Part 11

I have ascribed the early expansion of the Celts to iron. The possession of iron had a two-fold effect. The natural condition of the greater part of Europe is forest. If man were absent or idle-handed, nearly all Europe in a few generations would revert to the forest state. To clear the land of woods, or even to prevent the fresh growth of woods after clearance, the implements of the Stone Age, Early and Late, cannot have been effective. Even let us suppose that large clearances could have been made by burning, at once the thickets would again spring up, and under their protection the forest trees. Nor can the possession of bronze have sufficed to subdue the natural tendency towards forest. Bronze, in the Bronze Age, was not the industrial material of the many; it belonged to the privileged few who were not hewers of wood. Iron, when it came, introduced an industrial revolution relatively greater than that which has been introduced in modern times by the steam-engine. Once people knew how to work it, iron was abundant enough to be in the hands of every worker. Iron became and has ever since remained the sole master of growing wood. With the conquest of the forests came a great extension of tillage. Iron not only cleared fertile tracts but tilled them more rapidly and deeply than was possible with the wooden spade which, as the old Irish copper mines have taught us, was the digging implement of the Bronze Age. Thus food became abundant, and with it a density of population which, before iron, was possible only in fertile and forestless regions like the flood areas of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Road making, too, progressed, and the use of vehicles. As iron furnished the many with better implements of work, it furnished them also with better implements of war. An overflowing population and warlike arms for all--here we have the conditions for migratory conquest. On these conditions the Celtic migrations were based. The spread of these conditions to the Germans led to the later Germanic expansion, and their further spread brought about the Slavonic and Turanian migrations which drove the Germans down upon the subject peoples of Rome, peoples whose power of resistance and will to defend themselves had been already broken by that Roman policy so frankly described by Tacitus.

Just as the universal subjection of science and invention to the purposes of warfare has reduced Europe to its present condition, so the universal possession of iron made Europe in the third and fourth centuries a scene of universal war. Though Ireland was fortunately untouched by the great migratory movements of the Continent in that age, these movements reacted on Ireland by weakening the neighbouring provinces of the Empire.

The raids on Britain and Gaul for booty and captives--raids from which, as I have argued, the Irish got their new name of Scots--were followed by Irish settlements on various points of the British coast. The conquest of eastern Meath or Bregia by the kings of Connacht and Uisneach forced a part of the population to migrate, and one body of the migrants settled in Demetia, in the south of Wales. We can safely place the conquest of Bregia in the second half of the third century, but it does not follow that the settlement in Wales was made at the same time, for the story of the Déisi migration makes it appear that the expelled population remained for many years in Leinster before the settlement in Munster. There may have been a similar delay before their kindred crossed over to Wales.

In south-western Britain, there was also an Irish colony, apparently from Munster and headed by princes of the Eoghanacht dynasty which displaced the earlier line of the Iverni. Cormac's Glossary mentions in the Cornish region a stronghold named Dinn Map Lethan. This name, a mixture of Cymric and Gaelic, means the fortress of the Sons of Lethan. The Ui Liatháin, or descendants of Liathán, were one of the principal septs of the Eoghanachta, and their territory adjoined the Munster coast in the district immediately to the west of the Déisi.

The most noted and most permanent of the Irish settlements in Britain was that of Argyleshire and the adjoining islands. The kings of Dál Riada, according to the Annals of Tigernach, did not take up their abode in that region until far on in the fifth century, A.D. 470. This, however, does not imply that the Irish migration to Scotland began at that time. It rather means that the Irish colonies of Argyleshire and the islands became subject at that time to the kings of the nearest territory in Ireland. There is no record known to me of the Irish migration to Galloway, the south-western angle of the Scottish mainland, a region formerly occupied by the Picts. Though the Norsemen settled in Galloway in a later age, a glance at the map will show that the place-names of Galloway are almost as purely Gaelic as those of any part of Ireland. Gaelic was the prevalent language of Galloway in the sixteenth century and continued to be spoken there in the eighteenth century.

These Gaelic settlements on the western seaboard of Britain appeared to Sir John Rhys to be the remnants of a Gaelic population which, he thought, preceded the British or Brythonic conquest.

