The development of literacy in England seems to have been interrupted when the Roman army left the country, and Britain supposedly went back to an illiterate state. The movement of the written religions followed the trade routes and the conquests that had been made by the urban societies, especially that of Rome, whose rule penetrated right to the borders of Scotland, to the forests of Germany and to the Saharan fringes of North Africa, conquering the earlier ‘oral’ creeds and the ‘barbarian’ cultures that flourished there and helping to draw them into the state system. Christianity accompanied those conquests and the soldiers, like others, felt the need for supernatural support often beyond the traditional cults, and Judaism and other practices were caught up in this movement. The Romans, and to a limited extent the Greeks, had spread the knowledge of writing and of written cultures, alphabetic ones, and there was a significant level of personal as well as public literacy; from Hadrian’s Wall there is considerable written evidence of the life of the soldiers stationed there, not to mention an account of the conquest of the country by Caesar as well as a mass of literature on law and other topics of ‘higher knowledge’. All this came with the conquest.