dbridge, Coldingham, Towcester, Hackness, and
several other places. So the whole of England was soon covered with
monastic establishments, each liberally endowed with land, and each
engaged in tilling the soil without, and cultivating peaceful arts
within, like little islands of southern civilisation, dotted about in
the wide sea of Teutonic barbarism.

In the Roman south, many, if not all, of the monasteries seem to have
been planned on the regular models; but in the north, where the Irish
missionaries had borne the largest share in the work of conversion, the
monasteries were irregular bodies on the Irish plan, where an abbot or
abbess ruled over a mixed community of monks and nuns. Hild, a member of
the Northumbrian princely family, founded such an abbey at Streoneshalch
(Whitby), made memorable by numbering amongst its members the first
known English poet, Caedmon. St. John of Beverley, Bishop of Hexham, set
up a similar monastery at the place with which his name is so closely
associated. The Irish monks themselves founded others at Lindisfarne and
elsewhere. Even in the south, some Irish abbeys existed. An Irish monk
had set up one at Bosham, in Sussex, even before Wilfrith converted that
kingdom; and one of his countrymen, Maidulf (or Maeldubh?) was the
original head of Malmesbury. In process of time, however, as the union
with Rome grew stronger, all these houses conformed to the more regular
usage, and became monasteries of the ordinary Benedictine type.

The civilising value of the monasteries can hardly be over-rated. Secure
in the peace conferred upon them by a religious sanction, the monks
became the builders of schools, the drainers of marshland, the clearers
of forest, the tillers of heath. Many of the earliest religious houses
rose in the midst of what had previously been trackless wilds.
Peterborough and Ely grew up on islands of the Fen country. Crowland
gathered round the cell of Guthlac in the midst of a desolate mere.
Evesham occupied a glade in the wild forests of the western march.
Glastonbury, an old Welsh foundation, stood on a solitary islet, where
the abrupt knoll of the Tor looks down upon the broad waste of the
Somersetshire marshes. Beverley, as its name imports, had been a haunt
of beavers before the monks began to till its fruitful dingles. In every
case agriculture soon turned the wild lands into orchards and
cornfields, or drove drains through the fens which converted their
marshes into