ing together hints and allusions from his various
writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of
barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that
Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions
of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of
St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became
ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion,
introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the
Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.
Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.

This institution [he says] 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 civilization
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 civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of
all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in 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
soc