Map 7 The British Isles and the North Sea
In the same decades of the seventh century as saw the last triumphs of the East Roman empire in the Middle East and then its sudden collapse before Arab invaders, the northern peripheries of the Christian world took on a new and distinctive profile. Far to the north of Continental Europe and the Mediterranean, in the British Isles, in Scandinavia, and even further east, between the Baltic and the Black Sea, we meet societies in which new forms of power were being created, new religions were tested, and exotic goods avidly sought out. We see this most vividly in the great hoards which accompanied the burial of successful rulers. Over a thousand miles east of Rome and 700 miles north of Constantinople, one such grave was discovered at Malaia Pereščepina, in the Ukraine. It may be connected with a Bulgar prince, who, in the 630s, had played a crucial role in the diplomacy of the emperor Heraclius. It contained, in all, 20 kilograms of golden objects, gathered from Constantinople, the Balkans, Iran, and Central Asia.1 At the other end of Europe, overlooking the North Sea, the spectacular complex of Saxon burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, perched on the coast of Suffolk, is equally impressive in the variety of its objects, and in the mobilization of labor that must have gone into their creation. They were erected at some time after 650. The principal excavated mound contained a ship 26 meters long, weapons, and a selection of ornaments that showed contact with Denmark and southern Sweden, jewelry made from 4,000 garnet chips (such as would have required the full year’s labor of 17 skilled craftsmen to create), gold coins from Francia, spoons and a great silver dish from Constantinople, Romano-British enamels, and yellow silk from Syria. So magnificent a setting-aside of wealth to be given over forever to the earth echoed the sumptuous burial of Childeric, the pagan father of Clovis, which (as we saw in chapter 5) had taken place at Tournai a century previously. But there is one disturbing difference – recently discovered human skeletons arranged around another mound at Sutton Hoo imply, perhaps, that not only horses, but also human beings, were sacrificed on the occasion of a great royal burial.2
Map 7 The British Isles and the North Sea
THE BRITISH ISLES ca. 500–ca. 750
| Columba ca.520–597 founds Iona 565 | |
| Ethelbert king of Kent 580–616 Mission of Augustine to Kent 597 | |
| Edwin of Northumbria 616–633 Oswald of Northumbria 643–642 | |
| Foundation of Lindisfarne from Iona 634 | |
| Oswy of Northumbria 642–670 | |
| Synod of Whitby 664 | |
| Benedict Biscop 628–690 founds Jarrow and Wearmouth 674 and 685 | |
| Wilfrid of York 634–706 | |
| Theodore of Tarsus 602–690 Archbishop of Canterbury 668–690 | |
| Muirchú, Life of Saint Patrick 695 | |
| Caedmon ca. 680 | |
| Adomnán abbot of Iona 679–704 writes Life of Columba 697 imposes Law of Innocents 700 | |
| Compilation of the Senchas Már 720 | |
| Bede 672–735 writes Ecclesiastical History of the English People 731 | |
| Production of the Book of Kells ca.750 |
In the recent excavations of Gudme, on the island of Funen in Denmark, we can glimpse the sheer zest which went into the creation of such hoards. Gudme – the Place of the Gods – lay between the North Sea and the Baltic. It was placed where the land met the sea, the source of strange goods from over the water. It was dominated by a gigantic wooden hall (of 500 square meters – as large as a sizable Christian church) surrounded by the workshops of craftsmen. In these workshops, an unprecedented range of foreign objects (gathered by plunder, tribute, or gift-exchange) were transformed, by the magic of skilled craftsmen, into prestige goods that were distributed as royal bounty. This was the alchemy by which all that was most foreign was turned into a source of local power and prestige for rulers and their aristocracy.3
Gudme was not alone in Scandinavia. Between the fourth and the sixth centuries, Roman gold was transmuted into an astonishing abundance of luck-bearing amulets, known as bracteates. Four thousand were discovered at one time in Ostbornholm near Gudme. They may have been returned to the sea as votive offerings. Many of these amulets were based on Roman coins. Constantius II, the conscientiously Christian son of Constantine, lived on for centuries in the distant north, transformed into the image of a war-god! In such a world, successful warrior kingship and a demonstrative relationship with victory-bringing deities went hand in hand.4
These societies were not in any way cut off from the rest of the world. Nor were they placid backwaters, whose inhabitants preserved unchanged the traditions of a barbarian, “tribal” society. Few societies of the West in the sixth and seventh centuries were changing as rapidly as they were. New, more forceful styles of rule emerged. New customs and origin myths were invented, often under the guise of “immemorial” tradition. Local religion was subject to constant manipulation to meet new needs, and “exotic” religions were scanned with considerable interest, in the hope that, like the exotic goods which passed though the magical hands of craftsmen, these religions, also, might provide new sources of power, blessing, and healing. In this troubled landscape, which stretched across the North Sea from Denmark to the coasts of Britain and, further to the west, to Wales and Ireland, self-contained “barbarian” tribes, ruled by unchanging “tribal” custom (the ideal alike of a former generation of romantic historians and of many students of Christian missions), were not to be found. When Christian missionaries came to northern regions, they spoke of “barbarians … as yet unploughed by the ploughshare of preaching.” Their largely rhetorical complaints have made us assume that this soil must have been particularly heavy. In fact, it was sandy soil: it was light and already ready to shift into any number of different formations under the impact of exotic goods and of internal social strains.5
The case of Ireland makes this plain. In the course of the sixth century, Christianity emerged as the dominant religion because it was adopted by the royal and noble families who controlled Irish society. This was due in part to the growing links between Ireland and western Britain. Only a short distance across the water, West Britain would have impressed the Irish. It was characterized by proud, post-Roman Celtic kingdoms and by impressive enclaves of “Roman” Christian scholars. But the emergence of an aristocratic Christianity in Ireland itself was also an answer to a potential crisis of Irish society.
