Alfred was very zealous in his endeavours to repair the spiritual and intellectual losses which the Church of England had undergone during the contest with the Danes, whose ravages had almost entirely swept away all native scholarship. The king was especially eager to secure a literature in the vernacular for his subjects, and himself translated into "simple English" parts of the Holy Bible, and other religious books. In these labours he was assisted by a small body of learned men, including the two Aelfrics, Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and Wulfstan, supposed to have been Bishop of Worcester. The conversion of the Danes who had first settled in England to Christianity prepared the way for the evangelizing of later colonists; and when, through the crimes and weakness of the later Anglo-Saxon princes, the country fell altogether into the hands of Danish invaders, Canute the Great (A.D. 1016-A.D. 1033) not only embraced Christianity himself, but secured for his native country the services of English missionaries. [Sidenote: Evangelization of Scandinavia.] In fact, at this time Scandinavia seems to have been the chief mission-field of the English Church. [Sidenote: Roman influence comparatively small under the Saxons.] We can hardly be wrong in gathering from all this, that Roman influence had only to a certain limited extent been introduced into the Church of England by St. Augustine's mission, and that, as time passed on, the foreign element had become absorbed in the national one. With the Norman conquest of A.D. 1066, the {146} case was, however, altered. [Sidenote: Much increased under the Normans.] The claims of the Popes to temporal as well as to spiritual authority were by that time definite and authoritative; the Conquest itself had been undertaken by the permission of Alexander II., and the authority of the foreign conquerors, (as the Norman and early Plantagenet kings continued to be,) required foreign support. Hence the Bishops of Rome gained an amount of political influence in England which was thoroughly unconstitutional, and which could probably never have been attained by any foreign power, had the English sovereigns immediately after the Conquest felt themselves more firmly fixed upon the throne they had seized. [Sidenote: Denationalizing of the Episcopate.]