ABSTRACT
Throughout the Middle Ages the Church was the main agent in the preservation of learning and the provision of schools. Cardinal Newman once said that there was ‘not a man in Europe who talks bravely against the Church but owes it to the Church that he can talk at all’, and certainly, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, it was the Church which reintroduced schools and learning. The reason is not far to seek. Christianity is an intellectual and a teaching religion, and above all it is a religion of a book, the Bible. Readings from the Bible are the foundations of both its liturgy and its doctrines and consequently a literate priesthood is a necessity. It is not surprising then that the s Augustine to England after a.d. 597 began to establish schools. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period the Church, and more particularly the monasteries, were centres of learning and education, and in the following centuries, bishops, clergy and religious laymen continued to provide schools in order to keep up the supply of educated clergy. However, our knowledge of schooling in Anglo-Saxon times is very tenuous.*