Celtic Ireland was the oldest society in Europe, in that it had not experienced the disruption of the imposition of Roman rule. But this did not mean that it had not changed, and changed greatly, over the centuries. A period of “slump,” of aimless violence and recession of cultivation, came to an end in the fourth century A.D. as a result of a “boom” in the provincial economy of Britain in the last century of secure Roman rule. As the Roman defenses of Britain collapsed in the fifth century, trade was followed by extensive slave-raiding. Patricius was brought to Ireland with “thousands” of his fellow-Britons.6
A society such as Ireland could easily be swamped by so massive an influx of foreign slaves. Like most “barbarian” societies, made up of small, face-to-face communities, Ireland was fiercely stratified. Each túath (commonly called, for the sake of convenience, a “tribe”) was a tightly interrelated group, which often claimed common ancestry. Each occupied a tiny ecological niche. A túath was frequently named from the “plain” that it controlled – a patch of arable land surrounded by mountains and bogland. Such a “plain” could support only a midget community. A small class of persons of royal and noble descent (perhaps no more than 70 families in each túath) dominated the local farmers. These aristocrats were known as errid, “men of the chariot,” from memories of archaic warfare which had long since vanished. They dominated the farmers through their control of the livestock of the region.
The inferiors of the kings and nobility were called “base clients,” aithech. The services which “base clients” owed to their lords took many forms, but especially they owed them hospitality – which meant, in effect, that they fed them and their retinues for a substantial part of each year. Service was given in exchange for a formal gift of cattle that was essential for every farm. But the base client kept his farm and he, also, carried weapons. They were not serfs, as they would have been in most areas of Continental, “Roman” Europe. They could be bullied only to a limited degree.7
From top to bottom, therefore, Irish society was a society held in balance by an intricate web of mutual obligations created by gifts. In this society, nothing was for nothing. In chapter 10 we have seen how the Celtic system of compensations, which was echoed in the “tariffed penance” of the Celtic Penitentials, ensured that every injury and failure to meet obligations had to be atoned for by gifts. In the same way, the structure of Irish society depended on the assumption that every gift incurred the obligation of a return.
But, again like most “barbarian” societies, the nobles and the farmers had in common the precious quality of “freedom.” This was highlighted by the fact that they were slave-owners. Unarmed, without rights, the slave was the ever-present, dark alternative that lay beneath the brittle world of free men, in which nobles and farmers endlessly balanced their rights and obligations to each other and “washed the face” of their respective honors by elaborate gestures of compensation. Slaves had no part in that world. To bring too many slaves into such a small society, and especially slaves from one area (Britain) joined by a single faith and ministered to by clergy of the energy of Patricius, was to invite trouble. Later Irish legends would claim that the opponents of Patricius had prophesied that “He will free slaves, he will exalt base kindreds through the grades of the church.”8
The course of the sixth century showed how this fear (though it was a realistic one at the time) came to be resolved.9 What we call the “conversion” of Ireland was, in fact, the decision of the nobility of the land to make their own, quickly and very much on their own terms, the religion of their foreign slaves. In so doing, they came to share in the Christian culture of the Celtic, British world which lay so near, across the Irish Sea. The result was a remarkable variant of Christianity, created, in the course of the sixth century, by the collaboration of Irishmen and West Britons.
