At the same time that many cathedrals and collegiate churches were receiving these monastic colonies, new foundations were everywhere springing up. Ely, Peterborough, Malmsbury and Thorney abbeys rose once more out of their ruins; and such was the eagerness of the king and his nobles to promote the ecclesiastical reform, that more than forty abbeys were founded or restored during the primacy of St. Dunstan. With these events, however, so important in the Church history of England, we are only concerned in so far as they affected the restoration of learning; and, in fact, the revival of the monastic institute was one and the same thing with the revival of the English schools. From this time, in spite of many corruptions and abuses, which resisted even the efforts of Dunstan to remove them, the Dark Age, _par excellence_, of English history began to disappear. A new race of scholars sprang up in the restored cloisters, some of whom were not unworthy to be ranked with the disciples of Alcuin and Bede. St. Dunstan himself, during the remainder of his primacy, was occupied with measures rather of practical, than of educational reform; nevertheless, we find from his canons that his solicitude was directed in a very special way to providing for the religious instruction of the common people. He revived the old parochial schools, and obliged his parish priests to preach every Sunday to their flocks, requiring them also in their schools to teach the children of their parishioners grammar, the church-chant, and some useful handicraft trade. It was St. Ethelwold, however, who exhibited the greatest zeal for the restoration of sacred studies. He loved the work of teaching for its own sake, and had no sooner got possession of his own cathedral, and banished the canons who had so long disgraced it, than he applied all his care to collect and educate a staff of young clergy, who, he trusted, would prove worthy to fill the vacant benefices. “It was ever sweet to him,” says his charming biographer Wolstan, “to teach youths and little ones, to explain their Latin books to them in English, to instruct them in the rules of grammar and prosody, and allure them by cheerful words to study and improvement. And so it came to pass that many of his disciples became priests and abbots, some also bishops and archbishops, in the realm of England.” Among these was St. Elphege, who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, and was martyred by the Danes, and Cynewulf, abbot of Peterborough, an apt and gentle teacher, whose monastic school was so celebrated that, as Hugo Candidus says, scholars flocked to it from all countries as to the court of a second Solomon. He wrote some Anglo-Saxon poems, still preserved; their authorship being detected by the curious insertion here and there of a Runic letter, which, when put together, spell the writer’s name.