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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
life a golden memory to his disciples, who with him had
been laboring among the Picts for the greater part of a
century. Columbanus and most of his associates too were
dead after prolonged labor in France and the border-
lands, and a hundred years before Columbanus there had
been Irish priests and bishops in Gaul and Italy. In the
year 620 A. D. there were Irish missionaries in Bavaria
and Helvetia. But they passed the English tribes by.
What was at the bottom of this seeming dereliction of
duty?
In this attitude of aloofness the Irish were not alone.
Gaulish missionaries, whose negligence Pope Gregory
later rebuked, showed great reluctance in respect to
preaching to the invaders of Britain, for in a letter of
introduction which Augustine brought from Gregory to
Queen Brunhilda at Orleans we gather that applications
from the English for help and conversion had been made
1
in vain to neighboring priests.
"We are informed," wrote the Pope, "that they long-
ingly wish to be converted, but the bishops and the priests
of the neighboring region (France) neglect them." The
appeals of the English were probably prompted by the
presence of Bishop Luidhard, soul friend to Bertha, a
Christian Gaulish princess who had married Ethelbert,
king of Kent. Bertha was the daughter of Caribert, king
of Paris, granddaughter of Brunhilda, the great enemy
of Columbanus, and great-granddaughter of Clotilde,
wife of Clovis.
Going still further,
the clerics of the church of the
Britons refused absolutely to have any hand in the conversion
of the English, looking on them as being more
worthy of eternal reprobation than of the joys of heaven.
lEpist VI. 59. Migne, Pat. Lat. LXXVII, col. 842 seq.
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