The Story of Ireland Read online

  But this land of Ierne or Hibernia was only ever of marginal economic and strategic interest: there was never enough at stake to make a Roman invasion worthwhile. Only once, in AD 82, do we have a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when a decisive Roman intervention might have been possible. The historian Tacitus describes an embassy in that year in the form of a Hibernian princeling, ‘expelled from his home by a rebellion’, who sailed across the water to Roman Britain. The intentions of this prince were to negotiate with Agricola, the all-conquering Roman governor of Britain (and father-in-law to Tacitus himself, which is why we know so much about him), who maintained a fleet in the Solway Firth, less than a day’s sail from the northeast coast of Hibernia. He ‘was welcomed by Agricola, who detained him, nominally as a friend, in the hope of being able to make use of him’.2 The embassy, in other words, would have provided a convenient pretext to enter and conquer Hibernia, had the political will been present.

  The identity of this petty king has never been established, but some of the recurring themes of our story are set at this point. The first is of the disenfranchised or otherwise put-upon exile seeking foreign aid – with potentially momentous consequences. The second is of a relationship between the two islands that is already close and mutually significant. ‘I have often heard Agricola say,’ Tacitus remarked, ‘that Hibernia could be reduced and held by a single legion…and that it would be easier to hold Britain if it were completely surrounded by Roman armies so that liberty was banished from its sight.’3 But Agricola was diverted by rebellion in Scotland and his alternative invasion plans were shelved – for good, as it turned out: Hibernia may have been clearly visible from points on the coast of Roman Britain, but the empire’s legions would never cross the sea in force.

  By the fourth century, Roman control of Britain was visibly waning and Irish influences began to increase in potency. Although these contacts continued to take the form of pillaging, skirmishes and slaving raids, there were also sustained attempts at planting communities along the western seaboard of Britain. Such settlements were made in Cornwall, in west Wales and later in Dál Ríata, a long-enduring and politically successful kingdom straddling the narrow waters of the North Channel; the existence of such colonies underscores the sense that the seas at this time were as much highways as barriers to movement. These increasing contacts, of course, also impacted profoundly on the situation at home: goods and materials seized or traded in Roman Britain were carried back across the sea, helping to effect shifts of balance on the domestic scene.

  This was an intensely hierarchical society. The country’s many tribal kings were at the top of the structure, while grinding poverty without hope of betterment was the lot of the landless serfs at the bottom. There was no state, nor anything resembling it, in this politically fragmented land of túatha or petty kingdoms and endlessly fluctuating borders. Neither was there a firm division of the country into larger units: the provincial pentarchy of Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Meath might have been in existence at certain periods in history, but was certainly not a constant presence in political affairs. The nearest the country came to a degree of unity was in its structure of federations of túatha that had submitted to the authority of an overlord – and such federations were apt to change all the time. By the fifth century AD, when a documented history of the island begins, the forms of the modern provinces of Munster and Connacht were more or less recognizable, but those of the others were not: Laigin in the southeast occupied a much smaller territory than the modern province of Leinster; the ancient dynasty of the Ulaid ruled over a now-shrunken kingdom in the north and east of modern Ulster; and the northern and southern branches of the Uí Néill dynasty governed a wide and fluctuating area that stretched from the fertile eastern plains to the island’s rugged northwestern tip.

  Power was concentrated in the hands of a number of dynasties, flowing down from a king or patriarch into the rest of society. Emphasis, in this oral culture, was placed upon learning: poets and scholars were the conservators of tradition and convention. And so, in spite of the enduring rivalry between these kingdoms, Ireland was not characterized by anarchy: this society was abidingly conservative, its members tending to know their place in a complex and carefully calibrated scheme of things. Life was ordered by dense mazes of laws: these were extraordinarily pervasive and covered every issue under the sun, from marriage, murder and inheritance rights through to the perils and minutiae of beekeeping; the system was collated and written down after the arrival of Christianity heralded the shift from an oral to a written culture. As for the sense of political fragmentation, here too the roots of a larger collectivity could be discerned – and so the political disunity of these years ought not to be equated with the absence of a shared, if nebulous, identity. After all, it is significant that the Gaelic word for a province is cúige, meaning a fifth – and the presence of a fifth implies the existence of a whole.

