A number of factors and forces combined to keep alive the feeble and smouldering sparks of learning amidst the wide-spread intellectual gloom of the age. Early and prominent among these was the establishment and subsequent development of the abbeys and cathedral institutions in various parts of the continent and in Britain. Then came the founding of the Benedictines (which flourished from the sixth century on, spreading from Italy westward into France and England and in other directions, and gathering unnumbered devotees--under the threefold vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience--into thousands of establishments) together with the various Orders that arose from the tenth century on--in all of which there were greater or lesser attempts at study, learning, and literature, along with their other and more distinguishing ideals. [The orders and the dates of their respective beginnings were as follows: Carthusians, 1084; Cistercians, 1098; Carmelites, 1156; Dominicans, 1170-1221; Franciscans, 1209-1226. "The two orders," Franciscans and Dominicans, says Thatcher, "furnished all the great scholars of the later Middle Ages."] And toward the close of the "Dark Ages" the movement toward enlightenment, known as the Renaissance, was accelerated in the beginnings of the great universities, the roots of which run down into the soil of the thirteenth century. Prominent among the great universities that date to the thirteenth century and which were located in widely separated regions and among divergent peoples, in England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the North, were those at Cambridge, Oxford, Naples, Salamanca, Lisbon, Paris, Orleans, and Upsal. In all these there were nascent movements in the direction of literature manifested in the establishment of libraries as well as in the development of learning.