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Irish Tutelage of England
There were Irish monks and Irish trained monks at
York, at J arrow, at Monkwearmouth, at Melrose, at
Hexham, at Whitby, and other foundations. The later
English schools, brief and fitful in their career, were
often but the piecing together again, on the site or in the
neighborhood, of the older Irish foundations, broken up in
the periodic homicidal welter of internecine conflict that
succeeded the passing of one petty king or another through
Anglo-Saxon history. At York, an offshoot of Lindisfarne,
Alcuin appears to have acquired from Irish Hellenists
there resident such knowledge of Greek1 as he possest, tho
the knowledge may likewise have been acquired at Clon-
macnois, if he actually studied under Colgu in that great
seat of learning. 2
The master who influenced Alcuin most
in company with Albert had been brought into the
monastery by Eata, the protege of Aidan and one of the
earliest representatives of Irish learning among the
English. 3 The Irish scholars and craftsmen all over
England put no curb on the liberality with which they
dispensed their learning and skill. That the pupils should
lag behind the masters is only in the nature of things. The
slough of an age-long barbarism was not easily shed; but
if a mere film of mediocrity and dulness in contrast to
the depth of brutality and despair underneath is what is
represented by progress in the Anglo-Saxon epoch, it is
well to remember that in one or two directions and in
one or two examples Anglo-Saxon skill rivaled its Irish
1 This is the opinion of Gardthausen, the German authority on Greek
paleography.
2 As to whether Alcuin studied at Clonmacnois: cf. Monnier, Alcuin et
Charlemagne, Paris, 1854. Alcuin's admiration for the culture of Irishmen
as well as his dread of their "Egyptian" philosophy break out frequently in
his correspondence and other works (Probenius edition, I, 185, 285, 284, 286
note; II, 185, 246, vers. 458).
3 At York under Alcuin was Liudger, later archbishop of the Frisians,
apparently the only continental student that ever went to England for education.
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