‘The sorcerer then knelt before Saint George and begged him to make him a Christian. Seeing that his own sorcerer had converted to Christianity, the provost cut off his head. The provost had Saint George placed between two wheels mounted with swords, but the wheels broke, and Saint George remained unharmed. Then the provost had him thrown into a caldron filled with molten lead, but Saint George sat there comfortably, as if he were in a warm bath.’
‘The Legend of St George’, from The Golden Legend.1
The choice of patron saint for England, St George, has long been a controversial one. In a recent poll many more people voted for St Alban to represent the spiritual life of the nation.2 George wasn’t a native of this country; in fact, he never set foot in Britain, and had no tangible connections with it whatsoever. George’s roots lie in Palestine. That he existed is accepted, but the many fantastical legends associated with him, particularly his famed encounter with the dragon, were later elaborations. What can be known with some certainty about George is that he was born to a Greek Christian family around AD 280, and served as a soldier under Diocletian. When an edict was passed arresting all Christians that served in the Roman army in AD 303, George refused to concur with the Emperor’s wishes by sacrificing to the pagan gods, and so suffered a brutal martyrdom. Accounts suggest that he was lacerated with a wheel of swords, before he was boiled alive and finally decapitated. George was a prominent and important early martyr. But why has this man, distant in time and space from England, become its national saint?
Further into the medieval period, the answer lies with King Edward III (1327–77), the great military ruler of the fourteenth century and instigator of the Hundred Years’ War with France. Partly to antagonise his French counterparts, and partly to provide a new rallying point around an ancient soldier renowned for his faith and devotion, Edward chose George to be the new patron saint of England. This act disregarded many other candidates from the Anglo-Saxon period and beyond. The most obvious is St Alban, but St Cuthbert has also frequently been proposed as a more suitable national saint. Even Edward’s grandson, Richard II, seemed to favour older, native saints above George. In Richard’s personal altarpiece, the Wilton Diptych, George’s influence is reduced to a small flag. Instead, the English saints Edmund the Martyr and Edward the Confessor accompany the youthful King Richard.
Many patron saints are not natives of the countries they represent. For example, Scotland has St Andrew, companion of Christ and brother of St Peter. However, there are some saints that, particularly in the Celtic areas of Britain, connect nations with their distant past – especially the ‘dark age’ from the fourth to sixth century. Patrick, Maughold, Ninian and David are all figures cloaked in myth and legend, but they continue to be celebrated down the centuries in Ireland, the Isle of Man, western Scotland and Wales as significant, home-grown saints. True, of these only David seems to have stayed in the place of his birth, but all four were products of the early Celtic Church, and represent the founding moments when these nations embraced Christianity.
The Wilton Diptych is one of the finest medieval paintings to survive. Made between 1395–9 for the King of England Richard II, it could have been painted in England or France. The king is shown kneeling before the Virgin Mary and an army of angels, all of whom wear his personal emblem of the white hart. It was used for the private prayers of the King and shows an intimate relationship between the monarch and the Queen of Heaven.
One place in particular provides a very real and tangible connection with this age. Whithorn lays claim to being one of the oldest continuously occupied villages in Scotland, and is known as the crucible of Christianity in this part of the world. Nestled at the edge of the Machars peninsula in western Scotland, it is an especially picturesque and significant location from which to explore the Celtic patron saints. The isle of Whithorn today is the stuff of postcards, with its harbour front a collection of bright, regular houses nestled together, peering over the sea wall and out towards Ireland and the Isle of Man. From the white tower, known as the Cairn, which has been a mariner’s landmark for nearly two centuries, you can see the open expanse of the Irish Sea, while to the east is the undulating coastline of Kirkcudbright. The crags of rocks seem to collide with one another beneath, in emulation of the waves, while in spring wild flowers cover the banks and swallows whistle overhead. Across the water it is possible to make out the Isle of Man, which is just eighteen miles from Whithorn, while the Lake District rolls away to the south.
The sea was the motorway of the early medieval period, and even today it is quicker to approach Whithorn by water than by road. Its location on the edge of three nations, with the ocean just a short boat ride away, made it strategically important. Now the community is made up of just a few hundred people, but it is still frequented by pilgrims and tourists. The village of Whithorn is a short journey from the edge of the sea.
Ptolemy first mentioned Whithorn in his work The Geography, which around AD 140 recorded all the known parts of the Roman Empire.3 His map has the realm of the Novantae, which included Whithorn, positioned facing north. It testifies to the great age and significance of this site.
The evidence of the first Christian settlers in this area unfolds as you pass beneath a large archway known as the Pend. Through here, away from the main road, you are faced with nearly two millennia of history. The area behind the Pend takes you past the nineteenth-century parish church, and then to the ruins of the twelfth-century priory. The importance of this site as a bishopric and a flourishing monastery is clear from the scale of the Romanesque buildings that remain. These would have catered for the flow of later medieval pilgrims visiting the reputed tomb of Scotland’s first saint, Ninian, founder of Scotland’s first Christian building, the Candida Casa, meaning the ‘white house’. It got this name because of the whitewash plaster that covered its exterior walls, but it also connected the site more symbolically with ideas of purity and salvation.
