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Irish Tutelage of England
Biscop had late in the seventh century to import artizans
from Gaul to build the simple houses he desired to erect
at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Among the native population
he could find nobody capable of the simplest work of
carpentry, quarrying and construction, tho the models
of the vanished empire were ever before their eyes.
Everywhere throughout England on the other hand
where the arts and works of civilized life were superseding
the futile monotony and disorder of barbarism, Irishmen
were themselves accomplishing the work or instructing
the reclaimed English how to do it. In the region spread-
ing out like a fan from Malmesbury they dotted the land
with edifices that rivaled the Roman models in design
and durability. The church erected at Bradford-on-
Avon, whether the work of Aldhelm's time or a renova-
tion of the ninth century, shows the influence of Irish
hands and endures to this day. At Frome, Sherborne, and
Wareham on the south coast, where the first buildings
known to Wessex were raised, they must have worked in
goodly numbers. The monastic life they introduced into
the country was fruitful in good work. As Green puts
it: "It broke the dreary line of the northern coast with
settlements which proved the forerunner of some of the
busiest English ports. It broke the silence of waste and
moor by homes like that of Ripon and Lastingham. It
set agricultural colonies in the depths of vast woodlands,
as at Evesham and Malmesbury, while by a chain of
religious houses it made its way step by step into the heart
of the Fens." 1
It was of course chiefly in the north that Irish activity
directed its first energies. But soon the Irish missionary,
artist, and craftsman was exercising his humanizing
i Hist, of England.
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