All of the more important schools had students from foreign lands. An English bishop, writing in the year 705, says that they came in "fleet loads" from Great Britain and the Continent. Many of them were princes of royal houses. Several of the early kings of France and other countries were educated in Ireland, which was for three or four centuries the most learned country in the world. Great numbers of Irishmen were employed as professors and teachers in the schools and colleges of England and the Continent. Charlemagne, Charles the Bold, and other monarchs of the Middle Ages called learned men from Ireland as guests and as tutors in their courts, and the influence of Irish scholars was greater than that of those from any other country. For four or five hundred years after the time of St. Patrick the monasteries of Ireland were the center and source of science, and art and learning of every kind and the literature of the Gaelic reached its highest glory. The Danish invasion destroyed these conditions and threw everything into disorder. The monasteries were sacked, the monks were scattered, the students fled to their homes, and the development of learning and art suddenly was arrested. There was another revival during the reign of Brian Boru, but that was interrupted by the Anglo-Norman invasion, and Irish learning never again reached its previous fame. During the Reformation all the monasteries throughout Ireland except in a few remote districts were suppressed. More than four hundred were entirely destroyed and their inmates were turned out upon the world by the agents of Henry VIII. Cromwell's governors were even more severe and cruel, and the parliaments of 1692 and 1695 passed penal laws forbidding the Catholic children of the country to be educated, either in schools or in private houses. Education practically came to a standstill, although many Irish Protestants all through the country did a great deal in a quiet way to provide instruction for the children of Catholic friends and neighbors. The Relief Act of 1782 allowed Roman Catholics to open schools of their own, and the present national system, inaugurated in 1831, afforded means of education for children of all denominations under the supervision of their own priests, although members of different denominations are required to receive religious instruction separately and interference with the religious principles of any child is forbidden. From that time to the present the number of schools has been gradually extended, their efficiency has been improved, and the government appropriations for education have been slowly increased from year to year. The schools of Ireland are now governed by an act of parliament passed in 1892, and Dr. W.M.J. Starkie, national commissioner of education, explained the system to me as follows: