have been drawn from the first, and there spent eight years, founding
many churches and monasteries. There also he ascended Croagh Patrick,
the tall sugar-loaf mountain which stands over the waters of Clew Bay,
and up to the summit of which hundreds of pilgrims still annually climb
in his honour.
From Connaught he next turned his steps to Ulster, visited Antrim and
Armagh, and laid the foundations of the future cathedral and bishopric
in the latter place. Wherever he went converts seem to have come in to
him in crowds. Even the Bards, who had most to lose by the innovation,
appear to have been in many cases drawn over. They and the chiefs
gained, the rest followed unhesitatingly; whole clans were baptized at a
time. Never was spiritual conquest so astonishingly complete!
The tale of St. Patrick's doings; of his many triumphs; his few
failures; of the boy Benignus his first Irish disciple; of his wrestling
upon Mount Cruachan; of King Eochaidh; of the Bard Ossian, and his
dialogues with the apostle, all this has been excellently rendered into
verse by Mr. Aubrey de Vere, whose "Legends of St. Patrick" seem to the
present writer by no means so well known as they ought to be. The second
poem in the series, "The Disbelief of Milcho," especially is one of
great beauty, full of wild poetic gleams, and touches which breathe the
very breath of an Irish landscape. Poetry is indeed the medium best
suited for the Patrician history. The whole tale of the saint's
achievements in Ireland is one of those in which history seems to lose
its own sober colouring, to become luminous and half magical, to take on
all the rosy hues of a myth.
The best proof of the effect of the new revelation is to be found in
that extraordinary burst of enthusiasm which marked the next few
centuries. The passion for conversion, for missionary labour of all
sorts, seems to have swept like a torrent over the island, arousing to
its best and highest point that Celtic enthusiasm and which has never,
unhappily, found such noble exercise since. Irish missionaries flung
themselves upon the dogged might of heathenism, and grappled with it in
a death struggle. Amongst the Picts of the Highlands, amongst the fierce
Friscians of the Northern seas, beside the Lake of Constance, where the
church of St. Gall still preserves the name of another Irish saint, in
the Black Forest, at Schaffhausen, at Würtzburg, throughout, in fact,
all Germany and North Italy, they were ubiquitous. Wherever they went
their own red-hot fervour seems to have melted every obstacle; wherever
they went victory seems to have crowned their zeal[3].
[3] For an account of Irish missionaries in Germany, see Mr.
Baring-Gould's "Germany," in this series, p. 46.
Discounting as much as you choose everything that seems to partake of
pious exaggeration, there can be no doubt that the period which followed
the Christianizing of Ireland was one of those shining epochs of
spiritual and also to a great degree intellectual enthusiasm rare indeed
in the history of the world. Men's hearts, lull of newly--won fervour,
burned to hand on the torch in their turn to others. They went out by
thousands, and they beckoned in their converts by tens of thousands.
Irish hospitality--a quality which has happily escaped the tooth of
criticism--broke out then with a vengeance, and extended its hands to
half a continent. From Gaul, from Britain, from Germany, from dozens of
scattered places throughout the wide dominions of Charlemagne, the
students came; were kept, as Bede expressly tells us, free of cost in
the Irish monasteries, and drew their first inspirations in the Irish
schools. Even now, after the lapse of all these centuries, many of the
places whence they came still reverberate faintly with the memory of
that time.
Before plunging into that weltering tangle of confusion which makes up
what we call Irish history, one may be forgiven for lingering a little
at this point, even at the risk of some slight over-balance of
proportion. With so dark a road before us, it seems good to remember
that the energies of Irishmen were not, as seems sometimes to be
concluded, always and of necessity directed to injuring themselves or
tormenting their rulers! Neither was this period by any means a short
one. It was no mere "flash in the pan;" no "small pot soon hot"
enthusiasm, but a steady flame which burned undimmed for centuries.
