scholars, is not less characteristic. Ireland was once the
university, the literary market not only, as we have
seen, of northern England, but also m of the Frankish
realm ; and if its progress at home was arrested after
the fatal inroad of the Northmen in 795,[1] the seed
the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity
than it had ever reached on its own soil. n Wherever
they w r ent they founded schools. Malmesbury, the
house of which saint Aldhelm was a scholar and ultim
ately abbat, took its origin from the company of disciples
that gathered about a poor Scottish teacher. Mailduf,
as he sat in his hut beside the walls of the old castle of
Ingelborne. The foundations of saint Columban, Luxeuil,
and Bobbio,[2] long remained centres of learned activity
in Burgundy and Lombardy ; the settlement of his Bonifaz
comrade, saint Gall, rose into the proud abbey which yet
retains his name, and which was for centuries a beacon-
tower of learning in western Europe; the sister-abbey of
Reichenau, its rival both in power and in cultivation,
also owed its fame, if not its actual establishment on its
island in the lower lake of Constance, to Scottish teachers.
Under the shelter of these great houses, and of such as
these, learning was planted in a multitude of lesser societies
scattered over the tracts of German colonisation ; and
most commonly the impulse which led to their formation
as schools as well as monasteries is directly due to the
energetic devotion of the Scottish travellers.
- ↑ For the date see Todd, intr. to The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, pp. xxxii xxxiv; 1867. The oarlier invasion by the Northum- brian Ecgfrith (Bed. iv. 26) was little more than a momentary raid : the vikings on the con- trary settled in Ireland, plundered the churches, and destroyed all the special tokens of Irish civilisa- tion; see J. R. Green, Conquest of England, 65 sq. ; 1883. From a poem describing how Sulgen, after- wards bishop of Saint David s ivit ad Hibernos sophia miralile daros, written by the bishop s son John, Ussher, in his preface to the Syl- loge, infers that there was a re- vival of the Irish schools after the Danish invasion; since the verso relates to about the middle of the eleventh century : but of this further proof is wanting. [Com- pare Dr. H. J. Lawlor s intro- duction to the Psalter of Rice- march, 1. pp. x-xiii, 1914.]
- ↑ On their foundation see Bede s life of Columban, x and xxix, Opp. 3. 283, 304 sq., ed. Basle 1563.
