No More Learning

The text, long preserved in Ireland, he would suggest, passed to the
Continent in the train of the Irish missionaries. To our grammarian, ,
too, he would refer the epigrams in which Ennodius (473–521) ridicules
“ a certain foolish man who was known as Virgilius. ”
Clearly much of this argument is inappreciable by those ignorant of
Celtic languages. To the general contention one objection has been
urged which makes its appeal to a wider circle, and which, if upheld,
must do away with the greater part of Zimmer's hypothesis. It is that
Virgilius makes use of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (+ 636). If
so, he takes his place in the seventh century, after Isidore and before
Aldhelm. An examination of the long list of passages cited by
Manitius from the Etymologies, and supposed by him to have been
1 An abridged text of 1465 in a Bodleian MS. (D'Orville 147) is an exception.
CH, XIX.
32-2


## p. 500 (#546) ############################################

500
A Cosmography
borrowed thence by Virgilius, has failed to convince me that Virgilius,
and not Isidore, is the borrower. Practically all the passages contain
derivations of words (legitera = littera and the like). They are
thoroughly germane to the manner of Virgilius ; nor is it a consideration
of any weight that Isidore nowhere names Virgilius as his source, for
in this respect his practice is by no means consistent. In short, though
it may be shewn on other grounds that Zimmer has placed Virgilius too
early, I cannot think that his theory is invalidated by the appeal to
Isidore; and I feel justified in provisionally adopting his date.
Ireland has been named, and will for a time engage our whole
attention ; but before we leave France and Virgilius, a word must be
said of a book which has perhaps a claim to be regarded as a product
of his school. At least it reminds us of him by its language and by
its solemn absurdity. The work in question is the Cosmography of
“Aethicus Ister. ” I use inverted commas because it is not certain
that the form “ Aethicus” is what was intended by the author of the
text, who may have meant to write “ Ethicus” and have used that word
as a synonym for “philosopher. ” The Cosmography comes to us in the
shape of an abstract or series of extracts from a larger work, purporting
to have been made by St Jerome (or at least by a a “Hieronymus
presbyter”). In spite of the efforts of Wuttke to uphold this attribu-
tion and to identify the places and peoples who are mentioned, it is not
possible to regard Aethicus as anything but a romancer or to put him
earlier than the seventh century. His wild Latin, full of hapax legomena,
elaborate alliteration and short assonant clauses, his fables about
countries, tribes, and creatures, partly borrowed from Solinus and the
Alexander-romances, but largely peculiar to himself, and his display of
absurd learning (exemplified by the bogus Scythian alphabet with which
he ends his book), all stamp him as a charlatan. He probably wrote in
France: it seems that the first writer who quotes him is Frankish-one
of the continuators of the chronicler who is called Fredegarius.
At the same time, it would be no surprise to learn that he had Irish
connexions. Indeed, definite allusions to Ireland have been pointed out
in his writings and in those of Virgilius. Aethicus represents himself as
having crossed from Spain to Ireland, and having studied the books
(eorum volumina volvens) which he found there (a phrase which may
reasonably be taken to imply that Ireland enjoyed a reputation for
culture in his time)'. The two passages adduced from Virgilius are
both of doubtful import. One says that in the composition and elocu-
tion of the. . . . the verb holds the first place. The statement is true of
Irish, and the word represented by dots is given in the manuscripts as hi
bonorum, hiborum, in iborum, respectively. The conjecture Hibernorum
lies ready to hand; yet the possibility of Hiberorum or Iberorum must
1 For all that, he says of the island "Inperitos habet cultores, et instructoribus
habet destitutos habitatores. ” (p. 19, Wuttke. )


## p. 501 (#547) ############################################

Irish learning
501
be considered, especially as we have seen that Virgilius elsewhere
mentions the speech of his neighbours, the Basques. The other passage, ,
in which he quotes a verse by one Bregandus Lugenicus, has been
thought to contain an Irish tribal name. But strong collateral evidence
is needed to bring this out of the category of Virgilius's ordinary
mystifications.
We now approach the problem of the classical culture of Ireland.
How, when, and whence did it come into being ? Many generations of
scholars have been contented to regard the mission of Patrick (in 430-460)
as marking the accession of Ireland to the world of learning. It has
been realised, indeed, that Patrick himself was no scholar, but he has
been thought of as the parent of scholars, the progenitor of the great
monastic schools which sprang up all over Ireland in the sixth century-
Clonard (520), Clonmacnois (544), Clonfert (c. 550), Bangor (c. 560).
Before Patrick (or at least before Palladius), it has been commonly
believed, Ireland, lying outside the sphere of Roman political influence,
was also untouched by Roman culture. A readjustment of this view
has become necessary. Patrick was not the Apostle of Ireland in the
sense that before he landed there were no Christians in the island.
Apart from such results as may have attended the obscure mission
of Palladius (whom Zimmer would identify with Patrick), there were
pre-Patrician churches and pre-Patrician saints. It would indeed be
strange, if at a time when Christianity was highly organised and
flourishing both in Britain and in western Gaul—countries in active
intercourse with Ireland—there had been no sporadic evangelisation, no
formation here and there of small Christian communities, As a matter
of fact there are in the undoubted writings of Patrick allusions to
existent Christianity, and in particular to men who, we gather from
Patrick's language, possessed a higher degree of culture than he did.
There is, too, a persistent tradition (though the documents which
contain it are not of the earliest) that certain saints, Ailbe, for instance,
and Declan, were in Ireland before Patrick.
Into the precise value of this tradition I cannot attempt to in-
quire; to do so would be to exaggerate its importance for our purpose.
I should be giving the impression that missionary enterprise was the
sole factor in bringing the learning of the Continent into Ireland. This
would be a mistake. We have seen that stress has been laid in recent
years by Zimmer upon the commercial relations which undoubtedly
linked the island with Gaul, as well as with Britain ; while yet more
recently, attention has been called to a definite statement by an
anonymous writer, evidently of Gaul, such as has not been hitherto
producible: to the effect that in the early years of the fifth century
an exodus of scholars from the Continent took place under the pressure
of barbarian invasion, which affected the area under consideration.
The Huns, says our new authority, began that devastation of the whole
а
CH, XIX.


