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Bridging
the Old World and the New
remained the most renowned seat of learning in the world.
Founded in the fifth century it retained its supremacy in
the twelfth. Thus the synod of Clane in 1162 ordered
that from that time forth only former students of Armagh
were to obtain the position of "fer leiginn," or chief professor,
in a school attached to any church in Ireland. This
decree was really equivalent to a recognition of the school
of Armagh as a national university for all Ireland. Seven
years later the king of Ireland, Ruaidhri, established
and endowed in Armagh a new professorship for the
benefit of students from Ireland and Scotland.
After Armagh there followed Clonard in present
Meath, ancient Bregia and Tefrla, founded early in the
sixth century by Finan or Finnian; Clonmacnois, on the
banks of the Shannon in the present King's County,
founded in the same century by Ciaran, called the "Carpenter's
Son"; Bangor in Uladh, or Ulidia, amid the
coastal ards of Ulster, "that glorious institution" as St.
Bernard of Clairvaux calls it, founded by ComgalP in
558; Clonfert, founded by St. Brendan the Navigator;
Lismore in Desies (now County Waterford), founded by
Carthach, surnamed Mochuda, about the year 633 ;
Glendalough, in present Wicklow, part
territory of Hy-Kinsellagh.
Clonard (Cluain Erard, Erard's meadow),
and
of the ancient
on the
banks of the River Boyne, began as the cell of Finnian, 2
1 Columbanus, founder of Luxeuil, Annegray, Fontaines and Bobbio, who
was educated at Bangor, preserves in his second Instruction a fragment of the
writings of Comgall (See Ulster Journal of Archaeology, I, p. 174, Old Series,
Reeves on Antiphonary of Bangor; Migne, LXXX, 229 seq.). Notker Balbulus,
who flourished at the Irish foundation of St. Gall in 890, identifies the name
of Faustus, which Columbanus gives to his old master, with the Irish name
Comgall.
2 "Naimh (St.) Finnian of Clonard, the pious one.
And scholar, in whose school three thousand saints
Had studied wisdom, ere they wandered forth
To build their cells and churches throughout vast Erin." (Tain. Prol.,
Finding of the Tain, transl. by Hutton, p. 6.V
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