We could find no trace of his tomb, because in truth there is now no trace of his church. The hand of the spoiler has devastated Clonard perhaps more completely than any other of our ancient shrines. There was, we know, a round tower there, which is said to have partially fallen in A.D. 1039. “The Cloichtheach of Clonard fell,” according to the Four Masters, in that year. But the stump remained down to the close of the last century. Sir W. Wild says nobody knows what has become of it; we believe it was used for the purpose of building or repairing the present Protestant church, which is a plainer and uglier building than even such edifices usually are in Ireland. There are only two relics of antiquity now remaining at Clonard, and it needs a close inspection to find them out. The first and principal is an octagonal baptismal font of dark gray limestone about 3 feet high (with its pedestal), 2 feet in diameter, and some 20 inches deep, with an opening in the bottom to permit the water to flow away, after use, into the sacrarium. The eight panels of the basin are beautifully sculptured with various figures in bold relief, supposed to represent St. Finnian himself in his episcopal robes, St. Peter, St. John the Baptist, the Baptism in the Jordan, and other kindred and appropriate subjects. The faces of the pedestal on which the basin rests are in like manner appropriately ornamented with various floral decorations. No date is marked, nor can it be exactly fixed; the work, however, is in the highest style of Celtic art, and though it cannot by any means be referred to so early a date as the time of St. Finnian himself, it is of very great antiquity, at least dating back to the eleventh century. Some persons fancy that on one of the panels there is a representation of Augustinian monks, and hence they say this font cannot be older than A.D. 1175, when Walter de Lacy rebuilt the abbey for monks of that order. But as far as we could judge, the assumption that the figures represent Augustinian monks is somewhat gratuitous. This interesting monument of ancient monastic Clonard now stands before the Communion table of the Protestant church. It is quite evident that the worthies who placed it there knew little of ancient Christian usages.
The other relic is a curious stone trough now placed within a few paces of the entrance to the church. It is 2 feet 2 inches long, 21 inches wide, and 15 deep. It may have been a piscina to receive the water that flowed from the font referred to. My Catholic guide told many marvellous things of the efficacy of its waters for curing various diseases, how it never runs dry, and how fowl and other animals that profanely drink of it perish. But the unbelieving sexton of the church promptly contradicted him, at least on two points. He himself had seen it dry, and he saw the hens that drank of the water live to lay many excellent eggs. There is also a curious head-shaped stone which was once a corbel in the old abbey, but is now inserted in the church tower over the door. Like everything else of the olden time it is not only out of date, but out of place in its present position.
From the time of St. Finnian to Stephen Rochfort, the Norman Bishop of Meath, who transferred his episcopal residence from Clonard to Newtown, near Trim, we have a chronicle of the bishops and abbots who sat in the chair of St. Finnian. It is not certain that he was himself a bishop, although he is spoken of in his office as Praesul and Pontifex.
It is much more probable, however, that he was a bishop, and his successors, though frequently styled abbots, seem to have been in episcopal orders; and all of them certainly exercised episcopal jurisdiction. The school of Clonard, too, for many centuries retained its ancient fame, and from time to time produced distinguished saints and scholars. St. Aileran the Wise, who, like many other Irish saints, died of the fatal yellow plague that devastated the country in A.D. 664, is described as chief professor of the schools of Clonard. He was also, in Colgan’s opinion, the author of what is known as the Fourth Life of St. Patrick, as well as of Lives of St. Brigid, and St. Fechin of Fore, in Westmeath. Moreover, he composed a Litany partly in Latin and partly in Irish, which O’Curry discovered in the Yellow Book of Lecain in Trinity College. Fleming, too, has published a fragment of a Latin treatise by St. Aileran on the “Mystical Interpretation of the Ancestry of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This fragment was found in the Irish monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland. It was first published by Fleming in A.D. 1667, and reprinted in the famous Benedictine edition of the Fathers in A.D. 1677. It may, perhaps, with greater readiness be referred to in Migne’s Patrology (vol. 80, page 328). We make special reference to this fragment because we have no other writings of the Clonard school remaining, either of St. Finnian himself or of his immediate successors; and secondly because of itself it furnishes ample proof of the high culture attained at that early age in this great Irish seminary. The Benedictine editors say that although the writer did not belong to their order, they publish it because Aileran “unfolded the meaning of Sacred Scripture with so much learning and ingenuity that every student of the sacred volume, and especially preachers of the Divine Word, will regard the publication as most acceptable (acceptissima).”
This is high praise from perfectly impartial and competent judges, and in that opinion we cordially agree. We read over both fragments carefully, that mentioned above, and also a “Short Moral Explanation of the Sacred Names,” by the same author, and we have no hesitation in saying that whether we consider the style of the latinity, the learning, or the ingenuity of the writer, it is equally marvellous and equally honourable to the School of Clonard. The writer cites not only St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and the author of the “Imperfect Work,” but what is more wonderful still, he quotes Origen repeatedly, as well as Philo, the Alexandrine Jew. We cannot undertake to say that he was familiar with these two authors in the original Greek, but even a knowledge of the Latin versions in that rude age is highly honourable to our Irish schools. This fragment shows, too, that a century after the death of the holy founder scriptural studies of the most profound character were still cultivated with eagerness and success in the great school of Clonard. But evil days came upon this sanctuary of the holy and the learned, especially after the advent of the Danes.
It was plundered and partially destroyed some twelve times in all. But the Danes had half that work of sacrilege to their own exclusive credit—they plundered it on five or six recorded occasions. It was burned no less than fourteen times, sometimes partially, but on other occasions almost wholly, as for instance in A.D. 1045, “when the town of Clonard, together with its churches, was wholly consumed, being thrice set on fire within one week.” On another occasion, in A.D. 1136, the men of Breifney, led even then by O’Rorke of the One-Eye, the husband of the faithless Dervorgilla, “plundered and sacked Clonard, and behaved in so shameless a manner as to strip O’Daly, then chief poet of Ireland. Amongst other outrages they sacrilegiously took from the vestry of this abbey a sword which had belonged to St. Finnian the Founder.”—(Four Masters.)
Even in that century of nameless outrage and bloodshed, Clonard was still the home of poetry and learning, and to their shame be it spoken, it was an Irish chieftain and his followers who destroyed what the Danes had spared—the very men who claimed to have on their side “virtue and Erin,” forsooth, while on the other was the “Saxon and guilt.” But any one who has ever read the bloody annals of the long reign of Tiernan O’Rorke in Breifney will have some difficulty in accepting him as the representative of virtue and Erin. His rival, Dermod McMurrough, who was not outdone in villany by any other Irishman of the time, plundered and burned Clonard in A.D. 1170, and was aided in his foul work by Earl Strongbow and his friends from England; but next year he paid the penalty of his crimes, dying of a loathsome disease, without the sacraments, accursed of God and man, for the Four Masters tell us that “he became putrid whilst living, by the miracle of God, and Columkille, and Finnian, and the other saints of Ireland, whose churches he had profaned and burned”—truly a fitting end for such a life as his. In A.D. 1175 Walter de Lacy founded the monastery of Clonard for the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, but in A.D. 1206, as we observed above, Simon de Rochford transferred the See of Meath from Clonard to Trim[178]; and so the ancient glory of the place faded away until now it is merely a name known only to scholars, without even a broken arch or ruined wall to speak with saddening eloquence of its glorious past.