coming. The Norsemen were simply plunderers, and not religious enthusiasts; and they attacked the monasteries and churches, not because they hated Christianity, but because they found in them the most booty and the least resistance.
The result was almost as disastrous to the Irish Church as if the Danes had come of set purpose to destroy it. Amid all the troubles and disturbances of tribal warfare, the Irish had for the most part respected those peaceful settlements in their midst where the worship of God was celebrated. Occasionally, an act of sacrilege would be committed, but it was viewed with abhorrence by the nation in general. The result was that learning flourished, and the Church became more and more a power in the land. But the Danes changed all this. Bishops and teachers had to fly for their lives. Scribes saw their precious manuscripts in the rough hands of the barbarians, who took a brutal delight in destroying them, because they knew them to be so highly prized. And the native Irish were not long in following the pernicious example. Soon it came to be a recognised method of warfare that one chief should destroy the sanctuaries in the territory of his rival. Sometimes the churches of a whole province were ravaged because an unfriendly king was making war on its ruler. Under such circumstances learning could make but little progress. The Church itself became infected with the spirit of the age. The era of the 'saints and doctors' was at an end.
One of the more immediate results was the emigration of several Irish ecclesiastics to England and the Continent; and we learn incidentally that in the ninth century, as in the seventh, those churches which were in communion with the see of Rome refused to acknowledge the validity of the Irish
