. As early as the eighth century monasteries
were enormously multiplied and enriched, for the piety of the Saxons
assumed a monastic type. What civilization existed can be traced chiefly
to the Church.

We read of only three great names among the Saxons who impressed their
genius on the nation, until the various Saxon kingdoms were united under
the sovereignty of Ecgberht, or Egbert, king of Wessex, about the middle
of the ninth century. These were Theodore, Caedmon, and Baeda. The first
was a monk from Tarsus, whom the Pope dispatched in the year 668 to
Britain as Archbishop of Canterbury. To him the work of church
organization was intrusted. He enlarged the number of the sees, and
arranged them on the basis which was maintained for a thousand years.
The subordination of priest to bishop and bishop to primate was more
clearly defined by him. He also assembled councils for general
legislation, which perhaps led the way to national parliaments. He not
only organized the episcopate, but the parish system, and even the
system of tithes has been by some attributed to him. The missionary who
had been merely the chaplain of a nobleman became the priest of the
manor or parish.

The second memorable man was born a cowherd; encouraged to sing his
songs by the abbess Hilda, a "Northumbrian Deborah." When advanced in
life he entered through her patronage a convent, and sang the
marvellous and touching stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, fixing their
truths on the mind of the nation, and becoming the father of
English poetry.

The third of these great men was the greatest, Baeda,--or Bede, as the
name is usually spelled. He was a priest of the great abbey church of
Weremouth, in Northumbria, and was a master of all the learning then
known. He was the life of the famous school of Jarrow, and it is said
that six hundred monks, besides strangers, listened to his teachings.
His greatest work was an "Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,"
which extends from the landing of Julius Caesar to the year 731. He was
the first English historian, and the founder of mediaeval history, and
all we know of the one hundred and fifty years after the landing of
Augustin the missionary is drawn from him. He was not only historian,
but theologian,--the father of the education of the English nation.

It was one hundred and fourteen years after the death of the "venerable
Bede" before Alfred was born, A.D. 849, the youngest son of Aethelwulf,
ki