The earliest Irish Latin texts that have survived to the present day date from about the year 600. The so-called Codex Usserianus Primus is a copy of the gospels, now preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, written in ink on parchment with a quill pen. The so-called Springmount Tablets, discovered in a peat bog in County Antrim and now in the National Museum of Ireland, are six little wooden tablets measuring about 7.5 x 20 cm, each of which has one face recessed and filled with a light coating of wax; on to the surface of the wax has been incised with a stylus the text of Psalms xxx-xxxii. Materials, script and technique differ as between the codex and the tablets, but in each case the writing is assured and accomplished. These artefacts are the product of an Irish clerical community which took writing in Latin for granted.
These diverse sources, a selection only, have something to tell us of the Christianization of Ireland: new disciplines, new buildings, new learning, new artefacts, were imported and naturalized. And subtly changed in the process? The church imported into Ireland had to adapt itself to Irish conditions. There was nothing surprising about this. Missionary Christianity has to have both resilience and adaptability if it is to be widely acceptable. In the Ireland of Palladius and Patrick, Christianity entered a social world which was rural in its economy, tribal and familial in its organization and pre-literate – ogham excepted – in its culture. These characteristics of Irish society were bound to affect both the way in which Christianity could be presented and the way in which it would be received. Despite the trading and other connections with Roman Britain, the characteristic tell-tales of Roman dominion and civilization were absent: towns, roads, coinage, written law, bureaucracy, taxation. One might reasonably guess that Patrick’s Irish congregations were a good deal less touched by Romanitas than the Tervingi of Dacia among whom Ulfila had ministered.
In Ireland the fundamental political unit – the very word ‘political’ is perhaps something of a misnomer in this context – was the tuath (plural tuatha): a human grouping held together partly by kinship, partly by clientage, in occupation of a shifting zone of territory under the presidency of a dynasty of kings maintained by tribute in kind. The role of the king was religious as well as secular. He had to defend his people and win fame and plunder in warfare with other kings (not unlike Edwin of Northumbria after him, though on a smaller scale); he also had to mediate between his people and the gods to ensure fat cattle and plentiful harvests. Tuatha varied greatly in area and population, but it may safely be said that none was very big for there were perhaps 150–200 of them in early medieval Ireland. There was nothing systematic and nothing static about authority in the Ireland of St Patrick. Like biological cells, tuatha were constantly on the move, splitting, fusing, splitting again, as one king achieved a temporary supremacy over his neighbours only to lose it after a few years.
How could a Christian ecclesiastical organization build its house upon such shifting sands? This was a question that had not arisen before. Within the Roman empire it had been normal for the church to graft itself on to the existing framework of civil administration. Thus, for example, the civil province of Gallia Narbonensis, administered from Narbo (Narbonne), turned into an ecclesiastical province: its chief bishop (or archbishop, or metropolitan) came to reside in Narbonne and his subject (or suffragan) bishops were those of the various towns within the civil province – Béziers, Carcassonne, Lodève, Nimes, Uzès, Toulouse and so forth. But in Ireland there were no towns, no provinces, no fixed boundaries. So what was to be done? One answer was to associate bishoprics with sites connected with particularly prominent dynasties which might be expected to show stamina and continuity. Armagh, for instance, was an early ecclesiastical foundation, whether correctly or not attributed to Patrick does not matter here; it is suggestively close to the secular stronghold of Emain Macha, ancient seat of Ulster kings. At Cashel in County Tipperary association is closer still; the cathedral stands right on top of the Rock of Cashel, seat of Munster kings.
Kinship and clientage, mentioned above as the cement of the tuatha, were the strongest social forces in early medieval Ireland. Patrick’s accommodation to one of these may perhaps be seen in his reference to ‘the sons of kings who travel with me’. Setting out the rights and obligations of kings, lords, kinsmen, the whole ordering (sometimes idealized) of a graded, complex, status-conscious society, was the responsibility of a class of specialists (brithem, plural brithemin) who memorized, pronounced and handed down the law. There were specialists in another branch of learning too, which cannot strictly be called literature because like the law it was orally transmitted: the bards (fili, plural filid) who recited poems, genealogies, stories, works such as the great Irish epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). Together the lawyers and bards buttressed the sense of identity, the custom and morality of early Ireland. How were Christian identity, custom and morality to infuse themselves into so stout and immemorial a texture?
There was one distinctive Christian institution which proved itself brilliantly capable of meshing and marrying with Irish social habits: monasticism. Despite the references to monks in Patrick’s writings it is likely that the implanting of monasticism in Ireland on any serious scale was a development of that crucial but obscure sixth century. It is also likely that the monastic impulse, though it could have reached Ireland by more than one route, was felt particularly strongly from south Wales. One of the decrees of the ‘First Synod’ concerns British clergy who travel to Ireland. The south Welsh St Samson, whom we encountered in the last chapter, was a famous monastic founder and traveller. His earliest biographer shows him visiting Ireland and making monastic recruits there: though the passage is now thought to be a later interpolation into the text (above, p. 60) it may preserve a reliable tradition of a Hibernian visit by Samson.
We must remember that we are in an age when there were many shades of monasticism. A time would come when to be a monk meant to follow the monastic rule compiled by St Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 550). But the gradual coming to dominance of Benedict’s Rule in the western church at large was a very slow business, spread over several centuries. The late antique and early medieval periods were characterized by a ceaselessly proliferating diversity of rules. A monastic founder devised his own rule for his own monks to follow. Monasticism was therefore extraordinarily adaptable and transplantable, an institution with a marked degree of flexibility. In this respect it contrasted with the ‘Roman’ structure of organization in the secular church.
In Ireland monasticism made its appeal largely because it proved capable of accommodating itself to the structures of kinship and clientage. Ancient Irish law did not know of individual property. Land belonged to a family and could not be alienated. Founders and benefactors wishing to endow monastic houses with land could not do so by outright grants of absolute rights in perpetuity such as were known to Roman law. Instead, monasteries endowed with family land became family concerns, family possessions. The founder’s kin would supply the abbot and more than a few of the monks; the community would service the kin by praying for them, furnishing hospitality to them, leasing land to them on easy terms, looking after them in old age. A successful monastery could give birth to daughter houses or could acquire a following of houses which chose to opt for its customs and fellowship, just as a king acquired lordship over retainers or over other tuatha. In their physical appearance monasteries even looked like the fort-farms of the secular aristocracy with their dry-stone enclosing walls and their scatter of buildings within for human and animal inmates.7