Thus the document professes to be a circular letter addressed by Patricius, Auxilius, and Iserninus to the clergy, and embodying ecclesiastical rules and penalties on which the three bishops agreed. It seems misleading to describe these rules as the canons of a synod; they are canons laid down by a conclave of three bishops whose authority was acknowledged, and a conclave of three bishops is not a synod in the usual sense of the term.
It may be observed, before going farther, that the preface, instead of arousing suspicion, prepossesses us in favour of the genuineness of the document. Conferences and co-operation between Patrick and the southern bishops Auxilius and Iserninus are, as I hinted above, just what we should expect; and a forger who, say in the eighth century, desired to foist upon Patrick canons of later origin would have been much less likely to associate Patrick with these two bishops than with others, such as Benignus, who appeared more conspicuously in the story of his life. We may fairly argue that, if the canons themselves should turn out to be spurious, at all events the forger must have founded his superscription on the fact that genuine canons had been issued by the three bishops. Consequently, the superscription seems to me, in any case, to be evidence for the co-operation of Patricius, Auxilius, and Iserninus in organising the Church in Ireland.
The early date of the canons was rejected by Todd, who assigned them to the ninth or tenth century (pp. 486-8), by Haddan and Stubbs, who place their origin between A.D. 716 and A.D. 777 or 809 (ii. 331, z), and by Wasserschleben (Die irische Kanonensammlung, ed. 2, p. 1.). Todd brought forward three arguments: (1) the injunction in canon 6 that clergy should wear the Roman tonsure; (2) the implication of “a more near approach to diocesan jurisdiction, as well as a more settled state of Christianity in the country than was possible in the days of St. Patrick”; (3) the reference in canon 25 to the offerings made to the bishop (pontificialia dona) as a mos antiquus. Haddan and Stubbs add as another argument a point noticed by Todd, but not pressed by him as an objection, that (4) canon 33 must have been enacted “when the Britons and the Irish had become estranged, scil. by the adoption of Roman customs by the latter (north as well as south) while the former retained the Celtic ones”; and hence they derive their limits of date mentioned above.
Now, if we admit that all these objections are valid, it would not necessarily follow that the whole document is spurious. There is the alternative possibility that the document as a whole is genuine, but interpolated. The interpolations would amount to canons 25, 30, 33, 34, and a clause in canon 6.
Before I proceed to criticise the arguments of Todd, and Haddan and Stubbs against the genuineness of the document, it will be convenient to state the other evidence for Patrick’s activity in the shaping of ecclesiastical canons, as it has a close and immediate bearing on the present question.
(2) The Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, which has been admirably edited by Wasserschleben (Die irische Kanonensammlung, ed. 2, 1885), was put together, it is generally agreed, at the end of the seventh or in the first years of the eighth century. The external evidence is that two of the thirteen manuscripts which contain the collection were written in the eighth century. The internal evidence is that the latest authors cited are Theodore of Tarsus (ob. 690) and Adamnan (ob. 704);[252] none of Bede’s works are cited. As for the place of its origin, Wasserschleben and Bradshaw, though they differed otherwise, agreed that it originated in Ireland, while Loofs (De antiqua Britonum Scotorumque ecclesia, p. 76) argued for Northumbria on the insufficient grounds that the headings Hibernenses, Synodus Hibernensis, implied an origin outside Ireland, and that an Irish compiler would hardly have been acquainted with the Penitential of Theodore. A rubric in a Paris MS. (which came from Corbie and was written in Brittany) may contain a clue:
Hucusq; Nuben et cv. cuiminiae & du rinis.
Bradshaw infers that the collection was compiled by “an Irish monk or abbot of Dairinis” near Youghal. Dr. W. Stokes acutely saw that the name of Cucummne, a learned ecclesiastic (ob. 742 or 747, Ann. Ult.) is concealed in the corruption; and also amended Ruben (Academy, July 14, 1888). Mr. Nicholson, in an ingenious article in the Zeitschr. für kelt. Philologie, iii. 99 sqq. (1899), amends thus:
Hucusq; Ruben et cucuimini iae et durinis,