Christianity was certainly established in Whithorn by around AD 450, as archaeological finds from the area testify. A tomb monument for a man and a four-year-old girl opens with the statement in Latin: ‘We praise thee Lord’ – a rare survival.4 This means that Christians were setting up monuments in this part of Scotland at a time when the Romans were abandoning the British Isles, and pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes were taking control of areas just south of Hadrian’s Wall.
The Latinus Stone from Whithorn was carved around AD 450 and is Scotland’s oldest Christian monument. There are traces of a Chi-Rho symbol at the top of the stone that may be the ‘sign’ referred to in the inscription, which states: ‘We praise you, the Lord! Latinus, descendant of Barravados, aged 35, and his daughter, aged 4, made a sign here.’
The retreat of the Roman garrisons that had defended the borders with the Picts was completed by AD 410. While this spelt political, economic and social upheaval to the south, in the north it appears to have brought fewer calamities. The weakened defences of the Romano-Britons in England and along the Welsh borders meant that they were vulnerable to attacks by Irish Scotti and Picts. There were no longer Roman soldiers to defend them, and their rich villas and wealthy farms were prime targets for Celtic raiders. The Irish managed to take land in Cornwall and Wales, as well as cart off slaves, which could be employed in their homelands or sold on for profit.
In the north, the Picts crossed over the old defences of Hadrian’s Wall and seized slaves, property and possessions far beyond the borders. This was a perilous time for the Romano-Britons, but they did manage to regroup, and a further development began to turn the tide in the constant state of war: the Irish and the Picts became Christian. It was gradual at first, but once the rulers of these kingdoms had converted they conducted fewer raids and took fewer slaves. Hostilities between the various tribes outside and on the edges of Britain never fully abated, but the intensity of the years following the retreat of the Roman army dissipated, and certain British rulers were able to create powerful and stable settlements. The area around Whithorn was one of these, and at its heart was a saint. Ninian was a Romano-British Christian, a missionary, a stranger in a new land, a farmer, a preacher and a teacher. Or, at least, that is what we have been led to believe.
Saint Ninian is remembered as a fourth-century British Christian, who travelled up into western Scotland and may have arrived in Whithorn before the retreat of the Roman army as early as AD 397. It is most likely he came from south of Hadrian’s Wall, and he is credited with establishing Christianity in Scotland for the first time. What little we do know about St Ninian is derived from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History:
The southern Picts, who dwell on this side of those mountains, had long before, as is reported, forsaken the errors of idolatry, and embraced the truth, by the preaching of Ninnias, a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome, in the faith and mysteries of the truth; whose episcopal see, named after St Martin the bishop, and famous for a stately church (wherein he and many other saints rest in the body), is still in existence among the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians, and is generally called the White House, because he there built a church of stone, which was not usual among the Britons.5
Bede’s account draws attention to the fact that Ninian had founded the Candida Casa long before Columba arrived in Iona, with his particular (and in Bede’s eyes, unorthodox) form of Celtic Christianity. Ninian, in contrast, is described as being ‘instructed at Rome’, emphasising that this was an orthodox, Roman form of Christianity that arrived with his mission. This question of orthodox versus unorthodox will gain greater resonance when the Irish and Roman missions of the sixth century come into focus, but in this case it is clear that Bede is using Ninian as leverage: an example to Irish Christians that one of their missionaries did bring with him a Roman form of Christianity.
The Candida Casa provides a lesson in tempering the symbolic hyperbole found throughout saints’ written lives with the physical reality of archaeological excavations. The potency of the Latin name ascribed to this place – ‘the shining white house’ – associates this location and its saint with purity, radiating out from the pagan landscape. As both a monastery and a bishopric, it shone with the light of Christ’s teaching. Furthermore, Bede’s emphasis on the stone buildings Ninian established, with their permanence on the landscape and echoes of the grandeur of Rome, presents the Candida Casa as a paragon of Roman missionary work. However, the archaeological remains from Whithorn suggest that the earliest buildings at the site included a modest rectangular cabin, painted white, ringed by wooden round houses.6 The use of round houses recalls the homes found throughout Celtic territories, and it’s clear that the first monastery at Whithorn was small-scale and functional; more of a farmstead than a major ecclesiastical site.
Ninian and his fellow monks would have worked the land to prepare food for the community, which probably included men, women and children. The Latinus Stone, with its reference to a four-year-old daughter, suggests that this wasn’t one of the closed monasteries of later years. The small church could not have accommodated many, so while its very existence may be testament to the presence of Christianity in fifth-century Scotland, its scale suggests that the early missionary work was modest. Ninian would have lived like his fellow Celtic settlers, huddled around the hearth in a timber round house, and sharing the labours and hardships of the seasons.
Ninian is still regarded as ‘Apostle to the Southern Picts’, and while he may have been replaced by Andrew throughout Scotland, in the area around Dumfries and Galloway he is held as a patron saint. Yet it is Bede alone who directly connects a saint called Ninian with Whithorn and the Candida Casa. We know nothing more about him: we have no physical remains for Ninian and have no evidence from the site at Whithorn to confirm he was there. Instead, it is possible that the site of the Candida Casa has been mistakenly merged with that of a later Irish saint – Finnian of Moville. This character will loom large in his role as tutor to St Columba, but in relation to the Candida Casa it seems that Finnian may have studied there once it was up and running as a monastery. As we saw with Brigid, the distinctions between real living individuals and residual echoes connected to specific sites or locations could be confused. At Whithorn we have one place – an early Christian settlement – yet two blurred names: Ninian and Finnian.
