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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
number of books in the library of York in his day. If a
library so much superior to any on the Continent could
have been gathered together in England with its ever
insurgent barbarism which swept schools and libraries
away in a night we can well imagine, apart from the evi-
dence, how wealthy and numerous must have been the
libraries in Ireland where the great academies grew in
maturity from age to age in the midst of an ever-developing
national civilization.
Ludwig Traube draws attention to the numerous hand
libraries which the Irish schoolmen carried with them
to the Continent and points to the probability that Sedulius
Scotus, in making his remarkable collection of excerpts
from the Roman classics in the manuscript originally
owned by Nicolaus von Cues, used manuscripts written
in Ireland, since many of these ancient works were unknown
on the Continent. His copy of the De Re Militari
of Vegetius was procured by him on the Continent, but
he also quotes from almost unknown works of Cicero,
Lactantius, Valerius, and numerous other authors. While
it appears that Sedulius made excerpts from some of the
manuscripts in Liege, it appears also likely
that other
excerpts were made by him as a student in the course of
his reading in his alma mater in Ireland. 1
2. DESTRUCTION OF IRISH LIBRARIES
But it was, says Webb, "the object of the English gov-
ernment to discover and destroy all remains of the litera-
ture of the Irish in order more fully to eradicate from
their minds every trace of their ancient independence."
The men whom the English government sent on their mis-
sion of destruction and dispossession to Ireland in the
i Kl. Bay. Akad., Abhandl., 1891, p. 366.
7 6