The early English schools were the offspring of the Church and their curricula were designed with one principal aim in view, the more widespread dissemination of Christianity. If Christianity and civilisation were to be brought to the Anglo-Saxons, it was essential to have priests who were trained to read the Bible – a literate priesthood was a prerequisite for evangelisation.

After the coming of St Augustine in 597 schools were established by the great monastic churches, for example at Canterbury, Westminster and York, in an attempt to supply this basic, vocational training. These schools provided instruction in the Latin language, the Latin scriptures and in the Church's liturgy and music. Gradually, at the more important centres, the curriculum widened to include astronomy and arithmetic {1}. There was a utilitarian need for the latter – if only to calculate the dates of movable feasts and to keep rudimentary accounts.

We cannot be certain exactly when mathematics first was taught in England, but Bede (674–735) in his Ecclesiastical History {2} tells how Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late seventh century, and his deacon, Hadrian, ‘gathered a crowd of disciples … and … taught them the art of ecclesiastical poetry, astronomy and arithmetic’. Bede, himself, in his De Temporurm Ratione (3) demonstrated the arithmetic needed to make the necessary calculations concerning Easter. Of course, at that time the West had no knowledge of the Hindu–Arabic notation and so Bede made use of ‘finger-reckoning’, a form of arithmetic taught in monastic schools for many centuries (cf. p. 15 below).