There are stories of the Fiana and even of the heroes of the earlier Ulster cycle that reflect in tradition those raids on Britain which are recorded in Latin writings. As we approach the borderland of documentary history, the evidences are still more definite. The death of Niall of the Nine Hostages, king of Ireland, is assigned to the year 404. At the time of his death, he was at the head of an expedition in the English Channel, and he was slain on board ship by a Leinster prince. He was succeeded by his brother's son Nath-Í, commonly called Dathi in later writings. Nath-Í in turn met his death at the head of an oversea expedition in the year 429. He is said to have been killed by lightning in the Alps. At this time, the Roman Empire was making its final struggle in Gaul under Aetius "the last of the Romans," against the Visigoths who held all the southern parts from Italy to the Bay of Biscay, and the Franks and Burgundians who had occupied the parts along the Rhine. It does not seem likely that an Irish raid, in these circumstances, could reach the Alps, nor can we well imagine what it could expect to gain by such an inroad. The Alps are probably a circumstantial ornament to the story, and we may content ourselves with the main point that this Irish king, three years before St. Patrick's mission began, led a raiding expedition to Gaul and met his death there. The story contains an additional proof that the kings of Ireland, who reigned in Tara in those days, represented the ancient dynasty of Connacht. The remains of Nath-Í were brought back to Ireland and laid to rest in the ancient pagan cemetery of Cruachain, beside the royal burg of the Connacht kings. It was the old line of the kings of Cruachain that had now become kings of Ireland seated in Tara. There is another interesting piece of evidence on this point which did not escape the notice of the late Father Hogan. Loeguire, son of Niall, succeeded his cousin Nath-Í as king of Ireland, and was reigning at Tara when St. Patrick began his missionary work. But it was at Cruachain and not at Tara that St. Patrick met and baptised the daughters of Loeguire. Tara, in fact, was the official seat of the monarchy, but Cruachain in Connacht was still the real home of the kings of Tara.

The condition of Europe at this time, the first half of the fifth century, is terrible to contemplate, and many must have thought that the ancient civilisation was at an end. The Roman legions had abandoned Britain a prey to the Picts, the Scots, and the north-western Germans. Gaul and Spain were in the hands of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Alans, Suevi, and Vandals. Genseric, king of the Vandals, had overrun the opulent Roman province of Africa, which never afterwards recovered its ancient prosperity, and the greatest intellect of the time, St. Augustine, passed away in his episcopal city while the Vandals were besieging it. Rome itself was twice captured and sacked, first by the Goths and afterwards by the Vandals. Attila, the Scourge of God, led immense armies from one end of Europe to the other, and boasted that where his horse had trodden the grass grew no more. St. Patrick, in his Confession, relates that after his escape from captivity in Ireland he and his companions travelled for thirty days on the Continent through an unpeopled wilderness. It seems a miracle that hope and courage could have survived in any mind. Yet the spirit of peace and gentleness and mercy was stronger than all the violence and blood-thirst of all the nations. Some have complained that St. Patrick, in his simple narrative, tells little but his own heart, but his Confession is one of the great documents of history, and explains to us better than all the historians how barbarism was tamed and civilisation saved. Imagine a young lad of tender years, son of a Roman citizen, torn away by fierce raiders from his parents and people, no doubt amid scenes of bloodshed and ruin, and sold into slavery among strangers; kept for years, the despised chattel of a petty chieftain, herding flocks in a bleak land of bog and forest. Think that the ruling sentiment that grew out of this pitiful experience was one of boundless love and devotion towards the people that had done him such terrible wrongs, so that when he had regained his freedom by flight, in nightly visions he heard their voices calling him back to them and freely and eagerly made up his mind to spend himself altogether in their service. It was this spirit that subdued the ferocity of fierce plundering rulers and warlike peoples. The Irish ceased from that time to be a predatory nation. Two centuries later, the king of the Northumbrian Angles invaded and devastated a part of eastern Ireland. His own subject, the Venerable Bede, denounces this violence done to "a harmless people who have never injured the English," and finds a just retribution in the misfortunes that afterwards befell the king and the Northumbrian power.

In St. Patrick's time, the headship of Tara was not yet firmly fixed in the national tradition. He founded various churches in the neighbourhood of Tara. Tirechan names eight of them. To none of these he attached the primacy, but to the church he founded close by the ancient capital of Ulster. The story of this foundation illustrates another trait of Patrick's character besides his wonderful charity. The nobleman, Dáire, from whom he asked the land for his church, refused the site that Patrick wished and gave another instead. He afterwards presented Patrick with a fine vessel of bronze. Patrick said simply "Gratias agimus." This curtness displeased the magnate, so that he sent again and took away the gift. Patrick again said, "Gratias agimus." Hearing this, Dáire came in person and restored the vessel to Patrick and said: "Thou must have thy vessel of bronze, for thou art a steadfast and unchangeable man. And moreover that piece of land for which thou once didst ask me, I give to thee with all my rights in it, and dwell thou in it." And that, says the ancient life, is the city which now is named Armagh.

