302 Beowulf and JVidsith 



A certain propensity to wander was marked among the Irish 

 from the sixth century to the ninth. Concerning this I quote from 

 Pkimmer^ : 



Adamnan tells us how Irish saints set out to look for an uninhabited 

 spot^ in the ocean. . . . Often they would commit themselves to the 

 deep in a slender coracle, without oarage or steerage, and trust their 

 fate and the direction of their course to the winds and waters.^ [Thus 

 in 89, according to the Saxon Chronicle, three Irishmen came to King 

 Alfred in a boat without any oars from Ireland, whence they had 

 stolen away because they desired for the love of God to be in a state 

 of pilgrimage, they recked not where.] Besides the love of wandering, 

 the desire for self-mortification, and for gaining and imparting knowl- 

 edge, there was above all the missionary zeal,' ... to which was 

 due the fact that so large a portion of the Continent owed their first 

 knowledge of the glad tidings to Irishmen. 



It was perhaps in imitation of such practices that the Northum- 

 brian, Benedict Biscop, made his six journeys to Rome, each time 

 bringing back books, rehcs, pictures, vestments, and whatever 

 seemed hkely to be of use to the monasteries and churches in 

 which he was interested. ° He returned in 686, or later, "^ from his 

 last visit to Rome, bringing with him, among other things, a vol- 

 ume for which Aldf rith contracted to pay not far from a thousand 

 acres'^ of land. This was a remarkably executed manuscript of 

 the Cosmographers,** which he had liought at Rome ; when he 

 died, Jan. 12, 690, the transaction had not been completed, and it 



^2. 170; cf. 2. 72; Dunn, in Cath. Hist. Rcz\ 6. 442-4. 

 "^ Cf. Plummer 2. 126, top. 

 'Cf. Joyce I. 213-4. 



* The common formula of missionary enterprise among the Irish was : 

 'Pro Christo peregrinari volens, enavigavit' (Reeves, p. xxxvi) ; cf. Green, 

 p. 288. 



° Cf . Plummer 2. 359. 

 ®Cf. Plummer 2. 362. 

 ' Eight hides ; cf . Ramsay, p. 147. 



* Bede perhaps consulted this very book ; at all events, in his Dc Tonporunt 

 Ratione (a. d. 725), where he is speaking of the rise and setting of the 

 Pleiades, we have this sentence {Opera, ed. Giles, 6. 218-9) : 'Denique in 

 libris Cosmographorum authenticis et nobilissimis, ita eadem tempora ad 

 lineam distincta reperimus, adnotato etiam ortu Vergiliarum vii Id. Maii, 

 occasu quoque corundem vii Id. Novemb.' Apparently, then, the cos- 

 mographers were not merely geographers, but in some measure astronomers 

 also, though Cassiodorus (ca. 490-585) does not seem to have so regarded 

 them. He, whose writings were among the treasures of the York Library 

 (Alcuin, Dc Pont. 1545), and had i)erhaps l)cen brought from Rome by 



