Aldfrith's Qualifications as a Patron of Literature 305 



prey of men and women. The men of Erin besought of Adamnan 

 to §"o in quest of the captives to Saxonland. . . . Adamnan's 

 demand was that a complete restoration of the captives should 

 be made to him, and that no Saxon should ever again go upon a 

 predatory excursion to Erin ; and Adamnan brought back all the 

 captives.' These, as we learn from another source, were sixty in 

 number.^ Adamnan himself refers to this visit, which took place 

 in 686, two years after Ecgfrith's attack, and to a second, in 

 which he is supposed to have given the book to Aldfrith, in these 

 terms- : Tn Saxonia also, when I went to visit my friend King 

 Aldfrith, where the plague was raging and laying waste many of 

 his villages, yet both in its first attack, immediately after the war 

 of Ecgfrith, and in its second, two years subsequently, the Lord 

 mercifully saved me from danger.'^ ']My friend King Aldfrith,' 

 be it observed — though he was the immediate successor of a king 

 who had been a w-anton aggressor toward Adamnan's flock, and 

 had carried off a number of them into slavery, besides, according 

 to other accounts, devastating many churches and monasteries.* 



Thus far we have seen in Aldfrith a student of divinity, half- 

 Irish by birth, and no less so by long residence; a student of the 

 poetic art, himself a poet ; and a man sympathetic with the adven- 

 turous spirit — eager for learning and wandering, and curious 

 respecting foreign countries^ — of his Irish kin. To these traits 

 one might add an interest in supernatural visions, disclosed in 

 Bede's account of Dryhthelm, such as is abundantly exemplified in 

 the whole third book of Adamnan's Life of Coliimba.^ 



Aldfrith may then, in imagination, have wandered even further 

 than Ulysses, and at least have spoiled the climes, if not ransacked 

 the ages. It Remains to be seen w^hat kind of English king he was. 

 In particular, was he capable of playing a man's part in a troublous 

 time, harassed as he w^as by foes from without, and afflicted with 

 the internal dissensions of his realm? Of a successor, Ceolwulf, 



^Plummer 2. 301. 



^Reeves, p. yy (2. 47). 



^ a. Eccl. Hist. 5. 15, 21. 



* Ecd. Hist. 4. 26; Plummer 2. 260; Bright, p. 330; Montalembert 4. 57. 



^ We must not forget that it was an Irish monk, Dicuil, who in 825 finished 

 a treatise on geography, De Mensura Orbis Terrs. 



" Adamnan himself is credited with having seen a vision, for the text 

 describing which see Dottin, p. 43, note 195. 



