It is impossible to overrate the importance of the change which made such a life of earnest study and intellectual labour as Baeda’s possible amongst the rough and barbaric English.  Nor was it only in producing thinkers and readers from a people who could not spell a word half a century before, that the monastic system did good to England.  The monasteries owned large tracts of land which they could cultivate on a co-operative plan, as cultivation was impossible elsewhere. Laborare est orare was the true monastic motto:  and the documents of the religious houses, relating to lands and leases, show us the other or material side of the picture, which was not less important in its way than the spiritual and intellectual side.  Everywhere the monks settled in the woodland by the rivers, cut down the forests, drove out the wolves and the beavers, cultivated the soil with the aid of their tenants and serfs, and became colonisers and civilisers at the same time that they were teachers and preachers.  The reclamation of waste land throughout the marshes of England was due almost entirely to the monastic bodies.

The value of the civilising influence thus exerted is seen especially in the written laws, and it affected even the actions of the fierce English princes.  The dooms of AEthelberht of Kent are the earliest English documents which we possess, and they were reduced to writing shortly after the conversion of the first English Christian king:  while Baeda expressly mentions that they were compiled after Roman models.  The Church was not able to hold the warlike princes really in check; but it imposed penances, and encouraged many of them to make pilgrimages to Rome, and to end their days in a cloister.  The importance of such pilgrimages was doubtless immense.  They induced the rude insular nobility to pay a visit to what was still, after all, the most civilised country of the world, and so to gain some knowledge of a foreign culture, which they afterwards endeavoured to introduce into their own homes.  In 688, Ceadwalla, the ferocious king of the West Saxons, whose brother Mul had been burnt alive by the men of Kent, and who harried the Jutish kingdom in return, and who also murdered two princes of Wight, with all their people, in cold blood, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was baptised, and died immediately after.[2] Ine, who succeeded him, re-endowed the old British monastery of Glastonbury, in territory just conquered from the West Welsh, and reduced the laws of the West Saxons to writing.  He, too, retired to Rome, where he died.  In 704, AEthelred, son of Penda, king of the Mercians, “assumed monkhood.”  In 709, Cenred, his successor, and Offa of Essex, went to Rome.  And so on for many years, king after king resigned his kingship, and submitted, in his latter days, to the Church.  Within two centuries, no less than thirty kings and queens are recorded to have embraced a conventual life:  and far more probably did so, but were passed over in silence.  Baeda tells us that many Englishmen went into monasteries in Gaul.