Carpenters, smiths, bakers, tanners, and millers, were usually attached to the abbeys.

Thus, in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, Ripon, Beverley, and Bury St.Edmunds, the monastery grew into the nucleus of a considerable town, though the development of such towns is more marked after than before the Norman Conquest.

As a whole, it was by means of the monasteries, and especially of their constant interchange of inmates with the continent, that England mainly kept up the touch with the southern civilisation.

There alone was Latin, the universal medium of continental intercommunication, taught and spoken.

There alone were books written, preserved, and read.