Editing Anglo-Saxons (section)

==== Learning and monasticism (660–793) ====
[[File:Britain 802.jpg|thumb|Map of Britain in 802. By this date, historians today rarely distinguish between Angles, Saxons and Jutes.]]
Michael Drout calls this period the "Golden Age", when learning flourished with a renaissance in classical knowledge. The growth and popularity of monasticism was not an entirely internal development, with influence from the continent shaping Anglo-Saxon monastic life.<ref>Drout, Michael DC. Imitating fathers: tradition, inheritance, and the reproduction of culture in Anglo-Saxon England. Diss. Loyola University of Chicago, 1997.</ref> In 669 [[Theodore of Tarsus|Theodore]], a Greek-speaking monk originally from Tarsus in Asia Minor, arrived in Britain [[List of archbishops of Canterbury|to become the eighth]] [[Archbishop of Canterbury]]. He was joined the following year by his colleague Hadrian, a Latin-speaking African by origin and former abbot of a monastery in Campania (near Naples).<ref>Lendinara, Patrizia. "The world of Anglo-Saxon learning." The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (1991): 264–281.</ref> One of their first tasks at Canterbury was the establishment of a school; and according to Bede (writing some sixty years later), they soon "attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome learning".<ref>Bede; Plummer, Charles (1896). Historiam ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Historiam abbatum; Epistolam ad Ecgberctum; una cum Historia abbatum auctore anonymo. Oxford, United Kingdom: e Typographeo Clarendoniano.</ref> As evidence of their teaching, Bede reports that some of their students, who survived to his own day, were as fluent in Greek and Latin as in their native language. Bede does not mention [[Aldhelm]] in this connection; but we know from a letter addressed by Aldhelm to Hadrian that he too must be numbered among their students.<ref>Lapidge, Michael. "The school of Theodore and Hadrian." Anglo-Saxon England 15.1 (1986): 45–72.</ref>

Aldhelm wrote in elaborate and grandiloquent and very difficult Latin, which became the dominant style for centuries. Michael Drout states "Aldhelm wrote Latin hexameters better than anyone before in England (and possibly better than anyone since, or at least up until [[John Milton]]). His work showed that scholars in England, at the very edge of Europe, could be as learned and sophisticated as any writers in Europe."<ref>Drout, M. Anglo-Saxon World (Audio Lectures) Audible.com</ref> During this period, the wealth and power of the monasteries increased as elite families, possibly out of power, turned to monastic life.<ref>[[Keith Dobney|Dobney, Keith]], et al. ''Farmers, monks and aristocrats: the environmental archaeology of an Anglo-Saxon Estate Centre at Flixborough, North Lincolnshire, UK''. Oxbow Books, 2007.</ref>

Anglo-Saxon monasticism developed the unusual institution of the "double monastery": a house of monks and a house of nuns, living next to each other, sharing a church but never mixing, and living separate lives of celibacy. These double monasteries were presided over by abbesses, who became some of the most powerful and influential women in Europe. Double monasteries which were built on strategic sites near rivers and coasts, accumulated immense wealth and power over multiple generations (their inheritances were not divided) and became centers of art and learning.<ref>Godfrey, John. "The Double Monastery in Early English History." Ampleforth Journal 79 (1974): 19–32.</ref>

While Aldhelm was doing his work in [[Malmesbury]], far from him, up in the North of England, Bede was writing a large quantity of books, gaining a reputation in Europe and showing that the English could write history and theology, and do astronomical computation (for the dates of Easter, among other things).