§ 6. The Danish invasions brought extinction to the monastic life in the greater part of England. It was not until about a hundred years later that it was revived. Odo, archbishop of Canterbury 942-59, prepared the way for the movement. Its success was achieved under his successor, St Dunstan, with the co-operation of Edgar the peaceful. Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, and Oswald, archbishop of York, were its most active promoters. Both were disciples of the reformed Benedictine rule which, early in the tenth century, had begun to spread from the abbey of Cluny. The abbey of Fleury or Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, which, after the sack of Monte Cassino by the Lombards in 660, had become the resting-place of the body of St Benedict, was reformed under Cluniac influence. Oswald studied the Benedictine rule at Fleury. Made bishop of Worcester in 961, he was active in replacing the secular clergy of the churches of his diocese by monks. At Evesham, Pershore, Winchcombe, Worcester and elsewhere, Benedictine monks were introduced. In 971 Oswald aided Aelfwine, an East Anglian nobleman, to found the monastery of Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, and a few years later he and Ethelwold persuaded Abbo of Fleury to visit England and help them in extending the religious life. Ethelwold was equally active at Winchester, and, under a charter from king Edgar, restored destroyed monasteries throughout the country, including Ely and Peterborough. Dunstan, the reformer of Glastonbury, gave active sympathy to the movement, but was more cautious in his attitude to the secular clergy; and it is noteworthy that the reform did not at once extend to his cathedral church at Canterbury. § 7. This glorious period in the history of English monasticism closed with the disasters of the early part of the eleventh century. Canute and Edward the Confessor favoured and enriched many religious houses, and Edward, by his foundation of the abbey of Westminster, takes a foremost place among benefactors of the religious life in England. But, during this disturbed epoch, few new monasteries were founded, and the tendency to slackness in observance of the rule again appeared. The permanent triumph of monasticism was achieved after the Norman conquest. The Conqueror and his followers sought the salvation of their souls by the foundation of abbeys and priories on their new estates. The victory of Hastings was marked by the foundation of the abbey of Battle, the first of the long series of Norman monasteries in England. In the work of organisation ecclesiastics from the great abbeys of Normandy took, as was natural, the chief part. Two successive archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc, formerly a monk of Bec and abbot of St Stephen's at Caen, and Anselm, formerly abbot of Bec, were instrumental in giving the Benedictine order in England its pre-eminence under the early Norman kings.