From the Sabian ceremonial—succeeded by the Druidical—it unquestionably was that the Christian missionaries in Ireland first adopted the use of bells, wishing, wisely, therein to conform as much as possible to the prejudices of the natives, when they did not essentially interfere with the spirit of their divine mission. I shall hereafter relate the astonishment excited in England, at the appearance of one of those bells, brought there in the beginning of the sixth century by Gildas, who had just returned after finishing his education in Ireland; and this, in itself, should satisfy the most incredulous that the Britons, as well pagan as Christian, were ever before strangers to such a sight; and no wonder, for they were strangers also to such things as Round Towers, to which I shall prove those implements properly and exclusively belonged.
“Clogad” is the name, and which literally signifies a “pyramid,” that has led people into this “belfry” mistake. To conclude, therefore, this portion of our investigation, I shall observe, in Dr. Milner’s words, “that none of these towers are large enough for a single bell of a moderate size to swing about in it; that, from the whole of their form and dimensions, and from the smallness of the apertures in them, they are rather calculated to stifle than to transmit to a distance any sound that is made in them; lastly, that though possibly a small bell may have been accidentally put up in one or two of them at some late period, yet we constantly find other belfries, or contrivances for hanging bells, in the churches adjoining to them.”
I fear greatly I may have bestowed too much pains in dispelling the delusion of this preposterous opinion. But as it had been put forward with so much confidence by a much-celebrated “antiquarian,”—though how he merited the designation I confess myself at a loss to know,—I thought it my duty not to content myself with the mere exposure of the fallacy, without following it up with proofs, which must evermore, I trust, encumber its advocates with shame; and the rather, as this great champion of Danish civilisation and proclaimer of his country’s barbarism is at no ordinary trouble to affect ridicule and contempt for a most enlightened and meritorious English officer, who, from the sole suggestion of truth, promoted by observation and antiquarian research, stood forward as the advocate of our ancestral renown, to make amends, as it were, for the aspersions of domestic calumniators.
Both parties are, however, now appreciated as they ought; and though Vallancey, certainly, did not understand the purport of our Round Towers, his view of them, after all, was not far from being correct; and the laborious industry with which he prosecuted his inquiries, and the disinterested warmth with which he ushered them into light, should shield his memory from every ill-natured sneer, and make every child of Iran feel his grateful debtor.
Having given Milner a little while ago the opportunity of tolling the death-knell of the belfry hypothesis, I think I could not do better now than give Ledwich, in return, a triumph, by demolishing the symmetry of the anchorite vagary.
“It must require a warm imagination,” says this writer,—after quoting the account given by Evagrius of Simeon Stylites’ pillar, upon which Richardson, Harris, and Milner after them had founded the anchorite vagary,—“to point out the similarity between this pillar and our ‘tower’: the one was solid, and the other hollow—the one square, and the other circular: the ascetic there was placed without on the pillar; with us enclosed in the tower. He adds, these habitations of anchorites were called inclusoria, or arcti inclusorii ergastula, but these were very different from our round towers; for he mistakes Raderus, on whom he depends, and who says, ‘The house of the recluse ought to be of stone, the length and breadth twelve feet, with three windows, one facing the choir, the other opposite, through which food is conveyed to him, and the third for the admission of light—the latter to be always covered with glass or horn.’
“Harris, speaking of Donchad O’Brien, Abbot of Clonmacnois, who shut himself up in one of these cells, adds, ‘I will not take upon me to affirm that it was in one of these towers of Clonmacnois he was enclosed.’ It must have been the strangest perversion of words and ideas to have attempted it. Is it not astonishing that a reverie thus destitute of truth, and founded on wilful mistakes of the plainest passages, should have been attended to, and even be, for some time, believed?”
Thus have I allowed him to retaliate in his own words; but in order to render his victory complete, by involving a greater number within his closing denunciation, he should have waited until he had seen a note appended to the fourteenth of Dr. Milner’s Letters, which, unquestionably, would deserve a similar rebuke for its gross perversion of a “cell” into a “tower.”
It is this: “We learn from St. Bernard, that St. Malachy, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, in the twelfth century, applied for religious instruction, when a youth, to a holy solitary by name Imarus, who was shut up in a ‘cell,’ near the cathedral of the said city, probably in a Round Tower.” Risum teneatis?
But I am tired of fencing with shadows and special pleading with casuists. And yet, as I would wish to render this Essay systematically complete, I am forced, however reluctant, to notice the conjecture, which others have hazarded, of those Round Towers having been places of retreat and security in the event of invasion from an enemy; or depositories and reservoirs for the records of State, the Church utensils and national treasures!