THE CHRISTIAN REALMS 243of Beja and Isidore. He had enjoyed royal patronage, notably from
Queen Adosinda the daughter of Alfonso I and wife of King Silo,
until his benefactress was forced into monastic retirement by the
death of that monarch in 783. The fairly substantial literary resources
that Beatus had at his disposal were possibly those of a royal library.
Not until the later ninth century, when Leon became the benefi-
ciary of the movement of books from the south of the peninsula that
accompanied the migration of the Mozarabs, does more evidence as
to the intellectual culture of the kingdom emerge. The main influx
of texts to supplement those that had survived from the Visigothic
period probably took place at this time. A list of books appended to
a manuscript dated 882 probably records one such import of works
from Cordoba, which may have been part of the collection once
formed by Eulogius, whose relics were transported to the Asturias in
the same year. The list includes poetic texts as well as grammatical
and exegetical ones. Adding to this the books whose existence is
recorded in wills, notably that made in 927 by Bishop Cixila of Leon
in favour of his monastery of Abeliare, a substantial number of works
can be seen to have been available in the tenth-century Leonese
kingdom, including the poetry of Virgil, Juvenal, Avitus, Dracontius,
Corippus and A1dhelm.^30 Some of the manuscripts in question may
have started their wanderings in the Carolingian Empire.
However, the greatest quantity of books referred to in these sources
were liturgical. One manuscript of Virgil hardly makes a 'Renais-
sance', and most of the texts in Leonese and Galician monasteries
were of strictly practical use, being either service books or aids to the
study of scripture. A few monasteries, such as Abeliare, can be seen
to have possessed a large and varied selection of books, but the majority
are likely to have had only a handful and those being of strictly
utilitarian value. However, all of these houses may have provided
some level of education, not only for boys placed within their walls as
future monks but also for the children of the aristocracy, amongst
whose ranks literacy does not seem totally unknown. Clerics and royal
clerks, such as the notary and historian Sampiro, must have received
their training in monasteries or in episcopal households, which might
be, as in the case of Bishop Cixila and Abeliare, indistinguishable. In
very few cases is it likely that such education extended beyond the
ability to write and some acquaintance with liturgy and parts of the
scriptures.
Monasteries, together with a small number of noble families, the