The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (7 page)

The success of Columbanus’s new monasteries, complete with monks tonsured in the Irish style, proved unsettling to the bishops of the Frankish Church. Resentment simmered until the tension finally came to a head in a major ecclesiastical dispute over the precise dating of Easter. Calculating the correct and proper date of Easter was (and remains) a complicated process: and in the sixth and seventh centuries, although the European Church had come to a degree of accord on this vexed matter, the Irish Church continued to work along different lines. A century later, Bede would remember an epistle from Honorius I (pope from 625 to 638) to the Irish, whom ‘he found to have erred over the keeping of Easter…urging them with much shrewdness not to consider themselves, few as they were and placed on the extreme boundaries of the world, wiser than the ancient and modern Church of Christ scattered throughout the earth; nor should they celebrate a different Easter contrary to the pastoral tables and the decrees of the bishops of all the world met in synod’.
¹⁵
Columbanus held to the Irish model, with the result that his European monasteries celebrated Easter at a quite different time from that of their neighbours. In an age when the smallest degree of ecclesiastical difference could be regarded as heresy, his major deviation from European tradition gave Columbanus’s enemies an opportunity to attack.

Columbanus himself, displaying his trademark scorn for diplomatic niceties, had in fact already challenged Pope Gregory the Great to abandon the European model of calculation in favour of the Irish one – and in 603 he was summoned to account for his heresy before the Frankish bishops. Columbanus viewed these clerics with the utmost contempt: to him they were a caste of soft, self-important churchmen, satisfied with ministering only to the elite. So he simply refused to go, sending instead a letter that was stinging and calculated to offend: ‘I, Columba the sinner, forward greetings in Christ. I render thanks to my God, that for my sake so many holy men have been gathered together to treat of the truth of faith and good works, and, as befits such, to judge of the matters under dispute with a just judgment, through senses sharpened to the discernment of good and evil. Would that you did so more often…’.
¹⁶
In such texts, Columbanus proved his reputation as an abrasive and confrontational personality. His letter, employing beautifully crafted Latin, went on to take the bishops to task for their materialism, adultery, lack of industry and interference with his holy mission.

But someone will say: Are we really not entering the kingdom of heaven? Why can you not by the Lord’s grace, if you become as little children, that is, humble and chaste, simple-hearted, and guileless in
evil, [yet]
wise in goodness, easy to be entreated and not retaining anger in your heart? But all these things can very hardly be fulfilled by those who often look at women and who more often quarrel and grow angry over the riches of the world.
¹⁷

Having flayed the bishops thus, Columbanus appealed again to the pope, reaffirming his loyalty to Rome and asking to be left in peace. The dispute between the Irish and European Churches over the dating of Easter would not be completely settled until the Synod of Whitby in 664, but it appears that the resolve of the papacy cracked first. Columbanus’s monasteries continued to follow the Irish tradition; and their leader maintained an erudite and sometimes familiar correspondence with various popes, who seem to have permitted him to live and work as he pleased.

The local situation, however, became increasingly difficult. Columbanus had already offended the clergy; and eventually his uncompromising morality would result in offence to the civil authorities too. In particular, his refusal to bless the bastard offspring of the Merovingian monarch Theuderic (‘You ought to know that they will not receive the royal sceptres, because they have been born to whores’
¹⁸
) had serious consequences: he not only offended the king but threatened the stability of the realm – and his comments appear to have been the last straw for the authorities, already irked by Columbanus’s insistence on having his own way in every single matter, large or small. His loyal converts would continue to live by the Rule (although in the years following his death his monasteries quietly fell into line in the much-disputed matter of the timing of Easter) but the Irish monk himself – after a threat of deportation to Ireland was eventually lifted – was banished from Burgundy and forced once more into exile.

Columbanus spent two years wandering through what are now France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and as he went, he continued with the Lord’s work by conducting a campaign of destruction of pagan sites and disruption of ceremonies. His decision to direct his footsteps towards Italy, however, eventually created dissension amongst his followers. He quarrelled bitterly with his oldest friend, Gall, who would, as a result, remain in the Alps to spread the Christian message and become in the process the founding father of the Swiss Church. After his death, the great monastery named in his honour – at St Gallen, in northeast Switzerland – would play a crucial intellectual role in the evolution of the Swiss nation. Columbanus himself reached Milan in 1612 and, after interceding in a dispute between King Agilulf of the Lombards and Pope Boniface, was granted by a grateful monarch a piece of land in the Apennines between Milan and Genoa. Columbanus transformed a cavern here at Bobbio into a small chapel and his last days were spent in prayer.

His legacy would prove to be an enduring one. Possessed as he was of a harsh view of faith, Columbanus had been, in his own words, a ‘dissenter whenever necessary’. But he also exemplified the rigorous levels of scholarship that could be found in the Irish monasteries of the day, and he bequeathed an extensive body of work: his masterful scripts and sermons testify to his education, paying homage as they do to such classical writers as Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal. He was the first to conceive of Europe as a cultural entity in its own right; the first to express in writing a sense of a specifically Irish identity; and the first Irishman to leave a lasting impression in the world beyond his native island.

Bobbio itself became the greatest of his monasteries, developing in time into a centre of learning and scholarship. In its scriptorium, surrounded by books and manuscripts illuminated in Ireland, generations of European scholars would learn to read and write in Latin. His teaching monastery at Luxeuil, meanwhile, would produce hundreds of young scholars, who would follow his example and spread the gospel throughout pagan Europe; twenty-one of its students would be canonized. At least sixty monasteries were founded in his name across the continent: by the ninth century, Irish scholars had begun to follow the pioneering missionaries and to gain important academic roles in the courts of monarchs such as Charlemagne; and Irish foundations could be found across a great swathe of western and central Europe. The work accomplished by Columbanus and his evangelizing successors helped to disseminate Latin literature in western Europe, and in the process to underpin the future development of Europe’s rich array of national languages and literatures.