## p. 502 (#548) ############################################

502
Greek in Ireland
Empire which was carried on by the Vandals, Goths, and Alani; “and
owing to their ravages, all the learned men on this side the sea fled, and
in the countries beyond sea, namely, Ireland, and wherever else they betook
themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous
advance in learning. ” This statement, printed from a Leyden manuscript
as long ago as 1866, was, it seems, only noticed by Zimmer at the end
of his life. The importance of it may be over-estimated, but cannot be
denied. For the first time we have definite testimony that the culture
of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Autun, Lyons--in other words, the best learning
attainable in the West—did actually make its way in some shape into
Ireland. And we have, besides, the reminder which was needed, that the
missionaries were not solely or primarily the channels by which it came.
The words throw light upon Patrick's own challenge to the rhetorici who
knew not the Lord; but, more than all, they supply an explanation of the
undoubted presence in Ireland in the sixth century of a certain type of
learning. The fact that that learning was widely and rapidly diffused
over the country was due in no small degree to this, that it went hand
in hand with evangelisation. Had missionary effort not been there to
prepare the soil, it is impossible to suppose that men would have been
found so ready to study the grammar and rhetoric of Latin, or the
elements of Greek. But when these were presented to them as part of
the apparatus of the new faith, they were assured of a reception, and
subsequently gained citizenship by their own merits.
It will not be possible to call attention to every indication of higher
learning in Ireland; but it will be worth while to devote some space
to the vexed question, how far this learning included a knowledge of
Greek.
The question is not, it must be premised, a simple one. We must
remember, on the one hand, that some of the most striking specimens of
Irish Greek learning were produced on the Continent, and on the other,
that, in and after the lifetime of Theodore and Hadrian (668-690) when
Greek was made accessible to the English, there is a possibility of
English influence upon Ireland. In any case it remains the most
reasonable account of the knowledge of Greek on the part of a Johannes
Eriugena or a Sedulius Scottus, that it was acquired in Ireland and
transferred thence to the Continent.
In the first place, we can hardly doubt that Graeco-Latin glossaries
had made their way to Ireland in very early times. The occurrence of
Greek words in Irish writings of the sixth century is best accounted for
on this hypothesis. We meet with such Greek words in the hymn Altus
prosător of Columba, in that of St Sechnall on Patrick and in more than one
of those in the Bangor Antiphonary. Their raison d'être from the point of
view of the writers of these compositions is to deck the page. They are the
spangles on the cloak, no essential part of the fabric, and they do not by
themselves necessarily imply a knowledge of the structure of the Greek lan-


## p. 503 (#549) ############################################

Traces of Greek learning
503
mean more.
a
guage on the part of those who use them. They may mean little more than
does the use of Greek letters for colophons- the ΦΙΝΙΘ ΔΕΩ ΓΡΑΘΥAC
of a Breton monk in 952, and the like. Yet as a fact they probably do
It seems likely that with the glossaries (taking the word
glossary as the equivalent of a bare vocabulary) there came to Ireland
a more valuable guide to the Greek language, in the shape of a manual
containing conversations and narratives, fables of Aesop, dicta of the
Emperor Hadrian, stories of the Trojan war, compiled as far back as
the year 207. We have it under the formidable modern title of
Hermeneumata Pseudo-Dositheana. It has been transmitted through
“insular” channels, and was in the hands of Sedulius Scottus in the
ninth century, as is thought, before he left Ireland for the Continent.
The suggestion has been made that this and other Greek writings were
brought to Ireland by Byzantine
by Byzantine monks taking refuge from the
Iconoclastic persecution about the middle of the eighth century: but of
such refugees there is small trace. Certain entries in Martyrologies, and
the existence of a “ Greek church” at Trim in Meath, have been adduced
in favour of the hypothesis, but no such evidence as can be called
conclusive. There seems, moreover, no reason why a monk should have
brought the Hermeneumata with him, whereas it is just the book that is
likely to have formed part of the equipment of a fifth century rhetorician
from Gaul.
Instances have been brought forward of Irishmen who were clearly
acquainted with Greek. We will examine them briefly. Pelagius is the
foremost, both in date and in eminence. He came to Italy about the year
400, and it is on record that in 415 he took part in a controversy at
Jerusalem which was carried on in Greek. It will be allowed that, even
granting that Pelagius was Irish and not British by extraction, he had
every opportunity of acquiring Greek after he had left Ireland.
We find, next, that the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia
upon the Psalms was preserved and transcribed in a revised and shortened
Latin form at Bobbio. The actual work of translation and revision has
been ascribed to St Columban. That point is doubtful: but the
commentary was certainly studied by Irish writers on the Continent, and
it is possible that the translation was actually made upon Irish soil. It
had a wide influence. The researches of Dr Robert M. L. Ramsay and
Dr J. Douglas Bruce have demonstrated the use of it by English
glossators of the Psalter (perhaps by Bede himself) down to the
eleventh century.
In a gospel book of the eighth century at Würzburg is a note to
the effect that Mosuin Mac Armin (Abbot of Bangor, who died in 610)
learned by heart a Paschal computus drawn up by a Greek sage-
probably Theophilus of Antioch. " Coupled with the presence of Greek
words in the antiphonary of Bangor, this statement has a certain force,
and it should be noticed that the date of Mosuin excludes the pos-
CH. XIX.


