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CHAPTER 1

Patrick's Britain

THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY was among the most conspicuous changes that the Roman Empire experienced between the early fourth century and the birth of Patrick towards the end of that century or in the early fifth century. Beginning in 325, the year in which Emperor Constantine presided over the first ecumenical church council at Nicaea, a process of state-sanctioned religious change was set in motion that transformed the religious lives of the empire's inhabitants and integrated the church and its clergy more firmly into local as well as imperial government. Religious change seldom happens in isolation, and in this case too it was accompanied by social, economic, and cultural changes: communities began to embrace a new set of moral values, they congregated around new pastors based in churches (initially urban but gradually also rural), the churches themselves prospered as the wealthy and the well-to-do made them a new focus for ostentatious philanthropy under the banner of almsgiving, new forms of literature emerged with the Bible at their core, and gender relations in some societies were being reconceptualised with the gradual phasing out of polygamy and an unprecedented degree of (relative) independence that some women were able to attain in the monastic life. Following on from Constantine's successful gambit at the Council of Nicaea, emperors were keen to assert themselves as the champions of the church and of Orthodox belief, while gradually marginalising public pagan rituals until these were eventually outlawed by Emperor Theodosius (d. 395). Laws were routinely passed to safeguard the interests of the church and its personnel with the aim of guaranteeing a sustainable and mutually beneficial modus vivendi between churches and the state. This transition towards an ever-more-Christian empire was still very much an ongoing process in Patrick's day, and he is likely to have been alive to experience the last days of Roman Britain and their aftermath. The continual growth of the church and the vibrant atmosphere of religious change may, perhaps, have contributed to his choice to undertake missionary work in Ireland and spread the Christian faith beyond the westernmost boundaries of the empire.

As we attempt to examine where Patrick himself stood within this reality of religious and political transformation in the late imperial era, we may turn to some autobiographical details, mainly from the Confessio but also from the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. Of the details relating to Patrick's 'Romano-British phase', the aspects that scholars have seized on the most have been his pedigree and place of origin. His pedigree does indeed anchor him firmly in the cultural environment that historians commonly characterise as Romano-British, which was, by the late Roman period, overwhelmingly Christian. This much is clear from the opening of the Confessio, in which he introduces himself as the son of the deacon Calpornius and the grandson of the priest (presbyter) Potitus. In the Letter, he adds that his father was also a senior Roman administrator who held the office of decurion (decorione patre nascor). As a decurion, Calpornius would have sat on a Roman town council and would have had specific duties to discharge, such as managing the community's finances, organising votes, seeing to the maintenance of roads, administering the public post, recruiting soldiers for the army, and communicating with the provincial governor or emperor. But the chief obligation of decurions was the collection of imperial taxes, an ungrateful task that did not always endear them to the communities they served. Patrick himself identified as a Roman citizen; he says in the Letter, with reference to Coroticus's soldiers, 'I do not say to my fellow citizens, nor to the citizens of the holy Romans' (non dico civibus meis neque civibus sanctorum Romanorum). Patrick therefore emerges as the product of a solidly Romanised and solidly Christian background.

As for his place of birth, we are told in the Confessio that the family hailed from the town of Bannavem Taburniae and that his father also owned a small villa (villula). The exact whereabouts of the town and villa are unknown, although they occasioned much speculation in both medieval and modern times, ranging from Thomas O'Rahilly's identification of Bannavem Taburniae with Glastonbury to Charles Thomas's suggestion that it may have been Birdoswald (Banna), towards the western end of Hadrian's Wall, approximately twenty kilometres east of Carlisle. One of the more curious identifications draws on a tradition that was first committed to writing in the seventh-century Irish hagiography of Muirchú and by the eighth century was treasured in the hymn Génair Patraicc in Nemthur (Patrick was born in Nemthor). The tradition developed until, before the year circa 1000, Nemthor became identified with a place in Strathclyde. Although an origin in western Scotland has very little to recommend it apart from local-patriotic wishful thinking, historians tend to agree that the town and villa of Patrick's family lay somewhere along the west coast of Britain because of Patrick's testimony that he was abducted from his home to Ireland. A western origin would place him in the territory of the Demetae, or theOrdovices, or the Deceangli, or the Brigantes, or the Carvetii, population groups of which little is known, save the checkered record of initial resistance and later subjection to Roman rule, with some achieving a degree of political autonomy as client kingdoms (see Map 2). If Patrick's idea of a villula was in any way like the modern catch-all definition of villa — namely, 'a site consisting of a rural building of Roman aspect' (in David Mattingly's coining) — then his villula is unlikely to have been situated north of the river Tees in the Pennines, where no such site is known to have existed. Faced with these contingencies and uncertainties, the best we can hope for in locating Patrick's villa and hometown is educated guesswork. Patrick's reference to Bannavem Taburniae as a vicus may suggest it was a small town. But given that Calpornius was a member of a curia, one may infer that there was a larger public town nearby, in which an administrative bureaucracy was active and where Calpurnius would have fulfilled his obligations as decurion. An attractive identification, proposed by Charles Thomas, is Carlisle (Luguvalium), although, being north of the zone of Roman villas, it does not correspond perfectly to the landscape that Patrick describes.

