The nuns of Ste. Croix, too, seem not to have been lacking in generosity. Fortunatus frequently thanks them for gifts of eggs, fruit, milk, etc.; and on one occasion he receives more dishes than one servant could carry. He must have stood in some official relation to Rhadagund, for such freedom of intercourse to be possible; and if his verses sometimes suggest the courtier rather than the monk, it must be remembered that they are the work of a poet who had first been a friend of princes and was among the most fashionable men of letters of his day in Ravenna; and that they are addressed to a woman who was, after all, a queen. In 587 Rhadagund died and Bishop Gregory of Tours tells how greatly she was mourned by the whole community, and how some 200 women crowded round her bier, bewailing their loss. One of them, the nun Baudonivia, several years afterwards, cannot, she says, even speak of the death of Rhadagund without being choked with sobs.[13] It will be seen from these examples, that in all probability, 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.