‘Capraria rears itself, a filthy isle full of men who shun the light. Their name for themselves is a Greek one, “Monks” (from “monos”), because they wish to live alone. They fear fortune’s gifts, dreading its harm. What silly fanaticism of a demented brain cannot endure good things for fear of evil?’
Rutilius, A Voyage Home to Gaul.
Brigid is a patron saint of Ireland, and is remembered as a nun, founder and abbess of the ‘Church of the Oak’ in Kildare. The character of Brigid blends an extreme form of early monasticism with pagan Celtic beliefs. Through her a goddess became a saint. Hers is the era of the ascetic monks and nuns, whose austere and harsh existence appeared fanatical to those who encountered it. For example, in the early fifth century a senior Roman official called Rutilius took a sea voyage up the west coast of Italy.1 His route took him past the many small islands that scatter the Mediterranean near Corsica, and along the way he saw the island of Caprera, where monks had chosen a life of extreme seclusion and isolation. Their ascetic approach to Christian ideals repulsed Rutilius, but these early monks were following the example of the earlier desert fathers of northern Africa. Their goal was to withdraw from the temptations of the world in order to do battle with demons and protect humankind from their polluting influence.
A small shard of rock in the ocean, ten miles off the coast of County Cork in Ireland, presents a similar insight into early monastic ideals. Skellig Michael is notoriously difficult to access, even today in modern boats with powerful engines. But the earliest inhabitants of this inhospitable island were Irish Christians, and this location, complete with its beehive cells and monastic graveyard, opens a window onto the next stage of sanctity within Britain – the emergence of Celtic Christianity. Perhaps as early as the fifth century, Christians pursuing a rather fanatical form of seclusion set sail in open-topped curachs (boats made from wooden timbers with animal skin stretched over the sides) across the turbulent waves of the sea, in search of the most challenging and isolated sites where they could set up small colonies. These men were physically tough, could sail boats and land on oceanic outcrops, were hardened to the elements and extreme in their desire for physical suffering. They were prepared to exist outside of society and were willing to embrace death as part of their pursuit of a fundamental and ascetic form of monasticism.
The journey from the mainland to Skellig must have claimed many lives over the centuries, due to the immense swell of the waves against its sheer rocks. It is an unwelcoming and lonely crag of stone, emerging from the sea as the peak of a much greater subaquatic mountain. Seasickness on the journey over is somewhat inevitable, and actually landing on the island is difficult and entirely subject to weather conditions. If a boat can manage to beat the swell and pull into the crack in the rock on the east side of the island, the only access to the steep face of the mountain is a set of steps hewn out of the stone. Every journey involves a hazardous jump from the moving boat onto the slippery steps. There are three modern routes up to the monastic site at the top of the mountain. The most difficult, and the one most frequently used by the earliest monks, is now too steep and dangerous for tourists. However, even the least challenging of the routes is treacherous, curving dangerously near craggy edges and requiring great physical fitness to traverse the 600 feet to the monastery on the north peak.
The experience of travelling further upwards with each step on the mountainside is an awe-inspiring one, and the rare birds and plant life either side of the man-made path add to the feeling of being in an exceptional place. The approach to the monastic site is particularly impressive. Moving through a break in the stone wall, you are met suddenly by nine intact beehive cells, nestled together within an enclosure as if huddling from the elements; they are unexpected and almost otherworldly. The rigid, dark monastic cells, abutting one another and yet solidly differentiated from those either side, reinforce the central paradox at the heart of the monastic ideal: monks came together to be alone.
While we don’t know the names of the earliest monks that lived on the island, the location evokes the new type of saint that was to become celebrated across the British Isles. The reach of the Celtic monk was great throughout the fifth to ninth centuries, and no book on Anglo-Saxon sanctity would be complete without a firm understanding of how Christianity evolved in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Skellig Michael is an evocative, and yet not unique, form of early Irish monastic settlement, where developments in the Celtic Church appear most tangible.
Archaeological excavations have been conducted at Skellig Michael, particularly on the monastic burial ground.2 The evidence is startling, as the skeletons reveal the levels of extreme hardship and asceticism endured by the monks on the island. The bones indicate years of injuries, including damage to the feet and back, brought about through labouring and transporting materials up the slopes of the craggy mountain. They seem to have survived on a diet of vegetables grown on the island and sea birds, which they could hunt, eating their eggs as well. They had small quantities of meat, which must have been brought in on curachs from the mainland. This suggests that items the monks couldn’t get from the island could be imported, and that contact was maintained with communities on the shore.
