Above : Painting of St. Columba

After landing in Europe they had to go amidst people whose language was unknown to them, and though themselves often of noble descent, they found that they were poor and friendless in a strange land. It is frequently recorded how great were their sufferings from poverty, fatigue and lack of equipment, and how many met their death on the way. Yet in the service to which they had devoted themselves they bore all their trials with resignation and a stout heart. ” They were competent, cheerful, and self-supporting, faced privation with indifference; caring nothing for luxuries; and when other provisions failed them, they gathered wild fruit, trapped animals, and fished with great dexterity, and with any sort of rude appliances. They were rough and some­what uncouth in outward appearance, but beneath all that they had solid sense and much learning. Their simple ways, their unmistakeable piety, and their intense earnestness in the cause of religion attracted the people everywhere, so that they made crowds of converts.”*

Near the end of the seventh and at the beginning of the eighth century the Irish monks had estab­lished a series of monasteries which extended from the mouth of the Meuse and Rhine to tiie Rhone. Throughout the chronicles and the lives of the Saints of this time references are often made to them; and names purely Irish are constantly found such as Caidor, Furseus, Fullan Ultan, Frillan, Livin. Thus in the life of St. Reini, mention is made of his hospitable reception of ten pilgrims from Ireland. ” From that island, I say, seven brothers started on a pilgrimage for the love of Christ. They were men of great piety and virtue. These were Gebrian, Ilelan, Tressan, Germanus, Veranus, Ilebranus, Petranus, and three sisters, Franda or Francla, Portia and Possena.” In the life of St. Riquier it is recorded how a body of Irishmen preached the faith in Picardy. In Belgium they worked in Malines, Ghent and other places. In the ninth century the number of Irishmen travelling in France was so great as to be almost burtheusome and the Council of Chalons-sur-Saone made canons against the wandering Scots. There is also frequent mention made in the histories of the time of ‘ episoopi vagi,’ bishops without any fixed diocese, who journeyed through France, and of whom the great majority appear to have been our countrymen. Many of the missionary establishments in Germany were either originally Irish or were the offsprings of Irish foundations. In the tenth century we find a great number of Irish monasteries in Germany. O’ho I. of Germany consecrated a monastery in the Ardennes which was to remain the property of the Scots, and of which the Abbot was to be a monk of that nation. Adalberon II. decreed that the Abbey of St. Clement in Lorraine was only to receive monks of Irish origin, while that nation supplied sufficient recruits, and his biographer states that he always held the Irish monks in the highest esteem.* Cologne in the tenth century possessed a large Irish colony, and the monastery of St. Martin in that city was given to the Scots in perpetuity by Archbishop Eberger in 975. From this date to 1061 the Abbots were all Irishmen. Desibod constructed the monastery of Desiboden-berg near Treves, and St. Kilian was the Apostle of Franconia. The monasteries of Ifonau on the Rhine and Altomunster were of Irish origin and Virgilius became the Abbot of Salzburg. That Irish monks were present in considerable numbers in the North of Italy is evidenced by the fact that a hostelry was built near Bobbio in 883 for their reception.

Below : Painting of St Clement

In South Germany Marian us Scotus, a native of the North of Ireland, settled at Ratisbon on his way to Rome and founded a monastery in 1076. In less than forty years this monastery was not sufficiently large to accommodate the Irish monks who were labouring at Ratisbon, and a second house, the monastery of St. James, was built. From Ratis-bon twelve Irish monasteries were established in various parts of South Germany, and at the time of its greatest prosperity the Abbot of Ratisbon controlled the monasteries of Dels in Silesia, Erfurt in Thuringia, Wurzburg, Nuremberg^ Eichstadt in Franconia, Memningen and Constance in Swabia, and Vienna in Austria. Johannes, one of the associates of Marianus, went to Gottweich in Austria, where he died as an Anchorite; another of his monks went to Kief, and a third went to Jerusalem. Frederick of Bar-barossa found in Bulgaria a monastery governed by an Irish Abbot, and there are letters still extant from the Irish Abbot of Ratisbon petitioning King Wratislaw of Bohemia for an escort for his messengers through that country on their way to Poland. There is authentic evidence that these Irish monks who went to Germany in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries were worthy successors to the Saints and Missionaries who laboured in France at an earlier period. The houses which they founded were closed to Germans, and almost entirely recruited from Ireland, so that while in France the second generation of monks was largely composed of Frenchmen, the German establishments continued to be thoroughly Irish even in the constitution of their members.