We have already met, in chapters 10 and 11, a truly remarkable example of the type of learned man and ascetic leader produced by this collaboration – Columbanus (ca.550–615). Columbanus was the very first Irishman to become famous on the Continent of Europe. But Columbanus belonged to the second generation of established Irish Christianity. Far more important for the history of Ireland and Britain was a man who bore a similar name – Columba, later known as “Colum Cille,” Saint Columba, the “dove of the Church.”10 Columba belonged to an earlier generation. He was born in 521. Within his lifetime, Christianity changed from being the religion of an articulate minority to become the exclusive faith of powerful royal clans. It was not until Columba was almost 40 that the feis Temro, the solemn sacral act by which the high king of Tara (Temair) slept with the guardian goddess of the land, was celebrated, for the last time, by Dermot mac Cerball, in 558.
Columba was the first leading Christian to come from a royal family. He belonged to the Cenél Conaill – the “kindred of Connell” – of Donegal and Tyrone in northwest Ireland. They were Uí Niall (O’Neill) descendants of the great “Niall of the Nine Hostages,” the former high king of Ireland. Unlike the usual “tribal” levies of farmers and their lords, the warrior retinues of these northern O’Neills meant business. In 561, they defeated their southern O’Neill cousins, the rightful kings of Tara, at the unusually bloody battle of Cúl Drebene. A few years later, in 563, Columba decided to leave Ireland as a penitential exile. Whether he was shocked by the slaughter or implicated in it through his family connections we do not know. He sailed northward, across the sea to Scotland. There he settled in Iona, in the territories of a different Irish clan, the Dál Riata. These Irish eventually gave their name to Scotland, for they were known as scotti, the name for sea-rovers.
Columba arrived at Iona in around 565. In that year, at the other end of the Christian world, the great emperor Justinian lay dying, in southern Italy Cassiodorus was engaged in quiet scholarship in his monastery at Vivarium, in Gaul Gregory was about to become bishop of Tours. Columba stayed at Iona until his death, in 597 – it was the same year that Gregory the Great’s mission to the Saxons landed in Kent.
Columba came to Iona as an act of self-inflicted exile, following the Irish tradition of seeking to live among strangers which would later lead Columbanus to Gaul.11
There is a grey eye that looks back at Ireland: It will never henceforth see the men of Ireland nor their women.12
Walking the island, Columba once picked up with tenderness an exhausted crane from Donegal that had landed at his feet: like himself, the noble bird was an exile, far from home.13
Iona lay between northern Ireland and Scotland. It was cut off from the mainland of Argyll by a stretch of “glass-green” sea. Here was the classic “desert” of Egypt, the home of the great monks of old, now re-created, in a Celtic idiom, in the remoteness of an offshore island in the wild Atlantic. There was a touch of Paradise Regained about the island. On Iona the hard laws of nature in a warrior society were miraculously held in suspense. A knife blessed by Columba would no longer draw blood.14
Yet, in reality, Iona was situated at the center of the political world of the North, on the seaways where Ireland and northern Britain met. Columba eventually returned to Ireland, on a few, ceremonious occasions, to visit “his” monasteries – client monasteries founded by his disciples and his kindred – all over Ireland. But, even in Iona, Ireland was never far away.
He heard his companions … talking on the way about two kings … “My dear sons [he said], why do you gossip idly about these kings? For both of those you mention were recently killed by their enemies and their heads cut off … Sailors will arrive today from Ireland and will tell you this.”15
Iona emerged as the center of a spiritual empire which stretched from Ireland along the northwest coast of Scotland as far as the Hebrides, Loch Ness, and to the north of the Great Glen of Scotland. Within half a century of Columba’s death, the “family” of Iona had been built up. This was a constellation of client monasteries and bishops, similar to the pyramid of client tribes gathered around him by a strong high king. It was an unusually extensive spiritual empire. It stretched from western Scotland deep to the southwest into the heart of Ireland and, to the southeast, it reached down throughout northern Britain, through the influence of its sister monastery, Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne is still known as “Holy Island.” It was an island acting as a “desert,” similar to Iona, cut off by tidal waters from the mainland. It looked out on the North Sea, some fifty miles to the north of Hadrian’s Wall.
In 635 the Irish monks of Iona converted the leading Saxon warlords of the north – the Northumbrian dynasty of Bernicia. This extensive kingdom straddled Hadrian’s wall. It controlled the lowlands of Scotland and cast its shadow (and with it, the shadow of an Irish Christianity, based on Lindisfarne and ultimately loyal to Iona) as far south as the river Thames.16
Saint Columba had become the greatest saint of the north. And he had done this because he was the saint of a warrior upper class. It was to him that they turned.