As for the church or churches in which Patrick's father and grandfather would have served, these could have been located either in a town or in the countryside. Christianity is assumed to have been widespread, initially implanting itself among those of low to middle status. Consequently, as this hypothesis goes, churches were rather modest, and of the buildings that have tentatively been identified as churches, none actually contains Christian symbols. Such symbols occur only in high-status contexts, in buildings whose purpose might not have been exclusively to serve as a church. Indeed, it is very possible that Christian ritual was conducted in private residences (a possible candidate is a villa at Lullingstone in Kent containing distinct Christian symbols like the Chi-Rho and the alpha and omega) and in converted Roman public buildings, basilicae (for example, Calleva in Hampshire, Saint Paul in the Bail in Lincoln, and Verulamium, by Saint Albans), only some of which became distinctly identifiable as churches, usually following generations of architectural adaptation that lasted into the post-Roman period. These factors complicate the job of identifying the church or churches of Patrick's elders. We are not better informed in regard to the question of how exactly these churches or residences were served by priests — for instance, whether the priests were itinerant or permanently based. Only a few names of clerics from the period survive, and these tend to be senior members of the clergy, such as bishops who could be identified with specific sees. For example, we know of three British bishops who attended the Council of Arles in 314: Eborius, bishop of York; Restitutus, bishop of London; and Adelphius, bishop of Colonia Londinensium, a corrupt rendering of, perhaps, Colonia Lindensium, which was the Roman name for Lincoln. Unlike such lofty clergy, priests at the coalface do not receive mention in our sources.

The extent to which Patrick might have experienced life under Roman occupation is a contested issue. His self-identification as a Roman citizen does not necessarily mean that the empire still held Britain when he described himself in this way, towards the end of his life. By analogy, one can think of present-day refugees who identify as citizens of a certain state, even though that state no longer controls the area in which they were born. Territories formerly held by Syria and Iraq are two grim topical examples of this. However, the office of decurion, which his father had held, offers the strongest point of reference for dating Patrick's life in relation to the Roman occupation of Britain. Since the occupation officially came to an end in 410 following decades of political and economic decline (a date corroborated by the cessation of Roman coinage in the second quarter of the fifth century), then Patrick's father must have held office before this crucial year. Patrick could therefore not have been born long after 410, but may well have been born earlier. It has become commonplace in scholarship to date Patrick's life mainly to the fifth century, with little or no overlap with Roman rule. In the first place, this dating rests on the two contradictory obits given to Patrick by the Irish annals, both of which are in the second half of the fifth century: 457 and 493. However, since these obits are retrospective (they were written in the mid-sixth century at least), they offer no reliable dating criterion. Only rarely has his career, or the bulk of it, been dated before the fifth century. But to my mind there is no decisive argument for rejecting a dating before the fifth century. To understand why the objections to a pre-fifth-century date are not compelling, it is necessary to get a little technical. The strongest objection to a pre-fifth-century date was raised by David Dumville, drawing on previous work by Ludwig Bieler. Dumville holds that Patrick must have been writing after 404, but not too soon after, because in this year Jerome completed his translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, which is cited in the Confessio and Letter. He rejects the possibility that readings from the Vulgate were interpolated into Patrick's writings in the course of their medieval transmission: 'The untidy distribution of Vulgate-readings in the Psalter, Gospels, and Epistles, the absolute dominance of the Vulgate Acts of the Apostles, and the clearly Old Latin nature of the remainder are, in their very inconsistency with one another, as good a guarantee of general authenticity as could be wished for'. However, this common-sense argument is called into question by Bieler's own finding that at least four surviving copies of Patrick's Confessio 'frequently correct Old Latin quotations according to a standard text, generally the Vulgate'. In other words, medieval scribes who copied Patrick's Confessio replaced quotations from the Old Latin version of the Bible with quotations from the Vulgate. Hence one need not assume that a copy of the Vulgate was available to Patrick, and the Vulgate must therefore be dismissed as a dating criterion.

