noticeable after the monks took the craft into their own hands. Bæda
mentions mines of copper, iron, lead, silver, and jet. Abbot Benedict
not only brought manuscripts and pictures from Rome, which were copied
and imitated in his monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, but he also
brought over glass-blowers, who introduced the art of glass-making into
England. Cuthberht, Bæda's scholar, writes to Lull, asking for workmen
who can make glass vessels. Bells appear to have been equally early
introductions. Roman music of course accompanied the Roman liturgy. The
connection established with the clergy of the continent favoured the
dispersion of European goods throughout England. We constantly hear of
presents, consisting of skilled handicraft, passing from the civilised
south to the rude and barbaric north. Wilfrith and Benedict journeyed
several times to and from Rome, enlarging their own minds by intercourse
with Roman society, and returning laden with works of art or manuscripts
of value. Bæda was acquainted with the writings of all the chief
classical poets and philosophers, whom he often quotes. We can only
liken the results of such intercourse to those which in our own time
have proceeded from the opening of Japan to western ideas, or of the
Hawaiian Islands to European civilisation and European missionaries. The
English school which soon sprang up at Rome, and the Latin schools which
soon sprang up at York and Canterbury, are precise equivalents of the
educational movements in both those countries which we see in our own
day. The monks were to learn Latin and Greek "as well as they learned
their own tongue," and were so to be given the key of all the literature
and all the science that the world then possessed.

The monasteries thus became real manufacturing, agricultural, and
literary centres on a small scale. The monks boiled down the salt of the
brine-pits; they copied and illuminated manuscripts in the library; they
painted pictures not without rude merit of their own; they ran rhines