Patrick of Ireland

Patrick wrote two short documents, and they are the only reliable sources for his life. Everything else, the snakes, the shamrock, the bonfire on the hill of Slane, comes from lives written three or four centuries later.

He was born in Roman Britain, at a place he calls Bannavem Taburniae, which nobody has located. His father Calpornius was a deacon and a town councillor; his grandfather Potitus was a priest. Patrick says frankly that his own family's religion meant little to him as a boy and that he did not know the true God.

At sixteen he was taken by Irish raiders, along with thousands of others, and sold into slavery in Ireland. He spent six years there herding animals in the open. It was in that hunger and cold, he says, that he began to pray, a hundred prayers in the day and nearly as many at night, in the woods and on the mountain, before dawn, in snow and frost and rain. Then a voice in a dream told him his ship was ready. He walked about two hundred miles to a coast he did not know, talked his way onto a boat, and got out.

He reached his family in Britain, and they begged him never to leave again. Then he dreamed of a man carrying letters from Ireland, and heard in the dream the voice of the Irish calling: 'We ask you, holy boy, come and walk among us again.'

He went back, trained as a cleric, ordained, and eventually consecrated bishop, and spent the rest of his life in the north of Ireland, baptising, ordaining clergy, and planting churches among a people with no Roman administration, no towns, and no Christian past. He paid protection money to local kings to travel, gave gifts to their sons, and says he was robbed, seized, and put in irons more than once, and once held fourteen days expecting death.

His Confession was written as a defence. Church authorities in Britain had accused him of something, he never says exactly what, though he mentions a sin confessed to a friend before he was ordained, which the friend later used against him, and questioned his fitness and his learning. The Confession is his answer: an unpolished, urgent, deeply Scriptural account of a man who knows his Latin is rough and does not care.

The other document, the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, is a public excommunication. A British warlord's men had raided newly baptised Irish Christians, killed some and sold others to the Picts. Patrick, writing while the chrism was still on their foreheads, calls Coroticus's soldiers no longer his fellow citizens but citizens of demons, and orders that the letter be read aloud in their presence. It is one of the earliest Christian protests against the slave trade, written by a former slave.

He died in the fifth century; tradition places it on 17 March, and the annals give 461 or 493.

Sources: Patrick, Confessio and Epistola ad milites Corotici (English translation in The Works of St Patrick, Ancient Christian Writers 17); Muirchú, Life of Patrick (seventh century, for the later tradition); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.