U ċríoċ annso, Buiḋeacas le Dia.
FOOTNOTES
[1] For further particulars of the life of Adamnán, see Dr. Reeves’s introduction to his Adamnán’s Life of St. Columba, Dublin, 1857 (Irish Archæological Society); Dr. Healy’s Ireland’s Ancient Schools and Scholars; Canon John O’Hanlon’s Lives of the Irish Saints, vol. i.
[2] Mr. Alfred Nutt has suggested that the above passage appears to claim for the Irish scholars and clerics a monopoly of the educational and missionary work of the age to the exclusion of the eminent Anglo-Saxons who were labouring with success and distinction in the same field. I had no intention to disparage either the original genius nor the learning of Bede and Aldhelm, Caedmon and Cynewulf, Winifred and Alcuin, nor their missionary and scholastic work, both at home and in the Frankish Empire; only to point out that the position acquired by the Irish scholars and clerics enabled them speedily to disseminate through Western Europe the works of their compatriots. By recalling the names of a few of the most eminent Irishmen who enjoyed a Continental fame during the Middle Ages, we may perceive how wide was the area, and how long the duration, of their influence.
Clement was the chief of a group of Irish scholars who took a leading part in the educational reforms promoted by Charlemagne. Alcuin, Clement’s great English rival at the Frankish Court, had been educated at Clonmacnois. Joannes Scotus Erigena, in the reign of Charles the Bald, founded the scholastic philosophy, and by his translation of the pseudo-Areopagite, and his studies of the Neo-Platonists, bridged over the chasm between ancient and modern thought. Dungal, in the first half of the ninth century, was the first astronomer of his age; at the mandate of Lothair, King of Lombardy, he founded a school which afterwards developed into the University of Pavia, with branches in several other cities, and laboured with success at the task of civilising the Lombards. Add to these Dicuil, a geographer of the same date, the most accurate topographer of the early Middle Ages; Firghil, or Virgilius, Archbishop of Salzburg, who taught the rotundity of the earth and the existence of antipodes; Sedulius, the ninth-century grammarian; St. Donatus, Bishop of Fiesole (fl. c. 840), traveller, topographer, and Scripture commentator; Marianus Scotus, one of the leading chroniclers of the eleventh century; and many others, who laboured with distinction in France, Italy, Germany, England, and Flanders, down to the thirteenth century, when Frederick II., Emperor, summoned Petrus Hibernicus to the University of Naples, where he counted among his theological pupils no less a personage than Thomas Aquinas.
[3] There was also a Tír Enda, between L. Foyle and L. Swilly.
[4] Tigernach gives the date as 624, which Dr. Reeves is inclined to accept, op. cit. Introduction, xl-xli. Lanigan is in favour of 627, which agrees with the reputed age of Adamnán, 77, at the time of his death. Possibly the latter date is correct, the difference being explicable by the different system of chronology adopted by Tigernach.
[5] Lives of the Irish Saints, vi. 708; and see Ibid., ix. 505.