"During the seventh and eighth centuries, and part of the ninth," says
Mr. Goldwin Smith, not certainly a prejudiced writer, "Ireland played a
really great part in European history." "The new religious houses," says
Mr. Green in his Short History, "looked for their ecclesiastical
traditions, not to Rome, but to Ireland, and quoted for their guidance
the instructions not of Gregory, but of Columba." "For a time," he adds,
"it seemed as if the course of the world's history was to be changed, as
if that older Celtic race which the Roman and German had swept before
them, had turned to the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic
and not Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Church of
the West."
V.
THE FIRST IRISH MONASTERIES.
At home during the same period the chief events were the founding of
monasteries, and the settling down of monastic communities, every such
monastery becoming the protector and teacher of the little Christian
community in its vicinity, educating its own sons, and sending them out
as a bee sends its swarms, to settle upon new ground, and to fertilize
the flowers of distant harvest fields.
At one time, "The Tribes of the Saints" seem to have increased to such
an extent that they threatened to absorb all others. In West Ireland
especially, little hermitages sprung up in companies of dozens and
hundreds, all over the rock-strewn wastes, and along the sad shores of
the Atlantic, dotting themselves like sea gulls upon barren points of
rock, or upon sandy wastes which would barely have sufficed, one might
think, to feed a goat. We see their remains still--so tiny, yet so
enduring--in the Isles of Arran; upon a dozen rocky points all round the
bleak edges of Connemara; in the wild mountain glens of the Burren--set
often with an admirable selection of site, in some sloping dell with,
perhaps, a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the
ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over--an object
still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants. Thanks to the innate
stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of
stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler,
they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were. We can
look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail.
[Illustration: CROSS IN CEMETERY OF TEMPUL BRECCAIN, ARANMOR. _From a
drawing by M. Stokes (after Sir F.W. Burton_).]
In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself,
containing--one would say very tightly containing--a single inmate. In
other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers
of monks lived together. Some of these larger communities are stated to
have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this
sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were
enormously populous. The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact,
very readily to the arrangement. It was merely the clan or sept
re-organized upon a religious footing. "Les premières grands monastères
de l'Irelande," says M. de Montalembert in his "Moines d'Occident," "ne
furent done autre chose à vrai dire qui des _clans_, reorganisés sous
une forme religieuse." New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old
ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was
almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood. "Le prince,
en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbé, et restait ainsi dans
la vie monastique, ce qu'il avait èté dans la vie sèculière le chef de
sa race et de son clan."
There was thus nothing to jar with that sense of continuity, that inborn
love of the past, of old ways, old habits, old modes of thought which
made and still makes an Irishman--be he never so pronounced a
republican--the deepest at heart of Conservatives. Whereas every later
change of faith which has been endeavoured to be forced upon the country
has met with a steady and undeviating resistance, Christianity, the
greatest change of all, seems to have brought with it from the first no
sense of dislocation. It assimilated itself quietly, and as it were
naturally, with what it found. Under the prudent guidance of its first
propagators, it simply gathered to itself all the earlier objects of
belief, and with merely the change of a name, sanctified and turned them
to its own uses.
[Illustration: ST. KEVIN'S CHURCH, GLENDALOUGH.]
VI.
ST. COLUMBA AND THE WESTERN CHURCH.
About fifty years after the death of St. Patrick a new missionary arose,
one who was destined to carry the work which he had begun yet further,
to become indeed the founder of what for centuries was the real
metropolis and centre of Western Christendom.
In 521 A.D., St. Columba was born in Donegal, of the royal race, say the
annalists, of Hy-Nial--of the royal race, at any rate, of the great
workers, doers, and thinkers all the world over. In 565, forty-four
years later, he left Ireland with twelve companions (the apostolic
number), and started on his memorable journey to Scotland, a date of
immeasurable importance in the history of Western Christianity.
