The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  The arrival of Colum Cille brought political complications for the rulers of Dál Ríata, who were allied to the ancient rivals of the Uí Néill clan, the Ulaid of northeast Ulster. Once established on Iona, Colum Cille began to bring his considerable diplomatic influence to bear on the situation, not only consecrating MacGabráin as King of Dál Ríata but accompanying the new leader across to Ireland in 575 to a summit conference with the Uí Néill in what is now County Derry. This summit is said to have resulted in a pact binding the Scottish Dál Ríata to the Uí Néill – at the expense, needless to say, of the Ulaid. And, just to ensure that the agreement was duly honoured, Adamnán tells us that Colum Cille prophesied dire disaster to Dál Ríata should the alliance be broken. Adamnán’s Life is firmly hagiographical: although one takes from it a sense of Colum Cille as a flesh-and-blood individual, the text is manifestly designed to secure the reputation and international fame of its subject:

  And this great favour also was conferred by God on that man of blessed memory, that, although he lived in this small and remote island of the Britannic ocean [i.e. Iona], he merited that his name should not only be industriously renowned throughout our Ireland, and throughout Britain, the greatest of all the islands in the whole world; but that it should reach even as far as three-cornered Spain, and Gaul, and Italy situated beyond the Pennine [sic] Alps; also the Roman city itself, which is the chief of all cities.11

  In spite of Adamnán’s glowing testimony of a Christ-like man who loved children and spoke with the birds and animals, Colum Cille emerges from history as rather more the politician than the saint – and thus very much in keeping with the nature of the Irish Church in this era. Through his extensive federation of Irish monasteries he kept a very close eye on events on his home island, especially those relating to the fortunes of his Uí Néill kin; and it is clear too that he bound his church on Iona very closely to the affairs of state in Dál Ríata, in the remainder of Pict Scotland and later, in the neighbouring kingdom of Northumbria.* For Colum Cille and his followers, it seems, politics and spirituality went hand in hand.

  Certainly he was one of the most important figures in the early Irish Church. Through his efforts, the monastery on Iona would become one of the great centres of Christian learning in the early medieval world: from Iona, his followers would help to expand a literate, Christian society among the Scots and Picts of northern Britain; and after his death, a new wave of his disciples would effect the same radical cultural change across England.** St Aidan, for example, left Iona to evangelize among the pagan Angles of Northumbria and to found the island monastery at Lindisfarne in 635; the dazzling Lindisfarne Gospels would be created here at the beginning of the eighth century. Other figures would press further south and into an ever-wider world, heeding the call to ‘go out of thine own country, and from thy father’s house, into a land that I shall show thee’.12 In the eighth century the Venerable Bede, from the Northumbrian monastery at Jarrow, wrote approvingly of scholars travelling across to Ireland. Here they were welcomed gladly by the inhabitants, who ‘without asking for any payment, provided them with daily food, books and instruction’.13 Such stories and such education and zeal would seal Ireland’s reputation as a land of saints and scholars – and the deeds of one wandering monk in particular would have a decisive impact on the future course of western European language and culture.

  The Antiphonary of Bangor, with its pages of Latin hymns, psalms and chants, is the oldest surviving written service of the Irish Church, and a testament to the influence of Irish monks on European Christianity. It is likely to have been compiled at Bangor in what is now County Down, founded by St Comgall in the middle of the sixth century as one of Ireland’s most austere teaching monasteries. Significantly, this small prayer book is held today not in Ireland but in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. It was taken from Bangor by St Dungall early in the ninth century – as the abbey faced devastation from Viking raiders – and brought to the monastery at Bobbio, high in the Apennines in northern Italy and home to one of the great libraries of the medieval world. Bobbio was significant for another reason too: it was the final resting place of St Columbanus (540–615), among the most influential of the Irish peregrinari and the founder of Bobbio. Columbanus was a Leinsterman by birth: early in his life, however, he had travelled north to study at Bangor; and here he discovered that the starkness and intensity of the monastery’s regime suited him. But the call of exile would eventually prove too strong, and in 590 Columbanus sailed for France.

  Columbanus is a compelling figure in early Irish history. He was the first of the peregrinari whom fate would direct to the European mainland; and he was, moreover, a man both of remarkable scholarship and of firm and uncompromising opinion. He died at Bobbio some twenty-five years after setting foot in Europe, by which stage Ireland’s first and most striking brain drain was already in progress: for several centuries to come, the cream of the island’s scholars would similarly set forth into exile, imprinting an extraordinary Irish cultural influence upon western Europe and in the process securing their home island’s potent reputation as a centre of learning and literature. Not that Columbanus regarded himself principally as a saint or a scholar: he saw himself rather as a sinner and as a result lived a markedly stark life, striving always to get the better of a flawed nature. Such an austere interpretation of their calling won Columbanus and his followers a wide following among a population who could not possibly feel threatened by holy men who subsisted bleakly on a starvation diet and a lack of sleep.

