ABSTRACT
Although Julius Caesar mentions large schools run by druids for the youth of Celtic Gaul in the first century b.c.e., we know little or nothing about the education of poets and other men of learning in early Ireland before the eighth century c.e. Around this period, Liam Breatnach has argued, higher grades of poet, the filid, became differentiated from the oral “bards” by their literacy. They used written Old Irish texts to pursue studies of grammar, versification, genealogy and history that were closely modeled on the Latin curriculum of the church schools in early medieval Ireland. Almost every scholar of native learning recorded in the annals before 1200, whether poet (fili), expert in Irish traditional history (senchae), or judge of customary law (brethem), is identifiable as a cleric, or a teacher in a church school. However from the late tenth to the twelfth centuries, the annals also notice a few learned court poets, some of whose verses in praise of Irish kings still survive. A number of their surnames, Ua Cuill (Quill), Ua Sléibín (Slevin), and Mág Raith (Magrath) recur in the later Middle Ages, showing their descendants continued to practice the same hereditary art. During this transitional “Middle Irish” period, the distinction between literate filid and oral bards was lost. The best of the bards became literate, while filid lost their connection to the church schools after the twelfth-century reform of ecclesiastical organization in Ireland. New orders of Augustinian canons and Cistercian monks ran schools for their novices, which had no place for the study of Irish genealogies or customary law.
