In literary history Seghine is chiefly remarkable as the person to whom Cummian addressed his celebrated Epistle on the Paschal Question in the year A.D. 634, to which we have referred at length already.[270] The superscription is “Segieno Abbati Columbae Sancti et Caeterorum Sanctorum Successori”—a high testimony to the reputed sanctity of his predecessors. Seghine was also one of those to whom the Roman clergy during the vacancy of the See in A.D. 640, addressed an important letter on the same subject. This shows that from his high official position, as head of the Columbian monasteries, and, doubtless, also from his high personal character, it was deemed of the greatest importance to secure the adhesion of Seghine to the Roman discipline. In this, however, the authors of both the letters were disappointed. Seghine, who was animated with the unyielding and somewhat, haughty spirit of Conal Gulban’s line, could not bring himself to believe that his sainted predecessors, whose holiness was proved by so many miracles, could by any possibility be wrong in the discipline which they followed. The monks who were trained under him, like Aidan and Colman of Lindisfarne, were animated with the same spirit; so that even after the Conference of Whitby the aged Colman preferred to leave his beloved retreat in Lindisfarne, and sail back again to his stormy home on the coast of Mayo, rather than adopt the new discipline; and we know that the Irish monks of Lindisfarne followed him to a man.
Seghine was succeeded by Suibhne, the first “outsider” whom the monks of Iona elected as head of their Order. Colgan observes that his genealogy is not recorded in our native annals; whence we may infer that he owed his elevation to his merit rather than to the accident of his birth. He died in A.D. 657. His successor, Cuimine, was of the Cenel-Conail line, for he was nephew of Seghine, the fifth abbot. He wrote a tract, De Virtutibus S. Columbae, which is cited by Adamnan. It really forms the groundwork of Adamnan’s Third Book, into which it has been bodily transferred. It has been also published by Colgan, and the Bollandists, though from different sources. It is also to be found in the recently published Salamanca Codex. This life shows that Cuimine was an excellent Latin scholar, and although scarcely possessing the wide culture of Adamnan, he is little inferior to that celebrated writer, in the graphic account which he gives of the miracles and virtues of St. Columba.
The Paschal Epistle already referred to has been attributed to this Cuimineus Albus, as Adamnan calls him. We have shown elsewhere that the real author was Cummian Fada, Bishop of Clonfert; and it is well known that during the whole of the seventh century the entire community of Iona was vehemently opposed to the adoption of that discipline, which the author of the Paschal Epistle advocates and defends. This of itself proves that the Abbot of Hy was not its author. We are now come to Adamnan, the ninth abbot, whose history we must narrate at greater length.
VII.—Adamnan, Ninth Abbot of Hy.
In the year 1845 Dr. Ferdinand Keller was poking with a German’s pertinacity through the shelves of the Town Library of Schaffhausen, in Switzerland. In a corner of the room he found a high book chest filled with all kinds of old MSS., without title or number of any kind, and at the very bottom of the heap he came upon a dark brown parchment manuscript, bound in moth-eaten beech wood, covered with calf skin, carefully clasped in front, and very neatly and curiously sewed at the back. It was a goodly quarto of 68 leaves, with double columns, written on dark coloured goat skin parchment in large heavy drawn letters of the character known as minuscular. Everything about the MS. showed great antiquity—the cover, the parchment, the lettering, and the ornamentation. Dr. Keller at first thought he had come upon a hitherto undiscovered treasure; but in this he was mistaken. He only recovered a lost treasure, and secured its preservation for the learned world. On examination, the MS. turned out to be the oldest and most authentic copy of Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba, made in Iona either during the life time of Adamnan himself, or certainly within a few years after his death.
The monastery of Richenau in the ninth century appears to have had many Irish inmates; and this is not unnatural, for the great Irish monastery of St. Gall was within a few miles of the shore of Lake Constance, and considerable intercourse would naturally take place between the two houses. Walafridus Strabo, Abbot of Reichenau, from A.D. 842 to A.D. 849, had been previously Dean of St. Gall, and in his writings shows an intimate knowledge of many things connected with Ireland, which he could have learned only from Irishmen.[271] We know, too, from other sources, that crowds of Irishmen came to France and Germany in the beginning of the ninth century, and that many of them brought their books from their schools at home along with them, as Dungal brought the books which he bequeathed to the monastery of Bobbio. It is thus easy to understand how some of the monks of Iona, driven from home by the Norsemen, who so often plundered the Island about the beginning of the ninth century, would migrate to some friendly monastery on the continent, carrying their literary treasures with them.
There can, however, be no doubt that the Schaffhausen MS. of St. Columba’s Life was written in the Island of Hy by one of the Family, so early as the beginning of the eighth century. The character is of that peculiar kind of which we have almost contemporary specimens the Book of Kells, and the Book of Durrow, and which is now universally acknowledged to be purely Irish; the ornamentation of the chapters and of the capital letters is Irish; the orthography is Irish, and what is stranger than all, the Lord’s Prayer is written in Greek on the last page of the MS., and in Greek, of which we have other specimens remaining in old Irish MSS. with the same peculiar spelling, in the same semi-uncial character, without accents, and without breathings—a fact which of itself indisputably proves that the Greek tongue was taught and written in the Irish School of Hy, 1170 years ago.
The Colophon, or superscription, in rubric, at folio 136, at the end of the life, records, according to the usual custom, the name of the scribe:—“Whoever reads these books on the virtues of St. Columba, let him pray to the Lord for me, Dorbbeneus, that after death I may possess eternal life.”
In A.D. 713, Tighernach records the death of Dorbene, Abbot of Hy, the very year of his election to that high office. There can be no doubt that this Dorbene was the writer of the Schaffhausen MS.; there is no mention of any other of the same name in our annals except of one Dorbene, whose son Failan is said to have died in A.D. 724. This Dorbene was as Dr. Reeves thinks, a layman; and, if his son died in A.D. 724, he himself in the course of nature must have lived and died before Adamnan. But the Abbot who died in A.D. 713, would have outlived Adamnan only nine years, and in all probability had been for many years scribe of the monastery, and may have written the book at the dictation of Adamnan himself.
And now, who was Adamnan? Unfortunately we know very little of his early youth. He gives us to understand, at least by implication, that he was born at or near Drumhome, in the barony of Tirhugh, and co. Donegal. The church of Drumhome was founded by St. Columba, but St. Adamnan is the patron; and this fact, too, indicates his connection with the locality. There, also, he seems to have spent his earlier years; for it was there he says, “in my youth that a very old man called Ferreol, a servant of Christ, who is buried in Drumhome, told me of a glorious vision which he saw, when fishing in the valley of the Finn, on the night of Columba’s death.” Scarcely any traces of the old church of Drumhome now remain; but it was once nobly endowed by the O’Donnells. Even so late as A.D. 1609, an Inquisition tells us that “there are in the said parish of Drumhome, four quarters of church land, three quarters of Columbkille’s land, each quarter containing six townlands, then in the possession of Lewis O’Cleary,” the head of that family, which the Four Masters have made illustrious for ever. The old church was finely situated near the shore of the Bay of Donegal, not far from Ballintra, and in view of the bold range of mountains, where the sons of Conal Gulban so long and so nobly defended their ancient freedom.