Records suggest that Finnian of Moville was at Whithorn. He returned from the monastery there to Ireland before AD 540 with a very precious manuscript: a copy of Jerome’s Vulgate. This was extremely valuable, since Father of the Church and pioneering biblical scholar Jerome had created a translation of the Bible from the original Hebrew into Latin. This meant that not only were the various mistranslated Greek copies of the biblical books edited into a version more faithful to the original texts, but those in the West who didn’t read Greek could consult the Bible more readily.
With his valuable biblical text and a wealth of knowledge gleaned from the monastic community at Whithorn, Finnian went to Ireland and founded his own monastery at Movilla in County Down. If you travel across the Irish Sea, Movilla is relatively near to Whithorn, and the influence of the bishop of this monastery in Ireland may have extended to the Candida Casa. He was a powerful person who moved across great distances, affecting learning and politics throughout his lifetime, and may well be the true historical individual behind the name of St Ninian. This could be a case of mistaken identity.
The combination of the Candida Casa, Ninian and Finnian of Moville may have occurred due to a simple typographical error.7 The name Finnian would have been written Uinniau in the vernacular British, and the confusion with Ninian may be down to the common scribal error of mistaking an initial ‘u’ with ‘n’. Certainly, the name ‘Uinniau’ is found in place and personal names around south-west Scotland. So it is possible that the hagiographic tradition of the otherwise unattested St Ninian was conflated with St Finnian of Moville, whose presence is felt far more in the dedications around Whithorn. The combination of the Druidic goddess Brigid with a Christian saint of this name indicates how individuals may have slipped through the cracks of texts in subsequent retellings of older hagiographical accounts. This acts as a caution in our reading of all hagiographical texts. While we may pillage them for historical data on real individuals, they were literary creations, and the characters within could reveal varying degrees of fact and fiction.
That the Christianisation of this region of Pictish Scotland was successful is corroborated around the year AD 432, by that famous Irish saint and missionary St Patrick (whose similarly fluid identity will be discussed). One of the primary pieces of evidence recording St Patrick’s words, ideas and emotions is a letter written to the people just north of Whithorn, in which he refers to them as ‘apostate Picts’. Throughout his letter Patrick chastises the Christian Picts for not following a true Christian path – they have deviated from the example set to them by Ninian. The saint’s work at the Candida Casa and around this region of Scotland was to have a lasting legacy, and the village where he chose to establish his monastery has remained relevant and fascinating ever since. Be he Ninian or Finnian, the saint who created this potent early Christian community brought his mission to the pagan Picts, and he will be remembered as the first evangelist of Scotland.
From western Scotland it is a short leap both culturally and geographically to Ireland. However, while Patrick is arguably one of the best-known saints in the British Isles, like Ninian his world is one where the lines between fantasy and fact are repeatedly blurred. When studying the medieval period, the further back in time you go, the murkier the picture gets. Certain areas and individuals come into sharp relief thanks to a chance survival of a particularly clear text – for example, Bede’s accounts of Northumbria. But, otherwise, the wealth of material we have for, say, the eleventh century, is overwhelming in comparison to the fragments we have for the fifth. So St Patrick appears ‘through a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Patrick is celebrated the world over, wherever Irish people have moved and settled, although he is equally popular with those boasting little or no connection with Ireland, because of the great excitement surrounding his feast day on 17 March. Now notorious for the imbibing of pints of Guinness, this tradition actually stems from the fact that St Patrick’s Day was an opportunity for the harsh restrictions of Lent to be relieved for one day so people could feast and drink alcohol. In fact, Guinness developed a campaign that stated ‘Everyone’s Irish on March 17th’, which is not only clever marketing, but also indicates how deeply engrained saints are within national identity.
Other traditional aspects of Patrick’s feast day include ‘wearing of the green’ and the display of shamrocks. According to legendary accounts, the saint explained the three parts of the trinity using its leaf, although this could again be an echo of older Druidic practices which split a single god or goddess into triplicate form. The echoes of nature gods and goddesses are also felt in Patrick’s association with the colour green. Every year, the Chicago River is turned green on his feast day in order to reflect the Emerald Isle and its patron saint. But even this famous date and these seemingly ancient traditions are only tentatively linked to a real, living, breathing individual. In fact, as with Alban, Brigid and Ninian, the real Patrick is incredibly hard to access.
It is impossible to say with certainty where or when Patrick was born. In terms of his dates, the traditional view is that he arrived in Ireland in AD 432 and died in AD 461, making him one of the earliest missionaries to bring Christianity to Ireland. However, recent work has pushed his dates back to the end of the century. This would have wider implications, since this would question his place as the country’s first saint and evangelist. He couldn’t have written his two famous texts, Declaration and Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, earlier than the beginning of the fifth century (because he quotes part of Jerome’s Vulgate translations of the Bible, which were only circulated after AD 384) or any later than the end of the fifth century (as he suggests the Franks are still pagan at the time of his writing, and they converted around AD 500),8 but these are the only dates of which we can be sure. This leaves a huge historical sweep of over a hundred years to explore, and the question of exactly when Patrick lived, wrote and died has obsessed scholars across the centuries.
