. About the year 700, the island was divided among
fifteen petty chiefs, who waged war against one another almost
incessantly. Christianity, as introduced by Augustine, had somewhat
mitigated the ferocity of war, and England had begun to make some
approach toward a respect for law and a veneration for the Christian
religion, when the Danes came, and with them another period of
disgraceful atrocities and blighting heathenism. The Danish invasion had
almost extirpated the monastic institution in the northern districts.
Carnage and devastation reigned everywhere. Celebrated monasteries fell
in ruins and the monks were slain or driven into exile. Hordes of
barbaric warriors roamed the country, burning and plundering.

"At the close of this calamitous period," says Lingard, in his "History
and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church," "the Anglo-Saxon church
presented a melancholy spectacle to the friends of religion: 1. The
laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers. 2.
The clergy had grown indolent, dissolute and illiterate. 3. The monastic
order had been apparently annihilated. It devolved on King Alfred,
victorious over his enemies, to devise and apply the remedies for these
evils." The good king endeavored to restore the monastic institution,
but, owing to the lack of candidates for the monastic habit, he was
compelled to import a colony of monks from Gaul.

The moral results of Alfred's reformatory measures, as well as those of
his immediate successors, were far from satisfactory, although he did
vastly stimulate the educational work of the monastic schools. He
devoted himself so faithfully to the gathering of traditions, that he is
said to be the father of English history. The tide of immorality,
however, was too strong to be stemmed in a generation or two. It was a
century and a half before there was even an approach to substantial
victory over the disgraceful abuses among the clergy and the monks.

The churchman who is credited with doing most to distinguish the monks
as a zealous and faithful body was Dunstan (924-988 A.D.), first Abbot
of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Winchester, and finally Archbishop of
Canterbury. He is the most conspicuous ecclesiastical personage in the
history of those dark days, but his character and labors have given rise
to bitter and extensive controversy.

It was Dunstan's chief aim to subjugate the Anglo-Saxon church to the
power of Rome, and to correct existing