The necessary
machinery was almost entirely wanting. The monastic
schools, the great--the only--means of disseminating the
learning of the time, were few in number and not very
influential. For Athelney, a small monastery, Alfred had
difficulty in finding monks at all: he had to get them from
abroad; while the rule in this house does not seem to have
been wholly satisfactory. At the time of his death (c. 901)
monachism was in a bad way. Fifty years later its plight
would seem to have been worse. Only two houses,
Abingdon and Glastonbury, could be really called monastic.
"In the middle of the tenth century the Rule of St.
Benedict, the standard of monasticism in Western
Christendom, was, according to virtually contemporary
authority, completely unknown in England. This will not
appear strange if we consider that it was never very
generally or strictly carried out here, that the Danish
invasions had broken the continuity of monastic life, and
that not many years earlier the very existence of the Rule
had been forgotten in not a few continental monasteries."[1]
Although England always responded to the slightest effort
to affect her culture, as the long deer grass waves an
answer to every breath of the wind, yet the surprising
eminence of some of the churchmen in the latter half of the
century and the excellence of their work cannot be
accounted for if the influence of Alfred's reign had utterly
died out.
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