The Rest Is History - 164. Saint Patrick

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  No, Tom isn't turning Brixton's River Effra green, nor is Dominic distributing shamrocks throughout the Oxfordshire countryside, but they're here anyway with a very special pod on the mysterious Apostle of Ireland.  When was St. Patrick alive? Where was he really born? Why was he kidnapped by pirates? And did he really banish the snakes from Ireland? All this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is History. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. Now today for me and I imagine for many of you it's a very, very special day. 17th of March every year I wake with a song in my heart, with the music of the harps resounding in my ears, with the laughter of children because it is of course Tom Holland our favorite day it's St Patrick's Day isn't it it is a day in which we celebrate a great

British saint very good so Tom St Patrick's Day um everybody all over the world sort of knows or thinks they know we all think we know what happened with St Patrick's so to sort of to to give you the kind of caricatured version, the Roman Empire falls, the Dark Ages, an age of obscurantism and violence and stuff. I know you don't agree with that, so don't interrupt. So that descends. And then St. Patrick, in my mind, probably wrongly,

I've always thought of him as a Welshman or maybe a Cumbrian, goes over to Ireland, he kicks out the snakes converts them all to christianity three leaf clover yeah the shamrocks involved yeah he comes to and fro there's pirates there's all kinds of shenanigans amusing shenanigans he dies tremendous figure for Ireland. Everyone loves him. Later on, they start having parades in America. Yeah, it's all people wearing their terrible comedy beards and green hats. And actually, a lot of Irish people find that immensely patronising and annoying.

But that, to me, and I think to most people listening to this, is the image of St. Patrick. Now, am I right in thinking, I believe I am, that this is largely balderdash? Well, there are certain trace elements of fact to that. But it's a complicated story, but it's fascinating for everything that makes it complex. Okay. So Patrick did exist?

Patrick definitely existed, but there may, for instance, have been two Patricks. Oh, that's exciting. So that's just one of the many ambiguities, the ambivalences, the uncertainties, the paradoxes that surround and constitute the historical Patrick. It's all about paradoxes with you, Tom,

as always on this podcast. But before we get into all that, there is something else that is absolutely sensational and spectacularly exciting about this episode, Tom. Because do you know what today also marks? Is it, by any chance, our very first specially sponsored episode? It is.

Now, listeners will know, we are absolutely no strangers to promotional activities. We make no apology for it. We love it. We can't get enough of it. And if people want to encourage more such activities they are very welcome to do so now our friends at beer 52 who regular listeners will remember they um are offering a case of a free case a free case tom of eight irish beers for st patrick's day and do you know what they have sent some for us to try

which is brilliant because we're recording this at 10 o'clock in the morning. So it's like being at the airport. Yes, but it's much better than going to a Wetherspoons. There's absolutely no doubt about that. It absolutely is. So, right. So I think we should celebrate this sponsorship with Dominic by toasting the morning. Yeah. Top of the morning. And trying one.

Yeah, very good. So we have one here uh it's from um sligo's white hag are you on that white hag brilliant name so i'm three deep already tom i'm on uh i've moved on the new england ipa i've moved in now i've moved on to the uh oh brother brewing milk stout very tasty you can go to beer52.com slash Ireland to claim your free case. You only have to pay for the postage, which is £5.95. So that's beer52.com forward slash Ireland. So Tom, while you're sipping your beer, we have to get into the topic, the thorny issue of St. Patrick. And we've had lots of questions from our listeners about this. And basically the question

they all want to know is who is St. Patrick And did he really exist? So off you go. He did exist. And this is precisely what makes the topic so interesting. So, Dominic, we did an episode on King Arthur. And we talked about how it is perhaps legitimate to talk about the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain and even more Ireland as being a dark age in the sense that we know nothing about it really we don't have very many sources for it however what we have with Patrick is someone who wrote not one but two pieces of writing yeah that shed a kind of glimmering faint light on the otherwise complete darkness of this period in terms of the written sources. And so he is a figure of

enormous significance, not just for the history of Britain and Ireland, but actually for the whole study of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the period that Peter Brown, the great historian, called late antiquity. So in a sense, we also did an episode on Muhammad. You could situate Patrick in the same kind of world that gives rise to Muhammad. He is a holy man in an age when people are very prone to showing respect for holy men. And what these holy men do is that they tend to go to regions, to areas that are kind of remote from where they've grown up. So if you think of Muhammad leaving Mecca, going to Medina,

you think of monks going from kind of settled regions out into the wilds, into the deserts. The story of Patrick is that he goes from Roman Britain, a Roman settlement, and he goes to the wild barbarism, as it seems to him, of Ireland. And this is part of a kind of a churn that will help to facilitate the transformation of the Roman world into the early medieval world. And I think it's a completely fascinating topic. I mean, having flagged that up, I then have to say that it's also a complex topic. You're going to qualify what you've said. Yeah, because again, as with Muhammad, we talked about this, that the stories that are told of

