Between the fifth and the sixteenth centuries, the two main institutions of Irish education were the monastic schools, founded by Christian missionaries in the early fifth century, and the bardic schools, originating in ancient Celtic times. It has been argued that the bardic schools predate the arrival of Christians in Ireland, existed parallel to or were integrated with the monastic system and, after the decline of monastic schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, continued to thrive up until the seventeenth century. Between the fifth and the ninth centuries, however, the Christian monastic schools modeled on a classical Latin curriculum were the predominate educational form. What we know of education in medieval Ireland comes from manuscripts produced in Christian monasteries, accounts of the lives of the Irish saints, glosses, the Brehon Laws, and translations of Latin texts produced in monasteries. Most of these accounts describe a rigorous and dynamic monastic life that created learned scholars who influenced Irish and European culture, religion, and scholarship.
The Ancient Filid
When Christian missionaries arrived in Ireland, they encountered an already thriving educational system under the tutelage of the ancient learned class, the filid (scholars). Among their many social roles, the filid were educators and taught natural and moral philosophy. Three tracts of the Brehon Laws, the Senchus Mar, the Crith Gablach (the branched purchase), and the Uraicecht Becc (the small primer), provide a sharper picture of the schools created by the filid. The school itself involved a regular course of training with seven ascending grades: Fochluc, Macfuirmid, Dos, Cana, Cli, Anruth, and Ollamh. The whole course lasted twelve years, and each year was assigned a specific curriculum. To complete the course, the student progressed through instruction mainly in grammar, philosophy, and poetry. The filid enjoyed a very high social status, producing works of history, topography, romance and heroic tales, narrative, lyric and elegiac poetry, law tracts, folklore, epigrams, and songs. Of course, all of the productions by the filid were oral. It took the arrival of Christianity and the monastic schools to write down and record these accomplishments.
Monastic Schools
The fifth to seventh centuries witnessed a rapid increase in monasteries throughout Ireland, established by Christian missionaries of whom the Latinists Palladius and St. Patrick are the most familiar. Attached to many of these monasteries were monastic schools where monks instructed students in the Latin ecclesiastical tradition. Reading and writing Latin and the rigorous study of the Latin bible constituted the main conduits to knowledge. In these schools, monks studied Christian authors, the Scriptures, ecclesiastical rules, theology, canon law, and ritual. The seventh-century biography of Columbanus, written by Jonas, reveals that Columbanus as a youth received instruction in "liberal letters," grammar, and religious doctrine. By "liberal letters," scholars assume the presence, to a greater or lesser degree, of a classical curriculum comprised of the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Although the stern Patrician tradition would always maintain a foothold in monastic education, monastic schools are usefully characterized by their catholic interests in Roman knowledge. By the seventh century, monks studied and transcribed the works of Virgil, Horace, Marital, Juvenal, Claudian, Statius, and Ausonius. Using these Christian and non-Christian writings, the Irish monks labored to instruct their students about the pursuit of wisdom within a wider theological frame.
In general, early Christian monasteries were made up of either a small community dedicated to living a religious life or a tiny church where a single cleric served the local lay and religious residents. By the seventh century, the clergy lived a much more communal life in monastic settlements. Some of the larger monastic communities included Clonmacnoise (supposedly founded by St. Ciaran), Iona (founded by St. Colum Cille), Monasterboice (founded by St. Buite), and Glendalough (founded by Coemgen [Kevin]).
Writing
A monastic education was synonymous with writing. Transcription of manuscripts by scholars in the monastic schools everywhere flourished and writing became the means through which Irish monks communicated their learning to Europe. Scholars used quill pens and ink made from charcoal to write on parchment or vellum and the skins of goats, sheep, or calves for works intended for preservation. Long, thin wooden tablets covered in wax and etched on by an iron style were used as practice boards for impermanent notes. Many of the early monasteries boasted a sciptorium (a school for penmanship), but as the monasteries grew in size, it is reasonable to assume that in the larger monasteries the scriptorium was a separate building where the scriba (scribe) worked and where finished texts were stored. The Brehon Laws enumerate seven degrees of religious learning within the monastic schools: Feal-mac (a boy after reading his psalms), Freisneidhed (an interrogator), Fursaintid (an illustrator), Sruth do Aill (a stream from a cliff), Saf (professor), Anruth (a noble stream), and Rosaf (great professor). Whether or not the monastic school actually adhered to these categories is not known, but scholars contend that these designations provide insight into the pedagogical organization within the early monastic schools.