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence which the Irish Saints and Missionaries exercised at this early period upon European civilisation. The Continent was plunged in utter darkness, literary as well as spiritual, and the advent of the Irish teachers, men full of piety and zeal, with superior accomplishments and a genuine love of learning marked the renaissance of religion and letters. ” There reigned,” says Mr. Lane-Poole, ” not only amongst the professed, scholars of Ireland, but also amongst the plain scholars whom she sent forth to preach the gospel to the heathen, a love of literature for its own sake, and a keen delight in poetry. Apart from their written works, there is a vein of poetry running through the lives of these Irish confessors, a poetry of which the stories of their acts are better witnesses than their practical essays in verse-making. They brought imagination, as they brought spiritual life into a world well nigh sunk in materialism.” Through their Latin poetry, and especially through their hymns, which were carried abroad over Europe and sung in many schools and monasteries, they may be considered to have exercised no small influence on the literatures that were just then arising from the smallest beginnings in the various nations. The Romance languages which sprang from the Latin would naturally be most directly affected, and two well-known European scholars, Zeuss and Nigra, have traced the introduction of rhyme to the Irish monks who wrote in this language. Their skill in music appears from the fact that Gertrude, daughter of Pepin, sought for Irish monks to instruct her community at Nivelle in sacred psalmody. St. Gall acquired its highest fame as a school of music, as well as a seat of learning, during the time that the Irishman Moengal pre-sided over it, and Notker Ihtlbulus, the most celebrated musician of the Middle Ages, was one of his pupils.

St. Columba brought the poetry and learning of Ireland to Iona, and Oswald, Xing of North -umbria, who had been educated there, summoned the Irish monks to convert his country. In the words of liede:—”He sent to the seniors of the Scots, among whom himself and his fellow soldiers when in banishment had received the Sacrament of .Baptism, desiring they would send him a bishop, by whose instruction and ministry the Anglic nation which he governed might be taught the advantages of faith in the Lord, and receive its sacraments. Nor were they slow in granting his request, but sent him Bishop Aidan, a man of singular meekness, piety and moderation.” St. Aidan established himself at Lindisfarne, and the Irish influence was extended from there until the whole of Northumbria was supplied with monasteries and schools, and the love of study of letters was awakened amongst the people by the enthusiasm of their teachers. From the north the Irish monks penetrated into Mercia and East Anglia, and fresh bodies of missionaries came over from Ireland in a constant succes­sion. The Irish learning found its way to the South of England, and in Archbishop Theo­dore’s day the school of Canterbury was full of Irish scholars. An Irishman, Maelduf, founded a school, which afterwards grew into the famed Abbey of Malmesbury, and amongst his scholars was St. Adhelm, who was pronounced by Alfred two centuries afterwards to be the best of the A.nglo-Saxon poets. Glastonbury became a special centre of Irish learning and poetry, so that it may be claimed that Dunstan, the chief figure in the revival of English learning, derived from the Irish scholars, who founded tho school there, the spirit which inspired the movement. “This,” writes Mr. Stopford Brooke, ” was the Gaelic invasion of England, and its imaginative and formative powers ran through all the poetry of Northumbria, and stimulated the desires of Wessex and Mercia to know, and to feel utter the unknown.”

Below : Statue Of St Kilian