The pupil who had studied his Latin grammar and learnt the Psalter by heart, with the accompanying chant, would be able to play his part in the community to which he belonged not only by reading the Latin Bible aloud, with some understanding of its meaning, but also by singing in the church, an aspect of daily worship by which Bede set such great store. In addition to grammar and psalmody, monastic life and the study of the Bible to which it was devoted, depended greatly on at least an elementary knowledge of number. We do better to think of ‘number’ rather than ‘the mathematical sciences’, because the simpler term reflects the long centuries of decline in mathematical, and indeed in all scientific, studies from the age of classical Greece to the times of Gregory, Isidore and Bede. The philosopher Boethius, himself having a sound knowledge of the Greek language, as well as of Greek philosophy, translated or adapted some Greek mathematical treatises and something of his work reached Visigothic Spain, but Bede never mentions Boethius and seems not to have known anything of his work, though in later days his de Consolatione Philosophiae, written in prison before his execution c. 524, was one of the books chosen by Alfred the Great for translation into English.