architecture, such as that of Eadward’s magnificent abbey church at Westminster (afterwards destroyed by Henry III. to make way for his own building), was not inferior to continental workmanship.  All the arts practised in the abbeys were of direct Roman origin, and most of the words relating to them are immediately derived from the Latin.  This is the case even with terms relating to such common objects as candle, pen, wine, and oil.  Names of weights, measures, coins, and other exact quantitative ideas are also derived from Roman sources.  Carpenters, smiths, bakers, tanners, and millers, were usually attached to the abbeys.  Thus, in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, Ripon, Beverley, and Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery grew into the nucleus of a considerable town, though the development of such towns is more marked after than before the Norman Conquest.  As a whole, it was by means of the monasteries, and especially of their constant interchange of inmates with the continent, that England mainly kept up the touch with the southern civilisation.  There alone was Latin, the universal medium of continental intercommunication, taught and spoken.  There alone were books written, preserved, and read.  Through the Church alone was an organisation kept up in direct communication with the central civilising agencies of Italy and the south.  And while the Church and the monasteries thus preserved the connection with the continent, they also formed schools of culture and of industrial arts for the country itself.  At the abbeys bells were cast, glass manufactured, buildings designed, gold and silver ornaments wrought, jewels enamelled, and unskilled labour organised by the most trained intelligence of the land.  They thus remained as they had begun, homes and retreats for those exceptional minds which were capable of carrying on the arts and the knowledge of a dying civilisation across the gulf of predatory barbarism which separates the artificial culture of Rome from the industrial culture of modern Europe.

The towns were few and relatively unimportant, built entirely of wood (except the churches), and very liable to be burnt down on the least excuse.  In considering them we must dismiss from our minds the ideas derived from our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselves mentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiring little beyond what was produced on each man’s own farm or petty holding.  Such people are mainly fed from their own corn and meat, mainly clad from their own homespun wool and linen.  A little specialisation of function, however, already existed.  Salt was procured from the wyches or pans of the coast, and also from the inland wyches or brine wells of Cheshire and the midland counties.  Such names as Nantwich, Middlewych, Bromwich, and Droitwich, still preserve the memory of these early saltworks.  Iron was mined in the Forest of Dean, around Alcester, and in the Somersetshire district.