C (23:51)
While we can't pinpoint the exact dates of St. Patrick's life, it's not actually that important because we have almost no knowledge of specific events in Britain during the 5th century A.D. we're not just ignorant of the years in which things took place. We don't even know exactly what took place. There are no comprehensive narrative histories telling us who did what, who ruled in particular regions where battles took place, or between which forces, much less what people made of the massive upheavals shaping and reshaping their lives. What we have are impressions, vibes, for lack of a better word, from the very few textual sources available to us, and from the immense amount of archaeological material left behind. The physical evidence of this period tells a Stark story. In 350 A.D. roughly the year we would assume St. Patrick's father was born, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the Roman Empire. By the time Patrick died, probably Sometime in the second half of the 5th century, Britain was completely transformed. Cities like Londinium and Eboracum York emptied of people. The market towns scattered across the countryside of lowland Britain were abandoned. The army, the most visible symbol of Roman rule and an essential driver of economic activity, either withdrew from the island completely or stuck around and became local warlords. Coins stopped arriving when the army stopped getting paid, so the economy reverted to barter. The fine villas of the Romano British aristocracy often remained occupied, but their heated baths and mosaic floors fell into disregard repair. Anglo Saxon migrants from the continent's North Sea coast began settling in the lowlands of eastern Britain. Within a couple of centuries, English would be the predominant language in that part of the country which was well on its way to becoming England. Patrick didn't experience the arrival of the Anglo Saxons firsthand since he lived in the west, but the breakdown of Roman authority was no less noticeable in his part of the island. Picts from north of Hadrian's Wall and Irish raiders from across the Narrow Sea attacked formerly safe areas like Patrick's home, while local strongmen stepped into the power vacuum left by the departing army and disappearing officials. There are some indications that life was becoming more violent. One study found four times as many identifiable injuries from edged weapons on skeletons in the post Roman period compared to the era of Roman rule. The canonical date for the army's exit from Britain is 410 A.D. but units had been peeling off for decades before that, and scattered remnants stuck around afterward, sometimes in the same forts legionaries had been occupying for centuries. Patrick tells us he grew up in a place called Banawem Taburnii, which has never been positively identified. The most likely candidates are clustered around the city of Carlisle in Cumbria, which mark the western end of Hadrian's Wall. This was one of the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, quite literally within sight of territory where Roman officials held no sway. Yet Patrick's father was a member of a town council, a decurian, a rank that could be found anywhere west of the Adriatic. He received at least part of the traditional education most well off Roman boys received something we can discern from the sprinklings of quotations from classical texts everyone read. But the best proof of Patrick's Roman ness is in the way he writes, how he assembles sentences in Latin, the words he chooses, the persuasive style he utilizes, and a thousand other details that aren't visible when reading his writings in translation. Scholars have agreed for a long time that Patrick's Latin is a bit strange. He wasn't a native speaker, most say, and some of his weirder word choices, spellings and sentence structures must therefore have been due to interference from his native, presumably British Celtic language. But while Patrick certainly spoke British Celtic, that's not actually the case here. Way back when I was doing my master's degree, I got very into Late Latin. Not the literary style that aristocrats and bishops used to show how learned they were, but the meat and potatoes Latin spoken and written that residents of the later Roman Empire used on an everyday basis. Late Latin was well on its way to becoming the Romance languages we know from the Middle Ages and beyond. And its non literary and spoken forms had diverged a great deal from the ornate, almost impenetrable style favored by pretentious elites. Now, I'm not going to give you a tedious rundown of the sociolinguistics of Late Latin or toot my own horn too much. But practically none of the scholars who have studied Patrick's writing know, much less cite this material. Had the Anglo Saxons not migrated in such substantial numbers, or if Roman rule had lasted a little while longer, Britain may well have produced its own Romance language, as Africa was on its way to doing before the Arab conquest. Patrick makes much more sense viewed this way than as a half competent Latin stylist. There's no actual evidence of what we call bilingual interference in his Latin. There's no identifiable sign that he was a native British speaker whose first language seeped into the way he wrote. The peculiarities in his language are not the kinds of mistakes that second language learners tend to make. In fact, its peculiar qualities are all standard for Latin speakers who hadn't been steeped in Latin literary culture. People who, for example, were enslaved in their teen years, missed the final stages of their education and and returned to a place where that education no longer existed. That was St. Patrick. Growing up somewhere around the northernmost edge of the Roman Empire, speaking a regional variety of Latin that would have made him understood everywhere. From Carthage to Trier to Tarragona, his life straddled the end of one world and the beginning of another. In recent decades, scholars have stressed the slow, often barely noticeable aspects of that shift, calling it a transformation instead of a fall. In Britain, however, the word fall makes perfect sense. The lives of real people, people like Patrick, were shaped in enormous ways by the disappearance of the state that had formerly governed them. Enslavement defined Patrick's life as he tells the story in his confession. He was abducted from his home along with thousands of others when he was 16 years old and taken across the sea to Ireland. His journey didn't end at Ireland's eastern shore. From there, he was taken to the far northwest of Ireland, present day County Mayo, near the open waters of the North Atlantic. For the next six years, he says, his