Here are asses carrying on their backs as much as would ordinarily fill an ass-cart—peats in one pannier, provisions in another with a sack of flour laid across the bare back for good loading. We have come out of the country where there are horses and pasture-lands; not yet have we come into the West of Ireland but this part of an inland county reminds us of counties that are on the Atlantic seaboard: we might see asses like these, driven by just such old women or barefooted girls, in Galway or Mayo. Irish speech, too, is heard here. There are boglands around; the fields have bunches of rushes growing up in them; flocks of bog-larks rise in these fields. We are in Cavan, an Ulster county, and we are beside Moy Slecht, one of the places in Ireland where assuredly Saint Patrick stood.
He had come back to Ireland, to the ultimate western country, the missionary of Christian Europe, the envoy of the Roman world. He had been in Ireland before, the captive of a barbarian lord. Years of captivity went by. Christianity, which had not been fervent among his people nor in himself before his misfortune, became a living thing within him; now, between his fifteenth and twentieth years, was his conversion, now all he was to do was decided. He had intimations that he knew were divine. Sometimes he offered up a hundred prayers in the day. Often he rose before dawn, and, in the woods or upon the hillsides, in frost, in hail and in snow, offered up his heart to God. For him the Roman community in Britain, although a doom was over it, stood for civilization; his dream was to return to it. Once he heard a directing voice; he made a flight; he discovered a ship about to sail from Ireland. After he had come to the ship he had moments of tragic suspense. He was willing to work his passage to the port to which the vessel was bound. The proposal he made “was entertained by the mariners, but afterward the ship-master objected, saying sharply, “Nay, in no wise shalt thou come with us.” This disappointment, coming as the end of his captivity seemed to be in sight, was bitter. He turned away from the mariners to seek shelter. As he went he prayed, and before he had finished his prayer he heard one of the crew shouting behind him. “Come quickly, for they are calling you.” The ship-master had been persuaded to forego his objections, and Patrick, now about twenty-one years of age, set sail from Ireland in rough company.
The ship, the cargo and the voyage were as strange as any romance-writer need devise: dogs were part of the cargo—great Irish wolfhounds. The crew wished to enter into a compact of friendship with him, but Patrick refused to be adopted by them. They reached port and then made a journey overland; they wandered through a desert country for eight and twenty days; many of the dogs became exhausted and were left to die on the road. What was the desert land they traversed? Probably southern Gaul. “It was the last night of the year 406 that the Vandals, Suevi, Alani and Burgundians burst into Gaul.” The picture of the desolation which he gives has helped Professor MacNeill to date Saint Patrick’s journey.
Apparently Patrick and his company went into Italy; afterward he wandered back to the south of France. For a while he stayed at a monastery on an island in the Mediterranean. Then, after great labors, he won home again to his friends in Britain.
We know now where his native place was: the researches of Professor MacNeill, published just a year ago, in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, have cleared up that long-debated matter. Patrick’s native place was Abergavenny, in the country that is now Wales. There was still a Roman organization there in 401, the year, according to Professor MacNeill’s conjecture, of Patrick’s capture.
From Bath, Aquae Solis, an important Roman town, a Roman road led to the Severn estuary, and was connected by an established ferry (traiectus) with the great road which ran from the military station of Venta Silurum northward to another important military centre, Viriconium, and thence to Deva, now Chester, also a military station of great strategic importance. Not far from Venta, this road reached the Usk at Igca Silurum. Here a western branch traversed the southern seaboard of Wales as far as Maridunum. The main road, turning northward at Isca, passed through Burrium and Gabannium, Abergavenny, both on the river Usk.
Here, along ways that still communicated with the Roman centre lived communities loyally Roman, if not fervently Christian. Patrick spoke the language of the British Celts as well as the Latin tongue. But at the time he was taken captive—he was fifteen then, it is surmised—he had not been trained In the schools. He speaks in his confession of his inability to write good Latin,
apologizing that he has not had the double advantage that others [of his calling and station] have had, who, as is most fitting, have been educated in sacred literature, and have not lost the Latin speech of their childhood, but have rather constantly acquired a more refined use of it, whereas he, as his style, he says, betrays, was forced in youth to adopt a strange language iii place of Latin.
Professor MacNeill remarks acutely:
His style, indeed, suggests that, like many a candidate for examination in our time, his conscious weakness in Latin composition caused him to fill out his sentences with phrases taken from other writings, and not always apt to express the intended sense.
Well, on this Christian community that still had communication with the Roman centre, the Irish raiders descended in 401. These booty-seekers were probably under the command of the high-king, Niall. The household of the decurion Calpurius hardly survived the raid: its youthful heir was taken together with its man-servants and maid-servants. Thousands of captives were carried off from Britain by these particular raiders. They were sold as slaves, as Patrick tells us, and were scattered among many tribes, near and far, even to the most remote part of the land.
Roman power, which had long been gradually and steadily decaying, was many stages further on toward its dissolution when Patrick returned to Britain. Irish settlements had succeeded Irish raids, and there were now Irish kingdoms bordering the places in which Patrick had known Roman communities. And a British chieftain holding Roman power irregularly, he whom Welsh history knows as Cunedda, was attacking the Irish settlements and organizing the land—the land we now know as Wales—as a British Celtic kingdom. Patrick felt an impulse to return to the place of his slavery. The impulse became a call. In a dream he saw a man standing by his side. He had come from Ireland, as Patrick knew, and in his hand he held a bundle of letters.
