Weald of Kent or the forests of Arden and Elmet.

Only two elements broke the monotony of these self-sufficing
agricultural communities. Those elements were the monasteries and the
towns.

A large part of the soil of England was owned by the monks. They now
possessed considerable buildings, with stone churches of some
pretensions, in which service was conducted with pomp and
impressiveness. The tiny chapel of St. Lawrence, at Bradford-on-Avon,
forms the best example of this primitive Romanesque architecture now
surviving in England. Around the monasteries stretched their well-tilled
lands, mostly reclaimed from fen or forest, and probably more
scientifically cultivated than those of the neighbouring manors. Most of
the monks were skilled in civilised handicrafts, introduced from the
more cultivated continent. They were excellent ecclesiastical
metalworkers; many of them were architects, who built in rude imitation
of Romanesque models; and others were designers or illuminators of
manuscripts. The books and charters of this age are delicately and
minutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic elaboration of
later mediæval work. The art of painting (almost always in miniature)
was considerably advanced, the figures being well drawn, in rather stiff
but not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective is very imperfectly
understood, and hardly ever attempted. Later Anglo-Saxon architecture,
such as that of Eadward's magnificent abbey church at Westminster
(afterwards destroyed by Henry III. to make way for his own building),
was not inferior to continental workmanship. All the arts practised in
the abbeys were of direct Roman origin, and most of the words relating
to them are immediately derived from the Latin. This is the case even
with terms relating to such common objects as _candle_, _pen_, _wine_,