ITS H[ST01iY AND INHABITANTS. II. 



59 



at the Althing until the Archbishop of Thrandheim appointed 

 Norwegians in 1237. Two bishops, St. Thorlac and St. John, 

 were, by a public vote at the Althing, declared to be Saints, 

 after a thorough and searching Inquiry into the miracles they 

 had wrought. Thus the Icelandic Church was a Church of the 

 people for the people, and Kome had little power in the island. 

 Celibacy was never accepted by it. In the twelfth and 

 tliirteenth centuries six Benedictine and live Augustinian 

 Cloisters were founded, all centres of learning and culture. 

 The greater part of the Icelandic Sagas is supposed to have 

 been written or at least copied in them. The oldest was the 

 Benedictine Cloister at Tliingeyrar, 1133, next Thvera 1155, 

 also Benedictine. The Icelandic monks wrote in Icelandic, not 

 in Latin, as all their brethren on the Continent. Tliey were 

 intensely national, and handed down with scrupulous care even 

 the records of the heathen faitli. But it was owing to disputes 

 about the jurisdiction of the clergy that the King and Arch- 

 bishop of Norway were able to set chieftain against chieftain 

 and undermine the Icelandic commonweakh, disputes similar to 

 those which Thomas a Becket of Canterbury carried on with 

 Henry II. half a century earlier, and which are recorded in the 

 Icelandic Thomas Saga. 



The two centuries and a half which followed the introduction 

 of Christianity were the greatest period in ihe history of 

 Iceland. A great literature, especially the Sagas, came 

 into being, while the Continent, with the single exception 

 of the Provencal Troubadours, had nothing better to show than 

 monkish-annalists. At the Courts of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, 

 Dublin, England and Orkney, Icelandic poets were the chief or, 

 usually, the only singers of heroic deeds. It was an outburst 

 of literature such as the world had not seen since the downfall 

 of Itome. 



By degrees the chieftaincies, Go^or^s which passed not only 

 by inheritance but also by gift or sale, came into the hands 

 of a few great I'amilies. In consequence some chiefs became 

 masters of large districts, and, like feudal lords, rode to the 

 Althing with an armed body of retainers, numbered by 

 hundreds. The old blood-feuds became little wars conducted 

 by armies that engaged in battles. Disputes about the juris- 

 diction of the Church provoked interference by the Metropolitan 

 See of Drontheim, which appointed the tw^o Icelandic bishops 

 of Holo.T and Skdliwlt. Internecine civil wars, lasting through 

 the first half of the tliirteenth century, exterminated some of 

 the great i'amilies who had monopolized the chieftaincies. The 



