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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
musician, orator, poet, painter, sculptor, builder, gold-
smith; Dungal, theologian, controversialist, poet, as-
tronomer; Virgilius of Salzburg, prince of astronomers,
"most learned among the learned." Nor was Dicuil the
only great Irish geographer. Duncan or Dunchad, an
Irish bishop, teaching in the monastery
of Remi at
Rheims, where he died about the close of the tenth cen-
tury, wrote for the use of his students "Explanatory Obser-
vations on the First Book of Pomponius Mela regarding
the situation of the earth," as well as a "Commentary on the
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Nine Books of Martianus Capella on the Liberal Arts."
For these reasons "it was that Fingen and Duncan and
other Irishmen hiad been so (peculiarly patronized at
Rheims, Metz, Verdun, and along the territories of France
and Germany. Learning had been revived by Irishmen
in the imperial city of Cologne; they taught the
classics and the sciences in the extensive diocese of Toul ;
they established schools along the Rhine,
in the Nether-
lands, Switzerland, and the northern districts of Italy;
in short, the Irish ecclesiastics of the tenth and preceding
centuries were the persons by whose means the reign of
literature had been established in many of the most distinguished
cities and provinces of Europe." 2
Every
province in Germany proclaims the Irish as its benefac-
tors, says a German author. "The Saxons and the tribes
of northern Germany are indebted to them to an extent
which may be judged from the fact that the first ten
bishops who occupied the see of Verden belonged to that
(Irish) race."
Noteworthy was the modesty of these Irish pioneers.
Columbanus, friend of Agilulf, king of the Lombards,
iThe MS. (Lat. 4854) is in the BibliothSque Nationalc, Paris. See Hist.
Lit. de la France, I, 549-50.
Brenan, Eccl. Hist, of Ireland, p. 199.
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