In that dense fog which hangs over these early times--thick enough to
try even the most penetrating eyesight--there is a curious and
indescribable pleasure in coming upon so definite, so living, so
breathing a figure as that of St. Columba, In writing the early history
of Ireland, one of the greatest difficulties which the historian--great
or small--has to encounter is to be found in that curious unreality,
that tantalizing sense of illusiveness and indefiniteness which seems to
envelope every figure whose name crops up on his pages. Even four
hundred years later the name of a really great prince and warrior like
Brian Boru, or Boruma, awakens no particular sense of reality, nay as
often as not is met by a smile of incredulity. The existence of St.
Columba no one, however, has been found rash enough to dispute! His, in
fact, is one of those essentially self-lit figures which seem to shed
some of their own light upon every other they come in contact with, even
accidentally. Across the waste of centuries we see him almost as he
appeared to his contemporaries. There is something friendly--as it were,
next-door-neighbourly--about the man. If we land to-day on Iona, or
stand in any of the little chapels in Donegal which bear his name, his
presence seems as real and tangible to us as that of Tasso at Ferrara or
Petrarch at Avignon. In spite of that thick--one is inclined to say
rank--growth of miracles which at times confuse Adamnan's fine portrait
of his hero--cover it thick as lichens some monumental slab of
marble--we can still recognize his real lineaments underneath. His great
natural gifts; his abounding energy; his characteristically Irish love
for his native soil; for the beloved "oaks of Derry." We see him in his
goings out and his comings in; we know his faults; his fiery Celtic
temper, swift to wrath, swift to forgive when the moment of anger is
over. Above all, we feel the charm of his abounding humanity. Like
Sterne's Uncle Toby there seems to have been something about St. Columba
which "eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter
under him," and no one apparently ever refused to respond to
that appeal.
One thing it is important hereto have clearly before the mind, as it is
very apt to be overlooked. At the time of St. Columba's ministry,
England, which during the lifetime of St. Patrick had been Roman and
Christian, had now under the iron flail of its Saxon conquerors lapsed
back into Paganism. Ireland, therefore, which for a while had made a
part of Christendom, had been broken short off by the heathen conquest
of Britain. It was now a small, isolated fragment of Christendom, with a
great mass of heathenism between. We can easily imagine what a stimulus
to all the eager enthusiasts of the Faith the consciousness of this
neighbourhood must have been; how keen the desire to rush to the assault
and to replace the Cross where it had been before.
That assault was not, however, begun by Ireland; it was begun, as every
one knows, by St. Augustine, a Roman priest, sent by Pope Gregory, who
landed at Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet, in the year 597--thirty-two
years after St. Columba left Ireland. If the South of England owes its
conversion to Rome, Northern England owes its conversion to Ireland,
through the Irish colony at Iona. Oswald, the king of Northumbria, had
himself taken refuge in Iona in his youth, and when summoned to reign he
at once called in the Irish missionaries, acting himself, we are told,
as their interpreter. His whole reign was one continuous struggle with
heathenism, and although at his death it triumphed for a time, in the
end the faith and energies of the missionaries carried all before them.
After the final defeat of the Mercians, under their king Penda, at
Winwoed, in 655, the struggle was practically over. Northern and
Southern England were alike once more Christian.
One of the chief agents in this result was the Irish monk Aidan, who had
fixed his seat in the little peninsula of Lindisfarne, and from whose
monastery, as from another Iona, missionaries poured over the North of
England. At Lichfield, Whitby, and many other places religious houses
sprang up, all owing their allegiance to Lindisfarne, and through it to
Iona and Ireland.
In this very fervour there lay the seeds of a new trouble. A serious
schism arose between Western Christendom and the Papacy. Rome, whether
spiritually or temporally, was a name which reverberated with less
awe-inspiring sound in the ears of Irishmen (even Irish Churchmen) than,
probably, in those of any other people at that time on the globe. They
had never come under the tremendous sway of its material power, and
until centuries after this period--when political and, so to speak,
accidental causes drove them into its arms--its spiritual power remained
to them a thing apart, a foreign element to which they gave at most a
reluctant half adhesion.
