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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
ceeded. They built the first schools in England
Lindisfarne, Malmesbury, Whitby, Glastonbury, and the
others. They ruled the English as bishops. They taught
them to read, to write, to build, to work metals, and to
illuminate books. They delivered them, as far as they
were able, from the excesses of barbarism and taught them
the truths of the Christian faith. They not only taught
the English in England but they sent them by the ship-
load to Ireland, where they were received, and provided
with food, shelter, and education and sometimes with col-
leges and farms without payment of any kind. Before
the French or Norman conquest Irish influence in En-
gland was all pervading. The English knew almost no art
but Irish art, almost no civilization but Irish civilization.
So that of the relics of the Anglo-Saxon period that have
come down to us, there is hardly an object, whether a
manuscript or a jewel, whether a piece of sculpture or
a piece of architecture, that is not either wholly Irish in
character or with Irish characteristics.
Their work in other lands was equally noteworthy. The
Irish were the first missionaries in Germany, and Ger-
many had in the main been made a Christian land by them
when Boniface, who has been called the Apostle of Germany,
first arrived there. Near and along the Rhine
they established the great monasteries which were to be
the cradles of German civilization, St. Gall, Reichenau,
Rheinau, Honau and the others. Columbanus and his
disciples founded over a hundred monasteries in France
and central Europe, many of them noble abbeys enduring
to this day. But their field was wider still. Irish scholars,
missionaries, pilgrims and travelers are found as far north
as Iceland, which Irish mariners discovered, and as far
south as Carthage and the Nile valley. They traded in
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