One Celtic scholar, Charles Plummer, even claimed that Patrick never existed at all. But a more convincing argument has been put forward that hagiographical texts have blended two different individuals into the one figure of Patrick.9 According to this theory, the Patrick who wrote the two famous texts should be considered as distinct and different from the bishop Patrick (also referred to as Palladius), who brought Christianity to the Irish first and was a Gaulish bishop, sent by Pope Celestine to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity in the wake of the Pelagian heresy.10 It is highly likely that, just as the legends surrounding St Brigid seem to have blended a real woman with another figure, the goddess Brigid, so the Patrick still celebrated today is a hybrid of two individuals: one who wrote beautiful and revealing texts about his experiences, and another who was the first bishop of the Irish.
That there was a friendship between the two patron saints of Ireland – Patrick and Brigid – is suggested in the ninth-century Book of Armagh, which stated that the two pillars of the Irish people ‘had but one heart and one mind’. Yet there appear to be distinct differences between these two saints. While Brigid emerged from an ancient, home-grown tradition of pagan Druidic beliefs and practices, Patrick represented a world of Roman Christianity, translated over from Roman Britain and clear in its links with a more Continental set of ideas. This book will focus on Patrick the younger, rather than Patrick the elder (Palladius), and presume that he was active slightly later in the fifth century, with the annals suggesting a date as late as AD 492–3 for his death. This is the St Patrick whose words have lasted over the ages in his personally and intimately written texts, and who is charged with establishing the archbishopric at Armagh. It is he who legend remembers, and the time in which he lived was a fascinating one, when the distance between Celtic Irish, Christian Britons and the rest of Christendom was being stretched.
As far as his origins are concerned, it is established fact that Patrick was not Irish. However, in terms of determining exactly where he originated, suggestions range from Wales and Cornwall to Scotland. There is some evidence to suggest that he came from the Scottish site of Dumbarton Rock in western Scotland. This was the capital of the British kingdom of Strathclyde, and was reputedly governed by a chieftain named Coroticus. Dumbarton Rock is a significant location, since it was here that Welsh Britons had set up an independent kingdom and powerbase along the Clyde. That the settlers here in western Scotland spoke a form of Welsh attests to the fluidity of identity in the early medieval period, and it was probably at Dumbarton Rock that the famous Welsh poem, The Gododdin, was written down. There is a church dedicated to St Patrick on the Rock.
Other suggestions for where Patrick originated include areas of Christian settlement along Hadrian’s Wall. The site of Birdoswald has been suggested, since Patrick gives the name of his birthplace as ‘Banna Venta Berniae’. As this site was also known as Banna, the name could be reconstructed as ‘bend in the tribal pass’. This is conjecture, and all that is known for certain is that Patrick was of Romano-British stock, referring to himself as ‘civites’, a citizen of the Empire, despite the fact that he was writing some hundred or so years after Roman ties with Britain had been cut.
This was a time when the financial and political security felt by those previously connected to Rome was eradicated. Villas were starting to crumble, aqueducts were falling into disrepair, skills like glass- and wine-making were slipping away, and previously impressive cities were being abandoned to the elements. A way of life was dying; this was a volatile time, with a power vacuum waiting to be filled. Saint Patrick inhabited a world where legendary figures like King Arthur were the vestigial wielders of influence, and a time of relatively civilised security was replaced by uncertainty. The collapse of the dictatorial control of the Roman Empire left the native British people struggling to regroup.
Patrick tells us how these changes affected his life in two letters that have fortunately survived down the millennium and a half since he wrote them. In this respect, Patrick becomes the first British saint with a voice, since he straddles the divide between prehistory and history by writing down his own accounts.11 Unlike other writers of his time, his work is not purely focused on issues of Christian doctrine; his letters are extremely personal, and provide details of his life and times. They are very readable, even for a modern audience, and their accessible nature has made him feel more tangible than many of his contemporary saints. This could explain his great popularity as patron saint of Ireland, in that we can still get a sense of how he lived, what he valued and the feelings he experienced.
Patrick’s Declaration in particular provides nuggets of information about his life that become increasingly useful when considered alongside other evidence from late Roman Britain. For example, it states that his father was a deacon, and his grandfather a priest, so he was brought up in a Christian environment. His family were landowning aristocracy, who farmed the surrounding area and owed loyalty to the Roman system under which they had profited.12 As a young boy Patrick would have been educated, and taught to read and write in Latin. He would have lived a relatively privileged life, with his needs taken care of by slaves and his land farmed by serfs.
However, by the fourth century most of the Romano-British population appears to have been only minimally Romanised. The majority still lived in Iron Age-style houses and used perfectly effective pre-Roman farming techniques – like Ninian and his community in Whithorn. Patrick and his family probably owned a similar sort of a rural farm-holding, and they almost certainly spoke Celtic dialects alongside Latin. Yet Patrick’s aristocratic family were just as much Roman-Britons as were the few per cent that lived in villas or towns, and from early in the third century they were all legally Roman citizens. They didn’t live in the highly ordered grid system of a city like Verulamium; instead, they were masters of a farming community – a form of landed gentry. But disaster struck his household when Irish pirates ransacked his property and took the young Patrick into slavery just shy of his sixteenth birthday.
