The Ancients - Saint Patrick

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Man, myth or legend... who was the real Saint Patrick? Did he really banish all the snakes from Ireland? Where does the shamrock tradition come from? And was he even Irish?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Professor Lisa Bitel of USC Dornsife to find out more about the true identity of the mysterious figure who became Patron Saint of Ireland and gave his hallowed name to St Paddy's Day.Order Tristan's book, Alexander's Successors at War, today 📖➡️ https://ed.gr/dylvoFor more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.  If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, today is St. Patrick's Day. It's St. Paddy's Day. It's the 17th of March.

No doubt there'll be celebrations across the world, in Ireland, in the UK, in Canada, in the US, in Australia, and many other countries. There'll be lots of drinking. There'll be lots of March. No doubt there'll be celebrations across the world, in Ireland, in the UK, in Canada, in the US, in Australia and many other countries. There'll be lots of drinking, there'll be lots of celebrating. I myself have participated in a few St Paddy's Days over the past few years. It is a great time. Now today it is about time that we started to focus in on ancient Ireland. Ireland has got so much awesome ancient history and today we're going to be focusing in on the figure of Saint Patrick. This figure who ventured to Ireland in roughly the 5th century but did he really bring Christianity to Ireland? Was he Irish? Were snakes involved? Were shamrocks involved? Well to explain all I was delighted to get on the podcast Professor Lisa Bittell from USC Dornsife. Now with Saint

Patrick I must stress right here we don't have many sources for this figure. And as you're going to hear, some of the sources that we have are written later and include many, shall we say, fantastical elements, such as Patrick battling against druids in these epic competitions, trying to take control of elements such as the weather. They're quite interesting stories and we definitely delve into them because they deserve their mention. So without further ado, to talk all about St. Patrick, here's Lisa. Lisa, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast today. I'm very happy to be here. Now, Lisa, the St. Patrick of the ancient sources, of the earlier sources, shall we say, there are no snakes or shamrocks in sight.

That is true. Snakes did not make it across the land bridge to Ireland. Whenever they got there, it was after St. Patrick's time. Well, there you go. We'll definitely delve into that a bit more as our chat goes on. But I think first questions first, as we set the background to this chat, I mean, what sources do we have available, Lisa, when looking at the figure of St. Patrick in Ireland? In a way, we're lucky. I mean, we only have two, really, and they're both by himself, by Patrick. Two letters, one quite short and one a little longer. And the longer one, which people call now his confession, describes his career. It's a sort of retrospective because he wrote it in defence of that career to a council of British bishops. So we have this one fifth century,

not precisely dateable description of his career, though from admittedly a biased source. And to add a bit more, shall we say, colour to the story, do we have later on, a few centuries later, these hagiographies start appearing about Patrick? We do. The earliest was written two centuries, easily, after Patrick lived. And we have nothing from the period in between. But we have these two, well, I guess you could call one a vita, a saint's life, by a churchman named Wierchel, Marko Markheny, and another one by a bishop, Thiergen. And they're both very pro-Patrick. And they both drew on earlier sources, including Patrick's

letters, but some other sources that we simply don't have anymore and we don't know what they were. And they both claim to have talked to people who talked to people who talked to people who knew Patrick. But they are quite sensational. They're not at all the Patrick we see in his own writings. Well, I was going to say, Lisa, should we take these later writings with a pinch of salt, shall we say? Maybe a barrelful. They do use Patrick, but the two authors realised that Patrick wasn't exactly telling all the facts, that there should be much more to tell about how fabulous he was in particular, how powerful and so forth. And so they felt free in a hagiographic way to

fill in the blanks. Well, let's delve into this life of Patrick, as it were, then. Where and when do we think Patrick was born? Do you know that Irish scholars spent more than a century fighting about this? I think probably sometimes physically, as far as I can tell. There were theories that he came over to Ireland from Britain at the beginning of the 5th century, at the end of the 5th century. At one time, scholars thought there might have been two Patricks. So right now, we just say sort of vaguely he lived in Ireland. He was probably in Ireland in the second half of the 5th century. And whether he died around the 460s or 490s, we're still going back and forth. But from his own account, we know he was in Britain, from things he writes about, and a few references from the continent, we figure, 5th century.

