The literary restoration of his time is supported by the Carlovingian
schools, and in this we may see a repayment in the ninth century of that
help which Charles had received from England through Alcuin in the
eighth.

Different in its origin is the remarkable spring of religious and
intellectual life in the tenth century. Ever since the synod of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 813, the religious spirit in Gaul had manifested
itself in the stricter discipline of the Benedictine monasteries, and
this movement reached us in the middle of the tenth century. The
Benedictines had a famous school on the Loire at a place then called
Floriacum, now Fleury or St. Benoît-sur-Loire, and some leading men in
England were in active relations with this house.[10] In the eclipse
which the nominal seat of Christianity was under in the tenth century,
the light of the Church shone in France and England. The reforms of
Æðelwold and Dunstan and Odo are the transmission of this movement to
our island.

This great movement has only time to take shape enough to declare itself
when it is again interrupted by troublous times, invasions, and wars,
and changes of dynasty, and before any length of peace is again allowed,
by the decisive and final blow of the Norman Conquest, which brought
with it more than a change of dynasty. It changed the whole body of the
governing and influential classes, not from one stratum to another
within the Saxon nation, but by the introduction of a ruling class from
another nation, speaking another language, and one of a different
family.

The new language thus brought in was no barbarous dialect, but the most
cultivated of the Continental vernaculars. It was the other great factor