Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/31

Rh scholars, is not less characteristic. Ireland was once the university, the literary market not only, as we have seen, of northern England, but also m of the Frankish realm; and if its progress at home was arrested after the fatal inroad of the Northmen in 795, the seed the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity than it had ever reached on its own soil. Wherever they went they founded schools. Malmesbury, the house of which saint Aldhelm was a scholar and ultimately abbat, took its origin from the company of disciples that gathered about a poor Scottish teacher, Mailduf, as he sat in his hut beside the walls of the old castle of Ingelborne. The foundations of saint Columban, Luxeuil, and Bobbio, long remained centres of learned activity in Burgundy and Lombardy; the settlement of his comrade, saint Gall, rose into the proud abbey which yet retains his name, and which was for centuries a beacon-tower of learning in western Europe; the sister-abbey of Reichenau, its rival both in power and in cultivation, also owed its fame, if not its actual establishment on its island in the lower lake of Constance, to Scottish teachers. Under the shelter of these great houses, and of such as these, learning was planted in a multitude of lesser societies scattered over the tracts of German colonisation; and most commonly the impulse which led to their formation as schools as well as monasteries is directly due to the energetic devotion of the Scottish travellers.