Do we think he was born in Britain rather than in Ireland? Oh yeah, we know he was. He's quite proud of it. And he says in the opening paragraph of his Confessio, the first chapter of it, that he came from a place called Bannabem to Burnieye, and no one's sure where that is either you know places change names over a long time but we think it was probably somewhere maybe on the what is now the Welsh English border maybe further south but he came from a sort of Romanized he calls it a little villa at a settlement called this Bannerman place okay so it's very much the time of the Romano-British as you're saying right there so what's the behind, because I know there are a couple of

ventures, his first visit, shall we say, his first venture to Ireland? Because it's not one he takes on his own accord, is it? No, he wasn't real willing. That's saying it mildly. He was kidnapped by Irish raiders, Irish pirates, for the slave market back in Ireland. It didn't go one way in that period. There were people sailing off the British coast and taking people from Ireland and vice versa. And he was a teenager. He got swept up with a bunch of other children and women and hauled over to Ireland and sold. Or so he says, anyway.

And he spent six or seven years out in the wilds of mayo herding pigs for uh we don't know for sure later on the lives of patrick say it was a druid but so how does he manage to escape from this life of servitude it's hard to say he doesn't really tell us he tells us you know how hard it was for him to be out in the hillsides in the rain and snow. He had a sort of conversion experience while he was in slavery. He was, what, in his late teens. And he hadn't been a complete Christian by the time he was kidnapped, whatever that means. His parents were Christian, his father was anyways. And he had a sort of conversion experience and started hearing an angel speaking to him. And one day the angel said, your ship will be ready soon. And somehow he was inspired to walk eastward across Ireland, how he knew the way, how he finally made the decision, unclear, and find a ship and sail home. And so there's all

this stuff he writes about in his confession. It's a very peculiar episode. Another one that upset stuff he writes about in his confession. It's a very peculiar episode. Another one that upset Irish scholars, you know, hopping mad sometimes. He says he got to the coast and there was a ship ready to go and they didn't want to take him along. He says it's because, I quote here, I refused to suck their nipples. And people have wondered, oh, is that some peculiar old Celtic, you know, tradition? You had to suck somebody's nipples to get a boat ride? Was it a sort of symbolic, I refuse to bow to them? Was it some weird sort of basic ritual found across societies, as some people have posited? But it's actually a biblical trope.

There are references in the so-called Old Testament to sucking nipples or nursing being a kind of act of subservience. But he refused to play nicely with them is the thing. And they were probably afraid to haul a Christian across. You know, maybe do some weird, crazy voodoo on board or, you know, it didn't look right to be hauling a Christian around. But eventually they came to some sort of agreement and Patrick went off and then they crashed somewhere in the wilderness and had to wander around together for 40 days and nights. It was very sad. Very sad indeed. I mean, slight tangent right now, Lisa. You mentioned that Patrick is a Christian at this point. Of course, he's not ventured to Ireland yet for the miracles that are associated with St. Patrick. The mission, exactly. But so what's the story? How do we think Christianity, therefore, does come to Ireland at that time?

Is it very much this trading of ideas with places like Britain and the continent? Yeah, that's a fabulous question. That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out right now. I think lots of scholars are. You know, there's this narrative, right, of how Christianity came to Northern Europe. And it's these guys who come into town kind of wild-eyed and start preaching the gospel. And imagine telling stories about, you know, a savior from a desert land in a big city in Rome and all this stuff to these, you

know, very soggy rural people living in the distant north. I mean, it didn't make sense. Religion doesn't travel that way. You know, it moves through families. Probably a lot of British people who were Christians were kidnapped into Ireland. There were traders, people, merchants from the continent and Britain back and forth to Ireland. They weren't isolated. So there were people who were Christians, who knew of Christians, who did Christian things going in and out of Ireland, probably from the third century, a good century plus before Patrick. He wasn't the only apostle to Ireland. So what does, therefore, from the stories, from the accounts that we have surviving from Patrick's own mouth as well, I guess, what makes him decide, having escaped from Ireland

