iversity at York, to which scholars came from the continent.
His work as a teacher was carried on by Alcuin, who later brought
learning to the court and Frankish dominions of Charlemagne. The infant
church, following the example of the Irish Scots, showed much missionary
zeal, and English missionaries founded an organized church in Frisia and
laboured on the lower Rhine; two who attempted to preach in the old
Saxon land were martyred. Most famous of all, Winfrid, or St Boniface,
the apostle of Germany, preached to the Frisians, Hessians and
Thuringians, founded bishoprics and monasteries, became the first
archbishop of Mainz, and in 754 was martyred in Frisia. He had many
English helpers, some became bishops, and some were ladies, as Thecla,
abbess of Kitzingen, and Lioba, abbess of Bischofsheim. After his death,
Willehad laboured in Frisia, and later, at the bidding of Charlemagne,
among the Saxons, and became the first bishop of Bremen. Religion,
learning, arts, such as transcription and illumination, flourished in
English monasteries. Yet heathen customs and beliefs lingered on among
the people, and in Bede's time there were many pseudo-monasteries where
men and women made monasticism a cloak for idleness and vice. In the
latter part of the 8th century Mercia became the predominant kingdom
under Offa, and he determined to have an archbishop of his own. By his
contrivance two legates from Adrian I. held a council at Chelsea in 787
in which Lichfield was declared an archbishopric, and seven of the
twelve suffragan bishoprics of Canterbury were apportioned to it. In
802, however, Leo III. restored Canterbury to its rights and the
Lichfield archbishopric was abolished.

Later Anglo-Saxon times.

The rise of Wessex to power seems to have been aided by a good
understanding between Ecgbert and the church, and his successors
employed bishops as their ministers. AEthelred, who was specially under
ecclesiastical influence, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and before his
departure made large grants for pious uses. His donation, though not the
origin of tithes in England, illustrates the idea of the sacredness of
the tenth of income on which laws enforcing the payment of tithes were
founded. His pilgrimage was probably undertaken in the hope of averting
the attacks of the pagan Danes. Their invasions fell heavily on the
church; priests were slaughtered and churches sacked and burnt. Learning
disappeared in Northumbria, and thi