In order to restore the Church again, it was necessary above all things to refound the monasteries. Afterwards--society having become settled, religion being established, and the Church herself having acquired fatal wealth--these brotherhoods sank into torpor and corruption; but while the Church was still a missionary in a spiritual and material wilderness, waging a death struggle with heathenism and barbarism, they were the indispensable engines of the holy war. The re-foundation of monasteries, therefore, was one of Alfred's first cares; and he did not fail, in token of his pious gratitude, to build at Athelney a house of God which was far holier than the memorial abbey afterwards built by the Norman Conqueror at Battle. The revival of monasticism among the English, however, was probably no easy task, for their domestic and somewhat material nature never was well suited to monastic life. The monastery schools, the germs, as has been already said, of our modern universities and colleges, were the King's main organs in restoring education; but he had also a school in his palace for the children of the nobility and the royal household. It was not only clerical education that he desired to promote. His wish was "that all the free-born youth of his people, who possessed the means, might persevere in learning so long as they had no other work to occupy them, until they could perfectly read the English scriptures; while such as desired to devote themselves to the service of the Church might be taught Latin." No doubt the wish was most imperfectly fulfilled, but still it was a noble wish. We are told the King himself was often present at the instruction of the children in the palace school. A pleasant calm after the storms of battle with the Dane! Oxford (Ousen-ford, the ford of the Ouse) was already a royal city; and it may be conjectured that, amidst the general restoration of learning under Alfred, a school of some sort would be opened there. This is the only particle of historical foundation for the academic legend which gave rise to the recent celebration. Oxford was desolated by the Norman Conquest, and anything that remained of the educational institution of Alfred was in all probability swept away.