There were good reasons for the Irish to invade wealthy and industrially advanced areas of Britain after the decline of the Roman military defences in the early fifth century. Not only were there good supplies of slaves, which could be sold on for profit, but also there were natural resources and new industrial advances that the raiders could benefit from. It is very likely that, when the Irish raiders attacked the farms where Patrick was seized, they would have witnessed ploughing techniques and soil cultivation with iron spades and tools, which would have been valuable on their own lands. Indeed, they probably seized ploughmen and their tools, along with other commodities from the Roman farms, such as the young noble boy Patrick.13 It seems no accident that the young Patrick was put to work in agriculture, given responsibility for herding sheep and ensuring a good return on their wool.
Gildas, possibly writing in Gloucestershire, or elsewhere along the Welsh borders, recorded the predatory nature of the fifth- and sixth-century Irish raiders, describing them as insects emerging into the sun:
From curroughs in which they had been carried across the valley of the sea, there eagerly emerged foul crowds of Scotti [Irish] and Picts, like dark hoards of maggots from the narrowest cracks of recesses when the sun is overhead and its rays grow warm.14
The slave trade was an active and real threat across Roman Britain in the fifth century. But, while Patrick understood the hardships of slavery from the inside and condemned the murder of Christian slaves, he did not stand against it. To him, slavery was an essential component of life, and something that he had perceived from both sides: as slave and patron. He didn’t want to change the status quo, since the concept of a world without slavery would have been entirely foreign to him. He rallied against the mistreatment of slaves, but he was also a man of his time and did not want to radically reshape attitudes towards slavery.
In his other famous letter, Patrick criticises Christian soldiers under Coroticus’s command, as they had stolen some of his converts and sold them to the Picts as slaves. The appeal to Coroticus to return his slaves has a personal element to it, since Patrick himself had suffered a similar fate at the hands of Celtic raiders. He spent six years in Ireland, no doubt suffering deeply, both from physically punishing work and the social frustration at having gone from being a wealthy Romano-Briton to an abused commodity. In his letter he uses the power he later acquired by rising through the Church to find justice for those who suffered a similar fate to him.
It was while working as a shepherd slave in Ireland that Patrick discovered a burning passion for Christianity, and in his own letter he describes in the most vivid terms the motivation for entering into life as a missionary:
When I had arrived in Ireland and was looking after flocks the whole time, I prayed frequently each day. And more and more, the love of God and the fear of him grew in me, and my faith was increased and my spirit enlivened. So much so that I prayed up to a hundred times in the day and almost as often at night. I even remained in the wood and on the mountain to pray. And – come hail, rain or snow – I was up before dawn to pray … I now understand this, that the Spirit was fervent in me.15
After turning twenty-one, and having lived his early adult years as a slave in Ireland, Patrick says in his Declaration that he escaped and returned to Britain. This was an unusual event, as few slaves would be successful in such an enterprise, while fewer still would gain safe passage across the sea back to their homeland. Patrick writes with passion about the hunger he experienced, and the arduous journey of hundreds of miles he undertook to get back to his family. He would have travelled over sea in a curach, bashed by the oceanic waves and fearing for his life. He would have then travelled on foot along lawless, dangerous and neglected tracks, constantly using basic navigation techniques to wend his way back to his childhood home. This journey shows the willpower and strength of character the young Patrick must have possessed.
Having been welcomed back with great surprise and adulation by his family, Patrick was, remarkably, unable to settle back into his home. Perhaps the pirate raids had changed the complexion of his property, and he may have lost members of his family and friends through the six intervening years. Whatever his reasons, Patrick was soon restless to pursue his new-found religious fervour and follow his father and grandfather’s example by training as a priest. He then made the staggering decision to leave his home and return to Ireland as a missionary. That he was prepared to go back along this long and difficult journey is a sign of the extreme approach to his missionary work. Rather than a life of comfort with those who loved him, he chose hardship, ridicule and numerous brushes with death.
In true missionary spirit, Patrick seemed unable to resist returning to convert the people who had held him as a slave. This may seem like a foolish decision, but it chimes with the missionary zeal that was to grow up in Ireland particularly, whereby pagans should be appealed to, even if they were terrifying and hostile, because otherwise their souls were condemned to hell. Patrick himself wrote, ‘the one and only purpose I had in going back to that people from whom I had earlier escaped was the Gospels and the promises of God.’16
It is important to remember that the mind of Patrick was very different from those of modern-day Christians, in that he saw the end of days as being on the horizon. His world was one full of the threat of real demons and an apocalypse that would see humanity divided between the damned and saved for all eternity. He wanted to save people by converting them to Christianity while he had the chance. This is something that is hard to grasp from our modern perspective, but this was a true evangelical missionary fervour that burnt inside him, and in many of the other missionary saints of the early medieval period.
Patrick re-entered a hostile and unpredictable nation. Ireland in the early Christian period was made up of at least 120 chiefdoms, usually described as petty kingdoms, typically having about 700 warriors each. Patrick was faced with the challenge of both travelling safely between these kingdoms and calling people together. The bell that Patrick may have used as he wandered across the countryside in search of potential converts is venerated in a much later bell-shrine.17 The interior bell may not be contemporary with Patrick, as it has been dated to the eighth to ninth centuries, while the exterior reliquary is eleventh century. Nevertheless, it has been celebrated as one of Ireland’s most significant relics for over a millennium. The grandeur of the casing and its distinctly Viking style testify to the fact that it was treated with respect even by later, very different, settlers of Ireland. There are about a dozen surviving Celtic bell-shrines, which suggests that this sort of contact relic (rather than corporeal relics including parts of a saint’s body) were highly prized within the Irish Church. The bell, crozier and book are symbolic of the Celtic saint’s struggle through the wilderness to bring the word of God to those seeking salvation.
