We know from various entries in our Annals that St. Cronan’s School of Roscrea continued to flourish for many centuries even during the worst period of the Danish ravages. We find frequent reference to its abbots, scribes, and professors down to the period of the Anglo-Norman invasion. A portion of the old abbey still remains, and shows that it was one of the most beautiful specimens of Romanesque architecture in Ireland.
St. Senan’s monastery on Scattery Island was also a very famous institution; but we do not find that it was celebrated as a school. Neither was St. Flannan’s monastery at Killaloe frequented by scholars, who seem to have preferred the quiet beauty of Iniscaltra to the passes of the Shannon, especially after the arrival of our unwelcome visitors from Scandinavia.
CHAPTER XXII.
LATER SCHOOLS OF THE WEST.
| “’Tis a rosary of islands in the Ocean’s hollow palm— Sites of faith unchanged by storms, all unchanging in the calm, There the world-betrayed may hide them, and the weary heart find balm.” —M‘Gee. |
I.—St. Colman’s School of Mayo.
The history of St. Colman, who founded the monastery of Innisboffin, and the Monastic School of Mayo, is full of interest. He may be called an island-saint, like Enda of Aran; but his was a far more strange and adventurous career. Trained in Iona, ruling in Lindisfarne, defeated but not subdued by Wilfrid at Whitby, and then coming home in his old age with the relics of his sainted predecessors to labour and to die in the misty islands of the West—there is no element of romantic interest wanting in Colman’s extraordinary history.
We may, we think, fairly assume with Colgan that he was a native of some part of the West; for otherwise the very existence of Innisboffin would have been unknown to him. It is quite certain, however, that he received his education and religious training in Iona, and that he was for many years a member of that community. Bede describes him as an Irish Bishop (de Scottia Episcopus), and shows very clearly what he means thereby, when he adds, that on his departure from Lindisfarne he returned to Ireland (in Scottiam regressus est). Indeed, Bede has never, even once, applied the word ‘Scottia’ except to Ireland.[383]