Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

The enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury of a scholar who had studied in Syria provided converts in Britain with the glimpse of a thrillingly exotic world. Travelling with Theodore from Rome had come a second refugee, an African named Hadrian; and together they set up a school at Canterbury that taught both Latin and Greek. ‘Eagerly, people sought the new-found joys of the kingdom of heaven; and all who wished to learn how to read scripture found teachers ready at hand.’21 Such was the tribute that Bede, a young Anglian monk, felt moved to pay them in the wake of their death. Bede himself, a man of prodigious learning, offered living testimony to the sense of possibility that the two exiles had between them done so much to foster.