Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/35

Rh But the previous experience of the teachers enabled them to extend their lessons into a field still less in conformity with the accustomed routine of monastic schools: they made their pupils learn Greek so thoroughly that more than half-a-century later Bede says that some of them still remained who knew Greek as well as their mother-tongue. An Englishman too, Benedict Biscop, the friend of Wilfrid, who had attended Theodore on his road from Rome to Canterbury and had held for a while the abbacy to which Hadrian succeeded, helped forward the advancement of his countrymen in another way. He was a sedulous collector of books and took advantage of repeated journeys to Rome to return laden with purchases or the gifts of friends, gathered thence or from places on the road. With these he endowed the abbey which he erected at Wearmouth; and among his last charges to the brethren of his house we read that a he enjoined them to keep jealously the precious and very rich library, indispensable for the learning of the church, which he had brought from Rome,—bibliothecam quam de Roma nobilissimam copiosissimamqiie advexerat, ad instructionem ecdesiae necessariam,—and not to suffer it through carelessness to decay or to be dispersed abroad.

The example of these three men was not lost upon the English. Aldhelm who, pedant as he was, ranked among the most learned men of his time, passed from his Scottish master at Malmesbury to the school of Hadrian at Canterbury; arid a goodly band of other scholars see Bright (Greek is their peculiar qualification) went forth from his latter place to spread their knowledge over England. But it was in the north that the new learning took deepest root. At Jarrow, the offshoot of Benedict Biscop’s monastery of Wearmouth, lived and died Bede, the writer who sprang at once into the position of a father of the church, and whose influence was by far the greatest and most unquestioned of any between saint Gregory and saint Bernard. He is a witness to the excellence of Benedict’s collection of books : for though, he says, I spent my