From the twelfth century onward, the religious made recourse, under the most diverse names, to a new kind of norm and normative text: statutes, which came to complete their rules and, if they had some, also their customs, which had often been written down into customaries. With time, the statutes would permanently become the main pilar of their ever evolving ius particulare. They were regulations of their own law formulated in a general and prospective manner which had been passed conjointly on the occasion of their general chapter sessions, which were duly promulgated, and which could be amended at any time. In a broader sense, statutes were also, and perhaps most importantly, official written records of such regulations which were rapidly conceived as veritable codes of law. They are one of the most striking products of the movement of wider diversification of Western vita religiosa in the form of religious orders by the model of the Cistercians, that is in the form of structured networks of monasteries which constituted legal subjects and objects consciously differentiating themselves from the others and which were governed in a transpersonal fashion.