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 meadows and pastures for the long-horned English cattle.
Roman architecture, too, came with the Roman church. We hear nothing
before of stone buildings; but Eadwine erected a church of stone at
York, under the direction of Paulinus; and Bishop Wilfrith, a
generation later, restored and decorated it, covering the roof with lead
and filling the windows with panes of glass. Masons had already been
settled in Kent, though Benedict, the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
found it desirable to bring over others from the Franks. Metal-working
had always been a special gift of the English, and their gold jewellery
was well made even before the conversion, but it became still more