Muhammad several centuries later may not necessarily map onto the reality of the historical Muhammad the same is true with Patrick so we do have these very very kind of early texts written by him but then of course we have subsequent traditions subsequent accounts and the question of how reliable they are as evidence for the historical Patrick is an absolutely live issue it's very like the story of James Callaghan, Tom. Yes, mythic figure. Let's get to the nitty gritty. So when do we think St. Patrick is born? When and where? Am I right in thinking he is a late antique Melvin Bragg? Well, so does he come from Cumbria? So let's look at the two pieces of writing. The key one

really is his confessio, which isn't exactly confession. It's a kind of an account of his life. Infuriatingly, from the point of view of the historian, a substantial proportion of this is kind of it's a tapestry woven out of fragments of the Bible. So there are kind of like almost 400 biblical allusions in it. And that is the focus for Patrick. And the biographical details are relevant only insofar as they sustain his sense, you know, they help him to explain his sense of mission and his understanding of Christ. However, there are clues. So what he says is that his grandfather, Potitus, was a priest, a presbyter, and that his father,

Calpurnius, was a deacon. So again, a kind of a priest within the church, but also a decurion, which is a kind of, he sits on the curia, which is the local town or city council. So what he's describing there is the infrastructure of Roman Britain. And Tom, just to quickly jump in, this is at a point when Christianity is the state religion at this point? Yeah, so it's in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion. Christianity has definitely spread to Britain. How far is much debated and the evidence of Patrick's life sheds a shed, you know, sheds a light on that, perhaps. But what we see there certainly is that Patrick, so Patricia, his name, Patricius, you know, Patrician, it's a Roman word redolent of kind of nobility.

So he's upper class. Yeah. His father and his grandfather are figures of moment. They are part of the civic government of Roman Britain, but they are also figures within the church. And so that suggests the way in which church and the kind of the civic structure of cities is starting to meld and mesh. Sort of interwoven, yeah. Yeah. And civic government in cities is basically dependent on the existence of a broader provincial Roman provincial structure. So the implication is that he's born into a province that is still Roman. Okay, because I just wanted to pick up on that,

because when we did our When Did the Roman Empire Fall podcasts a few weeks ago, there was a sense that Britain was slightly semi-detached as you entered the 5th century. But you're sort of saying that the life of St Patrick implies that Roman structures are still actually very deeply embedded and if this is Cumbria you know it's a long way from Rome I mean it's a long way from the well maybe it's not Cumbria yeah so we're come to so yeah it does it implies that there are um offices that people take on local city councils or town councils. Patrick's father seems to have, he has land, he has slaves. So this is very much still a slave owning property society.

This does not seem to be a land that is collapsing into anarchy and barbarism. So there are implications that Roman civic life is continuing to function. So presumably this is either the late fourth century or the first decade of the fifth century. Now, the question of where it is, and there's been a number of questions on that, haven't there? So Father Darren J. Zanel, I've heard claims he's from several different places. Where is he really from? OK, so again, what Patrick tells us is that he's from a place called Bannovem Taberniae. Taberniae is kind of shops, taverns, it's places that sell things. Bannovem, we can't be certain where that is.

There have been various theories. One of them is that it's a fort that was known to the Romans as Banner, a horn in Celticic on hadrian's wall now known as bird oswald uh another theory is that it's carlisle which was a kind of a civic center um just south of hadrian well pretty much on hadrian's wall actually yeah however there's a problem there which you put your finger on which is that this is indeed a very very remote kind of frontier region and so far as we know, there are no villas. There's no evidence for any villas that far north. So that would imply that Patrick wasn't, in fact, I think, from Cumbria.

There's another theory, which is a much later one, which is that he came from Glastonbury. That seems a bit too good to be true, Tom. It does. Also that he's buried there. So that wouldn't go down well with Irish listeners. Exactly like King Arthur. And this is a tradition that's first mentioned by William of Malmesbury,

or at least by people who've rewritten William of Malmesbury in the 12th century, but it seems to date back to the 10th century at least. Again, unlikely. I would have thought that the likeliest place is is probably kellyan that would be the one that i would go for which is the fort of the legions in wales it's the great legionary center there would definitely have been taberniae kind of scattered around it uh even after the legions had gone um it's within striking distance of the coast and that's

important because as we'll go patrick goes on to say he gets captured by pirates and taken away to ireland so it's clearly that was the light the west the west coast is clearly the obvious place isn't it it must be on the west coast i mean there is also there is um an eighth century tradition that he was born in strathclyde so that that's beyond Hadrian's Wall. Again, like King Arthur. Yeah, again. So he's kind of shifting. But unlike King Arthur, we actually, you know, we don't have first-hand evidence from Arthur himself.

So we can't even say that Arthur existed. But Patrick, we can. Although, Tom, the St. Patrick of legend and the St. Patrick of history are two very different beasts. And some historians, and maybe I'm jumping ahead, think that there are multiple different people whose lives have found their way into this sort of, the canonical story of St. Patrick, don't they?

So, yeah, so we'll come to that. But if we stick for now to what Patrick himself tells us, and then we can ask, first of all, how credible Patrick's own account is, and then how it may have been distorted in subsequent decades. Ironically, I have to say the one place we know he didn't come from was Ireland. Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

So he's absolutely, he is British and he's Roman. Yeah. And he self-identifies as both. Okay. He's a Roman citizen. He confesses that as a young man he wasn't um a particularly good christian uh age 15 he seems to have done something very naughty for which he gets put on trial do we know um no suspicion taught on we he doesn't say what it was uh mine boggles yeah yeah behind the

bus shelter then shortly after this he gets taken by pirates as a slave, he says. And he gets taken, he gets sold. He becomes a herdsman. So looking after cattle, probably, in the forest of Focklet, he says, which I gather maybe is probably County Mayo. Learns Irish. christian faith deepens there um and then one day six years after his um abduction he hears a voice and this voice says to him you have fasted well soon you must return to your native land and then uh shortly afterwards again this voice says the ship is ready to take you.