From this it came about that early in the history of the Western Church
serious divisions sprang up between it and the other churches, already
being fast welded together into a coherent body under the yoke and
discipline of Rome. The points in dispute do not strike us now of any
very vital importance. They were not matters of creed at all, merely of
external rule and discipline. A vehement controversy as to the proper
form of the tonsure, another as to the correct day for Easter, raged for
more than a century with much heat on either side; those churches which
owed their allegiance to Iona clinging to the Irish methods, those who
adhered to Rome vindicating its supreme and paramount authority.
At the Synod of Whitby, held in 664, these points of dispute came to a
crisis, and were adjudicated upon by Oswin, king of Northumbria; Bishop
Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, maintaining the authority of
Columba; Wilfrid, a Saxon priest who had been to Rome, that of St.
Peter. Oswin's own leaning seems at first to have been towards the
former, but when he heard of the great pretensions of the Roman saint he
was staggered. "St. Peter, you say, holds the keys of heaven and hell?"
he inquired thoughtfully, "have they also been given then to St.
Columba?" It was owned with some reluctance that the Irish saint had
been less favoured. "Then I give my verdict for St. Peter," said Oswin,
"lest when I reach the gate of heaven I find it shut, and the porter
refuse to open to me." This sounds prudent, but scarcely serious; it
seems, however, to have been regarded as serious enough by the Irish
monks. The Synod broke up. Colman, with his Irish brethren, and a few
English ones who threw in their lot with them, forsook Lindisfarne, and
sailed away for Ireland. From that moment the rift between them and
their English brethren grew steadily wider, and was never afterwards
thoroughly healed.
It does not, however, seem to have affected the position of the Irish
Church at home, nor yet to have diminished the number of its foreign
converts. Safe in its isolation, it continued to go on in its own way
with little regard to the rest of Christendom, although in respect to
the points chiefly in dispute it after a while submitted to the Roman
decision. Armagh was the principal spiritual centre, but there were
other places, now tiny villages, barely known by name to the tourist,
which were then centres of learning, and recognized as such, not alone
in Ireland itself, but throughout Europe. Clonard, Tallaght Clonmacnois;
Slane in Meath, where Dagobert II. one of the kings of France, was
educated; Kildare, where the sacred fire--not lamp--of St. Bridget was
kept burning for centuries, all are places whose names fill a
considerable space in the fierce dialectical controversy of that fiery
theological age[4].
[4] For an excellent account of early Irish monastic life see "Ireland,
and the Celtic Church," by Professor G. Stokes.
This period of growth slipped all too quickly away, but it has never
been forgotten. It was the golden time to which men looked wistfully
back when growing trouble and discord, attack from without, and
dissension from within, had torn in pieces the unhappy island which had
shone like a beacon through Europe only to become its byword. The
Norsemen had not yet struck prow on Irish strand, and the period between
the Synod of Whitby and their appearance seems to have been really one
of steady moral and intellectual growth. Heathenism no doubt still
lurked in obscure places; indeed traces of it may with no great
difficulty still be discovered in Ireland, but it did not hinder the
light from spreading fast under the stimulus which it had received from
its first founders. The love of letters, too, sprang up with the
religion of a book, and the copying of manuscripts became a passion.
[Illustration: WEST CROSS OF MONASTERBOICE, CO. LOUTH.]
As in Italy and elsewhere, so too in Ireland, the monks were the
painters, the illuminators, the architects, carvers, gilders, and
book-binders of their time. While outside the monastery walls the
fighters were making their neighbours' lives a burden to them, and
beyond the Irish Sea the whole world as then known was being shaken to
pieces and reconstructed, the monk sat placidly inside at his work,
producing chalices, crosiers, gold and silver vessels for the churches,
carving crosses, inditing manuscripts filled with the most marvellously
dexterous ornament; works, which, in spite of the havoc wrought by an
almost unbroken series of devastations which have poured over the doomed
island, still survive to form the treasure of its people. We can have
very little human sympathy, very little love for what is noble and
admirable, if--whatever our creeds or our politics--we fail, as we look
back across that weary waste which separates us from them, to extend our
sympathy and admiration to these early workers--pioneers in a truly
national undertaking which has found only too few imitators since.
