The same is true of the Hisperica Famina. Whoever were the authors of that strange and attractive farrago, glossarial learning was to them synonymous with culture. Literary success meant the forging of phrases that should only just not defy interpretation. When, however, we find in a Bodleian manuscript (Auct. F. 4. 32), written in Wales about 887, passages from the Bible in Greek (and Latin) it is possible that we may be in the presence of a relic of British learning independent of Theodore's influence. The volume comes to us from Glastonbury, one of the few places where Celtic and English learning had a chance of blending; and, as Bradshaw says, "it passed out of British into Saxon hands in the tenth century, during St Dunstan's lifetime, when the old animosity had given way to a much more friendly feeling between the races." When we remember how sharp the animosity had been, we shall be more ready to acknowledge the probability that the pedigree of this solitary evidence of the study of Greek in Britain may be wholly independent of the school of Canterbury.
The truth of the matter is probably this, that in the period with which we are concerned there was learning in Britain, and learning of the same standard that then existed in Ireland; but that it was confined to a smaller area, that its products were fewer and that they have perished more completely. There must surely be some foundation for the stress laid by the Irish hagiographers upon the intercourse between the saints of Ireland and of Britain. Over and over again we find that the former go for instruction to the latter: they sit at the feet of David, Cadoc, Gildas. Gildas visits Ireland, as he visits Brittany; in the life of St Brendan it is said that he, Gildas, had a missal written in Greek letters, which Brendan, ignorant of the characters, was miraculously enabled to read at sight. It is, if I mistake not, the one mention of Greek in these late lives, – a fact which adds something, be it but a feather-weight, to the credit of the tale, apart from the miracle. In the Breton and Welsh lives we hear of the school of St Iltut (Illtyd) at Llantwit Major, and, through the mist of words with which modern writers have enwrapped the "first of British Universities," we discern something comparable to the monastic schools of Clonard and the Irish Bangor. For Brittany at least Llantwit was a mother of teachers. From her went forth Paul Aurelian (St Pol-de-Léon), Samson, Leonorius; and they went qualified to Christianise the Bretons, if not to educate them. Of their studies at Llantwit no first-hand record survives; but a few ancient Welsh books, a famous Juvencus at Cambridge, and a Martianus Capella, probably written at St David's and now among Archbishop Parker's manuscripts at Corpus Christi, may safely be accepted (though not earlier than the ninth century) as representing the kind of culture attainable in such a school. And the beautiful story of St Cadoc's intercession for the soul of Virgil, uncertain as is the date of it, gives a glimpse of the attitude of some Britons towards the great literature of