However, there's a catch because the voice also says that it's not nearby, but 200 miles away. The voice gives and the voice takes away. Because to be a slave, you know, a runaway slave in Ireland is very dangerous. Because Ireland is a place where you essentially, you have to belong essentially to the equivalent of a kind of a gang. You know, there are all these little monarchies, which again are subordinate to larger monarchies and so on. But basically, if you don't belong,

if you don't have an overlord who can give you protection, you're in real danger. But especially if you're a runaway slave. So the idea that Patrick has made it 200 miles to where this ship is supposedly waiting for him, the implication is that there is the quality of the miraculous to this. So it's probably not to be taken as just a documentary fact. I was about to ask about all this though, Tom. I mean, the captured by the pirates could have happened.

The voice, I think as secular secular historians we would probably say he didn't get a voice telling him that the ship was 200 miles away also the capture by pirates is very biblical it's very julius caesar it's so entrenched in kind of fables and stuff it is it is so we'll come again we'll come to that when we okay we ask how accurate yeah the account is um so patrick he arrives he finds the ship um they refuse to take him on and he specifies something very interesting which has provoked a lot of um speculation but he says he refuses to suck the breasts of the the people on the ship okay that's a that's an unexpected development yes it is on the ship that's the question so so this so what does this mean so there are scholars who have argued that um if you're in

ireland and you don't have an overlord to look after you yeah you can become you can gain the protection of of a lord by sucking his nipple uh i don't know what to say about that so you know you're you're traveling through ireland uh you're on holiday but everywhere you go you have to suck the nipple of the local the local bigwig that's it that's the implication and the the um the archaeological evidence for this is that um in 2003 two men were found in in in different bogs in ireland uh they were clearly aristocratic they the hands were you know they they weren't rough they weren't peasants they were clearly aristocrats both men had had their nipples surgically removed why would you have it so because you were sick of people sucking it probably to stop them being kings is the implication so you can't offer people the

nipple that is so weird well it is weird and so the other theory yeah is that um it's an allusion to a biblical verse okay verse in isaiah you shall suck the milk of the other theory yeah is that um it's an allusion to a biblical verse okay verse in isaiah you shall suck the milk of the gentiles so perhaps that's what that's sort of more banal but probably but a bit more persuasive i would say than this business about doing a road trip and having to suck nipple yeah but i mean it's something for the irish tourist authorities perhaps to why don't they make more play of that? I mean, madness. I know. The whole advertising campaign.

Anyway, so basically the people on the ship decide that actually they are going to let him come with them. They sail for three days. They land. They then journey for 28 days through a wilderness. The food runs out. They turn around and say say i thought that you were meant to be a chosen one of god what's going on and miraculously a herd of pigs arrive so they kill the pigs and have a massive barbecue that almost so that's good yeah um they then journey

for another 10 days and presumably he then arrives at his parents house or whatever doesn't actually specify where he's turned up right but the best the best thing is that he says that this is 60 days but obviously three days on the ship yeah 28 days going through the wilderness further 10 days that doesn't count to 60 days and so do you know what um roy fletchner who's written uh the most recent study of Patrick's life. I'm not as familiar with Roy Fletchner's work as I should be. Well, he's got a brilliant theory as to why Patrick says 60 when it doesn't add up to 60. Right. Patrick was simply not very good at maths.

Oh, wow. So it's a brilliant passage. He goes through all the kind of biblical reasons perhaps you know is he you know 40 days but he says basically there aren't any you know this isn't something you can get from the bible and he says maybe he just wasn't very good at maths that's a very literal approach to patrick's story i would say not that i'm dissing roy fletchner no no he's he i mean he's very very alert to the kind of the biblical context for it but i think it's a it's an interesting and i thought engaging well because this is very much patrick's own right maybe he just wasn't very good at adding things up you know i think someone would have proofread

it though like a copy editor or something right anyway um so he's come back so he comes back yeah and then the next thing we know he's about 45 and he's become a bishop. That's a leap. And he's hanging out in Britain again. And while he's with his parents back in Britain, he sees a vision of a man called Victoricus. And this man, Victoricus, nobody has a faintest idea who he is. Seems to be coming from Ireland with lots of letters and all these letters when he reads them are written by people from Ireland saying please come over and we beg you come and walk among us again right but hold on how would people remember him I mean it's just a vision it's a vision it's

a vision okay fine fine it's a vision yep and when you read it you get this sense of incredible kind of intensity this is you know, he's seeing this. He's struggling to put it into words what exactly it is he saw. But it's this kind of incredible sense that God wants him to go and preach beyond the Irish Sea in this land that had never been a part of the Roman Empire. Yeah. Is, you know, the epitome of barbarism for for generations of roman geography britain is still roman britain is still going at this point he's 45 no britain by this point must must have must have as i was about to say we must be post kind of 410 or whatever by now yeah um

