Following
the last Ice Age the earliest confirmed inhabitants of Ireland were
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, who arrived some time around 7900 BCE. In
the Neolithic period a complex society emerged, as evidenced by the Brú na Bóinne,
Palace of the Boyne, Mansion of the Boyne or Boyne valley tombs,
located in a bend of the River Boyne. It contains one of the world's
most important prehistoric landscapes dating from the Neolithic period,
including the large Megalithic passage graves of Knowth, Newgrange and
Dowth as well as some 90 additional monuments. The archaeological
culture associated with these sites is called the "Boyne culture".
Since
1993 the site has been a World Heritage Site designated by UNESCO.
Newgrange is an exceptionally grand passage tomb built during the
Neolithic period, around 3200 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and
the Egyptian pyramids.
The arrival of Celtic-speaking peoples
The Iron Age in Ireland began about 600 BCE.
The
period between the start of the Iron Age and the historic period (431
CE) saw the gradual infiltration of small groups of Celtic-speaking
people into Ireland, with items of the continental Celtic La Tene style
being found in at least the northern part of the island by about 300
BCE. The result of a gradual blending of Celtic and indigenous cultures
would result in the emergence of Gaelic culture by the fifth century.
It is also during the fifth century that the main over-kingdoms of In Tuisceart, Airgialla, Ulaid, Mide, Laigin, Mumhain, Cóiced Ol nEchmacht
began to emerge. Within these kingdoms a rich culture flourished. The
society of these kingdoms was dominated by an upper class consisting of
aristocratic warriors and learned people, which possibly included
Druids.
Linguists realised from the 17th century onwards that the language spoken by these people, the Goidelic languages,
was a branch of the Celtic languages. This is usually explained as a
result of invasions by Celts from the continent. However, other research
has postulated that the culture developed gradually and continuously,
and that the introduction of Celtic language and elements of Celtic
culture may have been a result of cultural exchange with Celtic groups
in southwest continental Europe from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
The
hypothesis that the native Late Bronze Age inhabitants gradually
absorbed Celtic influences has since been supported by some recent
genetic research.
Arrivals of slaves and followed by Christians
Gaelic
raiders kidnapped and enslaved people from across the Irish Sea for two
centuries after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire destabilised Roman
Britain; their most famous victim was Saint Patrick.
Early Irish
law makes numerous reference to slaves and semi-free sencléithe. A
female slave (cumal) was often used as a unit of value in financial
transactions, e.g. in expressing the honour price of people of certain
classes. It was worth a good deal less than a horse.
In the early fifth-century the 16 year-old future Saint Patrick
was captured by Irish pirates from his home in Britain and taken as a
slave to Ireland, and put to work looking after animals. He lived in
Ireland for six years before escaping and returning to his family. After
becoming a cleric, he returned to northern and western Ireland. In
later life, he served as a bishop, Bishop Patricius, but little is known
about the places where he worked. By the seventh century, he had
already come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.
Brown Bag FilmsGive Up Yer Aul Sins
is based on the Academy Award nominated short film by Brown Bag Films.
The episodes humorously reenact original recordings of Dublin
schoolrooms in the 1960s made by Peig Cunningham and subsequently
rediscovered and released by EMI. In each episode, a documentary crew
arrives to film the activities of the classroom. The teacher chooses
children to retell, in their own imaginative way, the bible stories they
have learnt.
The Irish annals
for the fifth century date Patrick's arrival in Ireland at 432, but
they were compiled in the mid 6th century at the earliest. The date 432
was probably chosen to minimise the contribution of Palladius, who was known to have been sent to Ireland in 431.
Palladius
was the first bishop of the Christians of Ireland, preceding Saint
Patrick; the accounts of these two Christian missionaries were perhaps
conflated in many later Irish traditions. Palladius was a deacon and
member of one of the prominent families in Armorica, Gaul. Pope Celestine I consecrated him a bishop and sent him to Ireland "to the Scotti believing in Christ".
Palladius seems to have worked purely as Bishop to Irish Christians in
the Leinster and Meath kingdoms, while Patrick – who may have arrived as
late as 461 – worked first and foremost as a missionary to the pagan
Irish, in the more remote kingdoms in Ulster and Connacht.
When the Abbey on Iona, founded by the Irish missionary Saint Columba
in 563, was attacked yet again by Viking raiders in 806, the massacre
of 68 monks led to many of the Columban monks migrating to the Columban Abbey of Kells in Ireland.