More interesting still is that many of the skeletons belonged to people who died very young, with few living beyond the age of thirty. The eldest skeleton belonged to a man in his fifties, but there were the bones of children as young as eight, which suggests that even novices and oblates went to Skellig. On the whole, it is clear that the pursuit of an extreme ascetic way of life was a youthful one, designed to test the physical limitations of those who were either dedicated to the monastic founder by their families or who chose to follow this lifestyle. This was hard living, and part of the tough, visceral existence was mirrored in the secular world by the physical exertion of soldiers and those who worked the land. The earliest textual references to a monastic site on Skellig Michael date from the eighth century, although archaeological finds suggest earlier settlement that may date back centuries before writers committed the place to vellum.
At the south peak of the island is a more treacherous and inhospitable site, where a simple chapel and hermit’s cell attest to the fact that sometimes even the small community 600 feet up the mountain to the north of the island was too comfortable for some of the monks.3 The tiny oratory and hermit’s cell on the tip of the south peak are almost impossible to access today, and climbing ropes are needed to survey it effectively. The monk living in this cell was emulating the example of hermits like Simeon Stylites (c. AD 390–459), who lived for decades on the top of a column fifty feet high. The monks sought ever-higher locations and more discomfort in order to separate themselves from humanity and gain greater access to an uninterrupted relationship with the divine. As military strategists know, the higher ground gives an advantage to those wishing to do battle with the enemy. In the case of monks, this enemy was the devil himself and his army of demons.
To third-century Christians the desert was seen as the rightful abode for devils on earth, since it acted as the antithesis of Creation. Everything that was abundant and plentiful elsewhere – flora, fauna, food and shelter – was absent in the desert, and consequently where God is not, there will be demons. The early desert fathers went into battle with these evil forces in a form of supernatural warfare. This idea continues throughout the medieval period in the three estates. Peasants work the land to provide food; knights work to defend the people here on earth; monks work to defend people’s souls for eternity.
The earliest recorded hermit and desert father was St Paul of Thebes. He retreated to the desert to escape the persecutions of Decius and Valerian in around AD 250. His life was recorded not long after by St Jerome, the Father of the Church and great translator of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin, around AD 375. By the time Jerome wrote his famous Life of Saint Paul the First Hermit, the desert was full of men and women seeking to follow Paul’s example and escape from the temptations of the world.4 Paul’s life can be seen as a foundation text of sorts, providing a narrative and explanation for the explosion of monasticism that took place in the fourth century. Paul lived his long life (Jerome states he lived to 113) in a cave, with just the shade of a single palm tree, a spring of water and, from the age of forty-three onwards, half a loaf of bread brought to him by a raven.
Saint Paul was clearly a religious fanatic. He went to extraordinary physical extremes to escape from the world and dedicate his life and body to prayer and suffering in the example of Christ. Today, we might be concerned about his mental health, but during the time of the early martyrs he was celebrated. He sought to embrace a form of living death in order to be removed from the distractions of a comfortable existence, and so gain a greater sense of communion with God.
His story was preserved through the account of a fellow hermit monk, St Anthony, who had a dream about Paul and sought him out. In an interesting example of nature bending to the will of saints, on the day Paul was to die, Anthony went to him. The raven brought a whole loaf, instead of half, which they ceremonially broke between them in imitation of the Eucharist. This motif has become a central one within monasticism, found throughout English and Irish sculpture, such as on the famous Ruthwell Cross, where it symbolises the brotherly ideals at the heart of the monastic life.
Outside of the desert, however, there were still opportunities for devout men and women to follow a life of monastic asceticism and withdrawal. They had to make use of different types of landscape in the British Isles, but equally hostile and remote locations were found in which to retreat as hermits. The most popular were hilltops, valleys, marshes and islands. Saint Gwyddfarch chose the first, a hilltop, as his retreat near the modern-day village of Meifod, Wales. We know little about him, apart from the fact that he lived during the sixth century, but despite his hilltop looking lush and green in spring, it would have been a cold and uninviting wilderness in the winter for a hermit.