but enough of roman society survives that he hasn't been troubled by anarchy or something and he's happy to make this journey off to ireland to carry the that he hasn't been troubled by anarchy or something and he's happy to make this journey off to ireland to to carry the gospel he doesn't say he doesn't tell us anything about his life in britain okay uh presumably staying with his uh well okay so one thing we can know is that when he crosses to ireland he clearly takes quite a lot of movable goods with him right which enables him to kind of cut a dash you know so he's he's a figure of some moment yeah and he he tells us that um he gets thousands of converts that he gets the sons of of uh various irish kings converting their daughters uh becoming nuns

uh the irish kings don't seem to have liked the daughters becoming nuns they don't seem to particularly ejected to the the sons becoming christian and it may be that they're kind of you know hedging their their bets that they're staying pagan their sons are becoming christian their daughters are maybe more important tools for kind of marriage alliances or something they don't want to you know them becoming nuns is a bit of a pain in that or or nuns allowed to get married at this point it's probably no no they're not okay he is he's uh gives us his portrait of an island that has been won by his missionary efforts um for christ that it's a church full of missionary zeal now this dovetails with the other piece of writing that has survived which is um a letter that he's written to a man called Caroticus, who seems to be a Romano-British slave trader.

And he has crossed the Irish Sea from Britain and has abducted a load of Irish converts, probably on Easter Day, and taken them off as slaves. And Patrick is writing, basically excommunicating him, telling Caroticus that he's an absolute rotter and to hand over the slaves. It seems from the letter that this isn't very successful and that Caroticus and his followers just kind of laugh at the very idea that they should right but patrick is patrick in this letter you get a sense of this you know the power of the holy man yeah his power to curse those who oppose him can i ask you a question can i jump in now tom um you said the power of the holy man so peter brown or you

mentioned at the beginning of the podcast one of the great living history one of the greatest living historians one of his early works was about the holy man in late antiquity and he was talking particularly about holy men in the eastern roman empire and syria and so on does patrick do you think play the same part as being the holy man who comes in and is a kind of arbiter and is a he he stands apart from the traditional power structures and therefore is able to kind of exert a different kind of authority and so on do you think yeah i'm sure that's part of it and i'm sure that um for reasons that we can't be certain about he clearly has a kind of charisma that derives from his claims to a supernatural power yeah and it may be that he brings a kind of a sense of the

power of of rome but not in such a way as to seem kind of overtly threatening of the independence of the various irish kings but a sense that there is a kind of a greater dimension beyond ireland that perhaps that the irish can become a part of So I was going to ask about that, because in the previous podcast, we did a very timely podcast about the Vikings in the East and the origin stories of Russia and Ukraine. And one of those stories was about Vladimir the Great and his conversion to Byzantine orthodoxy. And obviously, one reason Vladimir does that is because it's political. He wants to ally himself with the great superpower of the Eastern Mediterranean. But the Irish conversion, I mean, if the Roman Empire is dwindling and if Roman power is breaking up in Britannia,

in a sense, what's in it for them in following Patrick? I mean, what does Patrick have to offer? And also, Tom, am I not right in thinking, I mean, I'm just basically easily swayed by the questions from our listeners. Tony Larkin has a question. He says, why doesn't Patrick get the credit for introducing Christianity to Ireland when it seems there were previous missions? So is Patrick the first? And why does he in particular have this?

Because what's the sort of political subtext to his kind of conversion story? Okay, it is true that this is to plunge into the kind of the heart of some of the puzzles that surround what Patrick tells us. So what is Patrick doing in his Confessio, in this account of his life? I mean, it is a biography. It is a kind of self-exculpation. He is clearly, he's being attacked by people. He's trying to defend himself against kind of various charges that are never quite stated. So that's absolutely part of it as well. But it is, as I said at the beginning, it is absolutely a statement of mission. It's a sense that he's been called by Christ to take the gospel to lands beyond the Roman world. Now, the questioner is absolutely right that he is not alone in going to Ireland, it seems, because there is another figure who has not at all kind of entered the mainstream of Irish folklore or Catholic piety, a guy called Palladius.

Whereas we have no contemporary references to Patrick outside his writings, with Palladius we don't have his writings, but we do have references to him in authenticated chronicles of the time. So he's mentioned by a guy called Prosper of Aquitaine, who's writing kind of annals of the years as they go by. And Prosper, he's in Aquitaine, so he's distant from Ireland. But he writes in 431 that in that year, Palladius, who had been consecrated by Pope Celestine, is sent as the first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ. So what's the relationship of Palladius and Patrick? Are they the same person? Well, so this was the argument that a scholar called Thomas Francis O'Rahilly in 1942 put forward. And his theory was that there was the Patrick that we know, the guy who's written the Confessio,

but that Palladius was also he was a patrician so he was palladius patricius and that he was the first guy to go there yeah so that's the thesis and it's it's a thesis that remains kind of very very current but i think there is a telling difference between um palladius and patrick which is that prosper says of palladius that he's sent to the Irish believers in Christ who are already in Ireland. So presumably those are slaves, British slaves, perhaps, or Gaelic slaves who've been taken to Ireland. And Celestine himself, the Pope who's sending Palladius, had specified that bishops should only go to places where they wanted.

