es,
centres of piety and evangelistic zeal, sprang up, the abodes of
religion, civilisation, peace, and learning. They were the schools of
culture, sacred and profane, of industry and agriculture; the monks were
the architects, the painters, the sculptors, the goldsmiths of their
time. They formed the first libraries; they taught the young; they
educated women in convents, and by degrees dispersed the shades of
ignorance, idolatry, and barbarism, and reformed England.

To record the number of these monastic houses which were erected in the
seventh and eighth centuries would require much space; and as our chief
concern is with the vestiges that remain in our English villages, and
as most of these Saxon monasteries were plundered and destroyed by the
Danes, or rebuilt on a grander scale by the Normans, we will not now
enumerate them.

After the country had been evangelised by the itinerant monks and
preachers, the next process was to establish a church in every village,
and to provide a pastor to minister therein. Archbishop Theodore
encouraged the thanes to build and endow churches on their estates, and
introduced to this country the parochial system, by means of which all
villages could have the services of a resident pastor.

Then the thane's house was not considered complete without its chapel;
and in the scattered hamlets and village communities churches arose,
rudely built of wood and roofed with thatch, wherein the Saxon _ceorls_
and _cottiers_ loved to worship.

The great Churchmen of the day were not content with such humble
structures. They had travelled to Rome, and seen there some of the fine
buildings dedicated for divine service; so they determined to have the
like in their own country. One of these noble builders was Benedict
Biscop, founder of the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. When he
built the former, he imported foreign artists from Gaul, who constructed
the monastery after the Roman style, and amongst other things introduced
glazed windows, which had never been seen in England before. Nor was his
new house bare and unadorned. He brought from Rome vast stores of church
furniture, many books, and the "arch-chanter" John, to teach his monks
the music and ritual of Rome.

Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and first Bishop of Sherborne, was one of
the foremost church-builders of the time, and the beautiful churches at
Malmesbury, Sherborne, Bradford-on-Avon, Frome, and Wareham, owe their
erecti