[Illustion]
VII.
THE NORTHERN SCOURGE.
While from the fifth to the eighth century the work of the Irish Church
was thus yearly increasing, spreading its net wider and wider, and
numbering its converts by thousands, not much good can be reported of
the secular history of Ireland during the same period. It is for the
most part a confused chronicle of small feuds, jealousies, raids,
skirmishes, retaliations, hardly amounting to the dignity of war, but
certainly as distinctly the antipodes of peace.
The tribal system, which in its earlier stages has been already
explained, had to some degree begun to change its character. The
struggles between the different septs or clans had grown into a struggle
between a number of great chieftains, under whose rule the lesser ones
had come to range themselves upon all important occasions.
As early as the introduction of Christianity Ireland was already divided
into four such aggregations of tribes--kingdoms they are commonly
called--answering pretty nearly to the present four provinces, with the
addition of Meath, which was the appanage of the house of Ulster, and
included West Meath, Longford, and a fragment of the King's County. Of
the other four provinces, Connaught acknowledged the rule of the
O'Connors, Munster that of the O'Briens, Leinster of the McMurroughs,
and Ulster of the O'Neills, who were also in theory over-kings, or, as
the native word was, Ard-Reaghs of the entire island.
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF MAGHERA CHURCH, LONDONDERRY.]
Considering what a stout fighting race they proved in later
ages--fighting often when submission would have been the wiser
policy--it is curious that in early days these O'Neills or Hy-Nials seem
to have been but a supine race. For centuries they were titular kings of
Ireland, yet during all that time they seem never to have tried to
transform their faint, shadowy sceptre into a real and active one.
Malachy or Melachlin, the rival of Brian Boru, seems to have been the
most energetic of the race, yet he allowed the sceptre to be plucked
from his hands with an ease which, judging by the imperfect light shed
by the chroniclers over the transaction, seems to be almost
unaccountable.
It is difficult to say how far that light, for which the Irish
monasteries were then celebrated, extended to the people of the island
at large. With one exception, little that can be called cultivation is,
it must be owned, discoverable, indeed long centuries after this Irish
chieftains we know were innocent of the power of signing their own
names. That exception was in the case of music, which seems to have been
loved and studied from the first. As far back as we can see him the
Irish Celt was celebrated for his love of music. In one of the earliest
extant annals a _Cruit_, or stringed harp, is described as belonging to
the Dashda, or Druid chieftain. It was square in form, and possessed
powers wholly or partly miraculous. One of its strings, we are told,
moved people to tears, another to laughter. A harp in Trinity College,
known as the harp of Brian Boru, is said to be the oldest in Europe, and
has thirty strings. This instrument has been the subject of many
controversies. O'Curry doubts it having belonged to Brian Boru, and
gives his reasons for believing that it was among the treasures of
Westminster when Henry VIII. came to the throne in 1509, and that it
suggested the placing of the harp in the arms of Ireland, and on the
"harp grotes," a coinage of the period. However this may be we cannot
doubt that music had early wrought itself into the very texture and
fabric of Irish life; airs and words, wedded closely together,
travelling down from mouth to mouth for countless generations. Every
little valley and district may be said to have had its own traditional
melodies, and the tunes with which Moore sixty years ago was delighting
critical audiences had been floating unheeded and disregarded about the
country for centuries.
The last ten years of the eighth century were very bad ones for Ireland.
Then for the first time the black Viking ships were to be seen sweeping
shore-wards over the low grey waves of the Irish Channel, laden with
Picts, Danes, and Norsemen, "people," says an old historian, "from their
very cradles dissentious, Land Leapers, merciless, soure, and hardie."
They descended upon Ireland like locusts, and where-ever they came ruin,
misery, and disaster followed.
[Illustration: KILBANNON TOWER. _(From a drawing by George. Petrie,
LL.D.)_]