Some kings were conquered in the terrifying crash of battles and others emerged victorious according to what Columba asked of God through the power of prayer.17
Men of war, even “bloodstained sinners,” had escaped certain death in battle through chanting Irish hymns in his honor.18 In a quiet landscape, ringed by the hills of Scotland, the battlefields of Ireland and Britain remained always present to the community of Iona. Through the continued protection of Columba, the monastery of Iona was believed to hold in its hands the fortunes of the competing warrior kingdoms of the north. The subsequent abbots of Iona were chosen from among the kin of Columba, that is, they were of the same high blood as the kings to whom they offered their blessing.
The man who drew up the final version of the Life of Columba, a hundred years after the saint’s death, was as impressive a representative of the new, aristocratic Christianity of Ireland as was Columba himself. This was Adomnán, a descendant of Columba’s kinsmen, who was abbot of Iona from 679 to 704.19 In his day, Adomnán was the greatest ecclesiastical politician of the northern world. He was one of the few early medieval churchmen who enjoyed sufficient authority to control warfare. In 700, he persuaded 51 kings and 40 churchmen to agree to the Cáin Adomnáin, Adomnán’s Law, an Ireland-wide Law of Innocents. The Law of Innocents protected women and clerics from the effects of intertribal violence.20 The ability to create such a law was a sign of the way in which Columba’s spiritual empire had worked its way deep into the fabric of political life in Ireland and beyond.
We met Adomnán at the end of the last chapter. He turned the reports of a Frankish bishop recently returned from Muslim-occupied Palestine and Syria into a booklet On the Holy Places. He scanned the entire world with the tranquil eyes of an Irish sapiens in his country’s great age of Latin learning. Though he lived in a monastery that was unimaginably distant to most Continental Europeans, he received visitors (possibly students) from Francia. He checked the bishop’s report against accounts of the eastern Mediterranean in the texts of his own library. His comments on forms of Christian worship encountered in the Holy Land show that he wrote as one sapiens to others, wherever they might be. He shared with them up-to-date religious concerns which preoccupied an intellectual elite scattered all over Europe, as far as Rome and Constantinople.21 A learned Irish abbot and descendant of kings, the last thing that he would have considered himself to be was “out on a limb,” out of date, or in any way “peripheral” to Europe.
Adomnán’s Life of Columba marked the culmination of an age in which great monasteries and ambitious bishops had carved out for themselves extensive ecclesiastical “empires” in Ireland. In this process of empire-building, the monasteries had a distinct advantage. In a world without Roman towns, whose solid walls and long-established populations guaranteed the status of their bishops, great monasteries, such as Iona, were the few fixed points in an ever-changing landscape. Bishops and clergy existed in abundance in Ireland. Each túath was proud to have its own hierarchy.22 But these local figures lacked glamour. They belonged to the humble world of the small tribes. Their status rose and fell as each tribe passed from one powerful over-king to another. For to be a successful king in Ireland was to have ambitions wider than one’s own túath. It was to make one’s court the focus of a whole pyramid of minor communities, each committed (as base clients were committed to their lord within each túath) to providing regular services, food-renders, and tokens of honor.
The bid for the ecclesiastical equivalent of over-kingship was taken on by monasteries and sanctuaries such as Iona in the far north, the shrine of Saint Brigit at Kildare in Leinster, and the vocal “metropolitan” see of Saint Patrick at Armagh. Each strove to amass dependent monasteries and bishoprics.23 As a result of fierce competition, these religious centers emerged as the equivalent of the great high places of pagan times which had once acted as intertribal joining points. In a major Christian monastery or episcopal center, monks, students, and their dependents could be numbered in hundreds. In a land without large conglomerations of population, great monasteries were the nearest things to cities.24
Paradoxically, it was Christian poetry written in Irish that celebrated the pagan high places of Ireland. Many of these had ceased to function for centuries before the coming of Christianity. Only the outlines of their earthworks and the great burial mounds containing prehistoric passage graves survived. But the landscape was still charged with their mute presence. The glories of these places were now evoked, as if they had only recently passed away. They provided an epic backdrop for the thriving, pan-tribal sanctuaries of Christian times:
Tara’s great fort withered with the death of her rulers:
Great Armagh remains with a host of venerable heroes.
It has been quenched – great the downfall – the
pride of valiant Loegaire:
The name of Patrick, splendid, famous,
this is the one which grows.25
The bishops and abbots who entered into this competition for the ecclesiastical equivalents of high kingship in Ireland were as intensely aware of their social status as were any of their near contemporaries, the aristocratic bishops of Gaul. A seventh-century bishop of Klldare faced off a rival in this memorable, Old Irish poem of defiance:
Are your horns the horns of a buffalo? …
Is your land the Curragh of the plain of Liffey?
Are you the descendant of a hundred high-kings?
Is your church the shrine of Kildare?
