and _oil_. Names of weights, measures, coins, and other exact
quantitative ideas are also derived from Roman sources. Carpenters,
smiths, bakers, tanners, and millers, were usually attached to the
abbeys. Thus, in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, Ripon,
Beverley, and Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery grew into the nucleus of a
considerable town, though the development of such towns is more marked
after than before the Norman Conquest. As a whole, it was by means of
the monasteries, and especially of their constant interchange of inmates
with the continent, that England mainly kept up the touch with the
southern civilisation. There alone was Latin, the universal medium of
continental intercommunication, taught and spoken. There alone were
books written, preserved, and read. Through the Church alone was an
organisation kept up in direct communication with the central civilising
agencies of Italy and the south. And while the Church and the
monasteries thus preserved the connection with the continent, they also
formed schools of culture and of industrial arts for the country itself.
At the abbeys bells were cast, glass manufactured, buildings designed,
gold and silver ornaments wrought, jewels enamelled, and unskilled
labour organised by the most trained intelligence of the land. They thus
remained as they had begun, homes and retreats for those exceptional
minds which were capable of carrying on the arts and the knowledge of a
dying civilisation across the gulf of predatory barbarism which
separates the artificial culture of Rome from the industrial culture of
modern Europe.

The towns were few and relatively unimportant, built entirely of wood
(except the churches), and very liable to be burnt down on the least
excuse. In considering them we must dismiss from our minds the ideas
derived from our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselves
mentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiring