Open [38.2 MB]

Ireland and the Making of Britain
half Roman, half Irish, belonging to the eleventh century.
And so through all the visible evidences that have been
preserved to us of that period books, metal work, sculp-
ture, architecture and other products of the allied arts.
The portable specimens might have been made in Ireland,
and are believed, many of them, to have been made
in Ireland, so manifestly are they examples of Irish craft. 1
In the school founded by Theodore, the Cilician arch-
bishop had the cooperation of Irish scholars. Even then
that love of dialectical controversy, of probing into the
ratio of things, which was later to make the Irish schoolmen
the stormy petrels of the continental church, and
which already had found its illustrations in the Paschal
disputations and in the correspondence between Columbanus
and the Frank bishops and between Columbanus
and Popes Gregory and Boniface, had become habitual
to them. Aldhelm, who was stationed at Canterbury at
the time, in one of his letters indicates that in the Greek
from Tarsus the Irishmen discovered a doughty antago-
nist. The archbishop, he says, was "densely surrounded by
a crowd of Irish students, who grievously badgered him
(globo discipulorum stipetur) as the truculent boar was
hemmed in by a snarling pack of Molossian hounds. He
tore them with the tusks of grammar and pierced them
with the deep and sharp syllogisms of chronography till
they cast away their weapons and hurriedly fled to the
recesses of their dens." 2
The point to be noted here is
that even at Canterbury and in Kent, with which Irish
influence is seldom associated, Irish scholars were active,
1 "It is now well ascertained that all the sacred books so highly venerated
by the Anglo-Saxon Church and left by her early bishops as heirlooms to
their respective sees were obtained from Ireland or written by Irish scribes."
(Rev. J. H. Todd. Proc. Roy. I. Acad., Vol. I, 41.)
2 Giles, Aldhelmi Opera, p. 94; Brown, Aldhelm, 263-4. Compare Aldhelm's
description with Gregory Nazienzen's account of the encounter of Basil with
the Armenian students in Athens (Oration XLIII).
266