life consisted of tending sheep as an enslaved shepherd. It was during his captivity that he experienced a religious conversion. His father had been a deacon. Patrick was nominally Christian at the very least, but he hadn't really believed before this. On his own in a foreign land, with seemingly no chance of escape or freedom, Patrick found solace in the one place he still could. In prayer, building a relationship with a God who had previously been only a distant force in his life. One night, after six years of captivity, Patrick dreamed a voice told him a ship was being prepared to take him back across the sea to Britain. Compelled, he ran away, traveling some 200 Roman miles across Ireland until he found the promised ship. More trials and tribulations followed, but Patrick eventually returned to his family and resumed his life. But now he had a mission. He determined that he would one day return to Ireland and convert the people who enslaved him to Christianity. This is where the story of Patricius, a Roman teenager, ends and the legend of St. Patrick begins. There are all sorts of issues with the internal coherence of Patrick's autobiography and so little to work with that practically every detail has been called into question in the years since he wrote it, how long he was in Ireland and where he was held, whether he was freed or ran away, how he managed to convince a ship full of sailors to take him across the sea to Britain, and even whether he was actually enslaved or was instead running away from his inherited responsibilities as a Roman official, a common late Roman phenomenon called curial flight. Now, I'm not casting aspersions on the scholars who have questioned Patrick's narrative. It's pretty clear that my namesake was playing fast and loose with the facts in his writing. But there's nothing actually implausible about the basic outline he gives us. Slave trading across the Irish Sea had been going on for centuries, probably even before the Romans arrived in Britain. There were petty kings in eastern Ireland capable of assembling military forces large enough to grab hundreds or even thousands of captives at a time. And in these misty decades, somewhere between the 390s and the 450s, the Roman army that would have served as a powerful deterrent to large scale raiding in northwest Britain was either crumbling or gone. Had he lived along Britain's southeastern coast, Patrick might have been taken by Saxons across the North Sea to the continent. Had he lived in the northeast, he might have been taken north to present day Scotland by Picts. Had he lived in the southwest, he might have been taken by local British speaking warlords. Because of where he lived, it was Irish raiders who got him. What Patrick experienced being abducted and enslaved, was a much more common experience in the Britain of his time than it had been in his father's or grandfather's. Patrick had grown up with slaves. He tells us that his father's estate, he calls it a villula, a little villa, housed both male and female slaves who were captured by the Irish along with him. Late Roman slavery had changed a bit since the time of Crixus, Irisaki's bakers and little Abbas. But it was still slavery in every way that mattered. Patrick saw his enslavement as an unfortunate occurrence, a punishment for his and his neighbor's sins. But there was nothing out of the ordinary about being enslaved. Slavery in Ireland functioned a bit differently than it did in other times and places. It was more akin to the general and less intense unfreedom of later medieval serfdough. It still operated on the principles of people as property, and Patrick never drew any distinctions between the two. Not that his experiences gave Patrick any sort of fundamental opposition to slavery as an institution. Even once he returned to Ireland on his mission of conversation conversion. His letter to the soldiers of Coroticus takes issue not with slave raiding or slavery as a whole, but with the fact that Coroticus men were targeting Patrick's Christian converts in Ireland. It was unseemly for Christians to enslave free Christians, and one gets the sense that Patrick was angriest of all that his authority and prestige were being damaged by Herodicus actions. Yet slavery nevertheless had a profound impact on Patrick's way of thinking about the world, and especially on his faith in God. Patrick was far from the only late Roman author to use slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine. The parable of the faithful servant from the Gospel of Matthew left a particularly outsized impression. For example, the church Father St. Jerome writes of Paul the Apostle, who is not a slave to sin, is rightly called the slave of God, the Father and Christ. Yet despite its commonality in the works of other authors, the extent to which that metaphor specifically dominates Patrick's thinking is remarkable. He doesn't just reach for the illusions to support his arguments, they effectively structure the way he tells his life story. Being led away into slavery parallels his journey from lacking faith, being a slave to sin in Jerome's terms, to becoming a dedicated servant of God. We can read Patrick's life in all all sorts of different ways. He was clearly a complex figure for his contemporaries. His fellow bishops and church officials weren't altogether fond of him. Hence the need for Patrick to write his Confessio as a form of self defense. He's even more complicated for us today as we try to disentangle the real person as well as historical fact from the legend. But he was indeed a real person, one who sheds a great deal of light on both a dying world and and how enslavement could shape a person's life. In that far more than his missionary activity or his later fame, Patrick is unique in the ancient world. Next time on Past Lives, we're going to jump forward into the Middle Ages, but probably not to a place you visited before. The shores of the Black Sea during the age of Mongol conquest, where a boy named Baibars watched his parents die before he was sold into slavery. Through a twist of fate, Baibars became one of the most powerful people in the world, the ruler of Mamluk, Egypt. Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our Patreon linked in the description. It's only seven bucks a month and you get access to tons of bonus content like interviews with great scholars Q&As with me and much more. You can follow me on Instagram @wymanpatrick or on bluesky trickwyiman. Past Lives is a 100% independent production and your support is what allows us to make this show. So thank you. Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The Story editor is Rachel Kambori. Until next time, this has been Past Lives.
