The monasteries, so widely established during the period we are considering, became the schools and training-houses for the clergy--the only schools for a long period of time. And we are told that the rulers in the West encouraged the monasteries to open schools for boys in connection with their houses. The schools of this period, to be sure, would not compare with those of modern times, but they were the best available--in fact, the only schools; and they were not circumscribed to religious instruction. The testimony of Professor Dobschütz is that, "All the great fathers of the church insisted upon classical training; so did Jerome himself and Saint Augustine, not to speak of the great classical scholars in Christian bishoprics in the East. And even in the later centuries, when classical civilisation had gone and was only kept up artificially by assiduous reading, it was the church which maintained the right and the necessity of a classical training for the clergy.... There was a time when there was no reading at all outside the clergy and the monasteries, but this reading was a combination of classical and Biblical. That is the great merit of the medieval church."[73] The value and the extent of the instruction given in these schools was, for the most part, exceedingly limited, in both range and research. The monasteries were--and continued to be, for long--of far greater significance and service, no doubt, in their relation to literature--to its preservation and also its dissemination--than they were as seats and sources of learning. "If there had not been great abbeys where schools of grammar were established, and where as many books as possible were jealously preserved, perhaps not one Latin writer would have come down to us."[74] Most of the monasteries, especially the larger ones, were provided with a "scriptorium" or a writing-room, where the monks with an inclination to literature and those also who were skillful with the pen were required, in the custom of most monasteries, to devote a proportion of every day to the employment of copying books. The large majority of all the scribes, throughout this entire period of a thousand years, were connected with the churches or the monasteries. By their employment in the writing-room worn-out manuscripts were replaced; borrowed books, transcribed, the copies made therefrom being retained at the return of the borrowed book; and thus in these and in other ways, gradually an increasing number of books found a home in the monasteries.