Valleys were also popular in Wales. The virgin saint Melangell chose a deserted valley near Llangynog, in Powys, to hide away as a hermit. She was reputedly a princess who chose to escape court in favour of a life of seclusion, and she managed to remain isolated for many years in the valley. However, one day the prince of the region came to the site and, after talking with her, granted her land on which to build a monastery. A church remains on this location, and the virgin saint’s restored shrine lies within. It is believed to be the oldest Romanesque shrine in Britain.5
There are other echoes of the distant past in the existing church at Pennant Melangell, for it is enclosed within a ringed churchyard, which sits on top of an older Bronze Age burial site. It is surrounded by yew trees, which have a long symbolic history, particularly among the Celts, possibly because of their extended life (some yew trees are over 2,000 years old), or because of their toxicity. The life of St Melangell, however, emphasises that sanctity and monastic isolation were not simply the preserve of men in the fifth and sixth centuries – women could be influential spiritual leaders, retreat to the wilderness to do battle with demons and even establish their own monasteries.
Marshes and islands were more favoured by the saints of Ireland and England. Saint Guthlac sought hermetic isolation in the Fens, which covered nearly a million acres of marshland. Legends grew up around him. Supposedly, he was seen engaged in battle with horrific marsh creatures, giving physical manifestation to the otherwise cerebral battles monks were supposed to engage in. Saint Cuthbert, despite being Bishop of Lindisfarne, retreated to the smaller island of Inner Farne to seek separation from worldly concerns. The island is lashed on all sides by the sea, and in winter it is a cold, exposed and desolate place.
Both these men were members of Anglo-Saxon military society, and saw themselves as spiritual warriors, akin to the soldiers that propped up the social structure of their times. Yet they also had strong connections with the Celtic Church and its particular form of monasticism. Guthlac had been a monk at Repton, which was a Mercian monastery reputedly founded by the patron saint of Wales, David. Cuthbert had trained at Melrose, Scotland, which was a daughter-house of St Aidan’s Celtic monastery at Lindisfarne. The eremitic ideals they clung to indicate that the legacy of the Celtic approach of monastic isolation and self-deprivation lasted for many centuries, despite the fact that it stood in opposition to the more orthodox monasticism prevalent on the Continent. Early Anglo-Saxon monasticism had its roots in Celtic practices.
The extreme ascetics of the time, capable of withstanding the harshest of conditions, were respected for being able to punish their bodies more than most, in a way that top-tier athletes, climbers and explorers could appreciate today. These individuals would fascinate and inspire the people in their community through their suffering and apparent closeness to God.
The monastery on Skellig Michael was formed between the sixth and the eighth centuries. Six-hundred feet above sea level are a set of six beehive cells, two chapels and a cemetery. The cells are dry-built, meaning they are not held together with cement, and by radiating each of the layers out slightly the rain water will wash down the sides, rather than into the cells. They are amazingly intact after so many years of being assaulted by the elements.
Hermits became important members of many towns and villages, and their counsel was sought by the good and the great. Saint Guthlac gave refuge to Aethelbald, the future king of Mercia, and Melangell counselled a prince. The irony of hermit life for many was that, although they retreated from human company for spiritual isolation, this made them sought-after in terms of providing counsel and advice. So hermits and anchorites (an extreme form of enclosure which involved being physically sealed up in a cell for life) were often visited, and they retained influence in the worldly concerns they had sought to escape. This untapped Christian influence was something the papacy feared, since it positioned influential individuals outside of the remit of their control.
In many ways, early monasticism put it in opposition with other aspects of the Church. From when it gained the support of Emperor Constantine, the Christian Church was structured around the administrative and ideological framework of the Roman Empire. In Roman paganism gods, goddesses and the divine imperial family were celebrated as being human in appearance and sensibility. In Christian thought the divine God and his son Jesus also appear in a human guise – the central idea underlying Christianity is that the unknowable divine took human form, and that God fashioned mankind in his own image.
This meant that both Roman and Christian beliefs placed a profound importance on the appearance of man, which was modelled on the divine. For example, images showing the creation of Adam and Eve represent God as a distinctly human and sympathetic figure. The treatment of the body in these scenes, whereby Adam and Eve mirror the gestures, attributes and appearance of God, enhances that central premise of Christianity. As such, humans and the places they made and inhabited, namely cities, were the focus of the Christian Church. The word ‘civilisation’ derives from the Latin for city and civilians, ‘civitas’, since it was within these constructed sites that man could escape from the brutality of the untamed wild to pursue more elevated, human-centric experiences.