## p. 504 (#550) ############################################

504
Traces of Greek Apocrypha
1
sibility of Theodorian influence from Canterbury and England. What
is not excluded is the possibility that the computus lay before him in
a Latin version.
The Schaffhausen manuscript of Adamnan's Life of Columba, written
at Iona before 714, has in it the Lord's Prayer in Greek, and in Greek
letters. This is an example of importance, though, like those that
follow, it is post-Theodorian in date, and is accordingly liable to a
certain discount.
Sedulius Scottus had in his possession in the ninth century a collection
of apophthegms called Proverbia Graecorum. We have them only in Latin,
preserved in the Collectanea of Sedulius in a manuscript at Cues, quoted
copiously in an English source, the tracts of the famous “Yorker
Anonymus," and alluded to in a letter of one Cathvulf to Charlemagne!
Their Latinity is Celtic, and they may safely be regarded as a Greek
collection rendered into Latin on the soil of Ireland.
To Ireland also we probably owe the excerpts we possess of Macrobius's
important treatise on the differences and conformities of the Greek
and Latin verb, a book for the understanding of which a knowledge of
Greek is indispensable. One of our manuscripts attributes the selection
of the excerpts to a Johannes, thought to be the great Eriugena (Erigena).
The line of transmission has insular connexions. Similarly, quotations
from the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, dealing with the origin of the
alphabet, appear in a Laon manuscript of the school of Eriugena and in
a commentary on Martianus Capella derived from that same school.
That these imply the use of a Greek source, not necessarily of a complete
text of the Peplus, cannot be doubted.
In addition to this evidence, it will be useful, I think, to consider a
class of examples as yet not utilised in the investigation of this question.
They consist of traits in Irish literature (principally Latin) which are
drawn according to all appearance from some of the obscurer apocryphal
writings—writings which are not known to have existed in Latin. This
evidence, again, is not unambiguous. Some of our sources, notably the
Latin Lives of Irish saints, are of late date. Yet that fact is no real
bar to their testimony; for whatever they have absorbed in the way of
reminiscence of old learning was acquired before the exodus of Irishmen
to the Continent. In the interval between that exodus and the com-
pilation of the Lives, Ireland, harried by the Northmen and deserted by
its scholars, had ceased to be a learned country. These Lives, as their
most recent editor, Dr Plummer, has shewn, contain much that is pre-
Christian, and little that is characteristic of the later medieval period.
This is true also of such documents in the Irish language as will be cited.
First among the supposed sources I will place the Acts of Philip.
The Western Church knew absolutely nothing of the sensational Greek
1 The title occurs (crossed out) in an early catalogue of the library of Lincoln
Minster.
a


## p. 505 (#551) ############################################

Instances of use of Apocrypha
505
а
romance which passes under that name. According to the Latins, Philip
,
died a peaceful death like John the Evangelist. In Ireland we find
traces of a different tradition. The Passion in the Leabhar Breac inter-
polates the martyrdom into a version of the Latin Acts. The Irish writing
called the Evernew Tongue' is a kind of apocalypse in which the tongue
of the Apostle, cut out nine times by his persecutors, discourses to
assembled multitudes. In the life of St Boece is an incident strongly
reminiscent of the Greek Acts: a wolf brings a kid to the saint, as a
leopard does to the Apostle. In Muirchu's life of St Patrick (not
later than 699) is another possible reminiscence. A magician is whirled
up into the air and dashed on the ground. It may be a version of the
fate of Simon Magus, but it does rather strikingly resemble passages in
the Eastern Acts of Philip and of Peter and Andrew? .
In the life of St Berach there is a story of a druid killed at the
window of his cell by the arrow of a hunter. Pilate, in an exclusively
Greek legend, meets his end in precisely the same way. The climax of
the Greek book known as the Rest of the words of Baruch is that when
the Jews have resolved to stone the prophet to death, a stone pillar is
made to assume his form, and their attacks are directed against it until
Jeremiah has finished his last directions to his disciples. In the Irish
life of St Brendan, a follower of the saint is attacked : a stone is made
to put on his appearance, and the man escapes. In the Greek Testament
of Abraham a striking incident is that a tree utters words of praise to
God and prediction of Abraham's death. In the life of St Coemgen
.
a tree sings to him. In the same Testament is the story of a calf,
slaughtered at Mamre for the entertainment of the three angels, being
restored to life and running to its mother. This miracle figures in
several of the Lives, e. g. that of St Ailbe.
Evidence that apocryphal literature unknown to the rest of Europe
was read in Ireland is furnished by the Irish Vision of Adamnan, which
quotes a form of the story of the death of Mary only found now in
Syriac. The same Vision makes use of an apocalypse, as yet not
identified, which is also quoted in a (Latin) Reichenau manuscript of
Irish connexion now at Carlsruhe. The Irish tale of the Two Sorrows
of Heaven is another document based on an apocryphon which it is safe
to say belongs to Eastern Christendom. In it Enoch and Elias prophesy
to the souls of the blessed, which (as in certain Greek apocalypses) are
in the form of birds, the terrors of the end of the world.
Of the writings I have mentioned so far, the literature of the
:
1 Eriu, 1905, p. 96.
2 Other traces of reading have been pointed out in Muirchu, which may be
mentioned here: an allusion to Abraham's conversion to a belief in the true God,
possibly derived from Josephus; and an apparent reminiscence of a line of Valerius
Flaccus, as well as clear evidence of a knowledge of Virgil. The occasional use of
Greek words (e. g. antropi) may be merely "glossarial” learning.
a
CH, XIX,


