ABSTRACT
Secular life and secular standards had established a firm lodging in the monasteries, and the church was out to attract wealthy men to its shrines. It might be supposed that this would lower the general level of spiritual life. When the Viking settlements in Ireland began, the invaders were heathen whose terrifyingly savage behaviour might have been expected to earn them lasting hatred from their victims, but less than a hundred and fifty years later a Viking chief was ending his life in pilgrimage on Iona. The literature of the tenth and eleventh centuries shows a much closer combination of interest between the lay world and the clerics than did the ecclesiastical literature of the pre-Viking age. The Book of Kells, written and illuminated before the scriptoria felt the full effects of Viking depredations, is the master piece of Irish book production, showing a dramatic power and delight in fantasy, which qualities are ordered with consummate technical skill.