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it inherited many of the trappings of the secular power force that had given it an international footing. From its origins in house churches and rebellious martyrs, the early Church developed into an intricately structured, hierarchical, coordinated institution. The administrative structure of the Church was taken over wholesale from the Roman imperial system, so every city had a patriarch or bishop, while the Pope himself retained the Roman title of ‘pontiff’ (chief bridge-builder). Both the Church and the Empire were international organisations, and just as the Emperor had to maintain control over his subjects from Hadrian’s Wall to Syria, so the Pope had to maintain orthodoxy and order between cities the length and breadth of Europe and beyond.
In contrast, however, the polytheistic gods of the Celtic and Germanic people of northern Europe were partly human, but their forms could change. The Celtic gods were bound up with nature, and deities like Cernunnos were part human, part animal. On the third-century Gundestrup Cauldron – discovered in a peat bog near to the modern-day town of Aars, Denmark – the god has antlers and is surrounded by animals, including a snake that he holds up towards his face.6 Similarly, Germanic gods like Odinn could shape-shift, transforming themselves from human to animal. While the Romans had a big impact on the Celtic world in England and along the borders of Wales and Scotland, their reach was not felt in Ireland, where the people continued to practise a form of Druidic worship with deities that had not been classicised into toga-wearing men and women. The significance of the Romans not reaching parts of the British Isles like Ireland and Scotland shouldn’t be underestimated.
Ireland had not felt the impact of the roads, aqueducts and cities that the Roman Empire introduced elsewhere. As a result, it remained a society structured around tribal leaders and a landscape that was harsh to navigate, with pockets of habitation. Unlike mainland Europe, where an individual could use Roman roads to move between areas of civilisation – each similar to the other with its bath houses, churches and forums – the people of Ireland were conscious of the unpredictable nature of the woods, mountains, rivers and seas around them. To traverse the Irish landscape in any season, but particularly in the hostile winter months, could be life-threatening, and this may explain why a particularly hardy form of monasticism grew up in Ireland. Carvings on White Island, County Fermanagh, show a Celtic monk alongside other members of early medieval society, such as a warrior on the far right. The monk is characterised by the long cloak he wears to protect himself from the elements, the walking stick to help him navigate the landscape and the bell to call together people from the surrounding countryside to hear him speak of God and the Bible. Irish monks were hardy and able to travel long distances.
The carvings on the walls of the now ruined church at White Island, County Fermanagh, date to between AD 800 and 1000, yet they portray individuals who would have been recognisable in the fifth and sixth centuries. The missionary two in from the left carries a bell and staff, and the warrior two in from the right has a sword, shield and large penannular brooch.
In the eyes of Continental Christians, however, Ireland was barbaric and needed taming. The Roman troops had withdrawn from Britain in the early fifth century, by which time Roman-Britons were predominantly Christian. The faith of the Britons was acknowledged by those close to the papacy, including Prosper of Aquitaine. Writing in the AD 430s, he records how action had to be taken against the Pelagian heresy, but states clearly that the land of the Britons was populated with the true faith:
He (Pope Celestine I) has been, however, no less energetic in freeing the British provinces from this same disease (the Pelagian heresy): he removed from that hiding-place in the Ocean certain enemies of grace who had occupied the land of their origins; also, having ordained a bishop for the Irish, while he labours to keep the Roman island catholic, he has also made the barbarian island Christian.7
The Christian faith seeped over from Roman Britain to Ireland in the fifth century, most notably through the work of St Patrick. But before focusing on the primary male patron saint of Ireland, there is another saint that most effectively highlights the way Christianity set down roots in Ireland and the other Celtic areas of Britain in its earliest years: our first female saint.
If it has been difficult to get a sense of the person behind the name with well-known saints like Alban, it is more complex still when we come to St Brigid. While extremely well known and widely venerated, Brigid is an almost intangible saint, who may not be connected with a living individual at all, but rather with a place and its pre-Christian cult goddess. To this day, school children weave reeds and straw into equal-armed crosses, known as Brigid’s Cross. This symbol, like its namesake, connects Ireland back to Celtic Druidic roots.
