[13] See "Silva Gadelica," p. 111, and O'Curry's MS. Materials, p. 595.
[14] Aibhinn in tech in atá, Idir fira is maca is mná, Idir dhruidh ocus aes ceóil, Idir dhailiumh is dhoirseoir.
[15] Thus O'Curry translates casair as if he had taken it to be lasair. O'Grady translates "an overlay of Elpa's gold."
CHAPTER XIII
ST. PATRICK AND THE EARLY MISSIONARIES
Even supposing the Ogam alphabet to have been used in pre-Christian times, though it may have been employed by ollavs and poets to perpetuate tribal names and genealogies, still it was much too cumbrous and clumsy an invention to produce anything deserving the name of real literature. It is, so far as we know, only with the coming of Patrick that Ireland may be said to have become, properly speaking, a literary country. The churches and monasteries established by him soon became so many nuclei of learning, and from the end of the fifth century a knowledge of letters seems to have entirely permeated the island. So suddenly does this appear to have taken place, and so rapidly does Ireland seem to have produced a flourishing literature of laws, poems, and sagas, that it is very hard to believe that the inhabitants had not, before his coming, arrived at a high state of indigenous culture. This aspect of the case has been recently strongly put by Dr. Sigerson. "I assert," said he, speaking of the early Brehon laws, at the revision of which in a Christian sense St. Patrick is said to have assisted, "that, speaking biologically, such laws could not emanate from any race whose brains have not been subject to the quickening influence of education for many generations."[1]
The usual date assigned for St. Patrick's landing in Ireland in the character of a missionary is 432, and his work among the Irish is said to have lasted for sixty years, during which time he broke down the idol Crom Cruach, burnt the books of the druids at Tara, ordained numerous missionaries and bishops, and succeeded in winning over to Christianity a great number of the chiefs and sub-kings, who were in their turn followed by their tribesmen.
St. Patrick did not work alone, nor did he come to Ireland as a solitary pioneer of a new religion; he was accompanied, as we learn from his life in the Book of Armagh, by a multitude of bishops, priests, deacons, readers, and others,[2] who had crossed over along with him for the service. Several were his own blood relations, one was his sister's son. Many likely youths whom he met on his missionary travels he converted to Christianity, taught to read, tonsured, and afterwards ordained. These new priests thus appointed worked in all directions, establishing churches and getting together congregations from amongst the neighbouring heathen. Unable to give proper attention to the teaching of the youths whom he elected as his helpers, so long as he himself was engaged in journeying through Ireland from point to point, he, after about twenty years of peripatetic teaching, established at Armagh about the year 450 the first Christian school ever founded in Ireland, the progenitor of that long line of colleges which made Ireland famous throughout Europe, and to which, two hundred years later, her Anglo-Saxon neighbours flocked in thousands.[3]
The equipments of these newly-made priests was of the scantiest. Each, as he was sent forth, received an alphabet-of-the-faith or elementary-explanation of the Christian doctrine, frequently written by Patrick himself, a "Liber ordinis," or "Mass Book," a written form for the administration of the sacraments, a psaltery, and, if it could be spared, a copy of the Gospels.[4] A good-sized retinue followed Patrick in all his journeyings, ready to supply with their own hands all things necessary for the new churches established by the saint, as well as to minister to his own wants. He travelled with his episcopal coadjutor, his psalm-singer, his assistant priest, his judge—originally a Brehon by profession, whom he found most useful in adjudicating on disputed questions—a personal champion to protect him from sudden attack and to carry him through floods and other obstacles, an attendant on himself, a bellringer, a cook, a brewer, a chaplain at the table, two waiters, and others who provided food and accommodation for himself and his household. He had in his company three smiths, three artificers, and three ladies who embroidered. His smiths and artificers made altars, book-covers, bells, and helped to erect his wooden churches; the ladies, one of them his own sister, made vestments and altar linens.[5]
St. Patrick was essentially a man of work and not of letters, and yet it so happens that he is the earliest Irish writer of whom we can say with confidence that what is ascribed to him is really his. And here it is as well to say something about the genuineness of St. Patrick's personality and the authenticity of his writings, for the opinion started by Ledwich has gone abroad, and has somehow become prevalent, that St. Patrick's personality is nearly as nebulous as that of King Arthur or of Finn mac Cúmhail, and at the best is made up of a number of little Patricks lumped into one great one. That there was more than one Patrick[6] is certain,[7] and that the great Saint Patrick who wrote the "Confession" may have got credit in the early Latin and later Irish lives for the acts of others, is perfectly possible, but that most of the essential features of his life are true, is beyond all doubt, and we have a manuscript 1091 years old, apparently copied from his own handwriting, and containing his own confession and apologia.
How this exquisite manuscript, consisting of 216 vellum leaves, written in double columns, has happily been preserved to us, we shall not lose time in inquiring; but how its exact date has been ascertained through what Dr. Reeves has characterised as "one of the most elegant and recondite demonstrations which any learned society has on record, is worth mentioning." The Rev. Charles Graves, the present Bishop of Limerick, made a thorough examination of the whole codex when, after many vicissitudes and hair-breadth escapes from destruction, it had been temporarily deposited in the Royal Irish Academy. Knowing, as O'Curry pointed out, that it was the custom for Irish scribes to sign their own names, with usually some particulars about their writing, at the end of each piece they copied, he made a careful search and discovered that this had actually been done in the Book of Armagh, and in no less than eight places, but that on every spot where it occurred it had been erased for some apparently inscrutable reason, with the greatest pains. In the last place but one, however, where the colophon occurred, the process of erasure had been less thorough than in the others, and after long consideration, and treatment of the erasure with gallic acid and spirits of wine, Dr. Graves discovered that the words so carefully rubbed out were Pro Ferdomnacho ores, "Pray for Ferdomnach." Turning to the other places, he found that the erased words in at least one other place were evidently the same. This settled the name of the scribe; he was Ferdomnach. The next step was to search the "Four Masters," who record the existence of two scribes of that name who died at Armagh, one in 726 and the other in 844. One of these it must have been who wrote the Book of Armagh—but which? This also Dr. Graves discovered, with the greatest ingenuity. At