In France and Belgium, the names of the conspicuous abbey schools include those of Marmoutier, Fontenelle, Fleury, Corbie, Ferrières, Bec, Clugni. In England, the most noteworthy of the abbey schools were St. Albans, Glastonbury, Malmesbury, Croyland, and S. Peter’s of Canterbury. From the epoch of Charlemagne to that of S. Louis, the great abbeys of Christian Europe served in fact not only as its schools but as its universities. The more intelligent of the nobility and the kings themselves were interested in securing for their children the educational advantages of the monastery schools. Among the French kings who were brought up in this way are to be named Pepin the Little, Robert the Pious, and Louis the Fat. In Spain, Sancho the Great, King of Navarre and of Castile, was a graduate of the monastery of Leyre. In England, we have the noteworthy example of Alfred, who was not ashamed, after having reached mature years, to repair his imperfect education by attending the school established in Oxford by the Benedictines, where he is said to have studied grammar, philosophy, rhetoric, history, music, and versification.[164] A large number of the convents, following the example of the abbeys, contained schools in which were trained not only the future novices, but also numbers of young girls destined for the life of the Courts or of the world. Mabillon finds occasion to correct the impression on the part of some writers of the sixteenth century, that the monasteries had been established solely for the purpose of carrying on educational work. He writes: _C’est une illusion de certains gens qui ont écrit dans le siècle précédent que les monastères n’avaient esté d’abord établis que pour servir d’écoles faisantes profession d’enseigner les sciences humaines_. De Rancé, who wrote a _Traité de la saincteté et du devoir de la vie monastique_, took the ground that the pursuit of literature was inconsistent with the monastic profession, and that the reading of the monks ought to be confined to the Scriptures and a few books of devotion. The treatise was understood to be an attack upon the Benedictine monks of St. Maur, for that they were learned was a matter of general knowledge, and the monks of La Trappe, the Order with which De Rancé had associated himself, had an old-time antagonism to their scholarly neighbours. It may be considered as a good service for literature and for monastic history that the treatise of De Rancé, narrow and unimportant in itself as it was, should have been published. Nine years later, in the year 1691, was issued the reply of the Benedictines, the learned and valuable _Traité des Études Monastiques_ of Dom Mabillon, which will be referred to more particularly in the following chapter.