VI. INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND LETTERS

In our early literature there are many traces of an abiding tradition that already before St. Patrick's mission there were Christians and small Christian communities here and there in Ireland. Some of the statements, especially as to the founders of certain sees, have been discredited, being imputed to a desire to make out that these sees, alleged to have been founded before St. Patrick's time, were therefore independent of the jurisdiction and claims of Armagh, especially of the temporal claims for revenue. It was claimed in particular for St. Ailbhe and St. Iubhar, of the see of Emly, St. Declan of Ardmore, and St. Ciarán of Saighir that they were already bishops in St. Patrick's time. These things are stated in documents in which other things are said that cannot be reconciled with historical fact. The date of St. Iubhar's death, according to the Annals of Ulster, was 500, 501, or 504; of St. Ailbhe's, 534, or 542; and SS. Ciarán and Declan are both said to have lived into the sixth century. Saint Iubhar appears to have been the earliest of them and there is evidence that he received episcopal consecration at the hands of St. Patrick. The case, however, does not rest wholly or mainly on such unstable premises.

The genealogists of Corcu Loegdae, or Dáirine, claim that the people of that state were the first in Ireland to receive Christianity; and the claim at all events cannot be dismissed on the ground of improbability. The diocese of Ross appears to represent the extent of this little state in the twelfth century, but in earlier times its territory covered a much larger area. Dwelling around several good havens, which were most favourably situated in relation to the old Atlantic trade route, the people were always a sea-going people. We read of an O'Driscoll at the head of his fleet attacking the English of Waterford. One of their chiefs takes his distinctive byname from Gascony, another from Bordeaux. Thomas Davis's spirited ballad on the Sack of Baltimore brings home to our minds how direct hostile relations could exist between this region and the Mediterranean; and where such hostile relations were possible, trade relations may be taken as normal. It is by no means unlikely, then, that where the Crescent could come on pirate galleys from Algiers, the Cross might well have come in some early merchant ship from the Loire or the Garonne.

St. Patrick himself, in his Confession, seems to testify by implication to the existence not merely of individual Christians but of Christian communities with their clergy in and before his time in Ireland. "For your sake," he writes, "I have faced many dangers, going even to the limits of the land where no one was before me, and whither no one had yet come to baptise or ordain clergy or confirm the faithful." This surely implies that there were places in Ireland, not in the remoter parts, places where some had come before Patrick and had performed the purely episcopal functions of ordination and confirmation.

More definite still is the evidence of Prosper's Chronicle--direct testimony, for the chronicler was in Rome at the time. Under the year 431, the chronicle has this entry: "To the Scots believing in Christ, having been ordained by Pope Celestine, Palladius is sent as first bishop." The natural interpretation of this statement, I think, is that some Irish Christians sent a request to Rome to have a bishop sent to them. The mission was considered an important one, for Palladius, before his consecration as bishop, held a high ecclesiastical office at Rome. He had also interested himself in the religious concerns of Britain, having induced Pope Celestine two years earlier to send a special mission to Britain to counteract the teachings of a Pelagian bishop. In another work, St. Prosper refers to these two missions together. Pope Celestine, he writes, "while he laboured to keep the Roman island (_i.e._ Britain) Catholic, also, by ordaining a bishop for the Scots, made the barbarous island Christian"--barbarous meaning external to the Roman Empire. Even this does not necessarily imply that before Palladius there were no bishops in Ireland, but it does imply that these particular "Irish believing in Christ," to whom Palladius was sent, had no bishop in communion with Rome.

Pelagius, the author of the Pelagian heresy, was, according to St. Jerome, a man "of the Irish nation, from the vicinity of the Britons," and St. Jerome again, in his vigorous style, speaks of Pelagius as one "swelled out with the porridge of the Irish." Other contemporary witnesses say that Pelagius was a Briton. This leaves us in doubt, for, on the one hand, these may have applied the term Briton to anyone from any part of the Pretanic islands, and on the other hand, St. Jerome's language about Pelagius is the language of rhetorical depreciation, and from what I have quoted from him in the foregoing lecture, we may perhaps judge that by calling Pelagius a Scot, he thought the more effectually to discredit him. The known career of Pelagius lies between the years 398 and 418. One thing comes out clearly enough from the contemptuous phrase--the Irish were known abroad in St. Jerome's time as eaters of porridge.

