70 The Life and Times of Aldhclm. 



men worked together zealously and harmoniously in their en- 

 deavours to carry out their plana for the promotion of this object. 

 " They regarded," it has been said,^ "civilization as the handmaid 

 of Christianity, and of civilization they knew that learning is the 

 parent. They found the English people eager to be instructed 

 and appetent of knowledge. They gathered around them a crowd 

 of disciples, and, as Bede says, there daily flowed from them the 

 streams of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers. Througb 

 their influence all the larger and better monasteries were converted 

 into schools of learning, in which the laity as well as the clergy 

 imbibed a respect for literature, and, in many instances, a love of 

 it. In the time of Bede, as the historian himself informs us, there 

 were scholars of Theodore and Hadrian who were all as well 

 versed in the Greek and Latin languages as in their own." 

 Amongst these was certainly to be reckoned Aldhelm, who, on 

 more than one occasion, seems to have repaired to Kent, to receive 

 instruction at the " feet of Hadrian." As late as 680, — some years 

 after he must have been formally admitted as Abbot, — he signs as 

 " scholasticus Theodori Archiepiscopi," — an expression which may 

 be interpreted as meaning generally, " one of the school," or, as 

 as we might say, " a disciple " of Archbishop Theodore. 



It must have been about the year 670 ^ that Aldhelm was 

 admitted into the honorable office of Abbot of the monastery of St. 

 Peter and Paul at Malmesbury. We do not learn that at this 

 time Maildulf was dead ; — indeed as far as we can obtain a clear 

 account from the fragmentary and often conflicting statements of 

 chroniclers, he would seem to have lived some fourteen years after 

 Aldhelm's formal appointment as Abbot, and to have submitted 

 himself, as a member of the society, to the rule of his former 

 disciple. William of Malmesbury tells us ^ that Leotherius, Bishop 



* Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, i., 163. 

 ^ His signature, as Aldhelm Abbas, is to be seen appended to various charters 

 contained in the Codex Diplom., ranging in date from A.D. 670-701. See Nos. 

 7, 993, 995, 997. What authority is to be given to those signatures is of course 

 an open question. Some of the charters are, at the best, only copies of the 

 originals. As far as dates are concerned, there is no inconsistency with known 

 or faii-ly presumed facts, in Aldhelm's history. 



' Chronicle of the Kings of England, B. 1., c. 2. 



i 



