Adamnán of Iona

Adamnán was born in Donegal about 624, a kinsman of Columba's own family, and in 679 he became the ninth abbot of Iona, the island monastery off the west coast of Scotland from which Irish Christianity had gone out to the Picts and the Northumbrians. He held it until he died in 704.

He was a working churchman with an unusual reach. When Northumbrian raiders carried off Irish captives, Adamnán sailed to King Aldfrith's court, Aldfrith had been educated in Ireland and knew him, and brought sixty prisoners home. He visited Northumbria again and was persuaded there to accept the Roman dating of Easter, which put him at odds with his own monks on Iona for the rest of his life. He could not convince them. Bede, who admired him, says so plainly.

He wrote De locis sanctis, a description of the holy places of Palestine, taken down from a Gaulish bishop named Arculf who had been shipwrecked on his way home from the East and washed up at Iona. Adamnán questioned him closely, drew plans of the churches, and produced a guidebook to a country he had never seen. Bede thought it good enough to abridge and circulate.

His masterpiece is the Vita Columbae, the Life of Columba, written about a hundred years after Columba's death. It is one of the finest pieces of writing to survive from early medieval Europe: three books of prophecies, miracles, and visions, but grounded in real place-names, real weather, real people who could still be checked, and quiet domestic detail, the old white horse that came and put its head on Columba's shoulder before he died. Almost everything known about Iona's founder comes through this book.

And then there is the Law. In 697, at a great assembly at Birr in Ireland, Adamnán secured the promulgation of the Cáin Adomnáin, the Law of the Innocents. It bound the kings and clergy of Ireland, Dál Riata, and Pictland to exempt women, children, and clerics from warfare: they were not to be killed, not to be taken as captives, not to be made to fight. Penalties were laid down and guarantors named. Ninety-one signatures are attached to the surviving text, kings and bishops together.

It is one of the earliest attempts anywhere in Europe to put non-combatants outside the reach of war by law. He died on 23 September 704.

Sources: Adamnán, Vita Columbae and De locis sanctis; Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People; Cáin Adomnáin: The Law of Adomnán, ed. Kuno Meyer; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).