But besides being primarily and emphatically a religious foundation, the Abbey in the 13th century had grown into something else, and had become the home of a corporation of scholars and students, who were the leaders of art and culture in an age when art and culture were to be met with nowhere outside the walls of a great monastery. There, in what might be called the museum of the Abbey, you might see no mean collection of antique gems that had once been the pride of Roman magistrates. Mysterious specimens of barbaric goldwork, fashioned by unknown craftsmen for the necks of nameless chieftains who had drawn the sword and perished, none knew when. Engraved gems that had been dug up in mysterious sepulchres, about which even imagination despaired of telling any story; relics of saints and martyrs, charters of Saxon kings, granted centuries before the Normans came to ring out the old and ring in the new. The wealth of mere archaeological specimens at St. Alban's made it such a museum of antiquities as provokes wonder and bitterness, as we read the catalogue of what was once there, and has perished utterly and for ever.[3] The range of buildings to the south of the church covered a far larger area than that which the church itself occupied. Uncertain though the exact site may be and is, there had already been added in Brother Matthew's time what we should now call an Art school, a Library, and, almost more famous than all, the Scriptorium. By-and-bye, too, came the printing-press which John Herford set up in 1480. Wynkyn de Worde was sometime schoolmaster of Saint Alban's, and Lady Juliana Berners' famous volume issued from the Abbey Press, while Caxton was still pursuing his craft in the almonry of another monastery at Westminster. In the days of King John, however, people had so little idea of the possibility of the printing-press, that they were almost equally ignorant of such a material as paper for literary purposes. Yet it is a huge mistake which has not yet been exploded, as it ought to be, that reading and writing were rare accomplishments in the 13th century. Knowledge of a certain kind was disseminated far more effectively and far more universally than is generally believed. The country parson was expected to be the schoolmaster of his parish, and generally was so, and there was hardly a village in England during the reign of Henry III, in which there were not one or more persons who could write a _clerkly_ hand, draw up accounts in _Latin_, and keep the records of the various petty courts and gatherings that were continually being held, sometimes to the annoyance and grievous vexation of the rural population. The professional _writers_ were so numerous, and their training so severe, that they had got for themselves privileges of a very exceptional kind; the _clerk_ took rank with the _clergyman_, and the _writer_ of a book was almost as much esteemed as its _author_.