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 the ‘great men’ of the Saxons, ‘thegns’, ‘aldermen’, ‘earls’, or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their own hands; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents and services from the poorer landowners; they made what is called a ‘feudal’ state of society. In the year 600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120 acres of land; in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and for this he probably had to pay a heavy rent and to labour on some great man’s land.

The first rudiments of civilization were brought back to this barbarous England by the Christian missionaries whom Pope Gregory sent thither in the year 597. St. Augustine came and preached in Kent and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canterbury missionaries spread all over the island, and, in a century, the heathenism, that had rooted out Christianity two hundred years before, was quite gone. It seems that the fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. The old Roman capital of York recovered its importance and became an archbishopric. Some seventeen other bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monasteries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who retires from the world in order to devote himself to prayer with a view to saving his own soul.

Besides preaching the true Gospel of Our Lord, these missionaries preached the worship of saints, and every church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land to a monastery was called ‘a gift to God and His saints’. If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery,