It was a desolate scene; and Clonmacnoise looked desolate, too, with its gaunt grey towers, and huddle of little buildings, and cluttered graveyard. It seemed incredible that this obscure corner of the world was once a centre of learning toward which scholars turned their faces from the far ends of Europe, to which Charlemagne sent gifts, and within whose walls princes and nobles were reared in wisdom and piety. Yet such it was—the nearest to being a national university among all the abbeys, for it was not identified with any class or province, but chose its abbots from all Ireland, and welcomed its students from all the world.
The abbey was founded by St. Kieran in 548. St. Kieran belonged to what is known as the Second Order of Irish Saints, founders of monasteries and of great co-operative communities, as distinguished from the First Order—St. Patrick and his immediate successors—who were bishops and missionaries and founders of churches, and the Third Order, who were hermits, dwelling in desert places, often in small stone cells, just as St. Molua did in his little cell near Killaloe. St. Kieran had already started an abbey on an island in Lough Ree, but grew dissatisfied with it, for some reason, and he and eight companions got on board a boat and floated down the river, rejecting this place and that as not suited to their purpose, and finally reaching this sloping meadow, where their leader bade them stop.
"Let us remain here," he said, "for many souls will ascend to heaven from this spot."
So the abbey was started, and, though Kieran himself died in the following year, it grew rapidly in importance. Let me try to picture the place as it was then. The students lived in small huts crowded about the precincts; the classes were held in the open air; only for purposes of worship were permanent buildings built. Here, as at Glendalough, there was not one large church, but seven small ones; and the students seem to have attended divine service in the groups in which they studied. It was a self-supporting community, tilling its own lands, spinning its own wool, weaving its own cloth, and building its own churches; and its life, while not austere, was of the simplest.
The students, at times, numbered as many as three thousand. The teaching was free, but from every student a certain amount of service was required in the interest of the community. The principal study, of course, was that of religion, but from the very first the heathen classics and the Irish language, arithmetic, rhetoric, astronomy and natural science were taught side by side with theology.
The life at Clonmacnoise was typical of that at all the other monastic schools with which Ireland was then so thickly dotted; and it is the more interesting because the whole continent of Europe, at that time, was groping through the very darkest period of the Middle Ages. Culture there was at its lowest ebb—knowledge of Greek, for instance, had so nearly vanished that any one who knew Greek was assumed at once to have come from Ireland, where it was taught in all the schools. Those schools sent forth swarms of missionaries, "the most fearless spiritual knights the world has known," to spread the light over Europe; they established centres at Cambrai, at Rheims, at Soissons, at Laon, at Liége; they founded the great monastery at Ratisbon; they built others at Wurzburg, at Nuremberg, at Constanz, at Vienna—and then came the Vikings, and put an end to Irish learning. For the Vikings were Pagans, and the shrines of the churches, the treasuries of the monasteries and schools, were the first objects of onslaught.
For two centuries, the Danes made of Ireland "spoil-land and sword-land and conquered land, ravaged her chieftaincies and her privileged churches and her sanctuaries, and rent her shrines and her reliquaries and her books, and demolished her beautiful ornamented temples—in a word, though there were an hundred sharp and ready tongues in each head, and an hundred loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could never enumerate all the Gael suffered, both men and women, laity and clergy, noble and ignoble, from these wrathful, valiant, purely-pagan people." The Danes aimed to destroy all learning, which they hated and distrusted, and they very nearly succeeded.
I have already told how, under Brian Boru, the Irish drew together, and finally managed to defeat the Danes at Clontarf; and for a century and a half after that, ancient Erin seemed rising from her ashes. The books destroyed by the Danes were re-written, churches and monasteries rebuilt, schools re-opened—and then came Strongbow at the head of his Normans, and that dream was ended. There was civilisation in Ireland after that, but it was a civilisation dominated by England; there was education, but not for the native Irish; there were great monasteries, but they were built by French or Norman monks—by Franciscans or Cistercians or Augustinians; and finally even these were swept away with the coming of the Established Church.