Introductions: St Patrick and the snakes of Ireland

Saint Patrick’s Day was last week which seemed a fitting prompt to initiate this blog with a brief outline of who I am, what I do (and what it has to do with Saint Patrick). I am a first year PhD student in history at the University of Edinburgh drawn to Scotland by a long-standing fascination with the ‘Celtic’ nations of Britain. The aim here is to give you a window into my current research and allow you to share in the often weird and wonderful Medieval world (and the equally strange world of a doctoral student!).

Stumbling across a momentary reference to a particularly intriguing and largely unknown event in Scottish history (the Scottish invasion of Ireland between 1315-1318) as an undergraduate student has, as is so often the case with historical research, led me down a path an unexpected winding path. A desire to know why this invasion occurred and why it was accompanied by speeches promoting a ‘Celtic’ alliance against the English has led me to my current work. Using two major historical records written in the century or so after this invasion, John Barbour’s The Bruce and Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon I am looking at how these Scottish writers portrayed Ireland and the Irish in their works. This allows me to touch on a range of subjects including culture, identity, chivalry, literary genre and how literary works can be used to help us study history.

Luckily for me this provides a reason to dive into the depths of medieval literature and the possibility of legitimately spending time reading and writing about dragons (a childhood dream made real). On a more practical note, this research has important implications as both of these texts have been foundational in constructing the history of an Independent Scotland which continues to live on in the modern Scottish consciousness (and yes we’re talking Braveheart here).

So, to give you your first taste... You may well know that, among other things, Saint Patrick is said to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland. Most would view this as a cause for celebration (as indeed they did last week) but not everyone. Bower, a fifteenth century Scottish churchman explains in the second of my histories the Scotichronicon that:

“The reason for this purification is, as I discovered in an old document, that these saints had foreknowledge by the spirit of the character of the people that would inhabit the land and would have such hearts full of deceit and wickedness with such a propensity for theft, plundering and murder that, if the reptiles were as violently poisonous according to their usual nature, few of no Irish would possess the soil. For these reasons they took care that poison should be kept far from the animals and the turf of the land and that the land should be cleansed from all harmful infection so that the people might have a polished mirror for the contemplation of their uncouth and uncivilised behaviour.”

Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, eds John Maqueen, Winifred Macqueen and D. E. R. Watt, vol.1 (Aberdeen, 1993), book 1, 19.

Observing Bower’s particular venom for the Irish throughout his work is often highly entertaining, but it also raises several questions in my historian brain. Why does Bower harbour such strong feelings toward the Irish? Are these feelings purely personal or more widely felt in Scotland? What does Bower want his audience to take away from his account? How should we read and view histories like this for the purpose of research?