As places of education the convents exercised the most important influence on the outside world. Even in the ninth century children were sent to England from the continent to be educated in the schools established by Theodorus and Hadrian.[24] This is the more remarkable, as in the seventh century there were so few convents in England that many of the nobility sent their daughters to be educated in France. The religious house of Brie, of which mention has already been made, as having a Saxon abbess, received the daughter of Earconberth, King of Kent, during the rule of the Abbess Fara in 640. Eight hundred years later Sir Thomas Boleyn sent his ill-fated daughter Anne, during her sojourn in France, to a convent at Brie to complete her education. It seems probable that it was the same religious house. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the nuns were as much occupied with literary studies as the monks, reading theology and even classics, copying manuscripts, which they adorned with wonderful embellishments. They were able to correspond in Latin; some were acquainted with Greek, and they appear to have been very assiduous in the pursuit of such literature as was available. The Abbess Eadburga and her pupil Leobgitha were both correspondents of the famous Archbishop Boniface, who lived in the eighth century. On one occasion Leobgitha sends Boniface some Latin hexameters of her own composition. In her letter she says-- “These underwritten verses I have endeavoured to compose according to the rules derived from the poets, not in a spirit of presumption, but with the desire of exciting the powers of my slender talents, and in the hope of thine assistance therein. This art I have learnt from Eadburga, who is ever occupied in studying the divine law.” The lines run thus-- “Arbiter omnipotens solusqui cuncta creavit, In regno patris semperqui lumine fulget; Qua jugiter flagrans sit regnet gloria Christi, Illæsum servet semper te jure perenni.”[25] Another nun, St. Erkenwald, had as a teacher Hildelitha-- “a woman as well excellentlie learned in the liberall sciences as verie expert in skill of religious discipline and life.” For many centuries, indeed as long as the conventual system lasted, the only schools for girls were the convent schools, where, says Robert Aske, “the daughters of gentlemen were brought up with virtue.” From the educational point of view, the suppression of the convents was decidedly a blunder; and they were not merely schools for book-learning. Among other things were taught the treatment of various disorders, the compounding of simples, the binding up of wounds. The custom of bleeding people for every form of illness, and to ward off possible sickness, created the necessity for some kind of bandage ready prepared to apply to the place where the incision was made. It was common to make these bandages of silk, and offer them as presents.[26]