EARLY CELTIC CHURCHES- OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND. 197 



of the holy man would spread or he would become known as a 

 teacher or a scribe. His solitude was broken in upon by 

 students who would begin to gather round him. Each student 

 as he came would establish his cell around the central green, or 

 along the sides of the stream or valley in which the anchorite 

 had fixed his home, and gradually immense religious settle- 

 ments, half educational, half agricultural, and wholly religious, 

 would spring up. They came by degrees to include the entiie 

 Christian population, for each central monastery as it grew 

 unwieldy in size sent away offshoots wliich owned obedience 

 to the chief saint and carried out the same rule of life. Each 

 monastic establishment was self-contained, having its own fields 

 for growing corn and vegetables, its own mills, kitchens, store- 

 houses, and barns. The students and monks did the entire 

 work of the place, sowing, reaping, carrying burdens to the mill, 

 grinding corn and generally performing the duties of the 

 settlement. Even bishops are found ploughing the fields, 

 grinding corn and performing other menial offices. The 

 extreme simplicity of life in these early monasteries must be 

 carefully borne in mind. Part of each day was set apart for 

 the instruction of students, another part for active duties, while 

 the offices of the Church were regularly and minutely attended 

 to. I cannot imagine a system of any kind more suited to the 

 needs and more calculated to elevate a primitive and unlettered 

 people. These institutions set before the entire population a 

 new ideal of simple, industrial life sanctified by religion and 

 enlarged by study. 



In Ireland we find the most honoured saints and heads of 

 monasteries, even such men as St. Columba and St. Ciaran, 

 ploughing, reaping, cooking, and even grinding corn at the quern, 

 which was the office of women-slaves. St. Brigit, even after the 

 founding of Kildare, is found milking the cows, herding sheep, 

 churning butter, baking bread, and doing all the ordinary work 

 of a peasant-woman. When St. Columba goes for consecration 

 to Bishop Etchen, he finds him ploughing in the fields ; when 

 in his old age he returns to visit Clonmacnois the monks gather- 

 hastily from the little grange farms on which they have been 

 working to receive him with honour. Xor did they look on 

 such labours as derogatory ; they felt them to be ennobling 

 and elevating ; they felt (as it is told of St. ^N'athalan), " that in 

 the lowly work of cultivating the earth he approached nearest 

 to the Divine contemplation ; therefore, though he was of noble 

 blood, he practised with his own hands the lowly art of 

 cultivating the fields." Besides the manual labour and the 



