The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (5 page)

From the very earliest times his life and legacy were being shaped towards specific ends, and this can best be seen in his long-standing association with Ulster. According to tradition, Patrick’s ministry was at its most active in the northeast of the country: in particular at Armagh, close to the ancient political centre of Emain Macha (Navan Fort), and at Downpatrick. From the seventh century onward, the ecclesiastical authorities at Armagh were intent on asserting ownership of this saint and his legacy, the better to bolster their claim to supremacy over the Irish Church – and they did not hesitate to resort to invention when the facts of Patrick’s life let them down. Parts of the Book of Armagh, for example, were claimed to have been written by Patrick himself – although the earliest passages in the volume in fact date from the ninth century, long after the saint’s death. Other sections contain copies of narratives – originally written in the seventh century by the clerics Muirchú and Tírechán – which set out to glorify Patrick and his mission. Yet another section – entitled
Liber angeli
, or the Book of the Angel – describes a celestial messenger proclaiming Patrick’s status both as apostle of all the Irish and as first Bishop of Armagh, thus underscoring the monastery’s claims to primacy. In the face of this urgent political quest, the less politically relevant story of Palladius was bound to be set aside.

The developing cult of Patrick swept all before it – and yet aspects of the man’s personality can still be glimpsed. He was nothing if not worldly: very keen, for example, to emphasize his status as a bishop. Nor did he underplay the dangers he faced as a missionary in a land that was only tentatively opening up to his message: he was physically threatened, and came to understand the importance of ‘gifts’, or bribes, in smoothing his relationships with a plethora of petty Irish kings. Patrick was a pragmatist, in other words – one of many practical figures and budding politicians who dominated the dangerous world of the early Christian Church. He fully understood the importance of political patronage and of alliance-building with the myriad rulers of each
túath
or small Irish kingdom; an early tradition speaks of Patrick and St Declan of Ardmore, in what is now County Waterford, coming together to select the new king of the region. And Patrick was well matched in this world by these same political rulers, who recognized that the new religion could be turned to other uses. For such tribal kings, the arrival of the new faith held out the prospect of connection with a wider world, with its new ideas and potential for advancement. They could also work in conjunction with the Church to pass laws, legitimize their authority and control the people for their own purposes. The aims and aspirations of Church and local rulers began to fuse.

The new Church ploughed the energy of his supporters into the foundation of churches – hundreds of them, established at local level all over Ireland. These first places of worship may have been very small, simple affairs – buildings of wood or stone that could accommodate no more than a few dozen people – but they were instrumental in maintaining and extending Christian influence: such churches began to form the focus of local identity, their priests able increasingly to wield power over their communities. A machinery of governance thus came gradually into existence, as the Church began the long process of defending and advancing its own aims in a variety of ways.

The physical evidence of a pagan Ireland began to fade and was smoothly absorbed into the new Christian rite. The distinctive aspects of Irish society – its tribal kingship, its clannish culture, the place of the druids, the honoured role of the poet class – were utilized as points of contact between the new religion and the immeasurably old. The result was that a template of new belief was laid upon the ancient one, with results that can still be discerned today. The figure of the Christian patroness Brigit, for example, was grafted on to an older pagan entity – and places of spiritual potency and pilgrimage were similarly recycled and remoulded to a new Christian use. ‘There by dim wells’, writes the poet Austin Clarke, ‘the women tied/A wish on thorn’
⁵
– and, indeed, the holy wells and wishing trees that still exist today across the landscape of Ireland offer good examples of such ideological colonization.

Patrick died late in the fifth century, with the Church already deeply rooted in Irish society. The legends of the patron saint’s magical duels and miracles have persisted throughout the centuries – but, although this ‘most adaptable of saints’ has been a consistent focus of propaganda, his material legacy owes little or nothing to spin.
⁶
Instead, it is a substantial thing in its own right, and Patrick himself emerges as a complex and compelling character: at once a relatively unpolished man of provincial stock, a former slave with an unparalleled insight into the culture of his former captors, a passionate evangelist and a canny political operator who was able to establish foundations of tremendous durability for his Church.

