the aid of their
tenants and serfs, and became colonisers and civilisers at the same time
that they were teachers and preachers. The reclamation of waste land
throughout the marshes of England was due almost entirely to the
monastic bodies.

The value of the civilising influence thus exerted is seen especially in
the written laws, and it affected even the actions of the fierce English
princes. The dooms of AEthelberht of Kent are the earliest English
documents which we possess, and they were reduced to writing shortly
after the conversion of the first English Christian king: while Baeda
expressly mentions that they were compiled after Roman models. The
Church was not able to hold the warlike princes really in check; but it
imposed penances, and encouraged many of them to make pilgrimages to
Rome, and to end their days in a cloister. The importance of such
pilgrimages was doubtless immense. They induced the rude insular
nobility to pay a visit to what was still, after all, the most civilised
country of the world, and so to gain some knowledge of a foreign
culture, which they afterwards endeavoured to introduce into their own
homes. In 688, Ceadwalla, the ferocious king of the West Saxons, whose
brother Mul had been burnt alive by the men of Kent, and who harried the
Jutish kingdom in return, and who also murdered two princes of Wight,
with all their people, in cold blood, went on a pilgrimage to Rome,
where he was baptised, and died immediately after.[2] Ine, who succeeded
him, re-endowed the old British monastery of Glastonbury, in territory
just conquered from the West Welsh, and reduced the laws of the West
Saxons to writing. He, too, retired to Rome, where he died. In 704,
AEthelred, son of Penda, king of the Mercians, "assumed monkhood." In
709, Cenred, his successor, and Offa of Essex, went to Rome. And so on
for many years, king after king resigned his kingship, and submitted, in
his latter days, to the Church. Within two centuries, no less than
thirty kings and queens are recorded to have embraced a conventual life:
and far more probably did so, but were passed over in silence. Baeda
tells us that many Englishmen went into monasteries in Gaul.

[2] He was buried at St. Peter's, and his tomb still exists
in the remodelled building. Baeda quotes the inscription in
full, and quotes it correctly; a fact which may be taken as
an excellent test of his historical accuracy, and the care
with which