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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
Oswald, king of Northumbria, and his brother Oswiu,
received their education in Ireland and at lona. The
two young men became proficient in the Irish tongue,
Bede tells us: "Oswiu .... illorum etiam lingua optime
imbutus." Aldfrid, too, king of Northumbria, the son,
according to some accounts, of an Irish mother, and the
friend of Adamnan of lona, was educated also in Ireland,
and seems to have spent much time at Mayo of the Saxons,
founded by Colman. He spoke Irish fluently, like his
predecessor, and traveled around every principality in
Ireland. Very interesting is the poem from his hand,
which has survived both in Gaelic and Latin, in the light
it throws on the Ireland of the period, and in which the
note of worship, common to all the Anglo-Saxons where
Ireland was concerned, is almost as well defined as in the
pages
of Bede. The first two verses follow in their En-
glish translation:
I found in Inisfail the Fair
In Ireland while in exile there
Women of worth, both grave and gay men
Learned clerics, heroic laymen.
I traveled its fruitful provinces round
And in every one of the five I found
Alike in church and in palace hall
Abundant apparel and food for all. *
Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury,
dedicated to Aldfrid a
poetic epistle in Latin meter in which he congratulated
the king on his good fortune in having been educated in
Ireland. Aldhelm's own master was the Irish Maeldubh
or Maelduf, from whom the city of Malmesbury derives
its name.
Clonard and Slane, near Tara, seem to have been schools
i See Dublin Review, XXI, 519.
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