## p. 506 (#552) ############################################

506
Latin writers known in Ireland
English Church of the seventh and eighth centuries betrays no know-
ledge. There are others, now to be noticed, for example, the Book of
Enoch, of which this cannot be said. A non-Irish insular manuscript of
.
the eighth century has preserved a fragment of a Latin version of Enoch.
In Ireland we find, in the Saltair na Rann, a number of names of angels
which are pretty certainly derived from the same book. There, too, are
episodes taken from a Life of Adam, but whether they are to be traced
to a Western or to an Eastern text has not as yet been made clear. In
the “Gelasian” list of apocryphal books the Testament of Job is mentioned,
which probably implies the existence of a Latin version. An unpleasing
trait which occurs in this Testament is adopted in the Life of St Mochua.
It would not be difficult to shew by examples from the Irish Lives of
Saints that the legends of the Infancy of our Lord were familiar in the
country; but these were so widely diffused that the demonstration would
add nothing to our present purpose. Let it be recorded, lastly, that
the Reichenau manuscript cited above shews, in one of the fragmentary
Homilies which it contains, undoubted knowledge of the obscure
Apocalypse of Thomas, and that a fragment of an Irish service-book
in the Vatican Library presents us with a Lection from a Gospel
attributed to James the Less. Both Apocalypse and Gospel are con-
demned in the “Gelasian” decree.
It has seemed worth while to set forth this class of evidence in some
detail. Without detail, indeed, its force is inappreciable. The upshot
of it is that the Eastern legendary literature was domiciled in Ireland to
such an extent that it coloured the imaginations and contributed to the
stock-in-trade of hagiologists and seers; and this familiarity with a
branch of Eastern literature is not negligible as a confirmation of
other indications that in the sixth and seventh centuries a knowledge
of Greek was far from uncommon in Ireland.
Apart from Greek, which after all must be regarded as the fine
flower of their learning, what did the normal culture of Irish scholars
amount to ? The scanty list of their Latin writers between the end of
the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century-between Columba
(+ 597) and Adamnan (+ 704)—includes besides penitentials, lives of
saints, and hymns of no very marked excellence, several writings which
are without rival in their time. The Altus prosător, Columba's great
alphabetic hymn, and the playful poem in short Adonic lines by
Columban, cannot fail to impress the reader, the former in virtue of
its achievement, the latter by the background of learning which it
implies. The Altus has something of the learnedness and intricacy of
Celtic decorative art: Columban's poem, with its allusions to Sappho
and Danaë, is the work of a man who merits the name of scholar. The
1 This is true also of the Anglo-Saxon Homilists. What is practically a version
of the Apocalypse is contained in the Vercelli Book ; and two other Homilies, in a
Blickling and a Hatton MS. respectively, make copious use of it.
a


## p. 507 (#553) ############################################

Adamnan
507
a
second half of the seventh century gives us a treatise—that known as
Augustine De mirabilibus Scripturae—which, alike for its Latinity and
for the wide reading of its author, deserves respect. “ Augustine" has
some acquaintance with ancient history, gathered from such sources as
the Eusebian Chronicle and from Josephus; he is a student of Jerome,
and seems to have read books on medicine and natural history. His
allusions to Ireland, fewer in number than we could have wished, add a
pleasant flavour to his book. Aileran the Wise, not far from this author
in date, has left a tract on the interpretation of the names of our Lord's
ancestors according to the flesh, in which there is not much sound philo-
logy.
At the end of the same century we have Adamnan. His two un-
doubted works, the account of Arculf's pilgrimage to Palestine, and the
Life of Columba, are intrinsically two of the most precious books of their
time. The value of the tract on the Holy Places to the archaeologist
and topographer needs no exposition. It is worth much, also, as
exemplifying the interest in all sorts of knowledge which characterised
the Irish scholars of the day. The Life of Columba--less a biography
than a collection of anecdotes-preserves a picture of that saint and
seer which will never lose its charm. Evidence of Adamnan's gram-
matical studies, and of his knowledge of Greek (or at least of Greek
words), abounds in this book ; but there is a third work, a set of notes on
a
the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil, which, if it could be proved to be
his, would be plain evidence of his distinction as student and as teacher.
It is in the form of excerpts from three earlier commentaries, those of
Philargyrius, Titius Gallus, and Gaudentius, which seem to have been
written down by a class at the dictation of Adananus. Whether or not
this Adananus was the Abbot of Hy, this work is an undoubted product
of Irish scholarship. It witnesses to these facts: that the scientific
study of “grammar," as the Romans understood it, was carried on by
the Irish at a time when it was dead in continental Europe: and that
complete texts of ancient commentaries on Virgil had made their way
into the hands of an Irishman.
Exaggerated language has no doubt been used about the learning of
the Irish, and about their share in the preservation of classical literature.
When allowance has been made for this, it remains incontestable that,
during the latter part of the seventh century, it was in Ireland that the
thirst for knowledge was keenest, and the work of teaching was most
actively carried on. There the Latin language (and in a less degree
the Greek) was studied from the scholar's point of view. To the Irish,
we must remember, Latin was no inheritance: they had not heard it
commonly spoken among them: their knowledge of it was book-know-
ledge. They had to treat it very much as we do now-more nearly,
perhaps, as it was treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when it was the recognised medium of communication for scholars of
CH. XIX.