And so what you have there is an echo of the assumption that was absolutely hardwired into the Romans and preceded the conversion of the empire to Christianity, that the fruits of Roman civilization should not wantonly be bestowed on barbarians. And the kind of the Christian manifestation of that is the assumption that christianity is for people within the limits of the empire right so this is something that is being so augustine the saint who we talked about in the the episode on the fall of the empire that the great bishop of um hippo in north africa who is um essentially arguing why it doesn't really matter that rome, because ultimately what matters is that the church survives. He is kind of groping his way towards an idea that the Christian mission

is for everybody. It's for people beyond the limits of the empire, as well as for those within. But even he doesn't kind of quite arrive at the conclusion that you get with Patrick, because the key thing about Patrick is, and this is the Patrick of the Confessio, the guy who we've been talking about, his assumption is that the gospel should be taken beyond the seas to people who know nothing about it at all. And that's what makes him such a revolutionary figure, right? I mean, that's what makes him an extraordinary, groundbreaking figure in the late roman world is that right it does and i will quote again from from um peter brown the great historian of the holy man in late antiquity and he says of patrick's originality was that no one within

western christendom had thought such thoughts as these before had ever previously been possessed by such convictions um he's the first person basically to get the sense that barbarians living beyond the frontiers of the empire, that they should be brought to Christ. And this is, I think, a kind of momentous development because it means that the Irish church, as it comes to flourish and grow, is committed to the idea that um missions should be sent yeah and this is you know how the irish saved civilization that's the you know how thomas carhill in his book frames it yes the impulse for irish saints to go to go into exile you know whether that is to uh skelling michael this kind of remote island off-island,

which you'll know is in Star Wars. Yeah. Or it's like St. Brendan to take ship and go out into the Atlantic and discover perhaps new worlds there. I was about to say, didn't Irish missionaries go to Iceland? To go to Iceland, perhaps. Yeah. And of course, famously, St. Columbanus goes to Gaul and establishes a kind of great missionary tradition there.

And St. Columba, he goes to Iona and establishes, he starts the kind of the process of bringing Christ to the Picts an important part of the Anglo-Saxon church and then in turn inspires Anglo-Saxon missionaries to go to Saxony and to Germany and to Scandinavia. So it is, I think, a kind of, Patrick is for that reason, a really significant figure. Okay, Tom, I think we should take a break because while you've been talking, listeners may be wondering why i've been quite quiet that's because you've been talking about st patrick and i've been basically devoting my attention to my free beers from beer 52 uh so i've just finished my um oh brother brewing company milk stout which i have to say tom was delicious very rich velvety a lovely drink and uh have you been getting on while you've been chatting well i haven't i haven't had a chance because i've just been jabbering away oh that is but if you've really missed out what folly but if we're if we're going to um for a break now i can um have a quick

sip well listen in the commercial break and then uh and then before you do that tom i think it would be remiss of me not to say to people that if you want to taste them for yourself you should go to beer52.com slash ireland to claim your free case and we will be back after the break with more on St Patrick and some more on the beer goodbye I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History, and as if you didn't know uh sponsored this week by beer 52 now beer 52 i know you all want to hear a lot more about beer 52 and probably less from tom about st patrick uh beer 52 is actually the biggest beer club in the world and every month they send their members a case of beer from a different part of the world and wouldn't you know it for this month being st patrick's day it Day it is Ireland Tom have you chosen your beer

for part two of the podcast I have I have I have Dominic what is it it's um it's an Irish lager from O'Hara's Brewing Company a fine drink Tom I heartily heartily recommend I had that while you were talking about pirates and Christianity and stuff. It has watered my tonsils. Splendid. Splendid. So that I'm now able to continue with St. Patrick. So that's beer52.com forward slash Ireland. And that's the word beer, the numbers 52.com forward slash Ireland.

So now on to the other business of the podcast, which is St. Patrick. So let's talk about the kidnap, because you hinted in the first half that the kidnap by the pirates, that there may be more to that than meets the eye. And indeed, Tom, shockingly, it may not have happened. So what's going on? This is the thesis of Roy Fletchner, whose book St. Patrick Retold is really fantastic and fizzing with all kinds of brilliant insights and theses.

Fizzing like a New England IPA or an Irish lager from O'Hara's brewing company. Exactly so, Dominic. Brilliantly done. Exactly so, yes. Please keep these promotional inquiries coming to other companies. And he asks, wasrick really kidnapped right so the context for this is that there is a lot of kidnapping and slaving going on yeah i mean no one questions that yeah uh we we have in roman historians uh you know there are

accounts of kind of meltdown in roman britain Britain and Irish raiders are part of the kind of consortium of Picts and Saxons and all these other guys who are kind of breaking into Roman Britain. So we absolutely know that that is going on. We also know that there are so many slaves in Ireland that the word for a slave girl becomes a kind of, you know, it comes to denote a unit of value in exchange. So what is it? But Komal. Okay. I hope that it's probably pronounced completely different. Because we'll, yes.

To be fair, you're on your sixth beer of the podcast. I mean, you can be excused. I'll be absolutely fluent in it by the end. To that extent, it's, you know, it's entirely plausible that Patrick might have been taken. However, you know, we looked at the implausibility of the fact that he might, you know, did he really manage to walk 200 miles to a ship? But again, you could say maybe, or maybe, as you said, it's a kind of, you know, it's a biblical illusion or whatever.

