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Transmitting Treasures of Ancient Learning
of the Irish Clement, issued in 825 A. D. his important
edict assigning Pavia, Turin, Cremona, Piacenza, Florence
and other places for central schools, some of them
with Irish teachers like Dungal, to whom scholars from
the surrounding districts, mentioned in detail, were to
resort. Thus after centuries of unwearied effort Irish
scholars who presided at the opening of trie ninth century
in Gaul, Germany and Italy, saw the flourishing of the
seed which generations of Irishmen in those lands had
been sowing before them.
Yet it is at the Irish foundation of St. Gall that we
find the first indubitable evidence of the actual education
not only of youth intended for the priesthood or the
cloister, but of the Irish fashion of educating lay youths
as well. Of the ideal of lay or secular schools with lay
students taught by lay teachers, such as existed in Ireland,
we have to come almost to modern times to find an example
in other lands. But St. Gall at any rate made the nearest
approach to it at this early period and that approach
we see in actual working during a period of renaissance
when Irish teachers like Moengal and Marcus were the
life and soul of the celebrated center of learning and
cradle of German civilization.
Thus the remarkable extant plan of the monastery of
St. Gall, c. 820 A. D., which Dr. Ferdinand Keller un-
earthed in 1844^ shows an inner school of the novices
or oblati, i.
e., the boys offered to God,
and an outer
school, providing for about 150 boarders, for young gentlemen
intended for civil and military life. 2
At the time
1 There is a facsimile and description of the plan in the Archaeological
Journal, 1848, vol. 5. (London).
2 Irish proficiency in the secular studies was well recognized on the Continent.
Thus Walafrid Strabo (d. 849) says that Erlebald, of noble birth and
abbot of Reichenau (822-838) was first instructed at Reichenau by Heito and
afterwards was sent with a companion to some learned Irish instructor for
training in the secular branches of the sciences and arts.
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