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 also kept alive what remains of learning there were: they brought books from beyond the seas; they taught schools; made musical instruments, were builders, painters and craftsmen of all kinds; and produced famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English missionaries went from English abbeys to preach the Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did the Church become, that in the councils of our tenth-century kings the bishops and abbots were even more important than the thegns and earls.

The Church then taught men much and tamed them a little. It certainly helped towards uniting the jarring kingdoms; for Christian Northumbria, in the seventh century, was the first to exercise a real sort of leadership over the other Kingdoms; it was a Northumbrian king, Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh; it was in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow that the good monk Bede wrote the first history of England. You may still see Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral, with the Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important Northumbrian king fell fighting against the Picts beyond the Forth.

Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the eighth century, under King Offa, who drove back the Welsh and took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps it was he who built a great rampart there called Offa's Dyke; beyond it, even to this day, all is ‘Wales’. Then his family in turn was beaten by Egbert, King of Wessex (802–39). Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name at least, supreme over all England. If ever there was a capital city of England before Norman times it was Winchester, the chief town of Wessex; though London, one of the few Roman cities that have never been