, the battle was won in
favour of that civilisation which we still enjoy. It would have been
impossible to re-create a sound agriculture and to refound the arts
and learning; especially would it have been impossible to refound the
study of letters, upon which all material civilisation depends, had it
not been for the monastic institution. This institution did more work
in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far
more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half
depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman
order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No
other instrument was fitted for the purpose.

The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilisation
when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether
external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The
next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of
continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general
continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to
which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilisation,
is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these
difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited to a high degree.
Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose
whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for
spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up
forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian
people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of
learning and treasuring up of experience which single families,
especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved.
They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary
rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they
provided these in a society from which exact application of such a
kind had all but disappeared.

The monastic institution, so far as Western Europe was concerned, was
comparatively young when the work in Britain was begun. The fifth
century had seen its inception; it was still embryonic in the sixth;
the seventh, which was the date of its great conquest of the English
country-sides, was for it a period of youth and of vigour as fresh as
was, let us say, the thirteenth century for the renaissance of civil
learning. We must not think of these early foundatio