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THIS
PREFACE
book grew into being as the earlier half of a
work describing the efforts of medieval Irishmen
to establish civilization in continental Europe as
well as in Britain following the downfall of the Roman
Empire. As the work neared completion it was seen that
the activities of Irishmen in relation to the different
peoples inhabiting Britain would find their best representation
in a separate and independent volume. The
relations prevailing between medieval Ireland on the one
hand and medieval Wales and Scotland on the other were
relations of a kind that did not subsist between Ireland
and any other country. In both these countries of Britain
there were Irish military conquests and political settle-
ments as well as Irish cultural and missionary enterprises,
and both Wales and Scotland endured for centuries as
Irish provinces, colonies and political dependencies.
Among the English the work of medieval Irishmen partook
more exclusively of the character of Irish missionary
and cultural work on the Continent. Nevertheless the
relations between Ireland and England in that era were
relations of a special and peculiar kind, and if England
before the so-called Norman Conquest was not a political
dependency
of Ireland it was in a true sense a moral and
intellectual dependency.
As long as England remained really England its people
looked not to the Continent but to Ireland for that sus-
tenance and support without which its uncertain civiliza-
tion might never have come into being or might have
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