Despite geographical proximity and periods of close cultural ties, evidence of such influence on Irish literature is surprisingly scarce. Several reasons for this can be suggested at least for the seventh and early eighth centuries. During that period the Anglo-Saxons were much more likely to have been the recipients than the donors of influence. Ireland sent Christian missionaries to England in the seventh century who introduced Latin literacy and Irish script, while also providing hospitality for considerable numbers of Anglo-Saxon students who came to study in its schools of higher learning. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon literature in the vernacular was unlikely to have had much influence on its Irish counterpart, not only because of the language barrier but also because the English literary tradition was not well established until a full century after that of Ireland. An exception may be King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685-705), known as Flann Ffna in Irish, to whom Irish literary tradition dubiously attributed several gnomic works in Irish.
The available evidence suggests that Anglo-Saxon literary influence—such as it was—was exercised through the medium of ecclesiastical Latin, a culture which both areas shared as part of their common Christian heritage. Verifiable instances of that influence are the Latin works of Anglo-Saxon England’s greatest scholar, the Venerable Bede (d. 735). His commentaries on biblical exegesis, metrics, and computistics seem to have been known and studied in Ireland by the second half of the eighth century. Two manuscripts written by Irish scribes contain between them three of Bede’s computistical works, De rerum natura, De tem-poribus, and De temporum ratione. Although copied in the first half of the ninth century and on the Continent, these manuscripts contain glosses which from their language (Old Irish) and phonology suggest that Bede was being studied in the Irish schools by the second half of the eighth century. Further evidence of Bede’s influence on the Irish schools as a biblical scholar is found in the "Old-Irish Treatise on the Psalter," a commentary composed in Irish in the first half of the ninth century which attributes to him a comment on Psalm 1. Although no such work on the Psalms has been verified for Bede, the appeal to his authority and the use of the Irish form of his name (Beid) testifies to his high status in Ireland. Moreover, Bede’s most famous work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which was partially translated into Irish in the early tenth century, left its mark on medieval Irish annals and historiography.
Other influences can be traced to Anglo-Saxon England’s continuing contacts throughout most of the eighth century with the Gaelic monastery of Iona, the center from which the Irish mission to Northumbria had been directed. The so-called Penitential of Theodore, composed in southern England in the late seventh century, is cited as an authority in the Collectio canonum Hibernesis, a collection of Irish ecclesiastical legislation co-authored in the early eighth century by Cu Chuimne of Iona. Likewise, the presence of a stratum of Anglo-Saxon saints in the early Irish martyrologies probably derived from a Northumbrian martyrology which passed to Iona and thence to Ireland during the eighth century.
