ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY that the saint actually settled for a time in Burgh Castle is not to be doubted, though his sojourn there was but brief.' Meanwhile King Sigbert had not been idle. Profiting by what he had seen and learnt in his Burgundian retreat he seems to have begun soon after his return to his kingdom to found a monastery, which Bede says ' he had made for himself,' and to which he eventually retired. It is a question of some interest where that monastery — with its school — in which Felix introduced his duly qualified teachers imported from Canterbury, was situated.^ In the meantime — if we prefer to have a working hypothesis rather than none — we may give St. Felix the benefit of the doubt which Mr. Mickle- thwaite claims as a certainty. If this be conceded we may venture to claim for this curious and ancient church some connexion with the group of seven churches in this the southern portion of the early undivided East Anglian diocese. But this is not all. At the northern extremity of the diocese,' that is, on the coast of Norfolk, there is another group of seven churches in close proximity to the great Roman fortress of Brancaster. These churches all bear the common name of Burnham, though distinguished from one another by the names of their respective patron saints, as in the case of the South Elmham group.* They are crowded into a smaller area than the South Elmham deanery occupies, inasmuch as the quadrilateral within which they lie is scarcely four square miles in extent, and no one of them is distant so much as a mile from the other.' The parallel may be a mere coincidence, but who can help thinking of the groups of seven churches at Clonmacnoise, at Glendalough, at Clonenagh, at Innes Cealtra, and elsewhere in Ireland ? In the absence of historic record, or even of tradition, we fall back upon conjecture and ask whether it may not be that the powerful Celtic influence exercised upon St. Felix by his Irish teachers at Luxeuil suggested to him the founding of his schools in East Anglia on the model of those Irish schools and colleges which were renowned places of education all over Europe in the seventh century, and which continued to be so almost down to the period of the Danish invasion.* The work of evangelizing his people and of organizing and consolidating the church in his kingdom, went on with extraordinary enthusiasm while ' There is a very good life of St. Fursa in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. His career and that of his brethren after he left East Anglia and settled in France has been elaborately followed by Miss Stokes in her Three Months in the Forests of France. Canon Venables, rector of Burgh, has set up a magnificent granite cross in the churchyard of Burgh as a memorial of Fursa's sojourn in East Anglia. ' Bede, iii, 1 8, 19. The Historia E/iensis asserts that the place was Berdericksworth, a statement which is no more to be credited than the fable which planted it at Cambridge. ^ The diocese, it must be remembered, was conterminous with the limits of the East Anglian kingdom ; that is it extended from the Wash on the north to the Stour on the south ; it was bounded on the west by that region of morasses and fens stretching from Lincolnshire to Cambridgeshire, where the Gyrwas, of whom ■we know so little, seem to have roamed about as they pleased. Thomas, who succeeded Felix in his bishopric, was one of these Gyrzvas. Bede, iii, c. 20. See, too, Historia E/iensis, i, 4-5. ' Of course the names of all these saints are comparatively modern. ' These churches are (or were, as some of them are in ruins) : — I, Burnham Norton, St. Margaret ; 2, Burnham Overy, St. Clement ; 3, Burnham, St. Andrew ; 4, Burnham Sutton, St. Ethelbert ; 5, Burnham Ulph, All Saints ; 6, Burnham Westgate, B.V.M. ; 7, Burnham Thorpe, St. Peter (?). Burnham Deepdale, situated some three miles to the north-west of this group of seven churches, had probably no connexion with them, and was most likely a much later foundation.
- See Prof. George Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church (Longmans), lect. x, xi. See Dr. Joyce's Short
Hist, of Ireland, pt. 2, c. v. 215