Alongside Patrick, the character of St Brigid also raises interesting problems about the early Church in Ireland, the role of the first monastic settlements and the real figure behind the hagiography. She is remembered as the founder of a particularly powerful and influential monastery at Kildare. Here, women could embrace the harsh monastic ideals and mirror the extreme ascetic exploits of their male counterparts on distant isles like Skellig Michael. Yet Brigid is difficult to grasp, since she leaves none of her own writings, and some of the miracles later attributed to her appear entirely formulaic. She emulates Christ in turning water into beer, heals the sick and provides food for those in need.8
She is a female saint who does not suffer a martyr’s death to single her out, so her Life reads as a set of formulas drawn from biblical examples.9 However, there are some tantalising details in the texts written about her that give an insight into the political and religious landscape the saintly character of Brigid (real or invented) inhabited. Her part in the pre-Christian society of Druidic Ireland can be surmised through a number of suggestions. Firstly, she is best known for founding a monastery for women at Kildare, which translates as ‘the Church of Oak’. This suggests that it was established on a site that had connections to oak trees, which were sacred within the Druidic religion. In this respect, she emulated other early Christian monastic founders in Ireland. At Labbamolaga, in County Cork, a monastic community was established alongside a sacred Druidic stone circle, and the walls of the monastery enclosed the great standing stones within its precinct. Christian and pagan, church and Druidic megaliths were incorporated together.
In terms of the real Brigid, sources suggest that she may have lived between AD 450 and 520, since a number of individuals named in accounts of her life can be connected with people alive around this time. The earliest text mentioning her, however, was written by Broccan Cloen in the seventh century. She certainly appears from later texts to have been a hugely powerful and influential woman. She founded the nunnery at Kildare, along with other monasteries for both men and women. She also seems to have held considerable authority with regards to selecting the bishops of Kildare who would rule alongside her – a staggering responsibility for a woman. This relationship between the Bishop and the Abbess of Kildare continued through the centuries, with the female head of the monasteries bearing some episcopal authority.
The monastery at Kildare flourished under strong female leadership, and became a centre of learning and the arts. A later twelfth-century chronicler, Gerald of Wales, described a Gospel book he had seen at Kildare: ‘You will make out intricacies, so delicate and so subtle, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.’10 This book has been associated with the famous Book of Kells, but it is possible that a similarly extraordinary manuscript was produced at St Brigid’s flourishing art school in Kildare.
Accounts of Brigid’s life reveal connections with the earlier animistic belief systems of Ireland, since many of her miracles involved manipulating nature. She had control over wild and domestic animals, and one of her most famous miracles involved hanging her cloak on a sunbeam. She even performed an act that has continued to trouble Christians down the ages by terminating the pregnancy of a young girl simply through placing her hands on her womb. The girl had supposedly strayed from the path of righteousness, but this action may imply that Brigid had qualities of the local wise woman, and could perform rites that would become highly questionable – and even associated with witchcraft – in later Christian history.
Women could hold important positions within Celtic society; they could be involved with health care and medicine. Within a religious framework they could be seers, and were included in sacred acts, particularly surrounding fertility. In the secular sphere, a Celtic woman could be a peace-weaver, able to secure marriages between tribes. And like Boudicca, they could even lead armies and fight. Women were equal to men in a number of ways, and this bothered the Romans, whose world was far more misogynistic. The Christian Church, too, was a homocentric institution where men held the majority of positions of authority.
For early medieval societies like that of fifth- to sixth-century Ireland, the sidelining of women was not something that could take place immediately, since there were long traditions of prizing female contributions to religion and state formation. The most attractive proposal for women in the face of the arrival of Christianity was to establish monastic communities with themselves at the head. Saint Brigid and her nunnery at Kildare may well be an early example of this sort of re-articulation of female influence.
Whether St Brigid existed as a single identifiable fifth-century woman has been debated. Recent work on her cult concludes that she was, in fact, not a real Christian saint at all, but the result of symbolic manipulation; a means of adapting a pre-Christian Druidic cult into a Christian context.11 There appears to have been a powerful Druidic cult centre at Kildare, where the goddess Brigid was worshipped in her triple form. The separating of a deity into three was a common practice in Celtic religion, as evinced by the goddess in triplicate sculpture from Aquae Sulis. Brigid was also worshipped in triple form, with two sisters who both shared her name.
Traditionally, the three aspects of a goddess have been considered as mother, maiden and crone. This carving from Aquae Sulis shows the three women with their arms touching, signifying that they are three, yet one.
