The early Irish monks

Lindisfarne - photo credit National Trust Images

The Irish have a habit of leaving Ireland, and the early monks were no exception: in the sixth century the country's chief export seems to have been saints. Their itching feet took them trudging farther and farther from home, until soon they were founding Celtic monasteries as far away as Switzerland and Italy. The first step had been across the Irish sea to Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, where St Columba settled in about 563 with twelve monks, echoing the twelve disciples. An island near to the land was still their ideal choice for a monastery, and when Celtic monks later came down from Scotland into Northumbria they found somewhere which seemed perfect - Lindisfarne, also known because of the monks as Holy Island. At high tide it is an island. At low tide you can walk ashore. What would be better for a monk who is both in and out of the world?

Even before Lindisfarne was founded, Irish monks had spread deep into Europe, far from the sea and the safety of islands. In about 590 another party of twelve set sail from Ireland to France. They landed not knowing what was ahead of them, and offering a brand of Christianity that was singularly strict. Yet their success was astonishing. One of the party, Gall or Gallus, reached what is now Switzerland before he found a cave that suited him. A flourishing Swiss town now stands at the place and bears his name: St Gall. The leader of the group, St Columban, went even farther and crossed the Alps. An Italian place-name, Mezzano Scotti, still commemorates the distant time when the Irish were there - and when, to the eternal confusion of schoolboys, the people who lived in Ireland were called Scots. It is near Bobbio, where St Columban established his final monastery. Nothing remains of the monastery today, and even in its own time it was something of an impertinence. Bobbio was only a few hundred miles north of Rome. And the pope in Rome had already launched a counter-offensive, sending monks of his own north and west as the Irishmen moved south and east.

The Christians / Bamber Gascoigne / Book Club Associates 1977