Do you keep house with Christ Himself?26
Such competition brought about a sudden flowering of Irish hagiography. Each major center strove to bring its long-dead founders into the present. Cogitosus’ Life of Saint Brigit of Kildare (who died in 520) was written in around 675. It told a story from a very different age. Brigit had been a slave-girl (though of Irish, not foreign descent) in a still largely pagan world. But that world now lay in the distant past. Cogitosus’ account culminated on a triumphant note, with a description of the saint’s present shrine – a tomb of shimmering gold and jewels, surrounded by chandeliers and royal treasures, worthy of any Merovingian bishop, and housed in an exquisitely carved wooden church on the rich plain of the Curragh. “This site,” Cogitosus concluded, “is open to heaven.”27
Challenged by the claims of Kildare, Muirchú moccu Machtheni soon followed, in around 695, with a Life of Patricius, written to defend the prestige of the see of Armagh. In the case of Muirchú’s Life of Patricius, we can do what is seldom possible for a historian. We can measure the exact extent to which an imaginative chasm had opened, in the course of two centuries, between the hesitant Christianity of the late Roman frontier and the triumphant new Christendom of seventh-century Ireland. For Muirchú had Patricius’ Confession and Letter to Coroticus before him as he wrote. We can see how these texts, now two centuries old, were read by seventh-century eyes. But Muirchú’s eyes were not those of a modern scholar. He gave his readers what they wanted. This was not an eccentric British bishop, but a religious leader larger than life, cut to the measure of the modern “heirs” of Patricius, the great bishops of Armagh.
In Muirchú’s Life, Saint Patrick (as we can now call him, having abandoned the humble Patricius of history) is made to confront Loegaire (Leary), the high king at Tara,
where was the greatest kingdom of these peoples, the capital of all paganism.
In a triumphant confrontation with the king and his druids, Patrick
drove an invincible wedge into the head of all idolatry … For the faith of idols [so Muirchú asserted] was wiped out on Patrick’s arrival and the Catholic faith filled every corner of the land.28
Even the proud Coroticus (readers of chapter 5 of this book will doubtless be pleased to hear) was duly punished for his contempt for Patrick. He was turned into a wild fox!29
These literary fireworks took place in vivid Latin against the background of a tight economy. It was difficult to accumulate wealth in Ireland. A landscape of small farms ringed by large herds of cattle might seem prosperous. But it was open to the vagaries of north Atlantic winds and rain. A summer in which “the wind would not disturb the tails of the cattle from the middle of spring to the middle of autumn” was a dearly wished-for ideal; it was not the reality of Irish farming.30
Quite apart from the climatic vulnerability of the land, what wealth existed in Ireland was hard to tap. “Base clients” – small farmers owing dues – were the foundation on which the intense aristocratic culture of Ireland rested. But, unlike the serfs of “Roman” Europe, “base clients” carried arms and owned their own farms. There was a strict limit above which they could not be exploited. At a time when Visigothic bishops rode around the countryside of Spain with retinues of up to 60, lawyers in Ireland declared (admittedly somewhat conservatively) that a retinue of 12 was all that a local king or bishop should maintain.31 The local community could not and would not support any more. There was nothing in Ireland equivalent to the stunning accumulation of thousands of acres around newly founded monasteries which took place at the same time along the valley of the Seine in Frankish Gaul. By contrast, in Ireland, high kings, major bishops, and abbots of monasteries engaged in intense competition to extract wealth from a land of strictly limited resources – marks of honor, food-renders, rights of hospitality here, a proportion of local fines there. These were slim pickings. But they created a mentality. They stressed the fact that every gift, every offer of wealth or service implied an obligation to give something in return.
This insistence on the return of gifts affected the implantation of Christianity on the ground in Ireland. What the Christian Church offered was presented, quite frankly, as a “gift” in return for a “gift.” The laity supported the clergy and the monasteries in various ways by offering their wealth and services. In return, the local church or monastery was expected to offer the counter-gift of Christian blessing – baptism, “the Reading” (of the Psalms and the Gospel: that is, church services on regular occasions), confession, penance and absolution, and, at the end of life, prayers for the dead, and, for the favored few, burial near the church or in the cemetery where the monks awaited their “resurrection” on the last day. This was particularly true for the small churches and monasteries in each local community. It was by a punctilious exchange of gifts between the laity (the people of the túath) and the church that “the sewing together of church and people” took place, on the local level, all over Ireland.32
It is important to emphasize the distinctive nature of this ideal of reciprocity. The laity were not seen as the “subjects” of the clergy, as tended to be the case in Continental Europe. Rather, they thought of themselves, in a very Irish manner, in terms of entitlement. Their gifts gave them access to the blessing that was to be had in the little wooden and stone churches (often set among groves of what had recently been pagan holy trees)33 and in the monasteries, with their enclosures marked out by stone crosses, flanked by “holy” graveyards.
