The impression that Bononia, or Boulogne, was St. Patrick's native town is confirmed by Probus; he narrates all the misfortune that overtook Calphurnius and his family whilst they were quietly living in their own native country (in patria), and in their own seaside city in Armorica.
Armorica was then included in the Province of Neustria, one of the sub-divided kingdoms of the Franks, and it was on that account that Probus states that St. Patrick was born in Neustria.
Ware, Usher, and Cardinal Moran, who cling to the Scotch theory of St. Patrick's birth, all contradict the Scholiast, who asserts that St. Patrick was born in Dumbarton; whilst those who hold fast to the Dumbarton theory make frantic efforts to convert the Crag into a heavenly tower.
St. Patrick, after the vision, in which he was told that he should return to his own native country, sailed to Gaul and not to the Island of Britain.
It had been proved on the authority of Sulpicius Severus, who was born in the year 360, that Armorica was called Britannia, and the Armoricans were called Britons when the Council of Ariminium was held in the year 359—fourteen years before the birth of St. Patrick. The Saint, when writing his "Confession" in 493, when the province had even a stronger claim to the name, could emphatically say, if he was born in Armorica, that he was a Briton and had relatives amongst the Britons.
[The Site of the Villula where St. Patrick was born]
FRENCH archeologists point out the "Hotel du Pavillion et des Bains de Mer," facing the sea-bathing place at Boulogne, as occupying the site from which Caligula's tower, Nemthur, once lifted its head into the heavens and shed its light over land and sea. On the frowning cliff which casts its shadow over the hotel there is a mass of hard brick ruins—the last remnants of the fortifications built round Nemtor when Boulogne was captured by the British troops in 1544.
Calphurnius's villula was evidently situated somewhere on the plateau, called Tour d'Ordre, between the tower and the town, for St. Patrick, in his "Confession," assured us that his father's home was near to ("prope") Bonaven, a statement which he would not make if the villula stood on the sea-coast beyond the tower. It is, therefore, certain that the site of the villula still exists somewhere not far inland from the ruins alluded to.
THE PRESENT FORTIFICATIONS AND SITE OF THE ROMAN ENCAMPMENT AT BOULOGNE.