afterwards associated him. The welcome he won from that liberal-minded prince and their intimate comradeship, the gaiety and sprightly humour of the Irish sage, his removal to England after Charles's death, and his new career as a teacher under the auspices of king Alfred, finally his murder at Malmesbury; all these things are recounted by later annalists. His own time knows only that he was a 'holy man' who came from Ireland and had received no ecclesiastical orders.[1]
The king's regard for the sage, which we know also from John's poems and dedications, has its evidence in his employment in the palace school, but the story that this school was regularly established at Paris is a legend of a much later time.[2] Yet although the town on the Seine was by no means the ordinary seat of government, it was a favourite and not infrequent residence of the king—he was not yet emperor—whose capital lay at Compiegne or Laon. It owed its popularity at first no doubt to its neighbourhood to the abbey of Saint Denis, whose fame had attracted thither the dying Pippin and made his great-grandson Charles choose it for the burial-place of his house;[3]
- ↑ His birth is ironically touched on by an opponent, Prudentius of Troyes, 'Te solum omnium acutissimum Galliae transmisit Hibernia,' De Praedest. contra Io. Scot. xiv Max. Biblioth. Patr. 15. 534 E; 1677. [He describes him as 'nullis ecclesiasticae dignitatis gradibus insignitum,' iii. p. 479 E.] John's character appears from a letter of Anastasius the librarian, 'Ioannem . . . Scotigenam, virum quern auditu comperi per omniasanctum,' Ussher, Epist. Syllog. 65.
- ↑ The statement is founded on a letter of pope Nicholas the First in which he calls for John's removal from Paris 'in studio cuius capital iam olim fuisse perhibetur,' ap. C. E. du Boulay, Hist. Univ. Paris. 1. 184, Paris 1665 folio. But this passage in the papal letter is not found in the recognised copies, e.g. Mansi, Concil. 15. 401 c; and du Boulay, p. 183, admits that he took it from the collectanea of Naude. There is no doubt that it is merely one of those fictions invented for the glorification of the antiquity of the university of Paris, just as a later incident in John Scotus's life has been applied to that of the university of Oxford. Cf. Léon Maitre, Écoles épiscopates et monastiques 45, Le Mans 1866. [The words cited from pope Nicholas's letter are 'obviously interpolated.' See H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1. 273 n. 2, 1895; and L. Traube, Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, 3. 519 n. 5 1896.]
- ↑ Mr. E. A. Freeman has well told the history of the revival of Paris in the ninth century: see his essay on The early Sieges of Paris, Historical Essays, 1st series, viii.
