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168 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Northumbria were gradually made Benedictine. In Gaul, too, the Benedictine Rule ultimately supplanted that of Columban, though some monasteries still followed the Celtic customs as late as the beginning of the ninth century. Meanwhile, in Ireland itself the south had submitted to the Papacy in 636 and the north did so in 697, and the monasteries founded by Columba in Scotland conformed in 717. The monasteries in England not only led to the conver- sion of the invaders, but were the chief centers of civiliza- Monastic tion, and, like the Irish monasteries, preserved England? m the seventh and eighth centuries a higher cul- Bede ture than could be found in most Western lands. Of their teachers and writers Bede is the best known. He wrote in Latin his ecclesiastical history which comes down to 731, commentaries on the Bible, grammatical treatises, and even some treatises in the field of natural science. He also tells us of a poet, Caedmon, who composed para- phrases of Biblical story in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. When Charlemagne about 800 wanted scholars at his Frankish court, he looked to England for them. Irish culture, too, continued for some time, and Bede praised the learning of Ireland in his day. From an English monastery went forth in the eighth cen- tury a missionary, who, building upon the foundations Boniface which the Irish monks and other earlier mission- aoostie to aries had laid, converted many of the Germans to the east of the Rhine and reformed the Frank- ish Church in Gaul and brought it into closer relations with the Papacy. This was Winfrith, or Boniface, the name by which he was known after his visit to the pope in 719. With the powerful backing of Charles Martel, the real ruler of the Franks at this time, as well as with the support of the pope, Boniface visited Frisia, Thuringia, Hesse, Bavaria. He reformed the Frankish churches through coun- cils held in Australia in 742 and in Neustria in 744. These synods abolished surviving heathen customs, improved the morals of the priests, which seem to have been sadly in