Irish Nationality

								

Roman proprietors throughout the Empire. In the same way the foreign
learning brought into Ireland was taught through the tribal system of
schools. Lay schools formed by the Druids in old time went on as
before, where students of law and history and poetry grouped their huts
round the dwelling of a famous teacher, and the poor among them begged
their bread in the neighbourhood. The monasteries in like manner
gathered their scholars within the "rath" or earthen entrenchment, and
taught them Latin, canon law, and divinity. Monastic and lay schools
went on side by side, as heirs together of the national tradition and
language. The most venerable saints, the highest ecclesiastics, were
revered also as guardians of Irish history and law, who wrote in Irish
the national tales as competent scribes and not mere copyists--men who
knew all the traditions, used various sources, and shaped their story
with the independence of learning. No parallel can be found in any
other country to the writing down of national epics in their pagan
form many centuries after the country had become Christian. In the same
way European culture was not allowed to suppress the national language;
clerics as well as laymen preserved the native tongue in worship and in
hymns, as at Clonmacnois where the praises of St. Columcille were sung,
"some in Latin, which was beguiling, some in Irish, fair the tale"; and
in its famous cemetery, where kings and scholars and pilgrims of all
Ireland came to lie, there is but one Latin inscription among over two
hundred inscribed grave slabs that have been saved from the many lost.
Like the learning and the art, the new worship was adapted to tribal
custom. Round the little monastic church gathered a group of huts with
a common refectory, the whole protected by a great rampart of earth.
The plan was familiar to all the Irish; every chief's house had such a
fence, and every bardic school had its circle of thatched cells where
the scholars spent years in study and meditation. Monastic "families"
which branched off from the first house were grouped under the name of
the original founder, in free federal union like that of the clans.
As no land could be wholly alienated from the tribe, territory given
to the monastery was not exempted from the common law; it was ruled by
abbots elected, like kings and judges of the tribe, out of the house
which under tribal law had the right of succession; and the monks in
some cases had to pay the tribal dues for the land and send out
fighting men for the hosting.
Never was a church so truly national. The words used by the common
people were steeped in its imagery. In their dedications the Irish
took no names of foreign saints, but of their own holy men. St.
Bridgit became the "Mary of the Gael." There was scarcely a boundary
felt between the divine country and the earthly, so entirely was the
spiritual life commingled with the national. A legend told that St.