  Among the first of these admirers was Guntram, the Merovingian Frankish King of Burgundy, who permitted Columbanus to found a monastery at Annegray, in the Vosges Mountains. Within a short time, the new institution proved so successful that two further monasteries were founded nearby, at Luxeuil and Fontaines. Columbanus inspired his followers with powerful sermons, many of which survive to this day as decidedly stern testaments to the man himself: ‘one thing which I know I shall say: the man who here battens, here sates himself, here makes merry, here smiles, here is drunken, and here plays, shall hereafter hunger, thirst, mourn, wail and lament.’14 Building on the lessons learned at Bangor, Columbanus now drew up his own Rule: a set of forbidding regulations for monastic life built around fasting, obedience, corporal punishment and confession. It was far more austere than the Benedictine model, and for almost two centuries it became the cornerstone of monastic communities founded by the Irish and the European monks they trained. Perhaps its most lasting influence was in the application of the Irish penitential practice in Europe. Traditionally, European penance was performed in public, complete with sackcloth and ashes; in Ireland, however, confession and penance were private rites. The Irish version, moreover, had been thoroughly codified: it was guided by a horrifying series of texts that listed every conceivable sin nothing that could be imagined was excluded, with masturbation and bestiality ranked equally as the wickedest sins of all. This medicamenta pænitentiae, or ‘medicines of penance’, proved a good deal easier to swallow than the public mortifications prescribed in Europe; and, as a result, it began to spread throughout the continent. By the thirteenth century, the Irish practice had become standard throughout Europe; indeed, it remains the norm in the Catholic Church today.

  The success of Columbanus’s new monasteries, complete with monks tonsured in the Irish style, proved unsettling to the bishops of the Frankish Church. Resentment simmered until the tension finally came to a head in a major ecclesiastical dispute over the precise dating of Easter. Calculating the correct and proper date of Easter was (and remains) a complicated process: and in the sixth and seventh centuries, although the European Church had come to a degree of accord on this vexed matter, the Irish Church continued to work along different lines. A century later, Bede would remember an epistle from Honorius I (pope from 625 to 638) to the Irish, whom ‘he found to have erred over the keeping of Easter…urging them with much shrewdness not to consider themselves, few as they were and placed on the ext
reme boundaries of the world, wiser than the ancient and modern Church of Christ scattered throughout the earth; nor should they celebrate a different Easter contrary to the pastoral tables and the decrees of the bishops of all the world met in synod’.15 Columbanus held to the Irish model, with the result that his European monasteries celebrated Easter at a quite different time from that of their neighbours. In an age when the smallest degree of ecclesiastical difference could be regarded as heresy, his major deviation from European tradition gave Columbanus’s enemies an opportunity to attack.

  Columbanus himself, displaying his trademark scorn for diplomatic niceties, had in fact already challenged Pope Gregory the Great to abandon the European model of calculation in favour of the Irish one – and in 603 he was summoned to account for his heresy before the Frankish bishops. Columbanus viewed these clerics with the utmost contempt: to him they were a caste of soft, self-important churchmen, satisfied with ministering only to the elite. So he simply refused to go, sending instead a letter that was stinging and calculated to offend: ‘I, Columba the sinner, forward greetings in Christ. I render thanks to my God, that for my sake so many holy men have been gathered together to treat of the truth of faith and good works, and, as befits such, to judge of the matters under dispute with a just judgment, through senses sharpened to the discernment of good and evil. Would that you did so more often…’.16 In such texts, Columbanus proved his reputation as an abrasive and confrontational personality. His letter, employing beautifully crafted Latin, went on to take the bishops to task for their materialism, adultery, lack of industry and interference with his holy mission.

  But someone will say: Are we really not entering the kingdom of heaven? Why can you not by the Lord’s grace, if you become as little children, that is, humble and chaste, simple-hearted, and guileless in evil, [yet] wise in goodness, easy to be entreated and not retaining anger in your heart? But all these things can very hardly be fulfilled by those who often look at women and who more often quarrel and grow angry over the riches of the world.17

  Having flayed the bishops thus, Columbanus appealed again to the pope, reaffirming his loyalty to Rome and asking to be left in peace. The dispute between the Irish and European Churches over the dating of Easter would not be completely settled until the Synod of Whitby in 664, but it appears that the resolve of the papacy cracked first. Columbanus’s monasteries continued to follow the Irish tradition; and their leader maintained an erudite and sometimes familiar correspondence with various popes, who seem to have permitted him to live and work as he pleased.

