Our reply is emphatically in the affirmative. Thus there was a school at Hexham. Bede tells us of Herebald, who was a member of the school kept by St. John of Beverley, whilst Bishop of Hexham. "When in the prime of my youth," Herebald is reported to have said, "I lived among his clergy[57] applying myself to reading and singing."[58] Another school existed at Canterbury, and during the time it was conducted by Archbishop Theodore and the Abbot Hadrian it ranked as the most famous of the episcopal schools of this country. With regard to these two famous teachers, Bede writes: "They gathered a crowd of disciples, and there daily flowed from them rivers of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Writ, they also taught them the arts of ecclesiastical poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. A testimony of which is, that there are living at this day some of their scholars who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their own in which they were born."[59] It is owing to the labours of these two men that England, for a time, occupied the leading place in the schools of the west.[60] One of the most celebrated scholars of the school of Canterbury was Aldhelm, who can claim the distinction of being the first Englishman who cultivated classical learning with any success, and the first of whom any literary remains are preserved.[61] Bede describes Aldhelm as "a wonder of erudition in the liberal as well as ecclesiastical learning."[62] It is from a letter written by Aldhelm that we gain an insight into the curriculum followed at Canterbury, and learn that the course of study pursued there included grammar, geometry, arithmetic, metre, astronomy, and Roman Law.[63] A third famous episcopal school was that of York, of which we possess a full account in Alcuin's poem "De Pontificibus Sanctae Ecclesiae Eboracensis." Alcuin writes in most eulogistic terms of the work of this school, and, more particularly, of the educational labours of Archbishop Albert, to whom Alcuin was personally indebted for the instruction he received.