Patrick did not choose an easy path for himself. He was certainly rebuked, with hostility, by the native Irish Celts, and he endured criticism from other churchmen. The Declaration is actually written in defence of claims made against him by fellow Christians and Irish rulers. He opens the letter: ‘I am Patrick – a sinner – the most unsophisticated and unworthy among all the faithful of God. Indeed, to many I am the most despised.’ The accusations made against Patrick include fraud, for he states that he will return the money that wealthy women have given him and accept no payment for performing rites like baptism. It certainly casts him in a different light, but the accusation of manipulating women to commandeer their wealth for the Church is one that had been levelled against other churchmen, including St Jerome.
From the very earliest days of the Church, women were appealed to for financial support. In the Roman world wealthy women could conduct business transactions and lend money. Many of the earliest house churches, like that of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, take their names from the women who bequeathed the buildings to the Church. Individuals like Pudenziana and her sister Prassede were the benefactors of these earlier Tituli, which later grew into larger basilical churches. In the early centuries of Christianity, house churches were modest buildings containing a place for baptism, education and receiving the Eucharist. Widows in particular could inherit property and choose to leave this to the Church after their death.
Appealing to women for funds was not unheard of, but the fact that this is levelled against Patrick in the fifth century tells us two things: firstly, he was in need of funds to boost his missionary work in terms of converting the pagan Irish; and, secondly, that he resorted to any means possible, including sweet-talking Irish noblewomen, to secure much-needed income, protection and support. Patrick was a man alone without a lord in the wilderness, and this was a perilous situation in the early medieval period. He writes that he had to bribe the Irish kings constantly to ensure his safety. Yet he then encouraged the women in their households to become Christians, or even nuns. The removal of noblewomen from the secular sphere into the religious would have angered male rulers, since women were valuable cogs in the political machine. By becoming nuns, wealthy women could not secure bloodlines or expedient marriages. Patrick was wedging himself at the heart of Irish politics, and this would make him few friends.
There is another crime that is alluded to in the letter, which he related to a friend and which ultimately cost him his bishopric earlier in his career. While we don’t know what that crime was, it must have been severe to have such repercussions many years after the event. Patrick writes:
The pretence of that attack against me was that, after thirty years, they found out about a confession I had made in the years even before I was a deacon. At that time, because I was so troubled in my spirit, I revealed to my best friend something I had done one day in my youth – not even a day, but in an hour – because I was not yet then strong in my faith. I was, maybe, fifteen years old and didn’t believe in the Living God.18
The two sins that most fit this description are idolatry (Patrick had rejected the Christian faith of his parents in his youth) or murder, since both acts could take an hour, yet require a lifetime of penance. These are serious crimes, and they indicate that Patrick was a complex and problematic character. While he was remarkably willing to return to a people who had subjugated and punished him, in order to spread Christianity there, to other churchmen he was a sinner, an uneducated man who had not learnt his Latin or his theology thoroughly, a political game player with no clear protection or overlord, and someone many wished to see punished.
As far as setting up a successful ecclesiastical system across Ireland was concerned, it must have been clear to Patrick from the start that the Roman method of Church organisation, centred on dioceses and cities, was not going to be effective in Ireland. The Roman Empire had never reached Ireland, and so it had none of its roads, cities and administrative infrastructure. Instead, Ireland was a looser form of society, with petty kings surrounded by the family groups. The fraternal relationship between an abbot and his monks seemed to fit more comfortably within this familiar setting, and so as Christianity gained a footing in Ireland through the sixth century, monasteries became more popular than dioceses and bishops.
The Ireland into which Patrick stepped was not yet fully Christian. In the fifth century some early missionaries had success exposing the Irish rulers to Christian ideas, so we find the elder Patrick (Palladius) and others making good headway in terms of converting prominent members of Celtic tribes. Although boasting little Christian conclaves from the fifth century, the predominant religious group in Ireland at the time that Patrick was preaching was the Druids. Unlike Brigid, who emerged from, and melded with, older Druidic traditions, Patrick seems to have been unpopular with the Druid leaders. Murchiú’s seventh-century Life of St Patrick records a poem supposedly related by Druids in response to the saint. Although it was probably invented by the later writer, it presents possible insights into how Christian missionaries were perceived by the established religious leaders of pagan Ireland:
Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head, his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head. He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house; all his people will answer: ‘so be it, so be it.’19
Here the Druids seem to cast Patrick as a mentally unstable foreign eccentric, and his followers recite their basic, sheep-like reaction as a sign that they too are ‘crazed in the head’.
Patrick was unpopular with the Druids because he was directly assuming their role within society as religious guides to both the people and the royal houses. He was also upsetting the natural balance within royal households, encouraging women in particular to put aside their responsibility of bearing children and securing marriages, and instead embrace a life of chastity. Murchiú records how tensions between the Druids, the High King of Ireland and Patrick came to a head on Easter, at the symbolic location of Tara.
