From Ireland the art of illuminating manuscripts was carried by monkish colonists to the Western coasts of Scotland, and especially to the Island of Iona, where a monastery had been founded by Saint Columba in the latter part of the sixth century[66]. Great numbers of manuscripts resembling in style the _Book of Kells_ were produced in Iona; and offshoots from the monastery of Iona, established at various places on the mainland, became similar centres for the writing of richly decorated manuscripts. No less than thirteen monasteries in Scotland and twelve in England were founded by Irish monks from the mother settlement in Iona. In fact the whole of Britain seems to have owed its Christianity, during the Anglo-Saxon period, to the Irish missionaries from Iona, with the important exception of the kingdom of Kent, which was occupied by the Roman mission of Saint Augustine. _Celtic missionaries._ In the year 635, at the request of Oswald King of Northumbria, the Scottish king sent an Irish monk from Iona, named Aidan, to preach Christianity to the Northumbrian worshippers of Thor and Odin. Aidan selected the little island of Lindisfarne as the head-quarters of his missionary church, which, at first consisting mainly of a few Irish monks from Iona, rapidly grew in size and importance. In a few years, Saint Aidan, Bishop and Abbot of Lindisfarne, was able to establish a number of monastic houses throughout the Northumbrian Kingdom, and his own Abbey of Lindisfarne became one of the chief centres of Northern Europe for the production of fine illuminated manuscripts of the Celtic type. After the death of Saint Aidan other Irish monks succeeded him as Bishop of Lindisfarne, and the school of manuscript illumination continued to flourish. _Gospels of St Cuthbert._ One of the most beautiful existing examples of the Lindisfarne branch of the Irish school of miniature work is the famous "Book of the Gospels of Saint Cuthbert[67]" as it is called, now in the British Museum (_Cotton manuscripts, Nero_, D. IV). The history of this manuscript is a very curious one; it was written some years after Saint Cuthbert's death in 688, not during his lifetime as was formerly believed. Eadfrith, a monk of Lindisfarne in Saint Cuthbert's time, and subsequently eighth Bishop of Lindisfarne (698 to 721), was the writer of these _Gospels_, "in honour of God and of Saint Cuthbert," as he records in a note. The illuminations were added by the monk Aethelwold, afterwards ninth Bishop of Lindisfarne, and the elaborate gold, gem-studded cover of this magnificent _textus_ was the work of a third monk of the same Abbey named Bilfrith. _Viking piracy._ _Travels of the Gospels._