Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion, introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries. In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr. Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.
This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was fitted for the purpose.
The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of experience which single families, especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a society from which exact application of such a kind had all but disappeared.[12]