and escaped from captivity, to later decide to go back to Ireland for his mission. He has this mystical part of his personality, you know, in his Confessio, he talks about a number of very strange experiences besides having this angel speak to him and appear to him in visions, which is what eventually prompts him to go back to Ireland. eventually prompts him to go back to Ireland. He has a dream, and Angel comes bearing a letter to him, and the letter is from the people of Mayo, and they're saying, come back to us, holy boy. I love that they call him that, holy boy. And so, he's sort of propelled by these visions, these messages from God via an angel to do what he thinks is right. And he feels he must go back and bring Christianity to these people. And this is after he's gone home where he

must have trained and been ordained and so forth. Although whether he was made a bishop officially, we don't know, but he feels compelled to go back. He feels compelled. So there's very much a force in him going back to Ireland. Or so he says. Or so he says, as you say, Lisa. And was it also when he was writing this idea that he's going weirdly to the periphery of the known world, periphery of civilization to bring Christianity there? Well, to be fair, he's living on the Welsh border. He's pretty far on the periphery already.

I mean, fair enough. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, no, he feels he has to go out into the mission fields. There's an element of suffering that he feels that he must take upon himself as he goes out. And, you know, when he talks about his own mission and later in life, it's not comfortable. and he has to pay young men to go with him and protect him. And, you know, he gets insulted constantly. He takes it very personally and at the same time feels like he must endure this to bring Christianity to people. So right from the start, Lisa, because I'd love to delve into this now, just before we talk about the Druids, because I'd love to talk about the Druids in a bit. But right from the start, as Patrick returns to Ireland for his mission,

does he have some followers with him or do they join as he keeps going through Ireland? What a great question. We don't know. We don't know. He must have at least encountered people who were already Christian and became his followers or came to him or something. And the later saints' lives take this as a given. They assume that he had a retinue with him of people. In fact, they refer to those people occasionally as foreigners, as from Gaul or from Britain. And we know there must have been communities of Christians there already, because in the fifth century, there is this one external reference, you know, the Pope sent not Patrick, but another guy to Ireland, to the Irish believing in Christ. In other words, to a group of Christians there already.

Palladius was sent to be their bishop and then disappeared off the historical screen and Patrick moved in. proselytizing along the eastern southern coast and possibly even through Kerry, is the archaeological evidence now. So yeah, he had people with him. Okay then, so if we've established that, let's now delve into these Druid figures because they are absolutely extraordinary, Lisa, looking at this. First of all, who are these Druids in Ireland? How are they portrayed? Because it seems as if they become these scriptural villains of Patrick's story. They do, yeah. Yeah, they're so excellent in these saints' lives.

You know, okay, here's another controversy that I've been to. They had controversies in this field. You know, these documents are written in Latin, the earliest ones. So, you know, what they call these guys are magister, a wizard, right? The same thing that Simon Magus is called in Latin texts from the continent, this post-biblical figure of a wizard. And, you know, a wizard in Rome is a very different thing from something up in Ireland. So, you know, what scholars have done over the years is look at classical writings about the so-called Celtic priestly class, which are called by people like Julius Caesar, druides. And there is a word in Irish, old Irish, drui. So they did have something that we're calling a druid.

But it wasn't those white-robed, long-bearded guys with the golden sickles that you see in 19th century illustrations. We don't know what they were. So we have these classical sources about them. And then we have these medieval Irish stories from, you know, the eighth or later centuries talking about druids. And those guys are wacky. They're excellent. They can, and you see these in the saints' lives too, which you call these, these sort of stereotypical villains. But in the Irish stories, they're good guys. They can manipulate the weather. They can shape and fly like birds. They can see the future, you know.

And the way they turn up in these Christian sources is as sort of archmage pagans who have a completely developed religion that they lead. There's never any mention of their gods, but they seem to be priests and advisors to the king. And they're wielding their spells and telling the king how to get rid of Patrick and what a disaster it's going to be if everybody goes Christian and lots of magic going on there. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more

in the brand new podcast from history hit, Patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I want to delve into one particular story that I thought was absolutely extraordinary.