## p. 508 (#554) ############################################

508
British writers
99
8
all countries. We need not, however, insist that the great body of
the classical Latin literature which we now possess was preserved to us
by the exertions either of the Irish or of the English, to whom the
lamp of learning passed next in order.
No doubt, whatever the Irish
came across in the way of ancient literature they welcomed and treasured,
but it is not to be supposed that they ever acquired in their native land
a very large mass of such writings. It was when, impelled in the
first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at
home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they
became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they
had already learned to value. It is reserved for the palaeographers of the
next few decades to shew how many of our Latin classics betray the
existence of an “insular” stage in the line of their transmission. An
important class of scribal errors is due to the fact that a copyist of
the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance was using an archetype in
Scriptura Scottica,” in the insular script, in which the peculiar forms,
say, of r and s misled him. Sometimes these errors affect the whole body
of manuscripts of a given author, and in these cases it is obvious that
we owe the preservation of the text to an insular scribe. A leading
instance, as Traube has shewn, is furnished by the History of Ammianus
Marcellinus.
We shall have occasion to revert to the work of the Irish on the
Continent. The time has now come for us to pass from Ireland to
Great Britain. It will be worth while to inquire what, apart from
vague modern panegyric, is to be known of the state of learning in the
British Church before the coming of Theodore.
The small tract of the British bishop Fastidius is the only monument
assignable to the fifth century. In the sixth we have the writings
ascribed to Gildas, the Epistle, undoubtedly his, the Lorica, and the
penitential Canons. We have, too, the Hisperica Famina.
, Little, if
anything else, has been credited to Britons of this period. For any
further information about the leading lights of the British Church we
have to depend upon traditions committed to writing at a far later
time, and in particular upon the lives of the saints, which are of
exactly similar complexion with those of the Irish; embodying a
modicum of fact wrapped in a sparkling tissue of wonders.
Fastidius may
be dismissed with a word : he has no trait that can be
identified as British. Gildas, as his Epistle attests, was a man of educa-
tion. The writers whom we may credit him with having known are,
indeed, not recondite, but they are of good quality: Virgil, Persius,
Claudius (? Claudian), Jerome, Orosius, Rufinus. Such books as these,
then, were accessible in Britain ; was there more than this? The Epistle
affords no evidence of the study of languages other than Latin ; Greek
and Hebrew words occur in the Lorica, but-whether this be of Gildas's
composing or no—they need imply no more than the use of a glossary.


## p. 509 (#555) ############################################

Early British learning
509
The same is true of the Hisperica Famina. Whoever were the authors
of that strange and attractive farrago, glossarial learning was to them
synonymous with culture. Literary success meant the forging of phrases
that should only just not defy interpretation. When, however, we find
in a Bodleian manuscript (Auct. F. 4. 32), written in Wales about 887,
passages from the Bible in Greek (and Latin) it is possible that we may
be in the presence of a relic of British learning independent of Theodore's
influence. The volume comes to us from Glastonbury, one of the few
places where Celtic and English learning had a chance of blending; and,
as Bradshaw says, “it passed out of British into Saxon hands in the
tenth century, during St Dunstan's lifetime, when the old animosity had
given way to a much more friendly feeling between the races. ” When
we remember how sharp the animosity had been, we shall be more ready
to acknowledge the probability that the pedigree of this solitary evidence
of the study of Greek in Britain may be wholly independent of the school
of Canterbury
The truth of the matter is probably this, that in the period with
which we are concerned there was learning in Britain, and learning of
the same standard that then existed in Ireland ; but that it was confined
to a smaller area, that its products were fewer and that they have
perished more completely. There must surely be some foundation for
the stress laid by the Irish hagiographers upon the intercourse between
the saints of Ireland and of Britain. Over and over again we find that
the former go for instruction to the latter: they sit at the feet of David,
Cadoc, Gildas. Gildas visits Ireland, as he visits Brittany ; in the life
of St Brendan it is said that he, Gildas, had a missal written in Greek
letters, which Brendan, ignorant of the characters, was miraculously
enabled to read at sight. It is, if I mistake not, the one mention of
Greek in these late lives,-a fact which adds something, be it but a
feather-weight, to the credit of the tale, apart from the miracle. In the
Breton and Welsh lives we hear of the school of St Iltut (Illtyd) at
Llantwit Major, and, through the mist of words with which modern writers
have enwrapped the “first of British Universities,” we discern something
comparable to the monastic schools of Clonard and the Irish Bangor.
For Brittany at least Llantwit was a mother of teachers. From her
went forth Paul Aurelian (St Pol-de-Léon), Samson, Leonorius; and
they went qualified to Christianise the Bretons, if not to educate them.
Of their studies at Llantwit no first-hand record survives; but a few
ancient Welsh books, a famous Juvencus at Cambridge, and a Martianus
Capella, probably written at St David's and now among Archbishop
Parker's manuscripts at Corpus Christi, may safely be accepted (though
not earlier than the ninth century) as representing the kind of culture
attainable in such a school. And the beautiful story of St Cadoc's
intercession for the soul of Virgil, uncertain as is the date of it, gives a
glimpse of the attitude of some Britons towards the great literature of
CH. XIX.