But, as was usual in Ireland, entitlement varied from group to group and from class to class. The first obligation of a monastery was to its own clients. In a slippage of language that tells us much about the impact of Christianity on Irish society, these clients were called manach (plural manaig) from the Latin “monk.” Each abbot, in fact, ruled a monastery without walls, through the network of dependent farmers that he controlled. It was along thin but strong lines of personal dependence, perpetually created and re-created by gifts (the gift of blessing being met by the gift of hospitality and labor), and not through anything as uniform as pastoral care of the faithful, parish by parish, as had come to be the case in many parts of Continental Europe, that Christian practice spread into the Irish countryside.34
The manaig were the privileged clients of the church, even if they were not its only clients. Their position makes clear a crucial feature of the Irish situation. As we have seen in chapters 10 and 11, the penitential practices evolved in Britain and Ireland and brought by Columbanus to the Continent depended, for their application, on a desire on the part of the laity itself to seek forgiveness. Confession and penance were not imposed on the Christian population as a whole (as would be the case in later Catholic practice). Rather, they were the concern of an “elective elite.”35 Monks and clergymen were expected to have a “soul friend,” an anmcharae – a confessor, without whom they were “like bodies without heads.”36 But members of the laity in Ireland also sought penance according to the extent to which they were enmeshed with their local church and monastery. This depended on the degree of their piety and on the intensity of their sense of entitlement. Within a wider, nominally Christian population, an inner ring formed around the church, made up of pious lay persons, the áes aithrige, the “people of penance.”37
Because of pressure from the laity itself, the Penitentials tell us more than most modern persons want to know about the sexual practices of married persons. But this was because, as the clients of monasteries, lay people demanded the same careful attention as was enjoyed by the monks themselves. This included confession, penance, and forgiveness. Not all encounters with a monastic confessor were punitive. Even the austere Columba was consulted by a woman about an ugly husband with whom she could have no sexual pleasure. His prayers rescued the situation:
For the husband I hated yesterday I love today. For during the night, I know not how, my heart was changed within me from loathing to love.38
Others, of course, did not participate with such zest in the new Christian system. The Christian clergy had few illusions about the world in which they lived. It was a world ringed by extensive areas on which Christianity had little or no purchase. They expressed this situation in traditional terms. The Irish had tended to divide their landscape into concentric circles. At the center was the home and around it was grouped the comforting presence of fully domesticated animals, extending from the dog (who might enter the house) to the cow and the domesticated pig. But beyond them, in the world of the boglands, the woods, and the mountains, there lurked the grim antithesis to well-ordered living. When Patrick turned the proud Coroticus into a fox which fled into the woods, he was merely making plain that the warlord’s feral heart belonged to the wild world that ringed the placid settlements in the plain.
Monasteries arranged their sacred spaces in a manner that echoed an ancient mapping of the landscape according to moral criteria. Only monks could enter the monastic church itself. That was for “holy persons.” But, in the great courtyard outside the monastic church, there was room (as in the farmyard outside the farmer’s home!) for the more domesticated species of lay person: “we let enter the crowds of local people who are not given to much villainy.”39
The monks knew that, in seventh-century Ireland, a further, concentric band of persons lurked in the moral equivalent of the wild. The worst examples of these were bands of landless, unmarried young men – “kings’ sons,” exiles and outlaws – who lived a wild existence in the woods and boglands. Eating horseflesh, marked by sinister tokens of their vows of vengeance, frequently employed by the powerful as “enforcers,” these groups shadowed Irish society like the grey shapes of the wolves, the cú glas, the “grey dogs” – packs of savage creatures who had broken loose from human control.40 Human wolves, untamed warriors and brigands, occupied the unchurched edges of society. They were a constant presence at the time. The Old Irish word laech was applied to them. It was derived from the Latin laicus, “layman.”41 These were the ultimate “laymen,” men incapable of penance, whose feral life highlighted, by contrast, the little networks of mutual obligation that bound “lawful Christians” to their church.
A resolute profanity characterized much of the life of Ireland, and especially, as one might expect, of the warrior elite. These were hard men, not much given to penance. Many a noble hall in Ireland continued to be filled with “vehement and foul people … boasting and bellowing.”42 In the Lives of Irish saints, the “holy” sound of the saint’s hand-bell was vividly contrasted with the blood-curdling yell of warrior bands, “sons of death” bent on revenge.43 In Ireland, paganism was not definitively overcome, as Muirchú’s legend of Saint Patrick implied that it had been. It was, rather, pushed to one side, away from the brightly lit centers of life, now occupied by Christianity, and out on to the fringes of a landscape which still, one suspects, had plenty of room for the wild and for the non-Christian.
