Open [38.2 MB]

Ireland and the Making
of Britain
tive monarchy, and one dynasty, the Milesian, ruled over
Ireland, through a many-branched patriarchal system,
bound together by one language, one national literature,
and one code of laws.
The century that saw the final disruption of imperial
Rome saw Ireland growing greater and more splendid.
At that period the martial might of the Irish was at its
height; their fleets held the northern seas and their forces
triumphed in the lands which are now called Scotland,
England, Wales and France. Their foreign trade
brought them captives from the Roman provinces, representative
of a different culture, just as in former times
the Greeks had been drawn to Rome.
Greek and Roman learning was freely imported from
Marseilles, Narbonne and Bordeaux, where Ausonius
and his uncle and their circle kept alive the ancient tra-
ditions, as well as from northern Gaul and Roman Britain.
There were Christians in Ireland before the advent of
St. Patrick, and the ease with which the country turned
from paganism to Christianity is reasonably explained by
its long previous preparation in cosmopolitan culture. A
certain Ethicus in the third or fourth century tells us
how he visited Ireland and what he thought of its books.
Ussher says that in 360 A. D. a Christian priest was sent
from Rome to teach the Christian faith in Ireland. The
Glossary of Cormac, prince and bishop of Cashel, fur-
nishes strong testimony to the cultivation of letters and
learning before the arrival of St. Patrick. Cormac, who
was a younger contemporary of Johannes Scotus Eriugena
and wrote in the ninth century, quotes not only Christian
writers but also many pagan Irish authors poets, his-
torians, grammarians and others who must all have lived
previous to or contemporaneously with St. Patrick.
30