Certainly Latin was the predominate language taught in monastic schools. However, scholars still wonder: How did Latin arrive in a country that had limited contact with the Roman Empire? Undoubtedly, Christian missionaries brought Latin to Ireland, but the successful absorption of Latin into Irish scholarship necessitated instructional manuals and books for learning and teaching the language. O Croinfn plots a trajectory using two grammar textbooks, the Ars Asporii and the Anonymus ad Cuimnanum, from an educational system focused on studying Christian texts in the early sixth century to the celebration and serious study of classical texts by the eighth century. The Ars Asporii, an adaptation of the Roman grammarian Donatus’s Ars Minor, provides a rudimentary grammar guide for beginning Latin students within the context of Christian devotion. The Anonymus ad Cuim-nanum, produced two centuries later, renders a much more subtle and complex pedagogy; it treats Latin grammar as an autonomous subject and shows the influx of the grammarians Charisius, Consentius, Diomedes, and Probus into Irish thinking. By the eighth century, copies of many books transcribed in Irish scriptoria reached monastic libraries throughout Europe. Much of ancient saga literature owes its preservation to the monastic schools. In addition, Greek and Hebrew eventually found their way into the curricula. Although there is considerable debate about when Greek entered the monastic schools, scholars agree that by the ninth century Greek was known and studied, as we see in the works of early Irish hymnodists who often refer to Greek myths in their compositions and, more directly, in the writings of John Scottus Eriugena (an Irish scholar who worked in the Court of Charles II), especially his De Divisione Natura, which attempted to reconcile Neoplatonic ideas of emanation with Christian doctrine related to creation.
In addition, there can be no doubt that the monastic schools also taught Irish. As early as 600, Irish appeared side-by-side with Latin in the form of glosses—remarks, comments, and additions written by the copyist in the margins of the manuscript—that often explicate the Latin text in the Irish language. The Auraicept na nEces (the Instruction of the Poets or Scholars), a treatise on Irish grammar, appeared in the middle of the seventh century and continued to be worked on by monastic and lay authors until the eleventh century. The Auraicept outlines, among other topics, the origins of Gaelic; the Latin and Irish treatment of semi-vowels; the seven elements of speech in Irish; and the alphabets of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
During these centuries, students and scholars traveled to Ireland to benefit from Irish monastic education. Monasteries generally welcomed foreign students and lay students (those who were not intended for the church but a civil or military life), and there are a few records suggesting that women might have studied in the monasteries. In addition, evidence for the influence of monastic education on the filid and the native secular schools is found in the absorption of Latin into secular instruction and the writing of the Brehon Laws in the eighth century. At the same time, Irish scholars such as the famed St. Colum Cille and St. Columbanus fanned across Europe and founded monastic schools.
There have been two primary (and opposed) opinions about this period of scholarship in Irish history. The first, popularized by such writers as Douglas Hyde, suggests that Irish monastic schools from the sixth to the end of the ninth century preserved knowledge during the Dark Ages by devoting their cultural and religious institutions to scholarship and combated illiteracy and ignorance with the two-handed engine of classical texts from Greece and Rome and Christian religious texts. The second opinion argues the other extreme—that classical knowledge in ancient Ireland was limited, and the famed scholars in Europe such as John Scottus Eriugena acquired their classical knowledge in exile. Between these two claims resides the majority of scholarly opinion that might be summarized as follows: Even though there may have been variations in the quality and standards of education as well as the number of classical texts available to Irish scholars, what remains clear is that the texts read and transcribed, the skill of the Irish monks in writing and instruction, and their influence over the intellectual life of Europe were all formidable.
Bardic Schools
When Viking raids began in the last decade of the eighth century, monastic life was permanently impacted. The Vikings targeted monasteries because of their riches and encountered little resistance to their plundering. Between 775 and 1071 c.e., Glendalough itself was pillaged on numerous occasions and destroyed by fire at least nine times. Devastation, however, was not the only order of the day. Since the Vikings also settled in many parts of Ireland, their culture intermingled with the Irish. Evidence for the increasing internationalization of Irish learning is found in twelfth-century translations of The Aeneid, The Pharsalia, and The Thebais. In addition, many important native histories were written during this time, including Cogad Gaedel re Gallaib (the War of the Irish against the Foreigners), written in Munster in the early twelfth century, and Lebor na hUidre (the Book of the Dun Cow), a twelfth-century manuscript traditionally associated with Clonmacnoise.
In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the monastic schools weakened by Viking attacks, the bardic schools where the filid trained began to thrive again and were to some degree comparable to monastic centers of learning. Each bardic school was generally associated with a poetic family such as Ua Dalaigh in Cork and Ua hUiginn in Sligo. Students studied languages, metrics, mythology, history, genealogy, dinnshenchas, and, predictably, Latin, learning their lessons orally from the Latin and Irish manuscripts. Also, the filid class began to develop new forms of poetry, another indication that Irish intellectual life remained vital in the later Middle Ages. This structure of education, where an elite family would cultivate learning, might also have been true for the legal, medical, and musical professions.
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the continental monastic orders of the Cistercians, Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians had moved into Ireland and superceded the older Irish monasteries. These orders introduced a pervading movement in education toward Aristotelianism, which emphasized logic over the literary, historical, or mythological study of classical works. Aristotle continued to dominate Irish education well into the seventeenth century while the rest of Europe "rediscovered" the classics of Rome and Greece during the Renaissance. Despite the influx of European scholars and educators, Ireland still had no university and many students traveled to England or other parts of Europe for advanced studies; it would take until 1591 for a viable university to be established in Ireland in the form of Trinity College Dublin. In sum, from the fourteenth century on, a series of ordinances attempted to suppress the Irish language and Irish customs, restrictions that were increasingly successful in changing the shape of Irish education so that, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the monasteries were dissolved and replaced by grammar schools and Jesuit schools.