## p. 510 (#556) ############################################

510
Theodore of Tarsus; Hadrian
Rome that at least harmonises well with evidence of a better kind
emanating from Ireland,
Thus our knowledge of early British culture is scanty. It rests
largely upon conjecture and inference, It is not so with the first
beginnings of learning among the English. Whereas no English scholar
or writer can be named before 668, the next half century produces two
who would be remarkable in any age--Aldhelm and Bede. Nor is there
any room for doubt that these men owe their learning to Theodore and
Hadrian. For, even if there be a Celtic strain in Aldhelm's education,
as there surely is in his style, we must remember in the first place that
the very fact of an Englishman's taking to literary pursuits is a novelty;
and in the second place that we have this Englishman's own testimony
(in his letter to Eahfrid) to the enormous influence of Theodore and
Hadrian in the work of education: an influence not confined to England,
for it was potent enough to attract the scholars of Ireland. In Bede no
admixture of Celtic influence is traceable: he is simply the supreme
product of the normal teaching of his day. What, then, did Theodore
and Hadrian bring with them to this country? They brought the
permanent equipment of learning in the shape of books. They also
brought the knowledge and enthusiasm which secured that the books
should be used to profit. In these two men the culture of East
and West was concentrated. Theodore of Tarsus had studied in the
schools of Athens, and very little of his life had been spent in Italy.
Hadrian was of African extraction and abbot of a monastery near Naples:
he had absorbed all that Italy could furnish, and was possessed of Greek
as well. Through him we are linked with the ancients. The Institutions
of Cassiodorus are responsible for the existence of a man with such
qualifications. Unproductive of written monuments as Italy was at
this time, its monks had not, thanks to Cassiodorus, lost all touch with
the education of an earlier day. It is to Hadrian that we must attribute
the greatest share of achievement in the educational work which now
began in England. Less could be done by Theodore, occupied as he
was with administration and organisation, and often absent on journeys
to distant parts of the island.
With them an Englishman must be joined in our grateful remem-
brance—the man who spent his life and substance in the labour of
bringing to us the actual palpable treasures of art and learning-
Biscop, surnamed Benedict, Abbot of Wearmouth. It was he who
accompanied Theodore and Hadrian to England; he was himself
returning from his third journey to the tombs of the Apostles. On
every subsequent expedition (and he made four more) he brought back
in quantities books of every kind", pictures, and vestments, to say
nothing of the masons and the musicians whom on several occasions
1 The only book of a secular kind specified-indeed, the only one specified at all
except a Bible-was a book on cosmography of admirable workmanship which
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Benedict Biscop; Bede
511
a
he induced to come and work upon his buildings and to teach his
monks. Is it not a fair inference from the facts that the influence
of Theodore and Hadrian went for something here? Whether or no,
Biscop's work was just what was wanted to supplement theirs and to
ensure its continuance after their removal,
We do not find these intellectual fathers of the English race figuring
as writers. This is a slight matter. Their effectiveness as teachers and
the importance of their literary equipment are attested by the works of
the first generation of English scholars. Both Aldhelm and Bede are
able to use books on grammar and prosody in large numbers: they know
the standard poets, both heathen and Christian, and have access, it seems,
even to contemporary Spanish writers. The great Latin fathers, and
such other books as were valued for their bearing on the Scriptures,
doubtless formed the bulk of the libraries which now began to be formed
at Canterbury, York, Wearmouth, and perhaps Malmesbury. To put
it shortly, within the space of a few years England was placed on a level
with the Continent (and with Ireland) in respect of the apparatus of
learning. There was this great difference between them, that on the
Continent the tools were lying neglected, in England they were in
active use.
It is not, perhaps, necessary to describe in any detail the literary
monuments of the first
age
of our literature: the
age
of which Aldhelm
marks the youth and Bede the prime. The subject is well-worn : little
that is new can be offered in a general survey. The central fact is that
at the beginning of the eighth century England was the home of the
one great writer of the time, and was a source of light to the whole of
the West. In Bede's Ecclesiastical History we have a book of real
literary excellence, as well as an invaluable historical source. In his
other works, some of which have outlived their period of greatest
usefulness, especially his commentaries, he provided sources of infor-
mation which were at once welcomed as superior to anything then
available, and which retained their popularity until the thirteenth
century at least? .
The lifetime of Bede tides over the first third of the eighth century.
The last third sees the beginning of the Carolingian Renaissance. The
middle third, compared with its neighbours, is a barren time so far as
regards the production of writings of abiding value.
Indeed, when one has named Boniface, with the small group of
English writers who were his contemporaries, and Virgilius of Salzburg,
almost all is said. Boniface and his circle bear witness, in their letters
Ceolfrid gave to King Aldfrid in exchange for some lands. (Bede, Vitae Abbatum, 15. )
This may possibly have been the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes,
from which we undoubtedly find an excerpt in Latin in a manuscript given by King
Aethelstan to the see of St Cuthbert (CCCC. 183).
1 See also Vol. 11. p. 574.
CH. XIX.


## p. 512 (#558) ############################################

512
Wanaerings of Manuscripts
99
and in their poems, to the sound learning imparted in the great English
schools. What they wrote has some flavour of the elaboration charac-
teristic of Aldhelm as distinguished from Bede. The acrostic and the
riddle are in favour: Boniface even copies, in his verses to Duddus,
the “figured” poem of Publilius Optatianus, in which certain letters
picked out of the lines form a pattern or picture, and also compose
distinct lines or sentences. It is more to the purpose however to draw
attention to the frequent requests for books which Boniface prefers to
his friends in England, the fruit of which we may perhaps see now in
some of the small but precious group of manuscripts still preserved at
Fulda. Among the treasures of the Würzburg library too are books
with English connexions: in one is mention of a Worcester abbess? .
The presence of others may be due to the Irish missionary and martyr
Kilian († 689), among them the unique copy of the works of the heretic
Priscillian, or, as Dom Morin now inclines to think, of his companion
Instantius. It is thought, I may add, that the Graeco-Latin Codex
Laudianus of the Acts has made the journey between Britain and the
Continent twice. First brought to England by Theodore and Hadrian,
and there used by Bede, it travelled to Germany with some members
of the Bonifacian circle, and found a home there till the seventeenth
century, when a second Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, was instru-
mental in bringing it once again to this country along with many other
spoils of German libraries.
It will eventually be possible, thanks to the work of the great palaeo-
graphers of our own time, to write a history of the transmission of ancient
literature, and to trace its influence upon individual authors of the early
Middle Ages by the help of our rapidly growing knowledge of the styles
of writing peculiar to the great centres of learning, monastic and other,
and by the indications, which single manuscripts are gradually being
induced to yield, of their own parentage and wanderings. But the time
for attempting this is not yet: many monographs have to be written
and multitudinous details correlated, and the reader of a survey such
as this must be content to be told that the cloud which hangs over the
literary life of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries is in process of
being thinned : it is beyond hope that it can be wholly dispersed.
One other name demands notice before we close our review of pre-
Carolingian literature. Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, has made a con-
siderable figure in many a text-book in the capacity of an enlightened
cosmographer; or of an early martyr of science, persecuted and silenced
by clerical obscurantists because of his belief in the Antipodes. We
have not a line of his writing: our only life of him makes no allusion
to his secular learning : all that we know of this side of him is confined
to a couple of lines in a letter of Pope Zacharias to St Boniface, and to
1 The MS. is of Jerome on Ecclesiastes (cent. vi): the owner was Abbess Cuth-
suuitha (690-700).
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## p. 513 (#559) ############################################