The theory that Fletchner puts forward in his book, he goes back to look at the role that Patrick's father is playing in the Curia, in the kind of the town council of lot of weight put on the shoulder of those with land and property and slaves and possessions that kind of obliged you essentially to contribute your time and your money to caring for the city. And that in the kind of the dying days of the Roman Empire in the West, quite a lot of the elites got fed up with this and tried to kind of wriggle out of their responsibilities. And his thesis is that actually, what Patrick perhaps has done, and perhaps what he's justifying in the Confessio. So he keeps kind of emphasising again and again, I was kidnapped, kind of implying that people have been saying, well, maybe you weren't. Fletcher's argument is that perhaps he was a tax exile. So just before he becomes 16, when he comes of age,

perhaps he took his inheritance and went to Ireland and hung out there for six years. And then the Roman Empire collapsed and then came back. I thought I was being cynical in this podcast, but I mean, that's a very, very cynical view of St. Patrick's behaviour, isn't it? Yeah, it is quite. Do you, I mean, what do you think?

Do you think, do you buy the argument? I think the problem with that is that it absolutely requires Patrick to have been born at a time when the frameworks of Roman rule are secure enough that you get in trouble. Yeah. You know, the whip hand of central Roman government is pretty strong. Yes. Which then requires you to push Patrick's birth,

perhaps to, you know, I don't know, 380 or something like that. Further back into the fourth century. Yeah. And there's, and there's kind of further,

you know, there are kind of other pieces of evidence within the Confessio that suggests that actually Patrick died kind of certainly second half of the fifth century. So it's tricky. It requires Patrick to have been very cynical and self-interested early in his life and then to have this miraculous transformation into a much more altruistic figure later on, doesn't it? I mean, that's not impossible,

I suppose. That's not impossible. And that, of course, is the archetype of that is Saul, who persecutes the church and then becomes, you know, as St. Paul becomes the kind of the great missionary. Or Augustine, I suppose. Yeah, or Augustine. But Paul, perhaps, is the obvious example because he's the great missionary. So he's going out in converting those who know nothing about christ yeah so i don't know i mean we the truth is we will never know okay well that's a very never say in a history podcast but i don't think it is i don't think it is because i think the fact that it's the fact of what we do know that's exciting you know as i said at the beginning because otherwise we know nothing about this period we have no written sources written by someone from britain at all okay this period so that's what makes it so exciting let's

push on a bit tom because uh i'm keen to get back eventually to the beers um patrick dies when do we reckon you say that basically the second half of the fifth century or is that too late well we're given two dates in subsequent chronicles uh one is 457 one is 493 okay i mean so that's quite a big you know you pay your money it takes your choice okay and of course it's perfectly possible that neither of them are correct but what that does suggest is that the tradition is that he died in the second half of the fifth century does that imply there could be two different people though again that died in those two years or do you possibly so that's so that that is that is the thesis that maybe the first Patrick died in uh in 457 and the second one in 493 yeah so that has been argued and then obviously

after that point he he has this tremendous afterlife so he does to go back to Tony Larkin's question he does get the credit for introducing Christianity he is seen as the kind of father of Irish Christian identity. Well, how does that? Yeah. Come on then. How does that happen?

Okay. He's one of two people who can test for that. Actually, the person who really gets in the middle ages is Bridget, who your fans of the World Cup of Gods will remember. Well, they won't because she did. She crashed out so early,

Tom. Yeah, she did. So St. Bridget of Kildare is, is Patrick's great rival as the kind of the alpha saint, the uber saint for Ireland. So Kildare is in South Ireland. Patrick is associated with Armagh in the north of Ireland, in Ulster. Again and again, when you look at the posthumous reputations of saints and indeed of holy men, so you could say the same about Muhammad.

It really matters the places that they're associated with because the posthumous holiness that they shed gives power and authority and prestige to these places. And they become centers of pilgrimage. The authority of the person who may have founded the church or you know the mosque or whatever becomes incredibly important yeah um and essentially what the what the um what the monks of armagh are doing is bigging up patrick in almost every way they can so there is a slight problem that he's not buried there um he's he's buried it down patrick yeah um county down and so they have to come up with a reason for why he's there and so they say that he was in armagh um he died there but then angels took his body to uh to down patrick and of course the people in glastonbury would say that he's he died in glastonbury so

you know there is this kind of you know it's like greeks fighting over the bodies at of the dead at before troy people it really matters where these saints end up anyway so it's a problem that he's not buried armagh but not an insuperable one um the monks of armagh produce uh certainly two biographies of him um from the late uh the late seventh century so kind of 690s that have survived now the question is of course how reliable are these and it's in these biographies that you get the accounts that most people will have heard of patrick confronting druids right yeah someone's talking about this yeah so he uh the high king of the irish at tara has a whole load of druids around him

no one is allowed to uh to light a fire easter patrick lights a fire and the druids look out and they say unless this fire is extinguished then verily i say unto the fire shall be lit that will never be extinguished at all kind of words to that effect wow that's very uh cranmer archbishop cranmer isn't it um well the Martyrs Memorial. Well, yeah, I suppose. But actually, of course, what it is, it's Patrick confronting a posse of pagan sorcerers. It's Moses confronting the priests of Egypt in front of Pharaoh. It's Elijah confronting the priests of Baal.