And this is the story of, and forgive me if I get the pronunciation of this king's name wrong, the story of King... Learie. Yeah, Learie. Learie in Irish, although Learie, but Learie. King Learie, first of all,

he is the king of a place called... Tara. That's Tara. Tara, that's Tara. It's the symbolic capital of Ireland because there was never... They call him a king of Ireland in the stories,

but there was never really a king of Ireland. It was just the king who bullied or beat the other kings into submission as his clients would be nominally the king of Tara. And it's a retrospective sort of title in this story. of a dynasty that came really to control Ireland later in the Middle Ages, the 8th century, the O'Neills, the E-Nail. So this is a retrospective story about what people in the 8th or 7th or whatever centuries thought would have been the mightiest king in Ireland. And so in these lives of Patrick from the late 7th century, Learie is sort of, you know, the king of paganism in Ireland. And I know you're probably thinking of a story from, the king of paganism in Ireland. And I know you're probably thinking of a story from Werrihu of Patrick arriving in Ireland when he's coming back for his mission. So he's a grown-up man now. And he aims, after he lands in Ireland, for the capital of paganism, for Tara. And he just happens to know that there's a pagan holiday going on there that coincides with

the Christian Easter. And there probably wasn't one. There's no so-called Celtic holiday that would have coincided. But anyways, so he goes to Tara, which if you know, is sort of in the middle to the east of Ireland. And it's a multi-period burial complex, you know, beginning, I think, in the Bronze Age, if not earlier. A very sacred place where they buried kings and built sort of ritual circles. And there are various hills and, you know, chambers and so forth. But by Muirhu's time, it was a very politically charged place. So anyways, back in the 5th century, Patrick goes to a mountaintop. It's actually a burialaintop. It's

actually a burial mound also, and lights a fire there. And the Druids and Learie back at Tara see the fire and the Druids are saying, oh, if this fire is not put out, you know, it will rain over Ireland forever and it's going to be a total disaster. And the king is having a holiday and he had a ritual fire lit. No one's supposed to light the ritual fire before the king does. And so, as you know, they go charging off to find out who's lit this fire. And it's this foreigner who starts preaching at them. And there are a series of duels that follow where the Druids either curse the Christian God or threaten Patrick. curse the Christian God or threaten Patrick. Or at one point they try to poison him.

A series of ambushes of Patrick that, of course, by the grace and power of God, he always manages to come out on top of. At one point he makes a druid fly into the air and then drops suddenly and bashes brains out on a rock. It's a terrible mess. And it all culminates with a grand druidic versus saint duel. They talk about how they're going to carry out this duel. Well, you know, maybe both sides should have to drown their books.

And the druids say, oh, no, no, no, because we know those Christians, they worship water. You know, it's a joke about baptism, I think. And then they finally decide for the last bit of this whole series of duels that one druid is going to put on some Christian vestments and go into a house built of green branches. Not very, you know, burnable. And Patrick's disciple, not Patrick, is going to go into another very dry house wearing a druid's outfit. And they're going to set both houses on fire. Now, how is that fair? I don't know. But at any rate, they set the houses on fire. And of course, the druid gets burnt to a crisp, but the Christian clothing is saved. And the disciple of Patrick,

Benignus, is saved. The house burns down, the druid's clothes burn off him, but he's perfectly fine. So that proves it. Christianity is best. And in this version, anyway, King Leary converts. He says, it's better to believe than to die. And a lot of this whole thing is couched in biblical terms. They even refer to Leary as a Nebuchadnezzar. They call Tara Babylon. This is in Warero. This is something that the scholar Thomas O'Loughlin pointed out quite a while ago. Even the kinds of things that Leary says come from scriptural sources. So the funny thing is the other life of Patrick written right around this time by Tiragan says Leary never converted, but that's another story.

Talking about all of this, Lisa, is it important? I mean, it's another story talking about all of this lisa is it important i mean it's such an interesting but of course extraordinary story at the same time it's important does patrick ever mention tara in his own writings or ever visiting that area of ireland no it's so frustrating because patrick doesn't mention a single name he doesn't mention a single name. He doesn't mention a place at all. His Confessio is, you know, it met his purpose. It was sort of a classical mea culpa. Here's what I've tried to do and here's why. And it's almost as if the fact that he was in Ireland didn't matter. It was more about sort of his spiritual missionary journey. his spiritual missionary journey, incredibly frustrating to those of us who want to study what he was doing, though, really annoying, was left to these hagiographers a couple centuries later to go fill in those blanks and to cast this story at Tara and to assume that there was a showdown and there were druids involved and stuff like that. It made for a good story, but they had no clue. They were relying on

native literature for the broad strokes. Looking at the prehistory of Ireland and the amazing sites which stretch back to the Neolithic and before, is it quite interesting how many of these medieval writers, these hagiographers, try to associate parts of Patrick's story with these incredibly ancient sites that would have been ancient to those people back then too? Yeah sites that would have been ancient to those people back then too. Yeah, they would have been ancient and they would all have been politically charged with the politics of the day that the hagiographers were writing. So that stuff about the O'Neills, that was very much at the forefront of the thought of the hagiographers. And this is where it gets complicated. By then, the established churches that were dedicated to Patrick, because the O'Neills patronized what became Patrick's cult center at Armagh, Ardmacha.

