This article analyzes three examples (St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds) of conflicts between abbots and their monks in the High Middle Ages. It explores the strategies and means of power , as well as the communicative and linguistic conditions underlying them, which monks used when they clashed with their abusive abbots. The article argues that in those delicate moments when the outside world was involved into the internal conflicts, the monks often resorted to oral and ritual communication rather than writing. Writing was public and therefore precarious while monks strived to control the message and the image the outside world had of them.