We are not to suppose that the only intercourse with Ireland was through Britain by way of the English Channel. The south of Ireland, at least, was in direct communication with the north-western part of France by sea. When a province of the Third Lyonese was formed, with Tours as its capital, in 394, its area including Britany and the parts south of that, Martin was still Bishop of Tours, and he became the metropolitan. He at once sent into Britany the monasticism which he had founded in Gaul, and it passed thence direct to the south-west corner of Wales. Thence it passed to Ireland. We hear of a ship at Nantes, ready to sail to Ireland. And in Columba’s time, when the Saint was telling them of an accident that was at that moment happening in Istria, he assured them that in the course of time Gallican sailors would come and bring the news[48]. This double contact must be kept in mind, when we find the south of Ireland different in Christian tone and temper from the north. It would seem that there were race-differences too, but on that I must not enter.
I am not clear that the Irish Church, as such, had anything to do with missionary enterprise among our pagan English ancestors. Columbanus merely passed through Britain, on his way to do a much more widely-extended missionary work in Gaul than Augustine, his contemporary, did in England. But it is a very different matter when we come to the great off-shoot from the Irish Church, the vigorous Church whose centre was the island of Hii, its moving spirit St. Columba. Iona—to adopt the familiar blunder which makes a u into an n in a name all vowels—Iona did indeed pay back with a generous hand all and more than all that Ireland had owed to Britain.
It was in 563 that St. Columba crossed over from Ireland to north Britain, with the wonted twelve companions. He established himself in the island of Hii, the Iouan island, now called Iona. In 565 he went to the mainland, crossed the central ridge of mountains, and made his way to the residence of the king of the northern Picts, near “the long lake of the river Ness,” not far from Inverness. Here he found much the same kind of paganism as Patrick had found in Ireland. The king’s priests and wise men, here as in Ireland, went by the name of Druids, Magi in Latin, and professed to have influence with the powers of nature. Here he worked for some nine or ten years with great success, beginning with the defeat of the Druids in their attempt to prevent his coming, followed soon after by the baptism of the king, who appears to have been a monarch of great power and wide rule. Then Columba devoted himself to his island monastery; and it grew under his hands and those of his immediate successors, till its fame reached all lands. Columba died in 597, the very year in which Ethelbert was converted to Christianity. Thirty-seven years after Columba’s death, his successors did that for the Northumbrian Angles which the successors of Augustine had failed to do.
We shall make a very great mistake if we ridicule or under-rate the power of the pagan priests, to whom these stories make reference. Classical mythology treats the gods of Greece and Rome as intensely important beings: and their priests were dominant. We must assign a like position to the gods and the priests of our pagan predecessors. When Apollo was consulted in Diocletian’s presence, an answer was given in a hollow voice, not by the priest, but by Apollo himself, that the oracles were restrained from answering truly; and the priests said this pointed to the Christians. And when the entrails of victims were examined in augury on another of Diocletian’s expeditions, and found not to present the wonted marks, the chief soothsayer declared that the presence of Christians caused the failure. Just such scenes were enacted, with at least as much of tragic earnestness, when Patrick worsted the Druid Lochra in the hall of Tara, or when Columba baffled the devices of Broichan, the arch-Druid of Brude, the Pictish king.
While Columba was doing his great work, Christianity was re-established by a British king in a part of Britain where it had been obliterated by pagan Britons, that is, in the territory called Cumbria, extending southwards from Dumbarton on the Clyde and including our Cumberland. The king was a Christian; and the question whether Cumbria should be Christian or pagan was brought to the arbitration of battle. The great fight of Ardderyd, a few miles north of Carlisle, gave it for Christianity in 573, twenty years before the period to which our attention is mainly drawn. Kentigern, a native of the territory between the walls, became the apostle of Cumbria. His mother was Teneu, or Tenoc, and in these railway days she has re-appeared in a strange guise. From St. Tenoc she has become St. Enoch, and has given that name to the great railway station in Glasgow, much to the puzzlement of travellers, who ask when the Old Testament Enoch was sainted by the Scotch[49]. The establishment of Christianity in this kingdom of Cumbria is said by the Welsh records to have had a great result. They claim that the first conversion of the northern section of the Northumbrian Angles, before their relapse, was due to a missionary who was of the royal family of Cumbria; indeed they appear to assert that Edwin of Northumbria himself was baptised by this missionary, Rum, or Run, son of Urbgen or Urien.
