Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/67

Rh afterwards associated him. The welcome he won from that liberal-minded prince and their intimate comradeship, the gaiety and sprightly humour of the Irish sage, his removal to England after Charles's death, and his new career as a teacher under the auspices of king Alfred, finally his murder at Malmesbury; all these things are recounted by later annalists. His own time knows only that he was a 'holy man' who came from Ireland and had received no ecclesiastical orders.

The king's regard for the sage, which we know also from John's poems and dedications, has its evidence in his employment in the palace school, but the story that this school was regularly established at Paris is a legend of a much later time. Yet although the town on the Seine was by no means the ordinary seat of government, it was a favourite and not infrequent residence of the king—he was not yet emperor—whose capital lay at Compiegne or Laon. It owed its popularity at first no doubt to its neighbourhood to the abbey of Saint Denis, whose fame had attracted thither the dying Pippin and made his great-grandson Charles choose it for the burial-place of his house;