Long held as a potent site, the Hill of Tara was the powerbase for the high kings of Ireland, and it boasts an extensive Iron Age enclosure and the Stone of Destiny, Lia Fáil, at which the kings were crowned up to AD 500. The legendary semi-divine group the Tuatha Dé Danann, which included the goddess Brigid among its ranks, was said to have brought the stone to Ireland. In a telling account, which may be founded on grains of fact, Murchiú states that on Easter night the king and his Druid leaders were celebrating the Celtic festival of fire on the hill, during which they extinguished their flames and would not light them again until dawn. Patrick and his followers gathered at a nearby hill and lit Easter fires that illuminated the night sky. This was an act punishable by death, so Patrick was doing something extremely provocative. Although the hagiographical text dresses the event up in biblical references and symbolism, this was an act of incitement, designed to get a response from the king. Patrick, like Alban, was a political radical who was not afraid to challenge those in power.
Murchiú’s account does stretch the limits of reality. In a dramatic passage, he goes on to relate how the king, Loiguire, was furious and took his nine chariots to meet with Patrick. The Druid leaders instructed the king to remain outside, for then he was less likely to be tricked by the Christian saint’s acts. Patrick went out to meet the king and his followers, provocatively singing a Psalm which undermined Loiguire’s ceremonial arrival: ‘Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses; but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God.’20 The personality that emerges from Murchiú’s Life is wilful, militaristic, scheming and inflammatory.
Patrick was forced to defend his actions in a magical contest against the Druid leaders. Enflamed by one of the Druids’ words against Christianity, Murchiú writes that Patrick cast a spell which raised the magician up in the air and smashed his skull on a rock. While this is largely fiction, the idea that Patrick’s hagiographical text could record him murdering one of the most important advisers to the king, in his royal presence, on such a sacred site and during a sacred festival, seems remarkable.
In the following commotion, Patrick was said to have made darkness fall over the heathens, who were then slaughtered so that only the king, queen and two of his followers survived. The queen then begged for Patrick’s mercy and the royal family departed, humiliated and grieving. This story was transmitted as a sign that the forceful Patrick, filled with the power of the Christian God, could defeat any enemy, particularly the pagan Druidic bedrock of pre-Christian Ireland. But it strikes the modern reader as a startling and hard-hitting way to spread a religious message. Patrick appears unforgiving and brutal towards the Druids in this account, despite the fact that he uses many of their magical actions against them. The legend of Patrick banishing snakes from Ireland may, in fact, be referring to the fact that he banished Druids.
Patrick’s own letter to the soldiers of Coroticus contains a passage stating that ‘No murderer can be with Christ’, which casts doubt on the account of him murdering a Druid. Nevertheless, both his own letters and later legends that grew up around him suggest that Patrick was a man with many sides, capable of great and terrible acts. This fact was clearly appreciated by Christian scribes after his death. In the Book of Armagh, a ninth-century manuscript held in Trinity College, Dublin, a copy of his Declaration survives, but the sections relating to the more questionable acts he performed have been deliberately excluded. It is fortunate that six other copies survive across Ireland, France and England, with which comparison can be made. But the oldest copy now in Dublin indicates that attempts were made to clean up Patrick’s image. As with other saints covered by this book, Patrick was neither black nor white, good nor bad, but lived in the real world of politics, power and passion.
Patrick is credited with extending the reach of Christianity far throughout Ireland and the surrounding Isles, and here too later texts record that he employed a rather merciless set of techniques. The conversion of the Isle of Man to Christianity in the fifth century is also thought to be due to his influence. The founding saint of Man, St Maughold, was converted after an encounter with Patrick. The legend states that Maughold was an Irish prince and part of a pirate gang. On meeting Patrick, he attempted to test his sanctity, particularly the suggestion that he could raise people from the dead. Maughold placed a living man in a shroud and asked Patrick to revive him from death. Patrick blessed the body, and when they opened it they saw that the man had died – an interesting insight into the games that a saint could play. In effect, he murdered the man to prove a point!
The legend continues that Maughold was so upset by what he’d done that he appealed to Patrick, who revived the dead man in the manner of a magician, firmly rebuked the pirates and cast Maughold away on a curach with no oars, by which he landed on the coast of Man.21 Both saints come out of this encounter with a tarnished image. Maughold provoked a saint and through his foolish behaviour had one of his friends killed, while Patrick supposedly murdered someone to prove a point and then used magic to revive him.
Maughold is a particularly interesting example of an early saint who struggled to balance his virtues and vices. A later poem describes some of his failings:
If his sins we could fish up,
Before he was bishop;
He led his poor wife,
It is said, a sad life,
Would cheat her and beat her,
And often ill-treat her;
Nay, threaten to kick her,
When he was in liquor,
Though now a saint, yet he
Was once-of banditti.21
Maughold, like St Patrick who influenced him, is remembered as a complex character subject to human failings. That a saint could leave behind their sins, receive forgiveness and go on to perform good acts, features in a number of the surviving early hagiographical texts regarding conversion in the fifth and sixth centuries.
Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, also emerged from this conflicted time. He was born some time around AD 500 and died around AD 590, which is a long life at any point in history. He was renowned as a teacher, bishop and founder of churches and monasteries, mostly within the confines of Wales. It is interesting that the Celtic fringes chose saints that looked back to their earliest Christian days. David is a good example, since the texts written about him indicate he was not particularly renowned for miracles or asceticism. Instead, he seems to have been a practical leader of the Church, a bishop at the time of the Pelagian heresy.22 His best-known miracle is said to have taken place when he was preaching against Pelagianism in the middle of a large crowd at the Synod of Brefi: the village of Llanddewi Brefi commemorates the ground where David stood, which reputedly rose up to form a small hill. One writer notes that you can scarcely ‘conceive of any miracle more superfluous’ in that part of Wales than the creation of a new hill.23
He was Bishop (probably not Archbishop) of Menevia, the Roman port in Pembrokeshire, later known as St David’s, which was at the time the chief point of departure for Ireland. This is most of what’s known with any certainty about the patron saint of Wales. His life was recorded some 500 years after his death, by Rhygyfarch, a son of the then bishop of St David’s. Clearly, the hagiographical text is biased, firstly because it gives a partisan account designed to prop up the episcopate of St David’s and support its claim of independence from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Wales wanted devolution from England in the eleventh century too. And secondly, because so many centuries had passed between David’s life and his hagiographer’s. It would be like writing a biography of Henry VIII now without the benefit of documentary sources.
Saint David gets wrapped up in fascinating but farcical situations by other later authors too, all of whom have their own agendas. In one source, the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth, David is described as King Arthur’s uncle, while elsewhere it states that thirty years before his birth, an angel delivered a prophesy of him to St Patrick. Attempts have been made to connect these early British and Celtic saints over the centuries, and while their lives tell differing stories, they do present an image of fifth-century Britain moving gradually and haltingly towards Christianity. From Wales and Cornwall to Scotland and then over to Ireland, Christian missions did continue to spread the Gospel and spread their own influence and authority, occasionally with the backing of the Pope, and otherwise with their own guts and charisma to guide them.
The fifth and sixth centuries were difficult times to be a religious figure, since throughout the British Isles older traditions were being supplanted by Christian ideas, institutions and influential individuals. Patrick, Maughold and David all lived in a pagan Celtic world before they emerged as Christian saints. They had grown up within violent, complicated, conflicted environments, where slavery, barbarism, war and bloodshed were part of life. As they moved into a new ideology and embraced a Christian worldview that would alter society from the ground up, they would inevitably meet with resistance. It is hardly surprising that their legends retain glimpses of this world, and understanding their part as players in it allows us clearer insight into this transitional time.
The early saints of England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man are all shrouded in the mists of the darkest parts of medieval history in terms of documentary evidence – the fourth to the sixth centuries. On the basis of what can be distilled from later texts written about them, each saint had a different reason for being recognised as a founding father or patron saint. Patrick faced many struggles, in terms of being taken into slavery and battling opposition on many fronts. Yet his legacy remains in the deeply personal texts he wrote, which reveal a man battling against the odds to take his new religion to the very people who had oppressed him. He comes across as a victim, constantly having to defend himself and make excuses, but he was clearly determined enough to persevere, and if it wasn’t he who was the very first to preach Christianity to the Irish, then he is still remembered as the first to have widespread success with his conversion.
The process of converting and preaching is also recorded in the founding legends of Maughold and David. In the case of the Isle of Man, the real hero of the story is Patrick, for he is credited with spreading the Christian message to the island. However, the reformed criminal and outlaw Maughold experienced extreme guilt and undertook penance, so becoming a treasured saint in Man. David is even harder to pin down, especially since Wales was rich in Christians from the fourth century onwards. However, he has been remembered as patron saint due to his role in cleansing Britain of the stain of heresy, and through his apparently orthodox stance. As the next wave of missionary activity emerged in the late sixth century, this time with a papally sanctioned enterprise, the Welsh no doubt needed a rallying figure to present them internationally as virtuous and orthodox Christians that wished to keep in line with Roman practices. David was a good rallying point, and a home-grown bishop at that, so he remains Wales’s patron saint.
It has been essential to establish the emergence of sanctity, first in Roman Britain and then in Ireland, before arriving at the Anglo-Saxons. History is not a set of defined periods, sitting distinct from one another, but rather a constant flux, where changes take place gradually and are influenced by many varying factors. To leap straight into a study of Anglo-Saxon saints without first understanding the Roman period in which Christianity set down roots in Britain – and then the Celtic Church, which was to have such a profound effect on English saints – would be to begin the story far too late.
In terms of the next saint, our gaze moves towards England and the Anglo-Saxons. Though pagan in the fifth and sixth centuries, they were converted through the combined efforts of Roman and Celtic missionaries. The year AD 597 was pivotal. A group of fearful Roman missionaries was sent across Europe to Kent, while the Irish saint Columba died, having established a monastery on Iona, right on the edge of the Anglo-Saxon world. Two very different types of sanctity emerged, and both were to impact upon the later Anglo-Saxon saints. However, if Anglo-Saxon Christians could have chosen a patron saint for themselves, it is clear whom they would have picked. Like George, he was not a native of England, but he was celebrated as the saviour of the English and the man responsible for converting the pagan Anglo-Saxons. He was a Roman and a pope: Gregory the Great.