These are kind of archetypal stories with very, very obvious biblical precursors. I mean, that's the problem, Tom, with all these sources, though, isn't it? I mean, this is the problem with all sources written in this period, or indeed earlier, that they all have ultimately kind of devolved into archetypes. And when you dig into the stories, it's very hard to tell what's specific truth and what is purely a kind of a formula. It absolutely is and so um caroticus for instance the the romano british slave trader um one of these saints lives written

in the in the 690s says that um he was a british king that he uh ruled uh in strathclyde so presumably on the great rock of dumbarton the kingdom of Alclut um but if you're tempted to believe that as a as an authentic uh you know an authentic report you then face the problem that this life also says that when Caroticus died he turned into a fox so how you kind of integrate that into yeah yes so so it's a it's a it's a problem um there is one perhaps one intriguing fragment of evidence that does preserve an authentic detail um and this was uh it appeared i read it on a a blog post that's devoted to um to rude words golly you're really, you're doing the absolute forensic research here, Tom. And it's written by Vox

Hiberionicum, who has an excellent Twitter account, which I commend. And he gives this account of Patrick is sleeping on the Sunday, on the Sabbath, day of rest, and the pagans are busy working. I think they're digging a moat or

something. Patrick tells them to stop. The pagans are busy working. I think they're digging a moat or something. Patrick tells them to stop. The pagans tell him to piss off. And then, and I quote, Holy Patrick said, Mudabroth, in spite of all your labor, you shall achieve nothing. And so it happened. The following night, there came a heavy storm and stirred up the sea, and the storm destroyed all that the pagans had done,

as the man of God had said. Now, what I read there in english is written in the original in latin yeah but mudabroth yeah that's not a latin word that i gather from is a britonic word so that's a the language that patrick would have spoken as a britain yeah apparently mudabroth is a kind of jumble of various you know three britonic words and i you know I speak with no expertise whatsoever. I'm merely reporting what is written in this fascinating article that it means, may God's judgment be on you, or may God's doom be on you.

So perhaps that is an authentic patrician swear word, or exposition. Well, Tom, we're whizzing through. I mean, time is kind of catching up up with this so i would like to get on to to two more aspects in particular before we turn to the question of purgatory one of those is snakes now it's well known that saint patrick cast the snakes out of ireland but i think i'm right in saying there never were any snakes in ireland is that

correct yeah well there's an excellent question from Huel George. Should Patrick be considered an ecological villain for reducing the serpentine biodiversity of Ireland? But he didn't. He shouldn't. There never were any snakes. There never were any snakes. I'm not a natural historian,

so I don't know why there were never any snakes, but there just weren't, were there? Well, they never crossed the Irish Sea. No. So who knows why not? They couldn't swim. They couldn't swim. Right. Okay. So that's the end of the snakes what about the shamrocks well no oh you want to say something about snakes well

no it's just that um the way that this legend grows up is interesting because it was noted by you know roman geographers noted that there was no snakes in in ireland i mean they understood that um and the legend that um a christian holy man had banished them, it's not original to Patrick. So it gets associated with St. Columba, I think, first of all. Bede reports that reptiles, you know, full sweep can't survive in Ireland, that it just kills them the moment they land there. And then the story seems to have originated around 12 13 centuries so much i mean but basically almost a thousand years later well even then you get skepticism so gerald of wales who is very skeptical about almost everything that the rsa um he's very very contemptuous of the

whole idea it is more probable that from the earliest times and long before the foundation of the faith this island was naturally without them. OK, so now let's take the other great thing that people know about St. Patrick, which is that he waved shamrocks around to demonstrate the truth of the Trinity. Is this also untrue, Tom? The earliest attestation is 1680s. Yes, I saw that. So very late. So more than a thousand years after the event. So almost certainly not true. So how did the shamrock come to be associated with St. Patrick? Or is it purely just a sort of creation of early modern stroke modern nationalism, would you say? the backdrop is heightened Catholic Protestant tension, particularly in Ireland. So presumably that is the context for it. It's Protestants and Catholics competing over Patrick.

And then this question about purgatory. I mean, I'm actually just reading that off your notes, so I don't know what it refers to at all. I'm not going to pretend any knowledge. Well, so in the Middle Ages, the story arises um this island in county donagall is an entranceway to purgatory and the story goes that patrick was shown it by christ himself and this is well i mean relative to the shamrock this is quite early so this is um 12th century late 12th century yeah and pilgrims would go there and they're kind of very, very detailed accounts

of what people saw in it. And there's a brilliant account of this. This is how I came across the story. In Stephen Greenblatt, the great Shakespeare scholar, he wrote a book called Hamlet in Purgatory. Yeah. And he writes wonderfully about this. And inevitably, I'm afraid it got shut down by Protestants in 1632.

