The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (6 page)

By means of these monastic writings, therefore, a literary tradition evolved in Ireland centuries before it appeared elsewhere in Europe. Irish monks transcribed biblical texts and sermons, the Gospels, the Psalms and the lives of saints, before moving on to the great works of late antiquity, including many of the classics from Greek and Latin pagan literature. Ireland’s oral tradition now found a new and powerful expression. The sprawling oral epic of the
Táin
– the dramatic tale of the clash between Queen Medb of Connacht and the youthful Cúchulainn, hero of Ulster – was written down for the first time during this period, for example, and became fixed in a way that would have been inconceivable in a non-literate age, when stories would have altered endlessly in the telling. Pagan and Christian narratives, Gospel and heroic tale were thus subjected alike to interpretation and codification, and the legacy of this attention lies in the remarkable illuminated manuscripts produced in these centuries. The seventh-century Book of Durrow and the more famous and ‘magnificently comic’ Book of Kells that was likely produced on Iona are the most luminous examples – but there are many such, relating Gospel and biblical stories in extravagant and glowing detail.
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Such industry has had a profound effect on our understanding of Irish history. Virtually everything written and presented as historical fact under the auspices of the early Christian Church was manufactured, calculated and driven by political and ideological agendas. As we have seen, the monks working in the scriptorium at Armagh were in the business of producing carefully crafted propaganda in order to help their institution gain lasting primacy over the Irish Church. But the clerics of Armagh were not alone in their endeavours. The Church as a whole was intent on convincing potential converts that they were already part of a wider Christian faith; and as a result, its representatives now set about inscribing the Irish into a much greater narrative that encompassed the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition. Turning their attentions to the Book of Genesis, which described the creation of the world, early scribes and clerics noted that it neglected to mention the Irish – so they undertook, as compensation, the formation of a whole new story.

The result was the
Lebor Gabála Érenn
, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, begun around 700 and ranking among the most successful works of propaganda ever produced in the country. Inspired by the biblical history of the Israelites, the narrative recounts the histories of all the peoples who ever settled in Ireland, weaving a new genealogy that stretched all the way back to Noah and in the process establishing the legitimacy and lineage of the Irish people. In connecting these myths of origin to the Old Testament, the
Lebor Gabála Érenn
succeeded in portraying all the Irish dynasties and peoples as descending from a single set of ancestors. This proved to be a powerful and all-pervasive myth: race, language, land and landscape were utilized as the basis for ethnic unity; and Ireland and the Irish were placed on a par with the great classical cultures of the known world.

There was, of course, nothing unusual about the formation of such an origin myth, which was characteristic of any culture wishing to legitimize itself. Rome, for example, did precisely the same thing when its early writers invented a connection with ancient Troy, in the process underpinning a new position of authority within the classical Mediterranean world. In addition, genealogy was central to Irish culture. The role of the
filid
or caste of respected poets was to remember and celebrate the lineage of the king. They were figures to be feared as much as admired: with his power over words, a poet might damn a miserly or unappreciative noble in the eyes of the world – and in the process taint his future.

With the evolution of the
Lebor Gabála Érenn
, the monastic order in Ireland thus demonstrated its ability to shape the world: in reinventing the past, it might also change the present and influence the future. The monks could create a great and glorious genealogy, altering their destiny in the process: the same clerical spin doctors at Armagh who had used the figure of Patrick to further their own ambitions now became adept at putting forth their propaganda skills on behalf of their powerful patrons in the Uí Néill dynasty. Muirchú’s
Life
of Patrick had described Lóegaire of the Uí Néill clan as ‘a great king, fierce and pagan, and emperor of the Irish’; Niall, the ancestor of the Uí Néill, was from ‘the family that rules almost all the entire island’, invoking the institution of the high kingship; yet another Uí Néill king would be named as ‘ruler of the whole of Ireland ordained by God’.

The ecclesiastical authorities at Armagh were keen to develop the idea of an ordained and consecrated king; and they were able to draw on the Old Testament in their efforts to do so. The Book of Samuel notes that ‘Yahweh judges the ends of the earth, he endows his king with power, he exalts the horn of his anointed’; and the phrase ‘ordained by God’ occurs again and again in manuscripts written by clergy connected with the Uí Néill dynasty, which during this period had steadily expanded its power base.
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One result of this process of dynastic ascendancy was that it put some flesh on the bones of the ancient Uí Néill claim to the high kingship at Tara. This was a shadowy institution, with little in the way of practical application – there had never been a king at Tara who was in a position to govern the entire island – but its symbolic power was naturally enviable. The exalted claims made on behalf of the Uí Néill dynasty were by no means fully reflected in the political situation on the ground; but this fact was largely irrelevant to the great game being played out. With the assistance of the powerful clerics at Armagh, the Uí Néill were in it for the long haul.

The first record of a king being crowned in western Europe long predates this phase of activity at Armagh. The coronation was that of Aedán MacGabráin of Dál Ríata in 574, and the monk who consecrated his reign was himself a prince of the Uí Néill clan. He was also a warrior, a poet, a natural historian, a diplomat, a kingmaker, a founder of the monasteries at Derry, Durrow and the Scottish island of Iona, and a thoroughly industrious historical figure; we know him as Columba or Colum Cille (521–97).
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Colum Cille was born at Gartan in what is now County Donegal. Tradition tells us he was named Crimthann or ‘Fox’; it was only later, when he entered the monastic life, that he was given the name Colum Cille, ‘dove of the Church’. But he was rather more hawk than dove: he left Ireland for Scotland in 563 to found Iona, and it is fairly certain that his part in instigating the bloody battle of Cúl Dreimhne (in what is now County Sligo) was one reason why he abandoned Ireland relatively late in his life. A century later, however, his biographer Adamnán – abbot of Iona and the ninth Uí Néill to succeed Colum Cille as ruler of this powerful and influential monastery – begged to differ, claiming in his
Vita Columbae
(‘The Life of Colum Cille’) that the saint took to the road to become an exile for the Lord. This
peregrinatio pro amore Dei
was certainly common enough among the more devout Irish monks, who would sever all links with their secular identity and leave their community in order to become born again in Christ: by the ninth century, such monks were fetching up in locations as remote and inhospitable as the Icelandic coast. But Colum Cille did not propose going so far, nor even abandoning his own people: Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, was part of the kingdom of Dál Ríata that spanned the narrow seas between Ireland and Scotland – to all intents and purposes, a part of Ireland itself.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.