Pope Gregory the Great, who had been a Benedictine, was most ardent in the establishment of monasteries, of which he himself founded a large number. He was the chief promoter of two important missions which took place in 585 and 596; the first in Gaul, consisting of missionaries from Ireland, headed by St. Columba and St. Gall; the second in Great Britain, with monks from the Abbey of St. Andrew, headed by another monk, St. Augustine. This latter, who converted the Anglians and their king, Ethelbert, was the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Colomba founded the Abbey of Luxeuil, upon the southern side of the Vosgian forests; while Gall, his disciple, much younger than himself, penetrated into the country of the Helvetians, who were as deeply sunk in barbarism as the Anglians, where he founded a monastery which afterwards became famous under the name of its founder, and which owed its celebrity to the variety of subjects which were taught there. St. Colomba was the first to draw up a complete set of monastic rules, which were generally adopted in France, just as the rules of St. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, and those of St. Augustine of Ireland, were followed in the British Isles. These three codes, very similar in their general principles, varied from each other in many particulars, for they were applicable to monks living in different countries. In the communities which adhered to the rules of St. Colomba, as in all the great Benedictine monasteries, prayer, mental culture, and manual labour were the invariable occupations of cloister life (Fig. 241). The rules drawn up by St. Colomba and his imitators, St. Isidore and St. Augustine, thus remained in force down to the eighth century, in spite of the new system of education and religious teaching inaugurated so zealously throughout Gaul by the Anglo-Saxon monk, St. Boniface; in spite, too, of the industrial and artistic, rather than scientific and contemplative, turn which St. Eloi gave to the studies of the monks in his abbey of St. Martin at Limoges, and in the other monasteries founded or reorganized by him. That illustrious Bishop of Noyon, Master of the Mint to King Clotaire II., afterwards treasurer, goldsmith, and minister to Dagobert I. (568–659), was at great pains to make the cultivation of art an important feature in monastic life.