The lettering of the Irish owed, not to the Roman cursive but to the Half-Uncial brought by missionaries of the Roman Church in the 5th century. The letters were written painstakingly with a horizontal nib. The conversion of what is now England to Christianity was brought about by Irish monks, and while this determined the shape of Anglo-Saxon writing, the Half-Uncial there developed a character of its own, being written with more speed and more slant of the pen with a resultant pointed effect.