52 FOURTH PEKIOD. A.D. 590 TO 1049.
He changed the laws of the kingdom, healed the blind, raised nine per sons from death to life, and expelled all the snakes and frogs from Ire land.1 His memory is celebrated March 17, and is a day of great public processions with the Irish Catholics in all parts of the world. His death is variously put in the year 455 (Tillemont), 464 or 465 (Butler, Killen), 493 (Ussher, Skene, Forbes, Haddan & Stubbs). Forbes (Kalendars, p. 433) and Skene (Keltic /Scotland, II. 427 sqq.) come to the conclusion that the legend of St. Patrick in its present shape is not older than the ninth century, and dissolves into three personages : SEN-PATRICK, whose day in the Kalendar is the 24th of August ; PALLADIUS, " qui est Patricius" to whom the mission in 431 properly belongs, and PATRICIUS, whose day is the 17th of March, and who died in 493. " From the acts of these three saints, the subsequent legend of the great Apostle of Ireland was compiled, and an arbitrary chronology applied to it."
§ 15. The Irish Church after St. Patrick.
THE MISSIONARY PERIOD.
The labors of St. Patrick were carried on by his pupils and by many British priests and monks who were driven from Eng land by the Anglo-Saxon invasion in the 5th and 6th centuries.2 There was an intimate intercourse between Ireland and Wales, where British Christianity sought refuge, and between Ireland and Scotland, where the seed of Christianity had been planted by Ninian and Kentigern. In less than a century after St. Patrick's death Ireland was covered with churches and convents for men and women. The monastic institutions were training schools of clergymen and missionaries, and workshops for transscribing sacred books. Prominent among these are the monas-
1 A witty Irishman, who rowed me (in 1875) over Lake Killarney, told rne that St. Patrick put the last snake into an iron box, and sunk it to the bottom of the lake, although he had solemnly promised to let the creature out. I asked him whether it was not a sin to cheat a snake ? " Not at all," was his quick reply, "he only paid him in the same coin ; for the first snake cheated the whole world." The same guide told me that Cromwell killed all the good people in Ireland, and let the bad ones live ; and when I objected that he must have made an exception with his ancestors, he politely replied: "No, my parents came from America."
2 Petrie (Round Towers, p. 137, quoted by Killen I. 26) speaks of crowds of foreign ecclesiastics — Roman, Egyptian, French, British, Saxon — who nocked into Ireland as a place of refuge in the fifth and sixth centuries.
g 15. THE IRISH CHURCH AFTER ST. PATRICK. 53
teries of Armagh, Banchor or Bangor (558), Cloriard (500), Clonmacnois (528), Dcrry (555), Glendolough (G18).
Durin^ the sixth and seventh centuries Ireland excelled all
o
other countries in Christian piety, and acquired the name of "the Island of Saints." We must understand this in a compa rative sense, and remember that at that time England was just beginning to emerge from Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Germany was nearly all heathen, and the French kings — the eldest sons of the Church — were " monsters of iniquity." Ireland itself was distracted by civil wars between the petty kings and chief tains; and the monks and clergy, even the women, marched to the conflict. Adamnan with difficulty secured a law exempting women from warfare, and it was not till the ninth century that the clergy in Ireland were exempted from "expeditions and nestings " (battles). The slave-trade was in full vigor between Ireland and England in the tenth century, with the port of Bristol for its centre. The Irish piety was largely based on childish superstition. But the missionary zeal of that country is nevertheless most praiseworthy. Ireland dreamed the dream of converting heathen Europe. Its apostles went forth to Scot land, North Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and North Italy. " They covered the land and seas of the West. Unwea ried navigators, they lauded on the most desert islands; they overflowed the Continent with their successive immigrations. They saw in incessant visions a world known and unknown to be conquered for Christ. The poem of the Pilgrimage of St. Brandan, that monkish Odyssey so celebrated in the middle ages, that popular prelude of the Divina Commedia, shows us the Irish monks in close contact with all the dreams and won ders of the Keltic ideal." *
The missionaries left Ireland usually in companies of twelve, writh a thirteenth as their leader. This duodecimal economy was to represent Christ and the twelve apostles. The following are the most prominent of these missionary bands : 2
1 Montalembert, II. 397. 2 See Reeves, S. Columba, Introd., p. Ixxi.