  The local situation, however, became increasingly difficult. Columbanus had already offended the clergy; and eventually his uncompromising morality would result in offence to the civil authorities too. In particular, his refusal to bless the bastard offspring of the Merovingian monarch Theuderic (‘You ought to know that they will not receive the royal sceptres, because they have been born to whores’18) had serious consequences: he not only offended the king but threatened the stability of the realm – and his comments appear to have been the last straw for the authorities, already irked by Columbanus’s insistence on having his own way in every single matter, large or small. His loyal converts would continue to live by the Rule (although in the years following his death his monasteries quietly fell into line in the much-disputed matter of the timing of Easter) but the Irish monk himself – after a threat of deportation to Ireland was eventually lifted – was banished from Burgundy and forced once more into exile.

  Columbanus spent two years wandering through what are now France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and as he went, he continued with the Lord’s work by conducting a campaign of destruction of pagan sites and disruption of ceremonies. His decision to direct his footsteps towards Italy, however, eventually created dissension amongst his followers. He quarrelled bitterly with his oldest friend, Gall, who would, as a result, remain in the Alps to spread the Christian message and become in the process the founding father of the Swiss Church. After his death, the great monastery named in his honour – at St Gallen, in northeast Switzerland – would play a crucial intellectual role in the evolution of the Swiss nation. Columbanus himself reached Milan in 1612 and, after interceding in a dispute between King Agilulf of the Lombards and Pope Boniface, was granted by a grateful monarch a piece of land in the Apennines between Milan and Genoa. Columbanus transformed a cavern here at Bobbio into a small chapel and his last days were spent in prayer.

  His legacy would prove to be an enduring one. Possessed as he was of a harsh view of faith, Columbanus had been, in his own words, a ‘dissenter whenever necessary’. But he also exemplified the rigorous levels of scholarship that could be found in the Irish monasteries of the day, and he bequeathed an extensive body of work: his masterful scripts and sermons testify to his education, paying homage as they do to such classical writers as Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal. He was the first to conceive of Europe as a cultural entity in its own right; the first to express in writing a sense of a specifically Irish identity; and the first Irishman to leave a lasting impression in the world beyond his native island.

  Bobbio itself became the greatest of his monasteries, developing in time into a centre of learning and scholarship. In its scriptorium, surrounded by books and manuscripts illuminated in Ireland, generations of European scholars would learn to read and write in Latin. His teaching monastery at Luxeuil, meanwhile, would produce hundreds of young scholars, who would follow his example and spread the gospel throughout pagan Europe; twenty-one of its students would be canonized. At least sixty monasteries were founded in his name across the continent: by the ninth century, Irish scholars had begun to follow the pioneering missionaries and to gain important academic roles in the courts of monarchs such as Charlemagne; and Irish foundations could be found across a great swathe of western and central Europe. The work accomplished by Columbanus and his evangelizing successors helped to disseminate Latin literature in western Europe, and in the process to underpin the future development of Europe’s rich array of national languages and literatures.

  The sea which carried the monks from Ireland to Europe from the sixth century onward, however, would in later centuries carry other travellers too: warriors sailing from the cold north to haunt the sleep of Christians throughout the continent. The experience in Ireland would be no different.

  Chapter Two

  Landfall

  This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians…terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.1

  In the year 793, the monks on Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast looked out to sea and saw a fleet of small, nimble ships come swiftly out of the northeast. The authorities at Lindisfarne, if the hysterical accounts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are to be believed, must have been anticipating some horror or other to fall upon them – and so it came to pass. These ships were filled with warriors from western Scandinavia, who landed on the stony shores of the island and proceeded to burn the buildings and plunder the store of precious goods that had been built up at the monastery in the century and half of its existence. It was but the first of many such raids, which resulted in the forced abandonment of Lindisfarne a century later and marked the advent of the Viking age in northwestern Europe.

  Until this time the people of Scandinavia had had their own rich resources of timber, cattle and fish to exploit, and had tended to keep themselves to themselves. Now, though, they were bursting from their homelands and moving east into the heart of Russia, south towards Germany and the Mediterranean, and west into the Atlantic. There were a variety of reasons for this change: in the case of Norway, overpopulation combined with an increas
ing sense of the fragile fertility of their sea-girt valleys; new shipbuilding technologies that enabled longer and more ambitious voyages to be undertaken; and a gradually warming climate that stretched the sailing seasons and made these voyages less perilous. Norway, moreover, was the poorest region of Scandinavia and – like Ireland itself – lacked any degree of political unity. The mariners overseas, therefore, were individuals impelled by family and local loyalties and were seeking wealth and stability for themselves and their communities. In the end, then, it was the Norwegians of all the Scandinavians who made the most spectacular voyages, pressing west through bitter seas to Iceland and Greenland and finally across the Atlantic to Newfoundland.