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Extending Operations Over All England
been held in veneration in France. Their journey and
reception were felicitous. "Landing upon foreign
shores," says the old chronicle, "Fursa and his companions
are borne through Britain to Saxony (i. e., East Anglia),
where, being honorably received by King Sigebert at
Burghcastle, he softened the hearts of the barbarians."1
Fursa arrived in East Anglia contemporaneously with
the arrival of Aidan in Northumbria, and Sigebert, ruler
of the Angles of that region, put at the disposal of the
distinguished Irishman a tract of land at Cnobheresburg.
There Fursa and his associates built a monastery in the
Irish fashion within the enclosure of a Roman fort
Burghcastle in Suffolk surrounded by woods and over-
looking the sea. Using this place as headquarters the
Irish missionaries labored for years converting and
the natives. 2
instructing
Tribal wars then rent the population of East Anglia
and left them little leisure or disposition to improve their
minds or manners, or to listen to the words of religion.
But the indefatigable and lionhearted Irishmen had a way
of making most of the least hopeful material. Combining
firmness with kindness, they gradually brought the
aborigines to reason and put them through their first paces
in the direction of ordered living and moral restraint.
Sigebert was renewed in his fervor by Fursa. The devoted
Irishman labored without pause except for the interval
of one year of retirement and did not abandon his task
till tribal warfare growing ever more widespread made
it impossible to continue, obliging him to transfer the
theater of his operations to Gaul, after an apostolate in
England of about fifteen years. 3
1 Vita S. Fursae.
2 Hist. Eccl. Ill, XIX.
3 Hist. Eccl. Ill, XIX.
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