It was important to sort of promote Patrick's dominance in the 5th century as a symbolic statement about the dominance of Ardmacha and a network of churches over Ireland in the 7th century and the status of the O'Neills, etc, etc. So it was a very complex web of politics informing these saints' lives that were taking perspective on the 5th century mission of Patrick. So they're outrageous. I mean, it was important to be top saint in the 7th, 8th centuries in Ireland. Patrick's mission, the aim of his mission with Christianity in Ireland, is it not, let's say, to construct lots of churches and create that? Or is it more just to bring the idea of Christianity more to the island of Ireland? From Patrick's perspective, from his own writings, he's just saving souls. I mean, he talks about saving, you know, baptising people hundreds at a time. And he doesn't mention any

kind of infrastructure. As far as churches, we don't know of any from that period. There must have been some purpose-built structures eventually, but whether it was in Patrick's time or later, we don't know. It's only with the later lives of him, and especially the text by Tirchan, which isn't really a proper saint's life, it's more about real estate, actually, that we get talk about building churches and a church here and a church there. And they all were founded by Patrick and thus owe allegiance to his cult center. But so far as we know, there was no infrastructure for Patrick.

I mean, what these hundreds of people did after they were baptized, who knows? They must have wandered around thinking, how do I be a Christian now? I don't know what they do next. Well, it's so interesting how much we don't know about this period because it's always going back to these stories of the Druids and these later stories which obviously seem to have these extraordinary elements to them. I mean, just one last thing on that before we go into, I'd like to ask about converting some of the druids and these other figures so to be lowry is that whole story with tara in one of these later hagiographies now we see so many times in certain ancient sources where there is a basis of truth about something

but later sources then add a lot of color to it a lot of fictional elements on top of it could there be a basis of truth to that whole story we were talking with, Patrick and the Druids, Patrick going to Tara? Could Patrick have actually gone to Tara and people remember him being there, but then this whole story was then added as a later edition? I suppose he could have done. I have a feeling that if there had been some sort of climax to his missionary career like this, if there'd been a showdown and he'd been oppressed but then triumphed, he would have told us about that. But if you read his confession, it's just a series of interactions with people and baptisms,

you know, nothing in particular more important than another. And I think if he'd gone straight to the then supposed king of Tara and taken him, initially he would have written home to the British bishops about this. You know, look what I did. And he doesn't. He doesn't. He talks about kings who reject him, kings who accept him, but no particular leader. So if we focus on his writings, then what sorts of interactions does he therefore have with these various leaders in Ireland? He makes these references to hanging around with king's sons, to a king who, or maybe more than one, who threw him in chains, he says, or delayed him anyways, or made him pay to move through their territory. And that gets to be an issue because

it's thought that maybe one of the charges against him, and he makes reference to this, was that he got paid sometimes for what he did. And there was a controversy in Christian circles around this time about whether Christian officials, ordained churchmen, should take fees for what they did. They got to make a living somehow. But he's quite adamant that he didn't do that. But he does say that, and quite the opposite, that he had to pay people to stay alive. And so it's pretty clear that some local leaders did not want him coming near their areas, their region. Fair enough. So what other examples do we have from these later hagiographies

of these miracles by Patrick that he performs? Well, one thing I've been working on recently is, as I said, Tirchan is not quite a saint's life. He writes the saint's life bit in a couple paragraphs, birth to death Patrick, or birth to almost death Patrick. But then what he does is he takes Patrick on a tour, mostly of Western Ireland, of Connacht, the Midlands in Connacht. And as I said, talks about all the churches that Patrick founded. Either he had built while he was there or he would assign someone to go off and build a church somewhere. And the subtext was that church then became part of Armagh's network, as I said. And there's a series of episodes in Among All That Church Building where Patrick sees burials and graves and actually even interacts with some dead people.

