A Saxon school had been established in Exeter before A.D. 700, to which S. Boniface, or Wynfrith as he was then called, had been sent. He was a native of Crediton, then a Saxon stockaded settlement, and over the palisades, as a boy, he had looked with scorn and hatred at the native Britons occupying the country. When he was in Exeter he, in like manner, regarded the native Christians with loathing as heretics, because they did not observe Easter on the same day as himself, and perhaps with accentuated hate, because he knew that they had possessed Christian teachers and Christian privileges three centuries before his own people had received the Gospel. Perhaps also his German mind was offended at the freshness, vivacity, and maybe as well the fickleness of purpose of the native Celt. This early acquired aversion lasted through life, and when he went into Germany and settled at Mainz, to posture as an apostle, he was vexed to discover that Celtic missionaries had preceded him and had worked successfully among his Teutonic forefathers in their old homes. Thenceforth he attacked, insulted, and denounced them with implacable animosity, and did his utmost to upset their missions and supplannt them with his own. Virgilius, an Irishman, with a fellow Paddy, Sidonius, was at Salzburg, and Virgilius was bishop there. Boniface beat about for an excuse to get rid of them both. He found that the bishop, having discovered that one of his priests had been accustomed to baptise using a bad Latin formula, had acknowledged this man's baptisms as valid, for the will was present: the fault was due to ignorance of the Latin tongue. Boniface, hearing of this, laid hold of it with enthusiasm, and denounced Virgilius at Rome. Pope Boniface, however, took the side of the Irishman against his over-zealous henchman. Mortified at this rebuff, Boniface lay in wait to find another excuse for ruining Virgilius. He ascertained presently that the Irishman taught that the earth was round, and that there was an antipodes to those living in Germany. Now the Irish schools were the most learned in Europe, and Irish saints had sailed far into the west over the Atlantic: they had formed their own opinions concerning the shape of the world. Boniface wrote to the Pope to denounce the doctrine of Virgilius as "perverse and unjust, uttered against God and his own soul." This doctrine Pope Zacharias hastened to condemn as heretical.[9] Virgilius had to go to Rome to justify his opinion before ignorant Latin ecclesiastics--with what results we do not know.