Three Men in a Boat

This is the text of the Inaugural Lecture of the first Professor of Palaeography in the history of the University of Cambridge. It contains an account of the institutional provision for the subject since 1892, and illustrates the interaction of manuscript-studies with those of history, language, and literature by discussing the role played by Gaelic ecclesiastical exiles in continental Europe - and especially in central Europe - in the ninth century. The interrelationships of a series of multilingual manuscripts, written mostly by Irish ecclesiastics, provides the principal evidence for this study of an important aspect of intellectual creativity and transmission of knowledge in the Carolingian world.