Patrick’s status as a foreigner, a newcomer on the Irish cultural scene, moreover, places him within what was already a long-established tradition in Irish culture: one of porousness, of openness to overseas influence – a tradition that sprang from long years of inward migration, travel, and human and economic relationships. In the centuries preceding Patrick’s abduction Ireland had already been thoroughly probed, with the Greeks and later the Romans coming to a good understanding of its geographical position, topography, resources and relative worth. Irish exports of butter and cattle were prized; and merchants and entrepreneurs crossed from Gaul and Britain in search of trading opportunities. In the second century the island appears in the
Geographia
, the famous and influential atlas of the world compiled by the Alexandrian scientist and cartographer Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus). Ptolemy certainly never visited Ireland, but he was able to access the reports of sailors, traders and policymakers that circulated through the Roman Empire; and the island’s presence in the
Geographia
signifies its secure place in the Roman imagination.

In their turn, the Irish imported Mediterranean wines, oils and other indicators of ease and luxury; and they slowly absorbed, too, over the centuries, aspects of the culture of the outside world. In so doing, they altered inexorably the history of their own island – a process that finds its apotheosis in the coming of Christianity. As Patrick was setting out on his mission in Ireland, however, this outside world was itself transforming: and, as the Roman Empire imploded in the course of the fifth century, so the Irish began the process of writing a new cultural history – one that would stand the test of time.

The decline of the Roman Empire in the west had been slow, but the end when it came was relatively sudden and shocking: within a century of the first Germanic invasions across the Rhine, Roman civilization was barely a memory; Rome itself had been sacked by Alaric and his Visigoths in August 410. Across the continent of Europe, a patchwork of small feudal kingdoms fought with each other; the citizens of Italy and Gaul were now serfs; and even the Church faced a struggle to survive. The great continental libraries and repositories of knowledge began to decay and literacy to decline, as this epitaph from the bishop historian St Gregory of Tours in the sixth century testifies: ‘In these times when the practice of letters declines, no, rather perishes in the cities of Gaul, there has been found no scholar trained in ordered composition to present in prose or verse a picture of the things which have befallen.’
⁷

Relatively few written accounts of contemporary life survived these centuries in Europe. In Ireland, however, the cultural tides were running in the opposite direction, as the oral tradition began, from the sixth century onward, to give way to the written word. It was at this time that the most detailed records of everyday life began to be maintained, listing everything from tribal conflict to the weather, from outbreaks of plague and its fatalities to laws, poetry, hymns and prose. And as literacy throve, so too did Patrick’s Irish Church, assisted by its ability to adapt smoothly to local circumstances. Each Irish
túath
, for example, had its own bishop to oversee affairs; these arrangements replaced the structure of dioceses that were the basic building blocks of Church administration in Europe. This differing Irish practice was one of many that would cause persistent grumbles in Rome in the centuries to come. Moreover, these bishops were not, as was the case elsewhere, the ultimate wielders of authority – for in Ireland, final authority lay elsewhere.

From the beginning of the sixth century a network of monasteries began to develop in the Irish countryside, and the abbots that ran them became increasingly powerful figures. The earliest monastic foundations tended at first not to be of the church-and-cloisters model that would appear later, in the Middle Ages. Rather, they would consist of an enclosure with a small stone chapel and a number of cells in which the monks lived individually. By their nature, some were in the most remote areas imaginable: Skellig Michael, for example, which clung to its crag of rock in the stormy Atlantic 20 km (12 miles) off the coast of County Kerry. But other monasteries were rather more worldly: although ostensibly places of retreat from the world, they frequently had ample resources at their disposal. As a result, they attracted the patronage of kings and the wealthy: their abbots became wielders of temporal power in their own right and many lived in the style of the country’s temporal rulers, in the midst of wealth and (relative) comfort. Many monasteries also owned great swathes of land, thus controlling the economic destiny of much of the population and providing employment and distributing alms to the inhabitants; the monks of Armagh, for example, had a good deal of land not only in Ulster but across Munster and Meath too.