Thomas Cromwell would not be pleased with this story. No, nor Oliver. So I think the Franciscans run it today, but I think you can't go into the cave and look for purgatory. But that's another way in which the legends of Patrick has kind of woven itself into the flora and the fauna and the natural environment in Ireland. And then if we sort of fast forward

now, because we are quite close to the end, if we fast forward to the present day, St. Patrick and St. Patrick's Day has obviously become, as is so often the way, one of the great drivers for it is kind of Irish-Americans. And so you have

St. Patrick's Day parades among kind of Irish communities. And so you have St. Patrick's Day parades among kind of Irish communities in American cities from especially governing strength in the sort of late 19th century and then throughout the 20th century and obviously now completely institutionalized. And there is this sort of thing now that the Taoiseach will go to the White House

and present the president with a bowl of shamrocks and all this kind of stuff. But also that a member of the British royal family will present the Irish guards with a bowl of shamrocks and all this kind of stuff, but also that a member of the British royal family will present the Irish guards with a bowl of shamrocks and all this kind of thing. But do you think, Tom, that this still has a kind of religious dimension? And in particular, do you think it also has a dimension of, I mean, it's odd, isn't it, that St. Patrick has become this symbol of Ireland, and to some extent, I guess, of Irish Catholicism, of Catholic Ireland, when he wasn't Irish. I mean, that's a kind of strange thing, isn't it? Well, I think that that's what makes his story so... I mean, it's one that people can absolutely

adapt. So obviously, one of the reasons why Patrick's Day becomes so important in America is that Irish people who have traveled across the Atlantic to the New World are, you know, they're immigrants. Yeah. Just as Patrick was. They've kind of reenacted his voyage. Exactly. And actually, in 2017, when Enda Kenny went to Patrick's Day to the White House and Trump was in the White House and Kenny very pointedly said that St. Patrick is the patron saint of immigrants. Yeah. Nudge, nudge, nudging Trump in the rib.

So I think that that's kind of very helpful. I think, yes. So Patrick is claimed by both catholics and protestants so amar you know the great cult center of patrick is it got taken over by the church of ireland yeah i think that in uh you know in the late 90th early 20th century he obviously became associated with irish nationalism and therefore with the kind of the catholic strain of that so that's also um very much a kind of part of it so it becomes a um a national holiday in ireland in 1903 yeah you know the prompting of an irish nationalist mp yes i remember westminster and uh but also they they specify that the pubs should be shut on that day well there's always

been a slight tension but it might encourage that there's always been a slight tension there. But it might encourage that. I think it's only kind of early 1960s that they're finally legally allowed to open. That's right. There's always been that tension between the purely Christian kind of Catholic observance of St. Patrick's Day, but also what is obviously worn out in the long run, which is the sort of hedonistic sort of what you might, I suppose, call the Irish-American kind of St very what you might, I suppose, call the Irish American kind of St.

Patrick's Day, which is all about kind of drinking and partying in the streets and wearing green hats and sort of Irish beer, orange beer, orange beers. So a lot of Irish people actually find quite offensive. It's a weird thing, isn't it? That's sort of the chasm between Ireland and Irish America. I remember once when I lived in Minnesota going to they had an Irish shop in um St Paul Minnesota and it was all orange beards and pictures of leprechauns and stuff but also the kind of the kind of you know the kind of very catholic kind of the crosses and that kind of imagery and the sort of combination of the two things but I sort of wondered even at the time what would a visitor from you know know, 1990s Dublin make of this?

This sort of kitsch side of their own national identity. Well, I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the kind of the transformation of St. Patrick's Day into a kind of bacchanal has coincided with the collapse of the Catholic Church as the, you know, the source of kind of prestige and morality within ireland um and i think that also quite a lot of the um the stuff about the druids the stuff about the snakes if you're kind of new agey if you're into you know leprechauns let's use leprechauns as kind of shorthand for the the idea of ire of Ireland as a mystical land haunted by spirits,

then actually Patrick is a faintly sinister figure because he banishes them. Okay. I think there's a kind of interesting tension there. Well, Tom, I think we should just end with the bacchanal for obvious reasons. Let's go to the bacchanal. Because I'm curious to know how you've got on

with your free beers from Beer 52. Well, it is now kind of 11 o'clock. Yeah. I mean, that's normally the time where I start drinking anyway, to be honest with you. I've done the case now. I was polishing it off. How many have you had?

Eight, all eight. But you can, looking on the thing, you can actually order 10 if you want. I'm going to order another case, actually. I enjoyed it so much. Which you can do with the special offer, right? Yeah, you can. But you can claim your free case. I mean, this is an extraordinary thing. I've had my free case, so, I enjoyed it so much. Which you can do with the special offer, right? Yeah, you can. Well, you can claim your free case. I mean, this is an extraordinary thing.

I've had my free case, so I'll probably buy another one. But listeners will be able to claim a free one at beer52.com slash Ireland. That is beer in the numbers 52.com slash Ireland. And Tom, the amazing thing is they'll only need to pay for the postage, which is £5.95. Beer 52 are the world's biggest beer club. They'll send you a case every month and it's much, much, and I can absolutely vouch for this,

much more enjoyable than the bland, masculine sluggish you might find in the supermarket. There's no comparison. Isn't that right, Dominic? There's no comparison at all. And if dark beer is not your thing, you can choose the light only case. And also included is an Ireland themed

ferment magazine and a couple of snacks. And the snacks are excellent too. I might have them for lunch. And if you're not enjoying it, which you absolutely will enjoy it, you can simply pause or cancel anytime. So that is beer52.com slash Ireland. And people who listen to our Dickensian

and Christmas Carol-themed podcast will know that I shall be saving a glass for tiny Tom. And on that note, we wish you a very happy St. Patrick's Day and goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History.

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