  Part One

  Gods and Warriors

  Chapter One

  Children of God

  How wonderful it is that here in Ireland a people who never had any knowledge of God – who until now have worshipped idols and impure things – have recently become a people of the Lord and are now called children of God. You can see that the sons and daughters of Irish kings have become brothers and virgins for Christ.1

  According to the legends, Christianity first arrived in Ireland on a spring night in AD 433. The pagan high king Laoghaire (Lóegaire) had ascended the hill of Tara, and now he stood on its summit, surrounded by druids and vassals. His task was to light the sacred fire of Beltane, which would usher in summer, and the ancient law dictated that no fire could be lit on this feast day before that of the king himself. But suddenly, on the hill of Slane nearby, a flame flared in the darkness and the old codes were in a moment exploded. The druids pleaded with Laoghaire to ‘extinguish this flame or it will burn forever’; and, hastening through the spring twilight to Slane, they found on the summit of the hill the man called Patrick. An epic battle of magic followed, during which Patrick lifted a druid into the air and dashed his brains out; and in the aftermath of the newcomer’s victory, the fearful Laoghaire saw the truth: ‘It is better that I should believe,’ he said, ‘than die.’ On Easter Day the high king converted to Christianity; and at Tara, Patrick set about converting all the chieftains of Ireland in their turn.

  It is a captivating tale: and it sweeps the national saint, endowed with unprecedented power and authority, to the centre of the stage of Irish history. Yet, for all that it mingles legend with the rhythms of pagan Ireland, it pays scant attention to the historical reality – for Patrick was not in fact responsible for carrying Christianity across the Irish Sea. This new religion had taken root well in advance of his ministry: certainly an established Christian community existed in the south and east of Ireland as early as the last decades of the fourth century. This early Christian community did not exist in isolation: indeed, with the Pelagian heresy posing a substantial threat throughout much of Europe, the doctrinal wellbeing of the Church in Ireland, as elsewhere, was a pressing issue for the papacy itself.* In 431, then, the first Christian bishop was dispatched by Rome to Ireland – and his name was not Patrick. The theologian St Prosper of Aquitaine records the event: ‘to the Irish believing in Christ, Palladius, having been ordained by Pope Celestine, is sent as first bishop’.2

  Few details are known about this first bishop or his visit to Ireland. Palladius – most likely a Briton or Gaul of aristocratic background – made landfall on the coast of what is now County Wicklow, and most of his time in Ireland was spent ministering in this corner of the country: he is traditionally associated with Baltinglass, where he is said to have deposited his writing tablet, together with certain relics of St Peter and St Paul. His stay was of no great duration – within three years he had moved on to Scotland – and though his mission was symbolically important, it has essentially vanished from the Irish collective memory. Palladius’s
successor, by contrast, has attained an iconic presence in Irish history – though the irony is that precious few hard facts exist about the life and times of either man. As we shall see, however, the championing of Patrick and erasure of Palladius from the story of Ireland came about largely for reasons of political expediency.

  Much of what is known about Patrick derives from his own writings, which provide a number of insights into his character but – since they were never written as autobiography – hardly any into his movements and travels. In the centuries that followed, other historians made various claims and assertions – and as a result, we come to Patrick as through a thicket of half-truth, myth and falsehood to discover that he was born (it is not known exactly when) into a well-off Romanized family in a small trading town somewhere in western Britain (it is not known exactly where); and that he grew up comfortably enough amid the growing decay and fragmentation of the Roman world. Although the remnants of the Roman province of Britain had by now Christianized, this young man was certainly not in close communion with God. He had already committed a misdemeanour frequently referred to but frustratingly unspecified throughout his writings: it was perhaps a sexual crime or had something to do with the sin of idolatry. Patrick had received the bare bones of an education: although he could read and write in Latin, he lacked that polished grounding in philosophy and the classics that many of his male peers might have enjoyed. Just short of his sixteenth birthday, however, Patrick’s life would take an unexpected and violent turn.

