The relative scale of Aldhelm of Malmesbury's indebtedness to Irish, as opposed to Continental, intellectual influences has long been a vexed question. Dismissed by the previous generation of Anglo-Saxon scholars as hopelessly 'Hisperic' and obscurantist, Aldhelm has been reclaimed by this generation as 'the first English man-of-letters'. An untoward consequence of this restoration of Aldhelm's native standing, however, has been a Hiberno-sceptical depreciation, amounting to a denial, of any Irish influence on Aldhelm. This study, primarily through a close reading of writings by or associated with Aldhelm, redresses the balance. The tradition of Aldhelm's early schooling under Irish tutelage is substantiated. This educational grounding was apparently so thorough that it produced in Aldhelm-once he had been exposed, as a mature student, to the intellectual riches of the school at Canterbury of Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian-a nativist backlash that emerged in the abusive allusions directed at Irish scholars and scholarship that pepper virtually all of his writings.