Patrick of Ireland

Patrick wrote two short documents, and they are the only reliable sources for his life. The fire on the hill of Slane comes from Muirchu's Life, written late in the seventh century, and the snakes from Jocelin in the twelfth.

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. He prayed 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 him to come and walk among them once more.

He went back, trained as a cleric, ordained, and eventually consecrated bishop. He spent the rest of his life in the north of Ireland, baptising, ordaining clergy, and planting churches among a people with no Roman administration and no towns. 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, and he never says exactly what. He mentions a sin confessed to a friend before he was ordained, which the friend later used against him. They also 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 says so.

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, recalling that the chrism was still on their foreheads when they were killed, calls Coroticus's soldiers fellow citizens of demons, and orders that the letter be read aloud in their presence. It is a protest 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.

The Confession closes with its own title line, "And this is my confession before I die". White notes that Patrick himself describes the other writing as sent to the soldiers of Coroticus, and he calls it a manifesto and a protest.

Muirchu lived and wrote in the latter part of the seventh century, as Bury shows from the death of his friend Bishop Aed in 700. Jocelin's Life, of the twelfth century, tells how Patrick gathered the poisonous creatures of the island together and drove them out. Those are the later Lives' claims, and the two writings say nothing of Slane or of snakes.

Bede's History does not name him. A. M. Sellar's note says, "Bede only mentions him once, viz., in the 'Martyrology,'" and that the Martyrology is "perhaps, not his genuine work". Bede tells of Columba at Iona in 3.4 and of Aidan in 3.3, and he draws no line from Patrick to either.