  The Irish Sea had long been considered not as a barrier between Ireland and the outside world, but rather as a highway; and the established Irish settlements in west Wales, southwest Scotland and Cornwall enabled commodities and ideas to flow easily both east into Britain and west into Ireland. Some of these commodities were human: indeed, it seems likely that among the first Christians in Ireland were slaves taken in Irish raids on the increasingly undefended British coast. The adolescent Patrick was captured by one such party of slavers, torn from his comfortable provincial surroundings and brought to Ireland. This, he notes in his Confession, was no more than he deserved: ‘we had abandoned God and did not follow his ways…so God poured out his anger on us and scattered us among the hordes of barbarians who live at the edge of the world’.3 He spent the next six years herding animals – most likely in what is now County Mayo – and here both his destiny and his relationship with God were sealed:

  After I came to Ireland I watched over sheep. Day by day I began to pray more frequently – and more and more my love of God and my faith in him and reverence for him began to increase. My spirit was growing, so that each day I would say a hundred prayers and almost as many each night, even during those times when I had to stay overnight in the woods or mountains. I would get up each morning before sunrise to pray, through snow and frost and rain. No harm came to me because of it, and I was certainly not lazy. I see now looking back that my spirit was bursting inside me.4

  Eventually the young Patrick escaped, got on board a ship and fled Ireland, prevailing upon a pagan crew (who grumbled but happily soon came to their senses) to return him to his home in Britain. The heathen Irish, however, continued to be present in his thoughts; eventually he resolved to return there as a missionary – a move that was very much against the wishes of his family. His plans were also opposed by the local clerical establishment, which did not altogether approve of the idea of evangelizing in what was still a partially pagan society; Patrick was even accused of harbouring base financial motives. Nor was he free of other, private anxieties: in particular, his relatively uneducated status in relation to undertaking such a task is referred to throughout his Confession.

  He certainly faced daunting challenges in Ireland – not least because Christianity so firmly denied the existence of other gods. It was for this reason that later writers were at pains to demonstrate Patrick’s authority over his pagan enemies: it was only by smashing, humiliating and generally vanquishing them that he could repeatedly prove the authority of his God over all other gods. In some ways, though, the Christian mission resonated: pre-Christian devotion was characterized by, for example, the worship of gods in groups of three, by sayings collected in threes (triads), and so on – from all of which the concept of the Holy Trinity was not so very far removed. Against this backdrop the myth of Patrick and his three-leafed shamrock fits quite neatly. The concept of heaven and hell also struck a chord, given that pre-Christian Ireland had a deep and constant sense of communion with an invisible other world.

  The new religion’s central image – the crucified Christ who had sacrificed himself for the common good – would have meant much to a society where human sacrifice was still practised. The warrior caste in particular must have found such symbolism appealing; and the saints and missionaries of the early Church were recast as ‘warriors for Christ’ with relative ease. But Patrick’s message was also directed explicitly at those who were marginalized in society: at the young and especially at women, who had little enough to gain from preserving a status quo in which they had no independent rights of their own. Certainly, many women in his following – including members of the nobility – took the veil, and in the process handed over their precious things to enrich the Church. Given that females were themselves viewed as commodities, to be married off in whatever way best served their family circle, it is easy to imagine the hostility that a mission such as Patrick’s aroused.

  The story of his life, however, pivots on the writings of a host of later supporters and hagiographers – and it is largely as a result of these works that he was moulded into a miracle worker and prophet, his story intersecting with that of the heroes of ancient myth. In later centuries, sites scattered across the country took stakes in his life and reputation: his traditional burial place at Downpatrick held a tooth, for example; Dublin possessed the Bachall Íosa or crozier supposedly given to Patrick by Christ himself; and pilgrimage sites at Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg became famous across Europe.

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

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