The late Professor Zimmer, finding a somewhat obscure early reference to the flight of learned people from Gaul during the Gothic and Frankish invasions and to their finding a place of refuge in another country, founded on this an interesting theory regarding the early stages of Christianity and letters in Ireland. It was in Ireland, he contends, that the refugees found a home, for Ireland was the only land in Western Europe that escaped the Germanic invasions. To Ireland they brought with them a certain devotion to the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome. The limits of date for this learned migration, according to Zimmer, are the years 419 and 507, and he holds that it actually took place about midway between those dates, _i.e._, about the middle of the fifth century.

To make this theory of a learned migration from Western Gaul to Ireland more easily accepted, Zimmer gives a valuable collection of facts in historical evidence, showing that there was a regular course of trade between the two countries at this time and for centuries before and after it.

Zimmer applies his theory to the explanation of certain remarkable facts. In the first place, he explains by it the pre-eminence in the knowledge of Latin and Greek that belonged in the following age to Irishmen and the pupils of Irishmen. Secondly, he explains by it the reference made by St. Patrick in his Confession to certain critics who despised his rusticity, _i.e._, his want of a classical grounding in Latin. St. Patrick calls these critics "rhetoricians," a term which certainly seems to imply that they belonged to a professional academic set. Zimmer thinks that these "rhetoricians" were some of the learned refugees from Western Gaul. A third fact which Zimmer explains by his migration theory is the fondness of the early Irish poets and grammarians for certain artificial super-refinements of language and grammar, and in particular for the production of a learned jargon in Irish by making deliberate changes in the form of words, substituting one letter for another, and adding, transforming or removing letters or syllables. This trait, he argues, was adopted from a certain learned school of Aquitaine, who played similar tricks with Latin, and produced by such means not one but a dozen Latin jargons; and Zimmer goes so far as to insist that the supposed Irish poet-grammarian who is named "Fercertne the Poet" was actually and personally identical with one of the chief exponents of this artificial Latinity, Virgilius Grammaticus.

The difficulties I find in accepting this theory of Zimmer are chiefly two. The first is that Zimmer, when he set out to establish a novel theory, was quite as ingenious in weaving an argument as Virgilius Grammaticus could be in concocting a Latin jargon. My second difficulty is that, if such a school of foreign Latinists existed in Ireland in St. Patrick's time, I cannot understand why neither the school itself nor any individual belonging to it is mentioned in any Irish document. St. Patrick does not say that his critics lived in Ireland.

On the other hand, in a passage which Zimmer has not noted, there is reference to a high degree of Christian learning in Ireland possibly as early as St. Patrick's time. It is in a letter on the Paschal controversy written by St. Columbanus of Bobbio within the years 595 to 600. It may be remarked that St. Columbanus writes in a remarkably pure Latin style, founded on good sound Latin teaching, and in no way reflecting the ingenuities and puerilities of the Aquitanian school. He is speaking expressly in this letter about the chronological system devised by Victorius of Aquitaine, who flourished in the middle of the fifth century. "Victorius," he writes, "was regarded with indulgence, not to say contempt, by our masters and by the ancient Irish philosophers." Here, in the last years of the sixth century, we find an Irishman placing a higher value on the Christian learning of "ancient Irish philosophers" than on that of a noted Aquitanian scholar.

I do not propose here to deal with the life and work of St. Patrick. Let me escape with the apology made by the writer of the Irish Nennius: "It would be carrying water to a lake, to relate the wonders of Patrick to the Men of Ireland."

Let the beginnings of letters and literature in Ireland now occupy our attention. Cæsar's testimony will be remembered in regard of the Celts in Gaul: "They make use of Greek letters in almost all their affairs, both public and private." This use of the Greek alphabet is corroborated by the fact that the oldest Celtic inscriptions in Gaul are in Greek characters. The accompanying sculptures also demonstrate Greek influence. This influence radiated, no doubt, from the early Greek colony of Massilia or Massalia (Marseille) and its daughter colonies along the Mediterranean coast. It extended as far as to the Helvetii in the modern Switzerland, among whose spoils Cæsar captured a census of the entire people written out in Greek characters. On the other hand, the Cisalpine Gauls in Northern Italy used the Etruscan alphabet, from which the Roman alphabet was also in part derived, and a number of their inscriptions in the Etruscan characters have been discovered.

We can trace no such early use of the alphabet in Britain or Ireland. The earliest known use of letters in Britain appears to be in the coinage of the sons of Commius.

Tacitus has told us that the states of Britain were governed, not by kings, but by nobles and factions--just as Rome was governed in the later centuries of the Republic. In Gaul also there were no kings. It is interesting to examine how, in the period between the temporary invasions of Britain by Julius Cæsar and the permanent Roman conquest of southern Britain about a century later, a people of the southern seaboard happen to have kings, and these kings happen to have a coinage inscribed after the Roman fashion.