The arrival of The Book of Kells
This iconic Irish manuscript, the Book of Kells, may well have been created in the scriptorium
of the Abbey of Kells, but may also have been, in itself, an arrival.
The manuscript has many features that correspond to manuscripts created
in a group of monasteries associated with what is known as the Insular style. Insular art, also known as Hiberno-Saxon
art, is the style of art produced in the post-Roman history of Ireland
and Britain, a period when Britain and Ireland shared a largely common
style different from that of the rest of Europe.
Present day tourist arrivals are able to buy tickets to see the Kells manuscript on display in the old Trinity College Library in Dublin.
A. The
date and place of origin of the Book of Kells have attracted a great
deal of scholarly controversy. The majority academic opinion now tends
to attribute it to the scriptorium of Iona (Argyllshire), but
conflicting claims have located it in Northumbria or in Pictland in
eastern Scotland. A monastery founded around 561 by St Colum Cille on
Iona, an island off Mull in western Scotland, became the principal house
of a large monastic confederation. In 806, following a Viking raid on
the island which left 68 of the community dead, the Columban monks took
refuge in a new monastery at Kells, County Meath, and for many years the
two monasteries were governed as a single community. It must have been
close to the year 800 that the Book of Kells was written, although there
is no way of knowing if the book was produced wholly at Iona or at
Kells, or partially at each location.
Migration
is a prominent feature of the Hiberno-Saxon culture and the development
of Christian oriented communities of learning that stretched across
Europe during these centuries. It is these communities that held, and
only by a thread, the connections and continuity of a western Europe to
the ideas of antiquity and the science and philosophy of ancient Greece
and Rome.
The arrival of scholarship and knowledge
The story of the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate
version of the Christian Bible, is a story of migration and
communication. It was produced around 700 A.D in the north-east of
England, at the Benedictine monastery of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow
in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria and taken to Italy as a gift
for Pope Gregory II in 716. It was one of three giant single-volume
Bibles then made at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, and is the earliest complete
one-volume Latin Bible to survive, only the León palimpsest being older; and the oldest bible where all the Books of the Bible present what would be their Vulgate texts.
The Codex Amiatinus is named after the location in which it was found in modern times, Mount Amiata in Tuscany, at the Abbazia di San Salvatore and is now kept at Florence in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. It was produced in the scriptorium at Wearmouth Jarrow Abbey from an earlier manuscript that was brought to the Abbey by the Anglo-Saxon Christian abbot and saint Ceolfrith. from the library of the monastery at Vivarium.
The
Vivarium was a monastery, library, and biblical studies centre founded
c. 544 by Cassiodorus near Squillace, in Calabria, Italy. It became a
place renowned for the preservation of classical Greek and Latin
literature.
The Vivarium was meant to build bridges across the
cultural fault lines of the sixth century: those between Romans and
Goths, between orthodox Catholics and their Arian rulers, between the
east and west, between the Greek and the Latin worlds, and between
pagans and Christians.
The
Vivarium appears not to have been governed by a strict monastic rule,
such as that of the Benedictine Order. Rather, Cassiodorus' major work,
the Institutiones, was written to guide the monks' studies and as a guide for an introductory learning of both "divine" and "secular" writings.
To
this end, the Institutiones focus largely on texts assumed to have been
available in Vivarium's library. The first section of the Institutiones
deals with Christian texts, and was intended to be used in combination
with the Expositio Psalmorum. The order of subjects in the second book of the Institutiones reflected what would become the Trivium and Quadrivium of the seven medieval liberal arts:
grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and
astronomy. While he encouraged study of secular subjects, Cassiodorus
clearly considered them useful primarily as aids to the study of
divinity, much in the same manner as St. Augustine. Cassiodorus'
Institutiones thus attempted to provide what Cassiodorus saw as a
well-rounded education necessary for a learned Christian, all in uno
corpore, as Cassiodorus put it.
The
library at Vivarium was still active c. 630, when the monks brought the
relics of Saint Agathius from Constantinople, dedicating to him a
spring-fed fountain shrine that still exists. However, its books were
later dispersed, the Codex Grandior of the Bible being purchased by the
Anglo-Saxon Ceolfrith when he was in Italy in 679–80, and taken by him
to Wearmouth Jarrow, where it served as the source for the copying of
the Codex Amiatinus, which was then brought back to Italy by the now
aged Ceolfrith. Despite the demise of the Vivarium, Cassiodorus' work in
compiling classical sources and presenting a sort of bibliography of
resources would prove extremely influential in Late Antique Western
Europe.
