Cultural and Artistic Antecedents: Northern Italy 855 



province. 1 iEthelwold is said to have been the first to introduce 

 this stricter rule into England at the monastery of Abingdon, having 

 sent Osgar, a monk of Glastonbury, to Fleury (St. Benoit) for the 

 purpose. 2 Among the scholars of the period, the name of Abbo, who 

 went for a time from Fleury to England, is held in honor. At times 

 the monastery school was attended by as many as five thousand 

 students, each of whom was to give two manuscripts to the library 

 as his fee ; and contributions to the library were required from every 

 dependent monastery.^ 



A link between Fleury and the English royal house is found in the 

 person of Hugh of Fleury (d. 1108), who dedicated a history of the 

 church to Countess Adela,** a history of the recent French kings 

 to Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and his treatise, De Regia Potestate 

 et Sacerdotali Dignitate, to King Henry himself.^ It is thus evident 

 that Fleury must have been well within King David's ken, and fre- 

 quently visited by Englishmen during his reign. 



6. THE POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF NORTHERN ITALY 

 The sculptures of a certain group of churches in northern Italy 

 form so interesting a parallel to those on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle 

 crosses as to suggest a possible influence from that quarter. That 

 such an influence — either direct or through the mediation of French 

 sculptors — is not inherently impossible, is indicated by the bonds 



^ Raine, Archbishops of York 1. 118-121 ; cf. Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft 

 fiir Altere Deutsche Oeschichtskunde 16. 375. Raine (op. ciL, p. 121) tells 

 of twelve monks from Fleury whom Oswald established at Westbury under 

 the charge of Germanus ; ' the sight of that house was so gratifying to the 

 king that he directed more than forty monasteries to be constructed after 

 the same model.' Sackur says {Neues Archiv 16. 375) that the reformation 

 of the English monasteries by Dunstan emanated from Fleury. A prose 

 calendar of the Anglo-Saxon church was found at Fleury, and called Calen- 

 darium Floriacense (Piper, Kalendarien, p. 65). 



2 Chron. de Abingdon 1. 129 ; Robertson, Hist. Essays, p. 190 ; Diet. 

 Nat. Biog. 18. 38. 



3 Wetzer and Welter, Kirchenlexikon, s. v. Fleury. 

 * See p. 130, above. 



^ Sackur (op. cit., p. 375) considers that the relations between Fleury 

 and England must have been continuous from after the time of Dunstan's re- 

 form ; it may be noted that Hugh was a convinced royaUst, and that Fleury 

 stood under the direct patronage of the King of France, being exempt from 

 the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Orleans (op. cit., pp. 370 ff.). 



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