XXVII.  THE IRISH ILLUMINATION

We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and 410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales.  The next thing in China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.

He was an Irishman, and had been studying in Wales; where, certainly, there was great activity in churchly circles in those days.  Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names beginning with Llan,—­and you will see.  There are countless thousands of them.  ‘Llan’ means ‘the holy place of,’ and the rest of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached there:  of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic calendar.  They were most of them active in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Findian, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, had come under the influence of three of the foremost of them:  David, Gildas, and Catwg the Wise; who were perhaps great men, if we may judge by the results of their teaching, as Findian transmitted it to those that came after him.  We have seen that Patrick opened no kind of golden age in Ireland, gave no impulse to civilization or letters.  The church he founded had fallen on rather evil days since his death; and now Findian came to reform things in the light of what he had learned in Wales.  He began by founding at Clonard a monastery on the Welsh plan.  That was some twenty-two years before Geoffrey’s date for the passing of Arthur.  By the time Camlan had been fought, and the Crest-Wave had left Wales, Findian had made a channel through which it might flow into Ireland, and in the five-forties the Irish illumination began.

We must say a word or two as to the kind of institution he founded.  There were several of them in Wales,—­to be called colleges, or even universities, as rightly as monasteries:—­one at Bangor in the north; two or three in Glamorgan; one at Saint Davids.  Students flocked to them by the thousands; there was strict discipline, the ascetic life,—­and also serious study, religious and secular.  It was all beautifully simple:  each student lived in his own hut,

     “of clay and wattles made,”

—­or, where stone might be plentiful, as it is in most parts of Wales, of stone.  Like a military camp, the whole place would be surrounded with fosse and vallum.  They grew their own corn and vegetables, milked their own cows, fished in the streams, and supported themselves.  The sky roofed their lecture-halls; of which the walls, if there were any, were the trees and the mountains.  But these places were real centers of learning, the best there were in Europe in those days; and you needed not to be a monk to attend them.