Almost all our writers from Baeda to the days of the Angevins are clergy or monks.

The revival of letters which followed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this time a part of every religious house of any importance.

But the literature which found this religious shelter was not so much ecclesiastical as secular.

Even the philosophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics.

The literary revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old historical form.