ility, the
origin of the double monastery need not be sought, as has been supposed,
in Ireland, since it seems to have been known in Gaul before S.
Columbanus and his Irish disciples landed there and preached a great
religious revival, at the end of the C6. Indeed, though there are
scattered notices in the lives of the Irish saints, which seem to
suggest that there were double monasteries in Ireland in very early
times, there is no definite evidence until the description in
Cogitosus's "Life of S. Bridget," of one at Kildare, probably in the C8.
The monasteries actually founded by S. Columbanus himself, were all for
men.

On the other hand, the double monastery seems always to have flourished
wherever the fervour of the Irish missionaries penetrated. Perhaps, as
Montalembert[14] suggests, the ideal atmosphere of divine simplicity and
single-mindedness which characterised them, was particularly favorable
to the growth of such an institution.

S. Columbanus dedicated Burgundofara, or Fara, as a child, to the
religious life; and she afterwards founded the monastery of Brie to the
south-east of Paris, which we learn from Jonas, who was a monk there,
and from Bede, was a double monastery.

It is clear that this house was one of those ruled by an abbess, for
Jonas says that no distinction was recognised between the sexes, and
that the abbess treated both alike. The discipline here, however, seems
to have been very severe, for he adds that some of the new nuns tried to
escape by ladders from the dormitory. Brie is interesting to us as
forming one of the links between Continental and English monasticism at
this time. Bede says of the daughter of Erconberht, King of Kent, "She
was a most virtuous maiden, always serving God in a monastery in France,
built by a most noble abbess, Fara by name, at a place called Brie; for
at that time, but few monasteries being built in the country of the
Angles, many were wont, for the sake of monastic conversation, to repair
to the monasteries of the Franks or Gauls; and they also sent their
daughters there to be educated and given to their Heavenly Bridegroom,
especially in the monasteries of Brie, Chelles, and Andelys."[15]

He adds that two daughters of King Anna of East Anglia, "though
strangers, were for their virtue made abbesses of the monastery of
Brie."

Little is known of Andelys, except that it was founded by Queen
Clotilda. At Chelles, founded by Queen Bathilda in 662, ten miles