The goddess or goddesses had an exclusive female priesthood at Kildare and an ever-burning fire, which was tended to by nineteen priestesses, representing the nineteen-year cycle of the Celtic ‘Great Year’. This tradition seems to have continued after the priestesses became nuns, for a group of young women kept an eternal flame alight to the saint. Indeed, it was seen to be such a haven for women that a much later Christian visitor to Kildare, Gerald of Wales, said that men could not approach the sacred flame. It was surrounded by a hedge, and any men that crossed this would be cursed to go insane. This influential religious hub at Kildare could have become redundant in the wake of Christianity, and its priestesses scattered. However, the establishment of a nunnery on the site of the Druidic temple, and the elevation of the pagan goddess Brigid to St Brigid, meant that this sacred place among the oak trees remained powerful and prosperous.
There are many examples of this sort of syncretism, whereby Christianity adapted itself in line with native cults in order to smooth the road of conversion. Indeed, we need look no further than the naming of Easter. Bede records how this most significant of Christian feasts was named after a pagan goddess:
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.12
In this extract from Bede’s work The Reckoning of Time, he records how the other months of the year were also tied to pre-Christian festivals. ‘Hrethmonath’, the name for April, was related to another goddess, Hretha, and sacrifices were made to her in that month.
A similar translation of festivities from a pagan event to a Christian one centres on Brigid herself. Her feast day is 1 February, which was also the date on which the pagan festival Imbolc was celebrated. Imbolc was one of the four seasonal celebrations, designed to usher in spring. The festivities were focused on Brigid, the goddess of sacred wells, poetry, craftsmanship and the hearth. She was said to have invented ‘keening’, which is a combination of singing and crying, and which may continue in the mournful Irish ballads that have come down the centuries.
Her festival marked the start of the new season of life and fertility, and the fact that this pagan event was grafted onto the feast day of St Brigid is yet further evidence that her cult continued under a different guise. Furthermore, Brigid’s Cross, which has long been associated with Imbolc and 1 February, has its roots far back beyond the arrival of Christianity. Despite the fact that later writers sought to make sense of this symbol by creating a story in which St Brigid crafts the cross out of reeds on the deathbed of a nobleman, the tradition of hanging them outside houses to ward off fire has no connection to Christian practices, and seems an echo of older pagan rituals. But there may be yet another layer of symbolism to Brigid.
The Irish goddess Brigid may be connected to the Celtic deity worshipped in Britain as Brigantia. She is most closely associated with Minerva, goddess of the hearth and harvest, and played an important role across Celtic tribes – for example, there was a tribe in Austria who also honoured the goddess. Offerings were made to the goddess Brigantia in wells, springs and rivers across Britain. Indeed, this special sacredness of water as a life-giving force to animals, plants and humans continued in the number of sacred springs and wells associated with saints, particularly in Celtic regions.13
There are fifteen wells across Ireland dedicated to St Brigid, suggesting that she in particular retained this connection with water. One near Buttevant in County Cork is regularly visited by people wishing to be healed. Crutches have been left at the site, to indicate that people could walk after being healed by the waters. Although we know little with certainty about Druidic religious practices because the Druids did not write down their traditions, the sacredness of water is a defining aspect. Finds dating from across the centuries are found in rivers or bogs, where they seem to have been ritualistically placed as a form of offering to a deity. That St Brigid maintained her links with sacred springs is another indicator that her Christian cult preserves much more ancient Celtic practices.
The tribe for which Brigantia was the most important goddess of the pantheon was named after her – the Brigantes – and their stronghold stretched across the north of England, close to the border with Scotland. Images of her in this area showed her as a divine ruler. For example, on the Birrens Altar from Dumfries and Galloway, she is shown with spear, crown and orb to reflect that she was protector of the tribe. She wears a gorgon’s head around her neck, and combines the attributes of Minerva with Juno, queen of the gods. Around the helmet are depicted battlements, perhaps indicating that she was a protective deity of a particular region. To all intents she has been Romanised. Only the inscription indicates that the image shows not Minerva, but Brigantia. Her image is also recalled in later ones of Britannia.
This sculpture, made between AD 120 and 180, shows the goddess Brigantia, but was set up by a Roman. The inscription reads: ‘Sacred to Brigantia: Amandus, the engineer, fulfilled the order by command.’ It was found at the Roman fort of Birrens in Dumfriesshire, and testifies to the absorption of local cults by Roman soldiers along the northern frontiers.
