[199] The Story of Egil Skallagrimson, trans. by W. C. Green (London, 1893).
[200] These poems are in the Saga, and will be found translated in Mr. Green’s edition. They are also edited with prose translations in C.P.B., vol. i. pp. 266-280. With Egil one may compare the still more truculent, but very different Grettir, hero of the Grettis Saga. The Story of Grettir the Strong, trans. by Magnusson and Morris (2nd ed., London, 1869).
[201] Bede, Hist. Ecc. i. 13. Moreover, the chief partisan of Pelagius (a Briton) was Coelestinus, an Irishman whose restless activity falls in the thirty years preceding the mission of Palladius.
[202] As for the Irish Church in Ireland, there were many differences in usage between it and the Church of Rome. In the matters of Easter and the tonsure the southern Irish were won over to the Roman customs before the middle of the seventh century, and after that the Roman Easter made its way to acceptance through the island. Yet still the Irish appear to have used their own Liturgy, and to have shown little repugnance to the marriage of priests. The organization of the churches remained monastic rather than diocesan or episcopal, in spite of the fact that “bishops,” apparently with parochial functions, existed in great numbers. Hereditary customs governed the succession of the great abbots, as at Armagh, until the time of St. Malachy, a contemporary of St. Bernard. See St. Bernard’s Life of Malachy, chap. x.; Migne 182, col. 1086, cited by Killen, o.c. vol. i. p. 173. The exertions of Gregory VII. and Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, did much to bring the Irish Church into obedience to Rome. Various Irish synods in the twelfth century completed a proper diocesan system; and in 1155 a bull of Adrian IV. delivered the island over to Henry II. Plantagenet. Cf. Killen, Eccl. Hist. of Ireland, vol. i. pp. 162-222.
[203] The works of St. Columbanus or Columban, usually called of Luxeuil, are printed in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, 80, col. 209-296. The chief source of knowledge of his life is the Vita by Jonas his disciple: Migne, Pat. Lat. 87, col. 1009-1046. It has been translated by D. C. Munro, in vol. ii. No. 7 (series of 1895) of Translations, etc., published by University of Pennsylvania (Phila. 1897). See also Montalembert, Monks of the West, book vii. (vol. ii. of English translation).
[204] The article of H. Zimmer, “Über die Bedeutung des irischen Elements für die mittelalterliche Cultur,” Preussische Jahrbücher, Bd. 59, 1887, presents an interesting summary of the Irish influence. His views, and still more those of Ozanam in Civilisation chrétienne chez les Francs, chap, v., should be controlled by the detailed discussion in Roger’s L’Enseignement des lettres classiques d’Ausone à Alcuin (Paris, 1905), chaps. vi. vii. and viii. See also G. T. Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church, Lect. XI. (London, 1892, 3rd ed.); D’Arbois de Jubainville, Introduction à l’étude de la littérature celtique, livre ii. chap. ix.; F. J. H. Jenkinson, The Hisperica Famina (Cambridge and New York, 1909). Obviously it is unjustifiable (though it has been done) to regard the scholarship of gifted Irishmen who lived on the Continent in the ninth century (Sedulius Scotus, Eriugena, etc.) as evidence of scholarship in Ireland in the sixth, seventh, or eighth century. We do not know where these later men obtained their knowledge; there is little reason to suppose that they got it in Ireland.
[205] See the narrative in Green’s History of the English People.
[206] There is no positive evidence that Augustine painted the terrors of the Day of Judgment in his first preaching. But it was a chief part of the mediaeval Gospel, and never absent from the soul of Augustine’s master, Gregory. The latter set it forth vividly in his letter to Ethelbert after his baptism (Bede, Hist. Ecc. i. 32).
[207] Bede, Hist. Ecc. iii. 22, tells how a certain noble gesith slew his king from exasperation with the latter’s practice of forgiving his enemies, instead of requiting them, according to the principles of heathen morality.
[208] Bede, Hist. Ecc. i. 30. Well known are the picturesque scenes surrounding the long controversy as to Easter between the Roman clergy and the British and Irish. The matter bulks hugely in Bede’s book, as it did in his mind.