- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
people of husbandry', the other the aes dana 'the people of craft' .120 The aes dana
necessarily derived their sustenance from the aes trebtha, in exchange for which
they exercised crafts ranging from the skills of a smith to those of a poet-seer and a
teller of tales. Within the aes dana there was a restricted group of men skilled in words
- poets and scholars - and those whose sacramental or judicial functions
were exercised linguistically - priests and judges. All these crafts, both verbal and
non-verbal, were arranged in elaborate hierarchies of rank, the seven grades of
the poet-seer, the three of the judge, the seven of the clergy.12l Among the crafts
of the word, the minute distinctions of rank, based upon verbal skill, had immediate
linguistic consequences.
Among the 'scholastic colloquies' published by W.H. Stevenson, one, the
'Hisperic Colloquy', reveals the social and linguistic conditions under which a
Laitne6ir worked.^122 The colloquy is not solely Irish in background: the craftsmen
of the Latin word may move from one country to another within the British Isles.
The text therefore includes a passage in which a junior scholar from another land, a
discipulus peregrinus, approaches a master and his pupils. This device requires
the stranger to identify himself not merely as an individual but as a scholar. It
corresponds to the practice found both in Irish vernacular narrative and in Latin
Saints' Lives whereby the stranger is asked, usually by a king or other dignitary, to
identify himself. Particularly elaborate versions of this practice occur in Adomnan's
Life of St Columba;123 this custom of the world, therefore, lost nothing of its
significance in the monastery. In one of Adomnan's personal identifications the
stranger declares himself to be a student of scripture although he is not yet a monk.^124
In this way he reveals his conversatio, manner of life. The situation of the stranger in
the Hisperic Colloquy was, therefore, governed by recognized conventions. Yet until
the stranger has been securely placed within the social categories of the natives, the
relationship between the two sides - stranger and native -is uncertain and strained.
In the Hisperic Colloquy the consequence of this uncertain and strained relationship
is linguistic competition. Will the stranger's Latin put the disciples of the native
master to shame? Worst of all, could a foreign discipulus rival a native magister and
so shame not just individuals but an entire scholastic tradition?125 Such competitive-
ness and the extraordinarily elaborated language to which it gave rise is attested
both in the Hisperic Colloquy and in Aldhelm's letter to Heahfrith arguing the
inferiority of Irish scholarship to that offered at Canterbury by Theodore and
121 For the Church see the Col/ectio Canonum Hibernensis, ed. H. Wasserschleben, Die
irische Kanonensammlung (Leipzig, 1885), Books I-IX; Corpus furis Hibernici, ed. D.A.
Binchy (Dublin, 1978), 2269.35-227°.5, 2279.16-29; for the poets see Uraicecht na Riar,
ed. L. Breatnach (Dublin, 1987).
122 W.H. Stevenson, Early Scholastic Colloquies (Oxford, 1929), 12-20; what follows is
heavily dependent on M. Winterbottom, 'On the Hisperica Famina', Celtica 8 (1968):
126-39·
123 e.g. 1.2, 11.39, ed. A.O. and M.O. Anderson, Adomnan's Life of Columba (revised edn,
Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford, 1991), pp. 20,154.
12 41.2.
125 See esp. the foreign pupil's remarks, p. 14, lines 29-32, and the reply of the native pupil,
lines 33-4.