Virgilius of Salzburg
513
the epithets Geometer and Solivagus' which were applied to him, the
former by the Annals of the Four Masters when recording his death,
the other by an authority as yet untraced. Pope Zacharias, answering
a complaint of Boniface, says, “ with regard to the perverse and wicked
doctrine which he has spoken, against God and his own soul; if it be
made clear that he admits it,—that there is another world and other
men, or sun and moon, beneath the earth (sub terra)—you must hold
a council, deprive him of priestly rank, and expel him from the Church. "
This brief and rough characterisation has been made to bear the interpre-
tation that Virgilius had published a philosophical treatise setting forth
the view that there are Antipodes, possibly in dependence upon Martianus
Capella's teaching. Or, it is put more modestly that he had given
expression to this view in his lectures. It will be seen that the words
of Zacharias contain nothing to support (and nothing to bar) this
explanation. Another has been advanced which has never become
fashionable, but which, I think, deserves to be weighed. It is that
Virgilius had in his mind not Antipodes, but dwellers below the surface
of the earth. In the twelfth century, as William of Newburgh tells us, a
green boy and girl appeared at Woolpit in Suffolk, who were members
of an underground race. They called their world the land of St Martin
(perhaps Merlin was the real name) and told how it was lighted—not, it
is true, by another sun and moon, and how it was a Christian land and
had churches. Any one who has read much of Scandinavian or Celtic
fairy-lore will realise that the beliefs he finds there about the under-
ground people are just such as could be described by Pope Zacharias's
phrase. Were it not for the epithet Geometer, which does seem to
imply an interest in science, I should be strongly inclined to give the
preference to this second explanation of Virgilius's erroneous doctrine.
1 It seems to have been assumed that the word is connected with Sol: but does it
in fact mean more than “the lone wanderer"?
C. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. XIX.
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## p. 514 (#560) ############################################

514
CHAPTER XX.
LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL POPE SYLVESTER II.
Only a few years before the death of Bede, Alcuin was born, and in
Alcuin we have the principal link between the vigorous learning of these
islands and that, hardly yet born, of Central Europe. The main facts of
the connexion are familiar. Alcuin, educated in the traditions of York,
left England at about the age of fifty, on a mission to Rome to receive
the archiepiscopal pall for Eanbald of York, and in 781 met Charlemagne
at Parma and was invited by him to come to his court as soon as his
errand should be accomplished. With the exception of one interval
spent in England, the rest of Alcuin's life was passed on the Continent.
It ended in 804.
Meanwhile England had begun to be the prey of Danish invasion.
Exactly when the library of York, which Alcuin describes so glowingly
in an often-quoted passage of his poem on the Saints of the Church of
York, was destroyed, we do not know; but that this was a time of de-
struction, that a whole literature in the English vernacular was wiped
out, and that the stores of ancient learning, accumulated in the North by
Benedict Biscop and in the South by Theodore and Hadrian, were
scattered, is certain. Only waifs and strays remain to attest the height
which art and learning had attained here, and the value of the treasures
that had been imported. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Ruthwell
Cross on the one hand, and the Codex Amiatinus (happily retrieved by
its parent country before the catastrophe) on the other, are outstanding
examples.
Between the departure of Alcuin for the Emperor's court and the
revival of English letters under Alfred, England, disunited and ravaged,
makes no contribution to the cause of learning.
Interest is centred upon that same court of Charlemagne. Here for
a time lived Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa, both representatives of
Italy, where learning, if inert, was not dead. Incomparably the more
important figure of the two is that of Paul, chiefly in view of two pieces
of work, his abridgment of the Glossary of Pompeius Festus, and his
History of the Lombards. Both are precious, not for style, but for the


## p. 515 (#561) ############################################

Paul the Deacon
515
а
hard facts which they preserve. About half of the glossary of Festus,
itself an abridgment of the work of Verrius Flaccus, has survived only in
a sadly damaged Naples manuscript: without it, and what Paul has
rescued of the remainder, our knowledge of archaic Latin would be far
fuller of gaps than it is. His epitome was a mine, too, for later writers,
who drew from it strange forms to adorn their pages. In virtue of his
other great work, Paul has earned the name of the Father of Italian
history. Neither of these books was written at the instance of the
Emperor, who employed Paul in educational work and in the compilation
of a set of Homilies for use in church.
Paul was something of a verse-writer, and some fables of his are by
-
no means without merit; but both he and Peter were chiefly valued by
their patron as teachers of grammar. We have writings of both of them
on this subject, a subject touched by almost every one of the great
scholars of the period we have been and shall be reviewing; Aldhelm,
Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, not to mention a crowd of minor names, Irish
and Continental. Especially in the Carolingian age, when serious efforts
were afoot to raise the standard of education, were grammatical manuals
of frequent occurrence. Their compilers used the works of recent pre-
decessors and of more ancient writers in varying degrees, commonly
contributing little of their own, save perhaps the order and arrangement
of the material". No detailed review of these writers will be atteinpted
in this chapter ; but they deserve mention, and honourable mention,
since they ministered to the first needs of a fresh and very numerous
generation of scholars.
In leaving Paul the Deacon, it is worth while to remark that he
expressly disclaims knowledge of Greek (and Hebrew), and to note that
Greek does not figure very conspicuously in the works of most of the
important scholars in Charlemagne's own circle, though we can see that
it was known to more than one of them. There
may
have been some
few Greek books accessible to them: between 758 and 763 Pope Paul I
had sent some to Pepin; "the grammar of Aristotle, of Dionysius the
Areopagite; a geometry, an orthography ” says the Pope, obscurely
enough. But we do not fall on the track of these again.
The knowledge that Charlemagne revived education and learning in
his empire is common property. I shall not dwell upon his methods,
but rather upon the individual men whom he gathered about him to do
the work, and upon the results they achieved. Three have already been
mentioned, and I do not think it is insular prejudice which inclines me
to regard Alcuin as the central figure.
He was not a great writer: interesting as are his letters and his
poems, none of them can be rated high as literature. But as an organizer
and administrator, and as a personally attractive man, he stands in the
1 Smaragdus of St Mihiel (c. 820) takes illustrations from the vernacular, an
interesting point.
CH, XX.
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## p. 516 (#562) ############################################