And I've been puzzling about a pair of these episodes. In one, Patrick comes along to like a 120-foot grave or something. And the other clerks with him are like, oh, there can't be a real person buried there. And Patrick says, let's see. And he raises a giant from the dead. And the giant says, I always imagine it's sort of like a big, dumb giant voice. But he says, can I go with you, you know, and be a Christian? And Patrick says, no, I think you'll terrify people, but I'll baptize you and then you can go back to being dead, which is a good thing. He gets to go to heaven now, right? The giant. So he does that.

Then he comes past another pair of graves and there's a cross on one. And Patrick talks to one of those dead guys too. And it turns out that the cross has been put on the wrong grave. And the dead guy under the cross says, yeah, I'm not a Christian. But the other guy was, and his mom hired someone to put a cross on his grave, and they came and put it on mine instead. And so Patrick gets out of his chariot and moves the cross and then takes off. And his charioteer says, why didn't you convert that dead guy too? Why didn't you baptize him? It would have been better, wouldn't it? To sprinkle water on the grave and convert him.rick doesn't answer

and uh tirahan the author says i don't know why he didn't do it either you know maybe some people just don't get converted basically and i've been trying to figure out what the heck that means in the mind of a seventh century writer writing about this all great saint who could baptize a thousand at once you know what was the reason he didn't it is absolutely bizarre but it sounds like from what you're saying therefore you say you know someone who could baptize according to these stories you know a thousand people it sounds like this was just one of many various stories that there are of patrick in these hagiographies that were carried down over those couple of hundred years there's always that chance there's always the chance that it's just incidental, right?

Not part of a pattern. But I think given all the dead people that are in Tirhahan's account, there's some statement about burial and what's beneath the surface that's going on there. So like I said, I think Christianity came from the ground up to various parts of Europe, quite literally in burials and so forth. So I think there's more of a statement there but i'm still trying to puzzle it it out so i'd love to ask about some of the things we associate patrick with today and the first one i've always got to ask about is the

shamrock yeah now why is patrick connected to the shamrock what's the story behind this well that trinity stuff that's not the case so as we know, it's a legend that grew up much later about Patrick that when he was preaching, he held out a shamrock to signify or explain the Trinity, which, mind you, is probably a good technique because I've never completely comprehended the Trinity either. But we do know that in the early modern period, or maybe even later, that apparently on St. Patrick's Day, after people got totally drunk, they chewed shamrock to freshen their breath. That's another explanation I've heard of. But it doesn't leak back into, I mean, the early accounts have nothing to do with shamrocks or snakes, as we said. So those are both later accretions to the legend.

So when is the snakes legend created? many centuries later after patrick are we talking oh just just a few more centuries after the the early writers but you know the the explanation is that they were symbolic snakes you know that even if they didn't have snakes in ireland they knew from scriptures there were these worm snake things so dragons whatever they call them it's signified evil so with all that in in regards do you want actually another quick tangent for me because we've been talking about all these literary sources but it sounds like trying to trace as you've mentioned the like i guess the real saint patrick around ireland is is next to impossible is there any archaeological evidence at all that we can use to try and use alongside his own account,

let's say? We can use evidence for what was actually on the ground in the period. For example, there are a couple of references in Tirkan to square earthen churches. And through place names and stuff like that, we can sort of note where the oldest level of church settlements probably were, where those various places were. But there's nothing to link anything specifically to Patrick. Well, there are actually place names that link to possible other proselytizers in maybe the fourth century along the Wicklow Coast, Wexford-Wicklow Coast, but nothing with Patrick specifically. We know that there were certain kinds of burials in the fifth century, but there's nothing really to tag Christian burials as compared to others. I don't know if

your listeners will know, but, you know, one sign supposedly of a Christian burial in early Europe is that it's oriented east-west or that bodies are laid wrapped in some sort of shroud. But in Ireland around the late antique period, they started burying whole bodies instead of cremating them with or without shrouds. They laid them east to west. It was kind of a Roman thing to do, even though the Romans didn't get to Ireland in any big way. So it's impossible to tell from patrick's period no church foundations just place names no bodies really no markers of christian graves you know it's um yeah we can't keeping on the literary then what do the sources say ultimately happens to pat? Ah, good question. I mean,

