead in Holderness, and left them to his heirs; they came at last, by legitimate succession, to no less distinguished a person than Alcuin; who was, therefore, not only Abbot of Tours, with its vast territory on which there were 200,000 serfs, but also of this little monastery in his native country. Hedda, who styles himself mass-priest, in 790 bequeathed his patrimonial inheritance, consisting of two large parcels of land, with a minster on one of them, limiting the succession of the latter to clergymen of his family considered capable of ruling a minster according to ecclesiastical law, and in default of such heir, it was to go to Worcester Cathedral, where he had been bred and schooled ("Cod. Dipl.," i. 206).[29]
It is easy to understand how it was that in process of time many of these semi-secular religious houses passed easily into the status of parochial rectories; and, on the other hand, how a rectory, which often had a number of chaplains and clerks to assist the rector in ministering to the mother church and its outlying chapels, came to be called a "minster."
In the Danish invasions and occupations, most of these religious houses were plundered and ruined, the greater houses were not at once reoccupied on the restoration of order, and most of the smaller houses disappeared.