In the process, these institutions were responsible for a novelty on the Irish scene: prototype towns. After all, a good many hired workers, craftsmen, farmhands and artisans were employed by the monasteries, all of them requiring working and sleeping quarters; there were in addition populations of serfs – little better than slaves – bound to each institution; and as a result, clusters of buildings developed around each site. These settlements would typically contain orchards, beehives, physic gardens and all the paraphernalia of large farms, as well as markets, housing and places of instruction and incarceration. A seventh-century description of the wealthy monastery at Kildare offers an insight into the form and nature of such places:

And what words are capable of setting forth the very great beauty of this church, and the countless wonders of that monastery which we may call a city
[civitas],
if it is possible to call a city that which is enclosed by no circle of walls? However, since numberless people congregate within it and since a city acquires its name from the assembly in it of many, this is a very great city and the seat of a metropolitan. No human foe nor enemy onset is feared in its suburbana, the clear boundaries of which the holy Brigit herself marked out. But it (together with all its church lands throughout the whole of Ireland) is the most secure city of refuge for its fugitives. The treasures of the king are kept there…
⁸

The fusion between religious and civil authorities in these localities is a theme that would recur throughout Irish history, with the nobility integrating the monastic institutions they established into their royal houses and domains. Each abbot was a powerful figure: as well as being the spiritual father of his monks, he was also the ruler of the community and the heir to the property. Family succession increasingly became the norm, the role of abbot passing to a member of the local ruling family. Such secularization saw certain abbots behaving like petty kings, declaring war on other monastic communities. Over a four-year period, for example, the monks of Clonmacnoise are recorded as going to war with the monasteries at both Birr and Durrow, in the process leaving more than two hundred dead. These conflicts tended to arise not from dry doctrinal dispute but from dynastic quarrels. And tribal connections also meant that monasteries were drawn into larger political conflicts: as the ambitious Uí Néill clan vied with the Ulaid for control of Ulster in the late eight and ninth centuries, so control of the abbacy of Armagh became a key political objective. During this period the rolls recording significant ecclesiastical positions provide a window into a wider political history, reflecting simply and clearly the shifting power balance between the ruling families in a given district of Ireland.

The growth of monasticism also has legal ramifications, as the monks’ connections to powerful clans helped bind secular and ecclesiastical law closer together. The educated, literate elite – though by no means always clerics themselves – now invariably received their education in a clerical context, and their world view was shaped accordingly: the law of the land would now be bound up with the law of the Church. The result was the creation of comprehensive legal works such as the
Collectio canonum hiberniensis
(700–750) with its views on everything from property and theft to marriage and inheritance rights. The country’s intricate collection of oral laws was now transcribed on to the page, and interpreted through an ecclesiastical prism. At the same time, the pre-Christian world – still so tangible in a newly Christianized Ireland – began to be interpreted and shaped in a different light: it was now regarded as the Old Testament past to a fully enlightened New Testament present.

In these turbulent years the monasteries managed to balance their political and economic roles with a flowering of creativity; and their workshops and dimly lit scriptoria became sites of remarkable industry.

Throughout the country, monks laboured over great manuscripts and books, and many of them rapidly achieved a very high level of scholarship, mastering Greek, Latin and the rudiments of Hebrew. Crucial to this process was the fact that Ireland had never been a part of the Roman Empire: its people had not been systematically Romanized, and Irish culture had therefore preserved ancient history, legend and stories intact. The character of Patrick’s distinctively
Irish
Church, moreover, now proved decisive: just as the saint and his followers had been adept at absorbing pagan ritual and feasts into the new Christian canon, so now Irish monks freely and enthusiastically drew on local language and idiom. The first written grammars and alphabet in Irish were devised, the ancient tongue in the process becoming the first written vernacular language in Europe.