[50] This expression requires some explanation, being an apparent contradiction of what has been said before as to the Roman origin of the Irish schools. It must be borne in mind that the error in the Irish manner of observing Easter was not that of the Eastern Quarto Decimans, as they are called, who kept it on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, on whatever day of the week that might fall. This error was corrected at the Council of Nice, when it was commanded that the feast should always be celebrated on the Sunday after the fourteenth day of the moon; and the decree of the council was obeyed in Britain and Ireland as in Rome. But difficulties afterwards arose in the method of calculating Easter; the Cycles, or periods of years used for that purpose, were after a time found to be incorrect, and the philosophers of Alexandria were applied to, to calculate the day and notify it each year to the Pope, who should publish it to the rest of the Church. Even this plan failed to secure uniformity, and in the fifth century Rome and Alexandria were to be found computing the time of Easter after different cycles, Rome using one of eighty-four years, and Alexandria one of nineteen, which caused the feast to be celebrated on different days. The old Roman cycle was that which had been introduced into Ireland, and the Irish clergy continued to use it after it had been reformed in the time of Pope Hilarion, by whose command the Alexandrian cycle was established as more correct, and the calendar was corrected by Victorinus of Aquitaine. Such was the disturbed date of the world at this time, however, that the British and Irish churches heard nothing of this change, and stuck to their old Roman cycle even after the arrival of St. Gregory’s missionaries. The notion of the Irish having adopted the Eastern computation of the Quarto Decimans is very clearly disproved by reference to Bede, lib. iii. ch. 4. They at last adopted the Roman calendar at the Synod of Lene, held in 630, wherein it was agreed that “they should receive what was brought to them from the fountain of their baptism and of their wisdom, even the successors of the Apostles of Christ.”
[51] By astrology and the calculation of horoscopes must not be here understood the practice of judicial astrology, which was regarded by all the Anglo-Saxon prelates as a forbidden art; but, as Lingard supposes, studies connected with the Zodiac, and the art of dialling, here called horoscopii computatio; an art much in vogue among early scholars, and which formed one of the scientific recreations of Boethius.
[52] Surtees, History of Durham.
[53] Bede, lib. iv. c, 18.
[54] Alc. Opera i. p. 282.
[55] Nec linguam Hebraicam ignoravit. (Breviary Lessons.)
[56] Among the authors quoted by Bede are Virgil, Horace, Terence, Ovid, Lucan, Lucretius, Prudentius, Juvencus, Macer, Varro, Cornelius, Severus, Fortunatus, Sedulius, and Pacuvius, besides the Latin Fathers. He also makes frequent references to Homer, which was not at that time translated into Latin, and which he can, therefore, only have known in its original Greek.
[57] See De Nat. Rerum, Op. tom. ii. p. 37.
[58] Iren. de Hær. l. iii. 4.
[59] Three, however, were preserved which expressed sounds not conveyed by the Roman alphabet, corresponding to w, th, and dh.