It seems probable that the districts of Britain which we call Wales had in Romano-British times only one bishopric, that of Caerleon-on-Usk, near Newport, in Monmouthshire. But as soon as light is seen in the country again, after the darkness which followed the departure of the Romans, we find a number of diocesan sees. The influx of bishops and their flocks from the east of the island no doubt had something to do with this, as had also the territorial re-arrangements under British princes. The secular divisions probably decided the ecclesiastical. Bangor, St. Asaph, St. David’s, Llanbadarn, Llandaff, and Llanafanfawr, are the sees of which we have mention, founded by Daniel, Asaph, David, Paternus, Dubricius, and Afan. The deaths of these founders date from 584 to 601, so far as the dates are known. Llanafanfawr was merged in Llanbadarn, and that again in St. David’s. These dates correspond well with the traditional dates of the final flight of Christian Britons to Wales, under the pressure of Saxon conquest. We may, I think, fairly regard this as the remodelling of the British Church, which once had covered the greater part of the island, in the narrow corner into which it had now been driven. It is to Bangor, St. Asaph, St. David’s, and Llandaff, that we are to look, if we wish to see the ecclesiastical descendants of Restitutus and Eborius and Adelfius, who in 314 ruled the British Church in those parts of the island which we call England and Wales, with their seats or sees at London, York, and Caerleon.
When we come to consider the flight of the Christian Britons before the Saxon invaders, it is worth while to consider how far Christianity really had occupied the land generally, even at the date of its highest development. The Britons were rather sturdy in their paganism. Their Galatian kinsfolk were pagans still in the fourth century, to a large extent. Their kinsfolk in Gaul were pagans to a large extent as late as 350. It seems to me not improbable that a good many of the Britons stayed behind when the Christian Britons fled before the heathen Saxons; and that the flocks whom British bishops led to places of safety, in Britany and the mountains of Britain, may have been not very numerous. If on the whole the fugitives were chiefly from the municipal centres, places so completely destroyed as their ruins prove them to have been, the few Christians left in the country places would easily relapse. But they would retain the Christian tradition; and from them or their children would come such information as that which enabled Wilfrid to identify, and recover for Christ, the sacred places of British Christianity.
We should, I think, make a serious mistake if we supposed that the British Church in Cornwall and Devon was originally formed by fugitives from other parts of the island. The monuments seem to shew that Christianity was established there as well as in other parts of Britain in Romano-British times. Such monuments as we find there and in Wales do not exist in other parts of the island where the British Church existed; and it is an interesting and important question, is that because these parts were unlike the other parts, or is it because in other parts the processes of agriculture and building have broken up the old stones with their rude inscriptions? We now and then come across a warning that the total absence of monumental remains in a place may not mean that there never were any. Many of you would say with confidence that we certainly have not monumental remains from the original cathedral church of St. Paul’s, built in the first years of Christianity and burned after the Conquest. But we have. They found some years ago a Danish headstone, with a runic inscription of the date of Canute, twenty feet below the present surface of the churchyard. You can see it in the Guildhall Library, or a cast of it in our library here. I have no doubt there are many such, if we could dig.
But it is of course impossible here to enter upon the evidence of the monumental inscriptions. They deserve courses of lectures to themselves. I may say that the language of the inscriptions connected with the British Church is Latin, while in Ireland the vernacular is used, quite simply at the great monastic centres of Clonmacnois and Monasterboice; markedly Latinised at Lismore, the place of study of the south. In Cornwall the inscriptions are mostly very curt, just “A, son of B,” all in the genitive case, meaning “the monument of A, who was son of B.” In Wales they are many of them much longer, and some of them in exceedingly bad Latin, certainly not ecclesiastical Latin, almost certainly Latin such as the Romano-Britons may have talked: “Senacus the presbyter lies here, cum multitudinem fratrum;” “Carausius lies here, in hoc congeries lapidum.” One of the British inscriptions in Wales is charmingly characteristic of the modesty of the race: “Cataman the king lies here, the wisest and most thought-of of all kings.” Cataman, by the way, is identified with Cadfan, and Cadfan in his lifetime told the Abbat of Bangor his mind in very Celtic style as follows (evidently he made a point of living up to his epitaph): “If the Cymry believe all that Rome believes, that is as strong a reason for Rome obeying us, as for us obeying Rome.”
The question of the inscriptions is complicated by a very remarkable phenomenon. There are in South Wales, at its western part, a large number of what are called Ogam inscriptions, and in Devon there are one or two[50]. In the south of Ireland there are large numbers. Outside these islands no such thing is known in the whole world. The language is early Gaelic, that is, the monuments belong to the Celtic, not to the British people[51]. The formula is “(the monument) of A, son of B.” In Wales the Ogam is frequently accompanied by a boldly cut Latin inscription to the same effect[52], with just such differences as help to shew us how the Ogam cutters pronounced their letters. My own explanation of the Ogam system is that it represents the signs made with the fingers in cryptic speech, used as very simple for cutting on stone when the need for mystery was at an end, that is to say, in all probability, when Druidism was just dying out, and the practice of committing nothing to writing had ceased to be a religious observance. I merely mention these things to add another to the many varied and interesting problems which are forced upon us by a consideration of our fore-elder, the British Church.