The
migration of this knowledge, the ideas and scholarship included the
Irish monasteries. This includes the apparently isolated monastery of
Skellig Michael. This is how civilisation was conserved, "by the skin of
our teeth."
The first English involvement in Ireland took place in this period
Tullylease, Rath Melsigi and Maigh Eo na Saxain
were founded by 670 for English students who wished to study or live in
Ireland. A number of ecclesiastical settlements were established in 7th
century Ireland that accommodated European monks, in particular
Anglo-Saxon monks. Around 668 Bishop Colman, resigned his see at Lindisfarne,
and returned to Ireland. Less than three years later he erected an
abbey in County Mayo, exclusively for the English monks in Mayo,
subsequently known as Maigh Eo na Saxain ("Mayo of the Saxons").Other monasteries for Saxon monks include:
Lindisfarne Gospels - "Chi-Rho" at the start of the Gospel of St, Matthew
Many Anglo Saxons and Franks were educated at Irish monasteries, such as Mellifont Abbey, including King Alfred of England, Oswald of England & Dagobert II of France. Many of the early Anglo-Saxon manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels
were written in Irish script either directly by Irish monks based in
Britain or by Anglo-Saxon monks who were trained by Irish monks.
Rath Melsigi was located in what is now the townland of Clonmelsh, County Carlow, and situated within the LODE Zone Line. Among those known to have studied there were Willibrord, and Swithbert, Adalbert of Egmond, and Chad of Mercia.
Others studied at Irish monasteries at Armagh, Kildare, Glendalough,
and Clonmacnoise. In the controversy over the keeping of Easter, Rath
Melsigi accepted the Roman Easter.
In the plague of 664, Bede
tells, the monks of Rath Melsigi were almost all carried off by the
disease. One of those taken ill was the twenty-five year old Ecgberht of Ripon.
Most of his companions from Northumbria died. Ecgberht vowed that if he
recovered, he would become a peregrinus and lead a life of penitential
prayer and fasting. According to Henry Mayr-Harting, Ecgberht was one of
the most famous ‘pilgrims’ of the early Middle Ages, and occupied a
prominent position in a political and religious culture that spanned
northern Britain and the Irish Sea. Ecgberht would later organise the
first missions to Frisia. One of his missionaries to Frisia was the aforementioned Willibrord, whose story is the subject of the Life of Willebrord by Alcuin
of York, who became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian
court, following the invitation by the emperor Charlemagne himself.
Heligoland
In
697, Radbod, the last Frisian king, retreated to the then-single island
after his defeat by the Franks—so it is written in the Life of Willebrord by Alcuin.
The regions of Frisia include the islands of Heligoland and the Nordfriesland district, the northernmost district of Germany and, sharing with Carlow, a position on the LODE Zone Line.
Early
Medieval Cross of Rath Melsigi, Co. Carlow unveiled as Friendship
Agreement Signed between County Carlow and Echternach, Luxembourg.
Recently
County Carlow welcomed a delegation from Echternach, Luxembourg, led by
Yves Wengler, Mayor of Echternach, as part of the ongoing renewal of
friendship between both areas. The highlights of the visit were the
signing of a Friendship Agreement between both Councils and the
unveiling of the restored early medieval Cross of Rath Melsigi. In AD
690, St. Willibrord, Patron Saint of Luxembourg, First Apostle of the
Netherlands, departed County Carlow after spending twelve years at the
famed monastic settlement of Rath Melsigi and undertook his mission to
the continent. In AD 698 he established his major monastery in the town
of Echternach. His monastery also had a scriptorium which over the
centuries produced many fabulous manuscripts. Cllr. John Pender,
Cathaoirleach of Carlow County Council, led the welcome by Carlow County
Council.
The
highlight of the four days (visit) was on Wednesday 7th August last
when the entire day was devoted to exploring places associated with St.
Willibrord in County Carlow. At midday, the delegation, with an invited
audience, gathered at Rath Melsigi, Garryhundon, County Carlow, around
the recently restored early medieval cross, which is now all that
remains in County Carlow of the monastic settlement. The cross has for a
long time been in several pieces and in recent months the National
Monuments, Kilkenny Branch, OPW, in partnership with Carlow County
Council, through Carlow County Museum, restored the cross.
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