The leader of the Brigantes, a queen called Cartimandua, managed to maintain the security of her kingdom against Romans and competing tribes for many years through diplomacy and marriage. However, the Brigantes were finally destroyed by the coordinated military campaigns of the Roman twentieth legion around the year AD 80, with Agricola at its head. On the back of this defeat, a number of the Brigantes tribes-people left northern England and settled in southern Ireland. This included the remaining Druids.
In AD 60 the Romans had made a concerted effort to annihilate Druidism, since many of their leaders had questioned the authority of Rome in Britain. This culminated in an attack on the Isle of Anglesey, which had become a stronghold and sanctuary for British Druids. The site was levelled, and with this act, the long history of Druid practices in Celtic Britain was brought to a hasty end. However, the relocation of many Brigantes from their territories in northern England to southern Ireland would have included the Druidic leaders. Their powerbase was located close to the site where Brigid’s monastery was established, near Kildare, and here a branch of the Irish ruling family Ui Brigte was to gain a secure footing.14
That the Druids had great influence over the kings is revealed by Dio Chrysostom:
The Celts appointed those whom they call Druids, these also being devoted to the prophetic art and to wisdom in general. In all these cases the kings were not permitted to do or plan anything without the assistance of these wise men.15
In Ireland over the fifth century, as kings began to convert to Christianity, so their advisers had to find new footings within the establishments. Druids and Druidesses could continue to offer support and advice to the royal family, play a role in fertility rites and impart blessings, but only as heads of monasteries, and ultimately as saints. It seems likely in this context that the St Brigid we know from later hagiographical texts may in fact have been a Druidess who founded a monastery at the great oak where the goddess Brigid had been venerated. Stories connect her with healing, fertility and nature, and her reputation continued down the ages as a powerful and venerable woman, who wielded great influence within her world.
The acceptance of the basic premises underlying Christianity may not have been so difficult for the Druids, as many of their beliefs were founded on similar principles. At the heart of the Gospels lies a story of human sacrifice, since the Son of God – a wise teacher and preacher – gave up his life for the benefit of his community. However, he was an even finer sacrifice, since he was born again to wield power as Lord over heaven alongside his Father. There is a cyclical sense of regeneration and rebirth in the Gospel story that could be connected to the Druidic cycle of the year, where gods and goddesses are born, nourished, grow and decay across the seasons. Also, like many Druids, Jesus was a healer and a preacher, who imparted wisdom and spiritual guidance to his followers.
Celtic Christianity focused on the idea that God is present in all His creation – woods, animals, trees, plants – and used this as a means of adapting their pagan animistic beliefs. Springs, wells, woodlands and mountains could all maintain their spiritual potency through their part in God’s creation, and often through their association with the miracles worked by saints. Druids used wands to perform magic, while Celtic saints used their staffs to perform miracles. Many of these have been preserved as relics, and later became the model for elaborate bishops’ croziers. Even down to the seventeenth century, members of the community known as Áes Dána performed the role of earlier Druidic leaders, preserving traditions and genealogies through oral recitation. There is a long and unbroken legacy of these forms of pre-Christian rites, and although Christianity meant a re-articulation of spirituality in Celtic lands, the Druidic past was never fully eradicated. Early Irish saints like Brigid indicate how pagan and Christian could be combined, and how the fascination with nature and the landscape remained central through times of religious and social change.
Brigid is entirely fitting as one of the earliest and most important saints of Ireland, since in this one name the concept of gradual conversion from one religious world to another is preserved. Ireland didn’t receive a single papally sanctioned mission in the way that the Anglo-Saxons did which allowed them to benefit from an orthodox approach to the new religion that could be rolled out across kingdoms. Instead, its conversion was slow, and fuelled by practical choices, such as maintaining social order and structure. Significantly, the natural landscape of Ireland and the long-held Celtic beliefs in the spiritual potency of the environment were preserved through early saints like Brigid. She is held, alongside Patrick and Columba, as a patron saint of Ireland. The individuals whom particular kingdoms chose to tie themselves to spiritually by electing patron saints can tell us much about their values and the way they wished to be perceived. Brigid encompassed echoes of a much-treasured ancient Druidic Celtic past. But those saints who would come to fly the flag for the nations of the British Isles would represent other equally valued attributes.