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 noticeable after the monks took the craft into their own hands.  Baeda 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, Baeda’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.  Baeda 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.