In England the state of affairs was even more distressing than on the Continent.  The evil effects of the Saxon invasion, the demoralization that accompanied the influx of paganism, and the almost complete destruction of the religious institutions of British Christianity have already been noted.  About the year 700, the island was divided among fifteen petty chiefs, who waged war against one another almost incessantly.  Christianity, as introduced by Augustine, had somewhat mitigated the ferocity of war, and England had begun to make some approach toward a respect for law and a veneration for the Christian religion, when the Danes came, and with them another period of disgraceful atrocities and blighting heathenism.  The Danish invasion had almost extirpated the monastic institution in the northern districts.  Carnage and devastation reigned everywhere.  Celebrated monasteries fell in ruins and the monks were slain or driven into exile.  Hordes of barbaric warriors roamed the country, burning and plundering.

“At the close of this calamitous period,” says Lingard, in his “History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” “the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle to the friends of religion:  1.  The laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers. 2.  The clergy had grown indolent, dissolute and illiterate. 3.  The monastic order had been apparently annihilated.  It devolved on King Alfred, victorious over his enemies, to devise and apply the remedies for these evils.”  The good king endeavored to restore the monastic institution, but, owing to the lack of candidates for the monastic habit, he was compelled to import a colony of monks from Gaul.

The moral results of Alfred’s reformatory measures, as well as those of his immediate successors, were far from satisfactory, although he did vastly stimulate the educational work of the monastic schools.  He devoted himself so faithfully to the gathering of traditions, that he is said to be the father of English history.  The tide of immorality, however, was too strong to be stemmed in a generation or two.  It was a century and a half before there was even an approach to substantial victory over the disgraceful abuses among the clergy and the monks.

The churchman who is credited with doing most to distinguish the monks as a zealous and faithful body was Dunstan (924-988 A.D.), first Abbot of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Winchester, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury.  He is the most conspicuous ecclesiastical personage in the history of those dark days, but his character and labors have given rise to bitter and extensive controversy.