While Archbishop Theodore and the Abbot Adrian were organising Anglo-Latin education in the monasteries of the south, Wilfrith, the Archbishop of York, and his friend Benedict Biscop were performing a no less extensive work in the north. The schools of Northumbria gathered in the harvest of Irish learning, and of the Franco-Gallican schools, which still preserved a remnant of classical literature, and of Rome itself, now barbarised. Of Bede, in the book-room of the monastery at Jarrow, we are told by his disciple and biographer, Cuthbert, that in the intervals of the regular monastic discipline the great scholar found time to undertake the direction of the monastic school. "He had many scholars, all of whom he inspired with an extraordinary love of learning." "It was always sweet to me," he writes himself, "to learn to teach." At the conclusion of his "Ecclesiastical History" he has himself given a list of some thirty-eight books which he had written up to that time. Of these not a few are of an educational character. Besides a large body of Scripture commentary, we have from his pen treatises on orthography, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. His book on "The Nature of Things" was the science primer of the Anglo-Saxons for many generations. He wrote, in fact, to teach. At the school of York, however, was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its greatest pupil was Alcwyne. He became essentially the representative schoolmaster of his age. For fourteen years, attracted by the fame of his scholarship, students not only from all parts of England and Ireland, but also from France and Germany, flocked to the monastery school at York. In 782 Alcwyne left England to join the Court of Charles the Great and to take charge of the Palatine schools, carrying with him to the Continent the learning which was about to perish for a time in England, as the result of the internal dissensions of its kings and the early ravages of the Norsemen. "Learning," to use the phrase of William of Malmesbury, "was buried in the grave of Bede for four centuries." The Danish invader, carrying his ravages now up the Thames and now up the Humber, devastated the east of England with fire and sword. "Deliver us, O Lord, from the frenzy of the Northmen!" had been a suffrage of a litany of the time, but it was one to which the scholars and the bookmen, no less than the monks and nuns of that age, found no answer. The noble libraries which Theodore and the Abbots Adrian and Benedict had founded were given to the flames. The monasteries of the Benedictines, the chief guardians of learning, were completely broken up. "It is not at all improbable," says Mr. Kemble, "that in the middle of the tenth century there was not a genuine Benedictine left in England."