On the ground, the “Christianization” of Ireland was a distinctly piebald process. The truly remarkable achievement of the sixth and seventh centuries was, rather, the Christianization of one section of Irish society – the Irish learned class. This took a quite distinctive turn.
The complexity of Irish society had created a need for experts. “Speakers of the law,” brithemain, were the guardians of legal memory. Poets, filid, “seeing men” endowed with an almost uncanny gift for remembering the past, moved freely all over Ireland. Honor was their business. They laid down “the law of the face.” They made reputations by their poems of praise, and ruined them by their satires. Seldom had two such distinct classes of learned persons come to the fore in a “barbarian” society as the guardians of purely oral lore.44 And never before had such classes fastened, with such alertness, on the most “exotic” of all goods to come into Ireland from the outside world – the skill of letters.
The emergence of writing on stones in ogham, in the course of the fourth century A.D., shows that an arcane script was already valued in Irish circles. The arrival of Christian Latin culture, in the next century, gave the learned classes what they needed – the opportunity to write.45 In Irish memory of the seventh century, Patrick appears, always, as a bearer of books. His clergy advanced through a land without writing, holding their wooden writing tablets “like drawn white swords.”46 In churches that he founded, he would leave (so legend said) Psalters written in his own hand.47 To join the Church, as a monk or clergyman, was to obtain, at once, an entire new skill.
When Patrick was on the road, he saw a gentle young warrior herding pigs … Patrick preached to him, baptized, tonsured him and gave him a Gospel book.48
Furthermore, it was believed that Patrick had established a special relationship with the learned classes of Ireland. Dubtach maccu Lugair, a member of the filid, had been the first to show him signs of respect when he arrived at Tara. Dubtach then explained to Patrick the laws of Ireland. It was agreed between them that most of them were consistent with “natural law.” They did not need to be corrected greatly to bring them into harmony with “the blessed white language” of the written Scriptures, the “law of the Letter.”49
After the men of Ireland believed in Patrick, the two laws were joined, the law of nature [the ancient laws of Ireland] and the Law of the Letter … And anything, in the practice of the lawyers, that was not opposed to the word of God in the Law of the Letter and to the consciences of believers was confirmed.50
Of the traditional experts of Ireland, only the druids, the purveyors of non-Christian religious knowledge (who may, in any case, have had less interest in the deployment and preservation of words by writing than did lawyers and poets) were banished to the “wild.” They sank to the level of common sorcerers. The other learned classes established a symbiotic relationship with the Christian clergy.
However much the lawyers and poets of Ireland might value the inherited culture which preceded the arrival of “the blessed white language” of the Latin Scriptures, they shared with Christian bishops and abbots, who were drawn from the same noble class as themselves, a determination to uphold the social order in Ireland. Far from destroying a traditional culture (as has frequently been the case when literacy impinges on non-literate societies) the introduction of literacy into Ireland unleashed a surge of creativity within the most traditional sectors of Irish upper-class society. Newly endowed with the skills of literacy, the guardians of traditional law and of traditional memory, the lawyers and the poets, entered with gusto into a new age.
But, of course, to carry authority, they had to write in Irish, not in Latin. Hence the emergence of Old Irish as a written language. Honed to a remarkable degree of homogeneity by experts who would frequently travel from one end of the Irish-speaking world to the other, Irish went into letters with surprising rapidity and speed.51 Nothing like it had happened before in Europe.
The only parallel to what happened in Ireland was a contemporary one, but from the other end of the world. As we saw in chapter 13, the Muslim Arabs of the seventh century set about creating an entire historical tradition for themselves. Due to the influence of the Qur’ân, which was first written down in the 660s, the poetry and narratives of pre-Islamic Arabia were caught in texts. A totally new, “barbarian” language, destined to conquer the Middle East, made the leap into literacy in exactly the same century as did the learned men of Ireland.
