During the sixth and seventh centuries, the political break-up affected the economic and social structures of the Roman world only partially, and even of its education and culture. Whilst amongst the Roman nobility of the towns and the provinces family education was retaining its ancient place, the bishoprics and the monasteries were gradually taking over the public schools of the late Empire. All cultural activity, writing or reading, heard or read exegesis, the spiritual discourse of the confabulatio, right up to the conceptual systematisation of a theological discussion on God, is integrated into a specifically religious activity. The ideal of clerical life and of clerical training, and the practice of a language intelligently appropriate to the new conditions of the exercise of preaching, were to exert a lasting influence on the culture of the clergy, and on the oral teaching dispensed to Christian people by sermons and by the private reading of the Bible.