Excerpt from The Work of the Monk in Early England M. Guizot, in his History of Civilization, says that civilization seems to him to be the sum, the expression of the whole life of nations. He defines it as a fact subsisting on two conditions and manifesting itself by two symptoms, the development of social activity and that of individual activity; the progress of society and the progress of humanity. To one of our day, looking from an environment which is characterised by so high a degree of individual and social activity, back to a less fortunate age, it would be hard to find anything of greater interest than an attempt to discover what has brought about the change. Encouraged by the statement of M. Guizot that, if limited to certain centuries and certain people, this civilization is a fact which may be described, related, we have attempted within very narrow limits of time and space a study of the work of a single class, that of the monks, toward the furtherance of the progress of society and the progress of humanity. Early England makes a particularly fortunate subject for such a study, in that valuable testimony is given by one of the monks themselves, the venerable Bede. His Ecclesiastical History of the English nation, which was finished in 731, is made up of the results of his personal knowledge and of material which he gained from correspondence with people in other parts of the island, from the archives of the church at Rome, parts of which were copied by a friendly monk, from earlier written records and from traditional accounts. These materials were gathered and put together with the thoroughness and carefulness of an author whose habits and instincts were those of a scholar, and whose familiarity with the scenes and atmosphere which he described give to his narrative a peculiar vividness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.