And he gave me one of these, and I read the beginning of the letter which contained the voice of the Irish, and as I read the beginning of it I fancied I heard the voice of the folk who were near the wood of Fochlad, nigh to the western sea. And this was the cry, “We pray thee, holy youth, to come and walk among us as before.” I was pierced to the heart and could read no more, and thereupon I awoke.
But years of preparation in southern Gaul were to go by before he heard the actual voices of the Irish people. It was twenty-five years after he had taken ship from Ireland, in or about his forty-sixth or forty-seventh year, that Patrick returned to the land in which he had spent six years as a captive.
Again he stood in the place of his youth’s captivity. It was in northeast Ulster, in the modern counties of Antrim and Down. The ancient name of the territory was Dalriada; the kingdom of Dalriada was Pictish, and it remained Pictish until the eighth century. The most powerful king in Ireland at the time was Laegaire (Laery) the second in succession from Niall who had carried off Patrick as a captive. Laegaire claimed to be Ardi-ri, high-king or emperor of the Irish—but it is doubtful if his authority was very real in the outlying kingdom of Dalriada. Patrick went to Tara and preached before the high-king. Laegaire did not adopt the new creed, but he put no obstacles in the way of Patrick’s mission.
It cannot be merely a legend, it must be historically true that he came to the place that I look on now. Here stood the idol that had genuine popular worship and that drew offerings from the folk. Here was the precinct of Cromm, the sky-god of the older races, the giver of fertility to the furrow; At Hallowe’en, the moment between autumn and winter, the people came with their offerings. The idol was on a height; pilgrims approached it across a lake. Patrick, says the legend, came and touched Cromm with his crozier, and Cromm bowed down to him. Probably Patrick put the place under solemn interdiction, so that his worshipers gradually departed from Cromm. In a folk-tale the one who once was a god of the folk has become the servant of Patrick.
Crom Duv, Saint Patrick’s servant, was asked by the fairies to put the following question to his master: “What time will the Slanagh Sidhe go to Paradise?” “Not till the Day of Judgment, for certain,” answered the saint. Before that the good people used to put the sickles in the corn and the spades in the ground, and spade and sickle used to be seen working for men without visible assistance; but thenceforward the Sidhfir would do nothing.
He sat with three kings to revise the laws of Ireland. That revision was an acknowledgment that his mission had been successful, for it was to incorporate the new Christian teaching in the national law. But still Patrick looked on himself as an exile and a man of little account. The world that he felt he belonged to—the world of his father, the decurion—was perishing in his sight: the Roman legions had been withdrawn from Britain; Germanic pagans with Gaels and Picts were rending what was left of the Roman order. Nay, Christianity itself was no restraint upon men who had knowledge of the Latin language and who claimed some shadow of Roman authority, for the soldiers of the king of North Britain massacred Patrick’s converts and mocked the ambassador whom he had sent to rebuke them.
In hostile guise they are dead while they live, allies of the Scots and apostate Picts, as though wishing to gorge themselves with the blood of innocent Christians whom I, in countless numbers, begot to God and confirmed in Christ. On that day following that on which the newly baptized in white array were anointed with the chrism—it was still gleaming on their foreheads while they were cruelly butchered and slaughtered—I sent a letter with a holy presbyter, whom I taught from his infancy, with some clerics, to request that they would allow us some of the booty or of the baptized captives whom they had taken. They jeered at him.
And then in that epistle comes the bitter cry of the exile—an exile none the less, although twenty years had been spent in laboring in Ireland and he was now an old man:
Did I come to Ireland without God or according to the flesh? Who compelled me—I am bound by the spirit—not to see any of my kinsfolk? Is it from me that I show godly compassion toward that nation which once took me captive and harried the men-servants and maidservants of my father’s house? I was free-born according to the flesh. I am born of a father who was a decurion, but I sold my nobility, I blush not to state it, nor am I sorry for it, for the profit of others.
He did not know it, but he was doing for Roman civilization what soldiers and administrators had been unable to do for it—he was creating for it reserve forces. Later on, when the Christian and the Roman principles were all but destroyed in his Britain, the successors of the men whom he was ordaining were to bring back and reinstate something derived from these principles. Very few men’s labor had such fruit as this man’s has had. The National Museum in Dublin has the little bell that he held in his hand when he summoned his congregation in the Ireland of 1,500 years ago—always and by all visitors it is looked at with special reverence. Beside it is a reliquary made in honor of the saint by one of the Norman lords of the West of Ireland—one of the De Briminghams: it is covered over with the figures of the French saints who were thought most about at the time^one thinks of how present Patrick is in comparison with any of them, and of how unique is the veneration in which he has been held by all comers into Ireland. And here where Patrick triumphed somehow over a popular paganism I think of what his words were when he spoke of himself—
I, Patrick, a sinner, the most rustic, and the least of all the faithful, and in the estimation of very many deemed contemptible.
I think, too, of what the most penetrating of Irish writers, James Joyce, at one time said to me regarding him: “He was modest and he was sincere… He waited too long to write his Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man.”
