Pope Celestine sent Palladius to Ireland in 431, it was not primarily to convert pagans but rather to act as bishop to Christians already living outside the empire. Indeed, we know the name of one of the Christians in Ireland for whom Palladius might have acted as bishop: a Romano-British boy captured in a slaving raid on the western coasts of Britain, called Patrick. This remarkable person--the first British writer resident in these islands whose writings have survived--was the first to quote the Gospels in support of the mission to all men, and the first to see it as his moral duty to go outside the empire to convert the heathen.

The conversion of the Irish, in which Patrick was one of the first to be involved, was an experiment without any real precedents. No one had tried to introduce a religion organized around towns and dependent upon proclamation of the Word of God, in its original Greek or in Latin translation, into a tribal society which had no towns and which knew neither Greek nor Latin. Where would bishops be based? How would priests be trained? How would the Church fit into a society with strong kinship bonds and different property-owning customs from those of the Roman Empire? These were questions faced by all missionaries in northern Europe in the early Middle Ages, but a number of the solutions were first worked out in Ireland, and some of those solutions were exported by the Irish themselves to Britain and the Continent.

These solutions in the main relate to a new role assigned to monasteries within the missionary church. In the Roman Empire monasteries had been places of retreat from the world; the Church itself was run by the secular clergy, quite separate from the monasteries. In Ireland and in the rest of the barbarian north, monasteries were central institutions: bases for missionary activity, centres for basic education in Latin, for book production, for the training of clergy, and, as Christian lay men and women gave them more and more land, major economic and political centres as well. Bishops frequently resided in monasteries and, in Ireland in particular, were quite overshadowed by the abbots, who were, in earthly rather than spiritual terms, much more important than they.

-69-