In addition to this rather technical argument for accepting that Patrick's career might have — in whole or in part — spanned the fourth century, we may also entertain a dating on historical grounds, which underscores the extent to which we lack secure dating criteria. The main difficulty is identifying something in Patrick's writings that can serve as a precise point of reference for dating. But there are no mentions of historical events that are attested elsewhere, and the attempt to date with reference to general phenomena is futile. For example, the mention in the Letter of 'pagan Franks' and the subsequent inference that this must refer to a period before the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis in 496 only provide an upper limit for the dating range, and (unhelpfully) only after Patrick is likely to have been dead.

Another attempt to date Patrick on historical evidence, this time from the Confessio, can be made on his own admission that unlike other educated contemporaries, he could not claim Latin as his first language, that he was not brought up to use language to perfection, and that he did not study either law or scripture (iura et sacra literas). Apart from suggesting that Patrick's first language was probably a dialect of British, this deprecatory admission appears to be his way of telling his readers that he was not trained as a professional rhetor with a view to acceding to a political career or a career in the church. But, as we shall see later, he may nevertheless have been expected to perform a role in provincial politics and he definitely did become a cleric, eventually assuming a senior position in a church that he himself had founded in Ireland. What he describes as his modest education can be contrasted with the more accomplished education of the readers of the Confessio, whom he refers to as dominicati rethorici, an expression translated by Bieler as 'men of letters on your estates'. Patrick also styled them sapientes and legis periti et potentes in sermone, translated by Bieler as 'wise and expert in law and powerful in word', although legisperiti can also be translated in its narrower technical sense, meaning simply 'lawyers'. Here Patrick is giving us an important glimpse of what sort of education was considered elitist in his own time. It also raises the possibility that Roman law still carried force, either because Roman rule had not yet ceased or because certain communities continued to practice it voluntarily after the end of Roman rule. It is not unreasonable to assume that some communities in Britain did indeed continue to adhere to Roman law and to Roman patterns of education for some time after Roman occupation ended, perhaps to be identified with communities in places like Cadbury Congresbury (Somerset) or Wroxeter (Shropshire), which consciously retained Roman material culture into the fifth century. Such a continuity does not necessitate the observance of a pure form of Roman law, but perhaps a law combined with local custom, something for which the Roman legal system made allowances even in places in which its grip was firm — for example, Egypt and the Romanised eastern Mediterranean, where we have good evidence for different forms of law being practised concurrently in Roman times. All this suggests a date for Patrick during the Roman occupation of Britain (perhaps even in the fourth century) or not too long after.

This dating broadly corresponds to the prevailing scholarly view that Patrick spent at least his early years in a region in which Roman rule still held sway. Let us therefore accept this view as a tentative working premise, which will allow us to sketch a hypothetical background for the circumstances of his childhood. His father's office suggests that the family belonged to the Romano-British elite, for which the ownership of a dwelling in both town and country would not have been unusual. Towns were a common feature of the British landscape, consisting of both well-planned public towns, which were centres of government and administration set up mainly in the first century, and small towns, like Bath, Water Newton, or Catterick, which developed organically from the third century, usually on the vast network of Roman roads (there were around eighty in the late Roman period). In the hierarchy of Roman towns, colonia, which were colonies of Roman citizens, were at the top of the pyramid. The earliest such towns in Britain were Gloucester, Colchester, Lincoln, and York. Below them in the hierarchy were the municipia, sometimes incorporating provincial communities that were rewarded for military service. And below these were the civitates, regional capitals usually corresponding to traditional territorial divisions of indigenous peoples. There were approximately fifteen such capitals, each of which included a town council, such as the one on which Calpornius served, most likely in the west of Britain. The westernmost among the civitates were (from south to north) Caerwent, Carmarthen, Kenchester, Wroxeter, and Carlisle.

Towns of all kinds had satellite villas, and some public towns in late antiquity sprang villas of their own within their walls. The appearance and function of villas are among the primary examples of things that were undergoing significant transformations in late third- and early fourth-century Britain, and that show the growing assimilation of native elites into the inner circles of Roman society. The decades after the era known as the third-century crisis, the end of which is usually dated around the ascendency of Diocletian in 284, are regarded as the apogee of Roman culture in Britain. This was a time in which the native Britons were aligning themselves with the trappings of Roman culture in the same way as other native populations had been doing elsewhere in the empire, especially in Gaul. Architecture, vessels, dress fashions, and manners all took after Roman models, though often with a native twist.

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