The sea which carried the monks from Ireland to Europe from the sixth century onward, however, would in later centuries carry other travellers too: warriors sailing from the cold north to haunt the sleep of Christians throughout the continent. The experience in Ireland would be no different.

Chapter Two

Landfall

This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians…terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.
¹

In the year 793, the monks on Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast looked out to sea and saw a fleet of small, nimble ships come swiftly out of the northeast. The authorities at Lindisfarne, if the hysterical accounts of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
are to be believed, must have been anticipating some horror or other to fall upon them – and so it came to pass. These ships were filled with warriors from western Scandinavia, who landed on the stony shores of the island and proceeded to burn the buildings and plunder the store of precious goods that had been built up at the monastery in the century and half of its existence. It was but the first of many such raids, which resulted in the forced abandonment of Lindisfarne a century later and marked the advent of the Viking age in northwestern Europe.

Until this time the people of Scandinavia had had their own rich resources of timber, cattle and fish to exploit, and had tended to keep themselves to themselves. Now, though, they were bursting from their homelands and moving east into the heart of Russia, south towards Germany and the Mediterranean, and west into the Atlantic. There were a variety of reasons for this change: in the case of Norway, overpopulation combined with an increasing sense of the fragile fertility of their sea-girt valleys; new shipbuilding technologies that enabled longer and more ambitious voyages to be undertaken; and a gradually warming climate that stretched the sailing seasons and made these voyages less perilous. Norway, moreover, was the poorest region of Scandinavia and – like Ireland itself – lacked any degree of political unity. The mariners overseas, therefore, were individuals impelled by family and local loyalties and were seeking wealth and stability for themselves and their communities. In the end, then, it was the Norwegians of all the Scandinavians who made the most spectacular voyages, pressing west through bitter seas to Iceland and Greenland and finally across the Atlantic to Newfoundland.

Word of the cataclysmic raid on Lindisfarne spread quickly from community to community, from Northumbria to Iona and across the water-knit territory of Dál Ríata to Ireland. The records speak of a rising apprehension and of similarly strange phenomena as noted in the
Chronicle
: a blood-red moon; heavy snows falling after Easter. Two years after the raid on Lindisfarne, Viking longships appeared in Irish waters. Centuries later, when the tale of these years was written down, unceremonious chroniclers memorialized the event. ‘Devastation of all the islands of Britain and Ireland,’ noted the
Annals of Ulster
laconically on the burning of the monastery on the island of Rathlin. And so began a pattern of attack and plunder on the hosts of monasteries built on indefensible sites all along the coastline.
²
In 802 and 806 the Vikings attacked Iona itself: in the latter raid sixty-eight monks were killed, and in response the Columban federation of monasteries began construction of a new Irish foundation well inland in County Meath, carrying from Iona the precious Book of Kells.

By the middle of the ninth century, Viking ships had scouted out the entire coast of Ireland – even Skellig Michael, the most isolated and austere of Ireland’s monasteries, found itself under attack in 824. Little wonder that a clerical scribe could look out across a wintry sea and smile:

Bitter is the wind tonight,

It tosses the ocean’s white hair.

Tonight I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway

Coursing on the Irish Sea.
³

And as in Ireland, so it was across northwestern Europe: in France, where in 843 the dreadful sack of Nantes by the Norsemen led to slaughter on a vast scale; in England, where Saxon London was attacked and burned in 851; in Wales, where the Vikings fell upon fertile Anglesey in 853; and in many other places besides. And there were other consequences to this Viking activity. The political cohesion of Dál Ríata, for example, had long been under strain: the increasing sense of the island of Ireland as a distinct cultural entity was loosening the ties that bound northeastern Ireland and southwestern Scotland; the Scottish half of the kingdom was becoming an increasingly important player in specifically British affairs; and the increasing Viking control of the sea lanes now made communications between Scotland and Ireland more and more difficult. Before long, the two halves of the territory had gone their separate ways; and the Scottish half would gradually coalesce with Pictish society to form the embryonic kingdom of Scotland.

It proved almost impossible at first to defend against the Vikings’ tactics. Their small, agile ships could appear and disappear rapidly, long before any resistance could be mustered against them. They were, moreover, shallow-draughted and thus able to nose up many of Ireland’s rivers: soon, they had made the Shannon and other waterways their own; fleets were based on lakes across the country, and not even such wealthy and powerful inland monasteries as Birr, Clonfert and Clonmacnoise – the last of which was torched in 835 – were safe from assault. In 837, two great fleets of sixty-five ships sailed up the rivers Liffey and Boyne; and at the end of the summer of 841, for the first time the Vikings on Lough Neagh did not go home but instead pulled their longships out of the water, signalling their intention to winter on the lake. Nor were the treasure and grain stores of the monasteries their only goals: in 821, Viking ships raided the harbour at Howth on the northern edge of Dublin Bay and seized great numbers of women – slaves and thralls being as valuable to the Vikings as they were to the Irish.

These ferocious Norsemen have come down to us as very demons from hell – for so they must have appeared to the monks and scribes who recorded the history of these years and who saw their achievements and their very civilization suddenly under attack. The shock of the Viking arrival had much to do with the expansive nature of their warfare: the wars carried by the Irish from
túath
to
túath
were often highly localized in nature, often involving no more than cattle raiding, and the local inhabitants became adept at getting quickly and quietly out of the way. The Vikings, on the other hand, were driven implacably by economic survival, and their methods were much more brutal.