_Memorials of St. Dunstan_ (R.S.), pp. 391-395), to our knowledge of
the routes of travellers contemporary with Malachy, and to the rare
mention in the _Life_ of places through which he passed, we can follow
him almost step by step from Canterbury to Rome and back. He probably
sailed from Dover, and landed on the French coast at or near Wissant.
Thence he went by Arras, Rheims, Chalons-sur-Marne, Bar-sur-Aube,
Lausanne, Martigny, and over the Great St. Bernard to Ivrea. Then he
followed the beaten tract through Vercelli, Pavia, Piacenza,
Pontremoli, Lucca and Viterbo to Rome. On the whole journey, from
Bangor to Rome and back, the company traversed about 3000 miles on
land, besides crossing the sea four times. Allowing for stoppages at
Rome, Clairvaux and elsewhere, and for a weekly rest on Sunday,
Malachy must have been absent from Ireland about nine months. For
details see _R.I.A._ xxxv. 238 ff. The marginal dates are based on
that investigation, and are to be regarded merely as approximations.

[538] Ps. cxix. 14.

[539] Gen. xxxiii. 10, etc.

[540] Pref. Sec. 2.

[541] Malachy probably "turned aside" from the main road at
Bar-sur-Aube, from which Clairvaux is distant eight miles. A few words
may be said about this famous monastery and its first abbot. Bernard,
the son of a nobleman named Tescelin and his saintly wife Aleth, whose
memory exercised a powerful influence on the lives of her children,
was born at Fontaines, a mile or two from Dijon, in 1090. In Oct. 1111
he persuaded his brothers and many of his friends to embrace the
religious life. Early in the following year the whole band, thirty in
number, entered the austere and now declining community which had been
established in 1098 at Citeaux, twelve miles from Dijon. Their arrival
was the beginning of the prosperity of the great Cistercian Order. In
1115 Bernard was sent out, with some brothers, by the abbot, Stephen
Harding, to found a daughter house on the river Aube, in a valley
which had once been known, from its desolation, as the Valley of
Wormwood. After incredible hardships a monastery was built, and the
place was so transformed by the labours of the monks that henceforth
it deserved its newer name of Clara Vallis, or Clairvaux. The
community rapidly increased in numbers; and in 1133, in spite of the
opposition of the abbot when the proposal was first made, the building
of a large monastery on a different site was begun. It was probably
far adv