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Transmitting Treasures of Ancient Learning
gardener's house, hen and duck house, poultrykeeper's
house, baths and cemetery. There is also an immense
garden with all sorts of medicinal herbs, and incidentally
we learn from a Latin poem in the library the name of
the Irishman who laid the gardens out. So the monastery
was not merely a school, library and scriptorium, but a
world of industry, a university in the large sense of to-day,
a living metropolis, teaching the nation in which it was
set the art of civic life and work.
Indeed Wattenbach assigns to the medieval Irish the
leading place in the organization of Christian society,
declaring them to have first supplied the defect in the
organization of society which arose from the development
of cities, for until their time monasteries had been founded
only in the solitude of the country, excepting
were attached to episcopal seats. 1
such as
Wattenbach found the
inspiration for this observation in the Irish foundations
which Marianus Scotus and his countrymen established
in Germany in the middle of the eleventh century. Thus
the merchants from Ratisbon who founded Vienna knew
no rest till a colony of Irish monks, whom Ratisbon citi-
zens had helped in the building of their first monastery,
had come and settled among them. But it is to be noted
as part of the Irish contribution to modern civilization
that just as at an earlier period Irishmen had founded
cities like St. Gall by building on sites in the solitude,
so at a later period they supplied the organizing element
in cities in the origin of which they had at first no part.
i See the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Old Series, VII, 297.