The first Christians to live in Ireland were probably British slaves, rather than missionaries. The decline of Roman power in the fourth century gave the signal to the Irish to begin pirate raids on the British coasts. A Roman poet wrote that ‘the sea foamed with the beat of hostile oars’. One Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages, was credited with leading seven expeditions to Britain, and his mother, Cairenn, was said to have been a freed British slave. Another British slave was St Patrick, who was captured as a teenager in the last days of Roman Britain and carried off to Ireland, where he tended sheep for six years before he escaped, only to return c. 435 as a missionary bishop. Patrick later wrote that thousands of Britons had been slaughtered in these Irish raids. Although Patrick is popularly regarded as the apostle of Ireland, he was far from the first missionary to preach the gospel there. The first missions were sent by the church in Gaul in the late fourth or early fifth century, and by 431 there were sufficient converts to justify Pope Celestine appointing Palladius of Auxerre as bishop of the Irish. Other continental missionaries who were active around this time included St Auxilius, St Iserninus and St Secundinus. The continental mission was concentrated on Leinster; Patrick’s mission was to the still completely pagan northern half of the country. A rough guide to the area evangelised by Patrick comes from the distribution of early churches with the name Domnach Pdtraic (‘church building of Patrick’), only one of which is found south of a line drawn between Dublin and Galway. After St Patrick’s arrival, British missionaries gradually took over the work of conversion from the Gauls. This had an important influence on the development of early Irish Christianity, as it drifted out of the control of the Roman church. The British method of calculating the date of Easter was used along with other ‘Celtic’ practices, such as an informal diocesan structure and a more eremitical tradition of monasticism than that practised in areas controlled by the hierarchical and authoritarian Roman Catholic church. The conversion of Ireland was largely complete by the sixth century: it had been a peaceful process and, according to Irish tradition, no martyrs were made. The transition was probably eased by the policy of locating Christian centres close to ancient pagan ritual centres. St Patrick’s church at Armagh, for instance, was close to the seat of the kings of Ulster at Emain Macha, while St Secundinus’ church at Dunshauglin was close to Tara, which retained its symbolic association with kingship despite having been abandoned centuries before. The introduction of Christianity must have led to the destruction of much of the culture of pagan Ireland, yet it remained acceptable even for monks to enjoy the mythological tales of the ancient Irish heroes and their magical gods, and to pass them on and eventually write them down for posterity. In medieval Europe, only the Icelanders had a comparable respect for their pagan past.
Early Christian Ireland was a complex mosaic of hundreds of local kingdoms and dozens of over-kingdoms. An ordinary king (n tuathe) was the ruler of a tuath, which was defined as a ‘people’ or ‘community’, rather than as a territorial unit. The territory of a tuath could be very small, often less than 100 square miles (160 square kilometres). Each tuath would have its capital, usually a small ringfort or a crannog; a church or monastery; and an inauguration site, usually a prominent prehistoric barrow that was believed to be the grave of an illustrious royal ancestor. The people of a tuath were, in theory at least, an extended kinship group and the king was the head of the senior lineage. The king was responsible to his people for the fertility of their land and cattle, hence their prosperity: this was no doubt a legacy of pagan times. Kings also had duties of lawmaking, judgement and leadership in war. In return all the free families of the tuath owed the king tribute (paid in kind - coins were not used in Ireland before the Viking Age) and military service. Clerics and learned poets performed what little administration these simple kingdoms required. Ordinary kings might themselves owe tribute (usually cattle), hospitality and military service to an overking (ruiri), who in turn might owe it to a king of overkings (n ruirech). Overkings, therefore, did not exercise direct rule outside their own tuath - their power rested upon their ability to call on the resources and services of their client kings. Sometimes, an exceptionally powerful king might be described as king of Ireland (n Erenn) but the high kingship did not develop as a formal institution until the late tenth century. The relationships between kingdoms were not fixed. An ordinary king with military ability and ambition could build a strong war band and use it to make himself an overking. Nevertheless, even by the seventh century some stable dynasties of overkings had emerged, the most powerful of which were the Northern and Southern Ui Neill dynasties of north-east Ulster and Meath respectively. To an outsider, early Christian Ireland would have appeared to be a deeply divided country and, indeed, small-scale warfare was endemic. Yet this highly decentralised political structure was to prove remarkably resilient, well able to absorb the shock of invasion and constantly renew resistance.
The early Irish church was a mirror image of the country’s decentralised political structures. The rigid hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church, with its dioceses and provinces, was modelled on the administrative structure of the late Roman Empire. In Ireland bishops were respected but the church was dominated by the abbots of monasteries, which played the leading role in pastoral care for the laity. Monasticism was introduced to Ireland from Britain during the period of the conversion. British monks, such as St Finnian ofClonard {fl. c. 500), founded the first monasteries and trained Irishmen like Columba (Colum Cille) who themselves went on to become prolific founders of monasteries and churches. Monasticism was open to women as well as men, but there was a reluctance to donate land for nunneries, so they were fewer, smaller and less influential than male houses. Monasteries that were believed to share a common founder were grouped in paruchiae (parishes) but, unlike dioceses, these were not territorial units: the monasteries of a paruchia could be widely scattered.
World History