Like Arabs, Irishmen did not suffer from false humility as to the beauty and complexity of their native tongue. Irish had “the best of every language and all that was widest and finest in every tongue.”52 But there was a significant difference. The Qur’ân had been written in Arabic for Arabs. The books which Patrick and his successors brought to Ireland were written only in Latin. Hence the traditional learned class in Ireland confronted a double challenge. To put their own traditions into writing in their own language, they must first learn the “blessed white language” of the Latin Scriptures. They went to school as clergymen and monks. We can even catch them at work. Irish appears first in the form of “glosses” – little notes of the Irish meaning of words and phrases in Latin copies of the Gospels and similar ecclesiastical texts. A little later (in monasteries outside Ireland, in Continental Europe) we even meet them reading the classics. “Vergil was a great poet” is written out in Latin; and then there is added in Irish, “and he is not easy, either!”53
As far as we know, no learned persons in Ireland gained their literacy in any other setting than in Church schools largely dedicated to the learning of Latin. Nor did they set it to use outside the bounds of the Church. Old Irish literature was not used against the Church, as if it were a residue of “native,” pagan values, pitted against the new religion. What was written down in Irish at this time had nothing about it that was defiantly pagan, or even notably exuberant. Rather, written Irish was just one face, among many, of a clerical culture still dominated by Latin.54 It enabled the clergy and its allies to adopt, in Irish, a tone of command. What was produced were legal texts. Legal texts met a sharp concern for social order in an upper class formed through an alliance of clergymen, poets, and lawyers. Here were men of the same class, all of them used to ruling. Legal texts helped them to define themselves. They laid down the status of bishops, clergymen, and monks in an intensely hierarchical society. They regulated the exchanges between pious lay persons and their local churches. They recorded, in Irish, the rights of major sees. We must remember that legal texts circulated only among the members of the learned classes. In its day-to-day practice, Irish law never went the way of Roman law: written documents were of little or no importance in the process of witnessing and adjudication which took place at the level of the local community.55
We will deal, in our very last chapter, with the terms on which memories of pre-Christian Ireland were allowed to linger, through written literature, in the Christian present. A vivid literature of Old Irish tales, whose pre-Christian elements are unmistakable, grew up in Ireland at a later period. This literature has always been regarded, by modern persons, as the peculiar glory of the Celtic world. But the flowering of Irish vernacular literature took place in a later, more relaxed age. In the seventh century, issues of authority and of social order were central. It was not a time for epics and fairytales. Rather, the great collections of Irish law that would be followed, in Ireland, until the sixteenth century, were put together in this period. Forms of legal practice, many of which reached back to at least 1000 B.C., passed into writing at this time, through the pens of Christian scribes, to enjoy a further millennium of use.56
Of all the Latin books brought into Ireland, it was the text of the Old Testament which formed the bridge between the two worlds. Its influence was decisive. As we saw in the case of the Penitentials, the Old Testament had given Celtic Christian communities, in Ireland and Britain, a vision of an entire society, organized around the principles of sacredness and pollution. But it did more than that. The earthy texture of much of the Old Testament provided Irish Christians with a mirror in which to see their own society more clearly. From the practice of polygamy to the flaunting of the heads of decapitated enemies, there was nothing that happened in “barbarian” Ireland that had not happened in the Old Testament. This meant, in effect, that the blessing of God might rest upon the ways of the Irish as it was known to have rested on the Chosen People of Israel, despite their rough ways. At the very least, the past customs of Ireland could be seen as “their” Old Testament: they were seen as practices suited to a period of preparation for the coming of the Gospels. At best, the existing laws of Ireland could be seen as bringing a touch of the majestic strangeness of ancient Israel into the present day.
The classic statement of this view is contained in the great collection of Irish law, known as the Senchas Már, “The Great (collection of) Tradition.” The “Great Tradition” was put together around A.D. 720. It marked the end of an epoch of extraordinary creativity. It declared the unity of an entire new Christian region. It was a code written for all lawyers in the entire Irish-speaking world. In size and comprehensiveness no single legal compilation had appeared to equal it in western Europe since the Theodosian Code of 438. In it, the ancient laws of Ireland were brought into the Christian present, by being treated as if they were an adjunct to the Old Testament.
Altogether, the use of the Old Testament in the Senchas Már and other texts provided Irish lawyers with a firm middle ground in which to stand between the Christian present and traditions inherited from the past of their own land. Polygamy, for instance, was forbidden in the Christian churches, although it continued to be practiced throughout Ireland. Yet polygamy was taken for granted in the Old Testament. Who was to tell which law was the better? Validated by the example of the Old Testament, polygamy might yet have a place in Christian Ireland. In the words of a contemporary law text:
There is dispute in Irish law as to which is the more proper, whether many sexual unions or a single one. For the Chosen People of God lived in a plurality of unions, so that it is not easier to condemn it than to praise it.57
In such ways, a sanguine view of local custom was allowed to develop, under the aegis of appeals to the practice of the Old Testament. The “sewing together” of church and people in Ireland, in the sixth and seventh centuries, had resulted, by the beginning of the eighth century, in a “sewing together” of pagan past and Christian present that was unique in the history of Europe. Let us turn now to the pagan Saxons of eastern Britain to see what very different use they made, in the same period of time, of the “exotic” goods brought to them – also from overseas – by Christian missions.