The Scholiast and Colgan, who identify the Crag of Dumbarton with the
Nemthur of the Saint's nativity, are faced by the unanswerable
difficulty that though Nemthur may be the name of a tower, or may be
the name of the district in which the tower stood, it cannot be the
name of a town. The Saint in his "Confession" states that his father
hailed from the suburban district of a town called Bonaven Tabernise,
where he possessed a country seat, from which he (the Saint) was
carried off into captivity. Bonaven, therefore, is rightly regarded as
St. Patrick's native town. St. Fiacc simply states that St. Patrick was
born at Nemthur, but he does not assart that Nemthur was a town,
otherwise he would be at variance with his Patron, who plainly gives us
to understand that he was born at Bonaven Tabernise, The only way of
reconciling this apparent conflict of evidence is to assume that St.
Fiacc is giving the name either of the tower or the district in which
St. Patrick was born, while the Saint is giving the name of the town of
which he was a native, but not the name of the district which was
honoured by his birth.
Dr. Lanigan, however, objects "that no sensible writer, wishing to
inform his readers where the Saint was born, would say that he came
into the world in a tower" ("Eccl. Hist.," vol. i., p. 101).
Nemthur may indeed be a corruption of Neustria, as Dr. Lanigan
suggests; but it must not be forgotten that districts not unfrequently
derive their names from famous monuments that either stand or have
stood in their midst. We have an illustration of this in the very
locality where many believe that St. Patrick was born. The high level
on the north-eastern cliff's of Boulogne is called even at the present
time "Tour d'Ordre," deriving its name from Caligula's tower, which the
Romans called Turris Ordinis, and the Gaulish Celts called Nemtor,
which once stood on the lofty plateau, but is no longer in existence.
Ware's theory, in his own words, is this: "I must dissent from the
Scholiast that Nemthur and Alcuid were the same place; though it must
be granted that they stood near each other, as appears from a passage
of Jocelin: 'there was a promontory hanging over the town of Empthor, a
certain fortification, the ruins of which are yet visible,' and a
little later: 'this celebrated place, seated in the valley of the
Clyde, is, in the language of the country, called "Dunbreaton," that
is, the Fort of the Britons'" (Ware, vol. i., p. 6).
Relying also on Jocelin's statement that Tabernise signified a "Field
of Tents"--"Tabernaculorum Campus"--and on his unwarranted assertion
that the habitation of Calphurnius was "not far from the Irish Sea,"
Usher pointed out Kilpatrick, a town situated between Dumbarton and the
city of Glasgow, as St. Patrick's native town.
Jocelin's "Life of St. Patrick," as Canon O'Hanlon has said, is
"incomparably the worst" of the Latin lives of the Saint, and yet it is
on this untrustworthy foundation, and on the contradictions of the
Scholiast, that Usher and Ware rest their respective theories. Usher
discovered a Roman camp at Kilpatrick, and found that the town was "not
far from the Irish Sea," and it is upon this weak hypothesis that the
Kilpatrick theory rests.
The Aberdeen Breviary coincides with Usher, and the lesson referring to
St. Patrick is as follows: "St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was
born of Calphurnius, a man of illustrious Celtic descent, and of
Conchessa, a native of Gaul and a sister of St. Martin, Bishop of
Tours. He was conceived with many miraculous signs at Dumbarton Castle,
but was born and reared at Kilpatrick in Scotland, near the Castle."
But if the Aberdeen Breviary asserts that St. Patrick was born at
Kilpatrick, the Continental Breviaries, as Colgan freely admits, are
equally positive that he was a native of Armoric Gaul.
Cardinal Moran, in an article contributed to the _Dublin Review_ in the
spring of 1880, insisted rightly that the solution of the difficulty is
to be found in the word Bonaven. Bon, or Ban, he tells us, is a Celtic
word which signifies the mouth of a river, and Avon is the river
itself. From this, he argues that the Saint was born at a town which
once stood on the present site of Hamilton, which is situated at the
mouth of the Avon, just where that river discharges itself into the
Clyde. The same argument would apply with equal force to a town
situated at the mouth of the River Aven on the French coast, which
flows into the harbour of Concarneu in Brittany.
Anyone who accepts the authority of Probus, who asserts that Bonaven
Tabernise "was not far from the Western sea," or of the Scholiast, who
is the author of the Dumbarton theory, will see a grave objection to
accepting the Cardinal's solution of the problem: Hamilton is about
fifty miles distant from Dumbarton, and far away from the Atlantic
Ocean.
None of the authors mentioned make any attempt to reconcile the two
contradictory statements of the Scholiast: (1) that St. Patrick was
born at Dumbarton, and (2) that he was captured in Armorica. They have
failed to notice that, if the Saint was captured in Armorica, he could
not have been born at Dumbarton, because he assures us in his
"Confession" that he was captured at his father's home. Even according
to the admissions of the Scholiast, therefore, Bonaven Tabernise, St.
Patrick's home, was situated in Armorica. Usher, Ware, and Cardinal
Moran, while contending that the Apostle of Ireland was born in North
Britain, refuse to accept the Scholiast's statement that he was a
native of Dumbarton.