516
Alcuin
first rank. Socially we can see that he must have been very acceptable ;
in the common phrase of to-day, he had a genius for friendship. In
promoting the revival of education he had this advantage over his
helpers, that alone among them he was possessed of the traditions and
methods of a long-established and thriving school.
The mass of writing for which he is responsible is very large. There
are Biblical commentaries, not more distinguished for originality than
those of Bede: treatises upon the Adoptionist heresy which sprang up in
his time in Spain, and upon the Trinity, accounted his best theological
work. There is a liturgical corpus, of great importance in the history
of worship, of which a Homiliary, a Lectionary, and a Sacramentary are
the chief members. Of a revision of the text of the Latin Bible due to
him there is a constant tradition which we need not doubt, though we
possess no record of the imperial order under which it is said to have
been undertaken, and there are few allusions to it in Alcuin's own
writings. Moreover, the task of distinguishing the Alcuinian text from
other current types is beset with difficulties. There is also a series of
educational manuals: we have those on Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic,
and there seem to have been others. They were not popular for long,
and were not intrinsically very valuable. Still, they were pioneer work,
and as such they doubtless had an influence not to be despised.
As to his own range of reading, apart from the theology which
ranked as standard in his time, something must be said. The mass of
verse which we have from him shews his knowledge of such authors as
Virgil—some study of whom may be assumed in the case of everyone
with whom we shall be concerned-Statius, Lucan, and of the Christian
poets Juvencus, Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius and others who, like Virgil,
were read by all who read at all. His list of the writers who were to be
found in the library at York is instructive though incomplete (it omits,
for example, Isidore); but it contains few names which ceased to be
familiar in later centuries. Of theologians, Victorinus and Lactantius, ,
of poets, Alcimus Avitus, of grammarians Probus, Focas, Euticius
Pompeius, Cominianus, are those who became comparative rarities in
and after the twelfth century. The most learned of Alcuin's letters are
those that relate to astronomy, in which the Emperor was interested.
In one of them he asks for a copy of Pliny's Natural History to help
him to answer certain queries, and elsewhere in his correspondence he
quotes Vitruvius and alludes to Dares Phrygius as if he knew the Trojan
History current under that name. He is also credited with the intro-
duction of a few texts to the Continent—the spurious correspondences of
Alexander the Great with Dindimus, king of the Brachmani, and of
St Paul with Seneca. If not very important, both of these became
excessively popular: more so than the Categoriae of Augustine, the
transmission of which is also due to Alcuin.
His knowledge of Greek is a matter of controversy, but at least
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## p. 517 (#563) ############################################

The Carolingian Minuscule
517
he can quote the Psalter and the Epistles to elucidate a point of
grammar.
A A remark may be permitted here which is applicable to most of the
individual cases we shall meet. Those who had learnt the grammar
and
machinery of the Greek language were not few in number (and I see no
reason for excluding Alcuin's name from the list), but when they had
learnt it and were in a position to use Greek books, there were no Greek
books for them to use. Literally, as we shall see, hardly any beyond
a few copies of parts of the Bible—Psalter, Gospels, Epistles. In other
words, there was very little matter which they did not already possess in
a form easier to be used and considered equally authoritative. Hence
the study was unpopular; it involved great labour, and had little to
offer save to those who coveted abstruse learning and took pleasure in
the process of acquiring it,
of acquiring it. For all that, the tradition of the supreme
excellence of Greek learning was slow to die; and in every generation
some individuals were attracted by it, though the difficulties they had
to encounter increased as time went on.
Alcuin's abbey of St Martin at Tours played a great part in the
diffusion of that form of writing, the Carolingian minuscule, which was
the vehicle of transmission of the main bulk of the ancient literature.
Obscured for a time-ousted, indeed-by the Gothic scripts of the later
Middle Ages, it emerged again at the revival of learning, took perhaps
a more refined shape at the hands of the humanists, and became the
parent of the common “Roman " type in which these lines will be read.
That the introduction of this clear and beautiful script is one of the
most remarkable and beneficial of the reforms of Charlemagne's age,
whoever has had to do with Merovingian, Beneventan, or Visigothic
hands will readily allow. It would be pleasant if we could point to it
as an enduring trace of the influence of Alcuin, as has been commonly
done. The trend of expert opinion, however, is against this attribution.
The traditions of writing in which Alcuin was brought up were insular,
and so good an authority as Traube pronounces that the great Anglo-
Saxon scholar had no share in forming the hand of the scriptorium of
Tours.
The pupils of Alcuin did not fail to follow his methods and to pro-
pagate sound learning to the best of their ability. We shall revert to
them and their work. It is now time to leave the great teacher and to
notice a few other leading members of the court circle.