Battle of Hastings, The by Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood

minster schools succeeded in this is
indicated by the number of English missionaries who went to convert the heathen on the Continent, such as St Boniface, or were sent for to take education and civilization to foreign schools, as
Alcuin was recruited by Charlemagne. These men were accustomed to send back to England for books unavailable to them where they were working; English book production was clearly of a high standard.
Boniface wrote to ask the Abbess Eadburh to copy St Peter’s epistles for him in gold. This would presumably be for ceremonial occasions, but more workaday books were in demand also. Dorothy
Whitelock listed the writings that were then available in England:
    They were, of course, familiar with the Bible and the writings of the Christian Fathers, and with the Christian poets, Juvencus, Prudentius, Sedulius, Prosper, Fortunatus,
     Lactantius, and Arator. Bede makes use of a number of historical writings, of Josephus, Eusebius (in Latin translation from the Greek), Orosius, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, etc., and of
     saints’ lives such asPaulinus’s Life of Ambrose , Possidius’s Life of Augustine, Constantius’s Life of Germanus. Of classical
     authors, both Bede and Aldhelm knew Virgil and Pliny at first hand, and Aldhelm used Lucan, Ovid, Cicero, and Sallust. Citations of other authors occur, but could have been taken from the works
     of Isidore of Seville, or from the Latin grammarians, of whom a really remarkable number were available in England already in the seventh century. Some very rare works had already found their
     way to England, and one, the grammar of Julian of Toledo, owes its preservation to this circumstance, for all surviving manuscripts go back to an English copy. xli
    And the English monastics were not just reading these books, they were writing new works for themselves. Bede’s and Aldhelm’s works were produced at this period.
    It is impossible to know how far learning reached the lay population in the eighth and ninth centuries. There may have been, probably were, noblemen and women who were literate and could read
Latin as well as English. Many of the most famous founders of monasteries, such as Benedict Biscop, the founder of Bede’s monastery of Jarrow/Monkwearmouth, and a noted buyer of books, must
have come into this category; many, like him, must have entered monasteries or taken holy orders later in life. If there had been no tradition at all of lay education, Alfred would hardly have
lamented in his letter on the state of learning in England (?890s) that there were now few people north or south of the Humber who could even read English or translate a letter from Latin into
English, or make use of the books that remained. It is not entirely clear from his letter whether he is thinking of clerics or laypeople or both. He may have beenthinking
primarily of priests or monks; but if he had been thinking only of the clergy, his programme of translations into English of the books that were most necessary for all men to know would look
rather strange. He would never have supposed that it would have been sufficient for a priest or a monk to know only these particular books and only in English. Their needs would have been far more
extensive. His programme of translation, as well as his own words, ‘all men’, imply a determination to reach the laity. Asser, one of the scholars whom Alfred recruited to make his
court a centre of learning, speaks in his life of Alfred of the king’s children being educated
    in company with all the nobly born children of virtually the entire area, and a good many of lesser birth as well. In this school, books in both languages – that is to
     say, in Latin and English – were carefully read; they also devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent that, even before they had the requisite strength for manly skills (hunting,
     that is, and other skills appropriate to noblemen), they were seen to be devoted and intelligent