It would be strange if the organisers of the Church in Ireland in the fifth century had not held synods, or some substitute for synods, and committed their resolutions to writing;[251] and if so, there would be every probability that the Acta or canons would have been extant in the eighth century, and would have been perfectly well known to the bishops and clergy who sat in the synods of the seventh and eighth centuries; for it was not till the ninth century that the destruction of books began through the devastations of the Northmen.
It was clearly one of Patrick’s duties to take measures to establish and secure harmony and unity of ecclesiastical administration between the north of Ireland, the special field of his own activity, and the south, which lay outside his immediate sphere of operations.
As a matter of fact, we possess evidence which, if it is genuine, records a “synod” or meeting in which Patrick was concerned; but it has been called in question, and is generally rejected. Nevertheless the last word has not been said.
The evidence is twofold.
(1) We have thirty canons preserved in a MS. which once belonged to the cathedral library of Worcester, and is now MS. 279 in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was written on the continent in the ninth or tenth century, and an account of it and its contents will be found in The Early Collection of Canons known as the Hibernensis, two Unfinished Papers, by Henry Bradshaw, 1893. These canons are usually described as the acts of a synod—Synodus I. Patricii—and were printed inaccurately in the collections of Spelman (i. 52 sqq.) and Wilkins (i. 2-3). An accurate text is given in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, ii. 328-30.
The document begins thus:
Gratias agimus Deo patri et filio et spiritui sancto. Presbiteris et diaconibus et omni clero Patricius Auxilius Isserninus episcopi salutem.
Satius nobis negligentes praemonere [quam] culpare que facta sunt, Solamone dicente, Melius est arguere quam irasci. Exempla difinitionis nostrae inferius conscripta sunt et sic inchoant.
The canons follow.