The Irish school of writing, after its triumphs of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, lost much of its home-life in the midst of the struggles with the Norsemen. In England and on the continent its influence was still felt for some time longer; even in the thirteenth century many of the Psalters produced by English illuminators have the initial letter B decorated in the style adopted from the Irish six centuries before. Irish MSS. of any age are excessively rare; even the comparatively worthless transcripts of the eighteenth century are in no inconsiderable request. The English school continued to blend its Irish style of writing with the illustrative pictures and borders which may have been entirely of native production in the eighth century, as was seemingly the fact, or may have originated from the artistic tendencies of Frankish Gaul, as has already been surmised. They were, in any case, influenced to some degree by examples of late Roman work, introduced by the Italian missionaries who came to convert the Saxons of South England after the Angles of the north had been converted by the Irish monks of Iona. It was really this English phase of decorative art which blossomed into Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century. The French schools were still Carolingian and splendid, but their pre-eminence was not maintained after the breaking up of the empire of Charles the Great. The revolutions of the ninth century led to the making of nations. France ceased to be the Gallo-Roman province of a Frankish monarchy. A French language and a French nation emerged into existence in the tenth century, but the grand ornamental and calligraphic work of the Franco-Gallic time was no longer equalled. The Caroline writing, which attained its greatest beauty about the middle of the {50}ninth century, gradually lost its elegant boldness, tending towards angularity and crampness when the eleventh century had begun. _Scandinavian Writing_ The Scandinavian countries have not yet been alluded to specifically. The immense quantity of Runic monuments found in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, of all ages, and in England, of and after the Norse period, proves that Runic writing was almost exclusively Scandinavian. There is now no question as to the actual origin of the Runic alphabets. They came into existence, as already said, by reason of the necessities of the amber-traffic between the coast of the Baltic and the Crimea long before the time of Christ; but what has survived belongs to the monuments of the North. The real age of the extant runes does not probably exceed the fifth century. That they were prized as national characteristics seems to be proved by their continued use among the Northmen, even after they had come into collision with a superior civilisation in the British isles.