Terekhan finishes before Patrick dies, really. I mean, he just sort of rushes the end. And Winterhut tells us that there was a fight over the body and that Patrick told his followers to bury him under at least a cubit of earth so nobody could dig him up and fight over his body. But they managed to fight over it anyway, so they think they fight over it. And somehow Patrick arranged for this posthumous miracle where the cart carrying his body would have a doppelganger cart carrying a doppelganger body, or it seemed to be carrying a body. And the two carts would go in different directions. And the two factions that wanted his body, they were fighting, they were coming to war over who would get it. And this prevented there being a bloodshed over who got Patrick's body. So is it at Down Patrick? You know, it's certainly not at Armand. And then later on, there was supposedly what you call a translation of his body. They dug it up and reburied it at Armand. Or did they? With Bridget

and Colm Keller, or did they? I mean, they were moving around bones all the time in the Middle Ages, so who knows? There's so much of it that, as you say, these later hagiographies have been filling in the gaps with their own stories. Do you think Patrick has come to maybe be a microcosm to symbolise a number of early missionaries, almost, who ventured to Ireland at that time to, I guess, spread the word of Christianity across Ireland? I don't think he's like a mélange. I think there is a strong tradition about him in particular because of Armand and because they became so politically powerful. It's like in France,

where Martin and Denis and Genevieve are top saints, you know. But he does take on a lot of the typical characteristics of sort of macho proselytizer saints. Whether he's the prototype or whether he's a form of that, you know, all saints are modeled on saints. So in writing about Patrick, you have to be sure that Terracan and Weirach knew about Saint Martin, for example, who was also sort of a macho converter of people. So, you know, he becomes the one and only in Irish hagiography, and other saints are modelled on him, male saints. But… I quickly forgive my Joe Bloggs ignorance here, but what's this strong connection with Armagh that you mentioned just there?

Oh, as I say, it became his chief church. It was supposedly, it was his cult centre. So the guys there got more endowments and more donations and more political patronage than other churches that were devoted or founded by Patrick, even though they didn't have his body, which was very strange. But their bishop was more powerful in terms of wealth and contacts than other bishops. And they just became very powerful and rich. And other churches devoted to Patrick would have been their client churches, just as Irish tribes were, their kings were clients to more powerful kings. And every tribe had its saint, you know, every region had its own patron saint. So just as Patrick was top saint, his church was top church. You know,

among patrician churches, Armagh was the top one. Just last thing from me there for Patrick, talk us through Patrick's sin that no one knows about, Lisa. Well, the reason he wrote his confession, supposedly, was to explain his mission to the British bishops. And it's unclear why the British bishops needed an explanation. Scholars have speculated that it's because Patrick essentially went rogue. He went back to Ireland on his own without permission. He wasn't maybe really a bishop yet. He'd never been made officially a bishop. We don't know. But there's something about his mission that they disapproved of. And he refers himself to something he did as a youth that his best friend, who was also by then a bishop in Britain, knew about.

And that bishop squealed to the council about whatever it was Patrick had done. And he was being summoned back to take account, you know, to explain all this. And that's what the confession was written for, to say, look, this is what I've been doing. Cut me a break here. But he never tells us what it was, that teenage sin that took place when he wasn't, you know, a full Christian or didn't regard himself as being a true Christian. You know, people speculated you know i mentioned

the thing about taking money maybe he did something pagan that came through later and everybody was like oh that's gross or maybe you know i've wondered was it something sexual but you know nobody knows interesting unfortunately but it's interesting thing though so it seems like this whole venture his mission to ireland could well have been based on penance you know and you know for this earlier crime might be too strong a word because you don't know what it is or i don't know fault yeah yeah yeah he certainly suggests that and it seems reluctantly that he talks about it in the confession but you gotta wonder despite its supposed rusticity it's a very complex text. So he's a good spin master. Absolutely. Well, so many people from the ancient world really were.

It's a prudent, aren't they? Lisa, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It's always fun to talk about Patrick. Well, there you go. There was Professor Lisa Bittell explaining all about St. Patrick. I don't know about you but I was really obsessed with the Druids and I just love this idea of Patrick duelling Druids this later addition to his story. If you would like more ancient content in the meantime well you can subscribe to our

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