Patrick's Death and Burial
It would appear that some years before his death Patrick resigned his position as head of the church of Armagh, and was succeeded by his disciple Benignus. If this is…
“Patrick’s Death and Burial (a.d. 461)” from The Life of St. Patrick and his Place in History by J. B. Bury, 1905.
It would appear that some years before his death Patrick resigned his position as head of the church of Armagh, and was succeeded by his disciple Benignus. If this is so, it seems probable that he retired to Dalaradia, and spent the last three or four years of his life at Saul, in the Island-plain. Here he may possibly have written his Confession; here he certainly died. His death is encircled with legends which reflect the rival interests of Armagh and Downpatrick, but attest the fact that he died and was buried at the barn of Dichu. It was a disappointment to Armagh not to possess his body, and it was a stimulating motive for mythopoeic ingenuity to explain how this came to pass.
When the day of his death drew nigh, an angel came and warned him. Forthwith he made preparations, and started for Armagh, which he loved above all places. But as he went, a thorn-bush burst into flame on the wayside and was not consumed. And an angel spoke—not Victor, the angel who was accustomed to visit Patrick, but another sent by Victor—and turned him back, bidding him return to Saul, and granting him four petitions, as a consolation for the disappointment. Of these petitions two are significant. One was that the jurisdiction of his church should remain in Armagh; the other that the posterity of Dichu should not die out. The first represents the interests of Armagh ; the second clearly originated in the Island-plain.
Patrick obeyed the command of the angel, who also predicted that his death would "set a boundary against night." The rite of the Eucharist was administered to him at Saul by Bishop Tassach of Raholp, and at Saul he died and was buried. After his death there was no night for twelve days, and folk said that for a whole year the nights were less dark than usually. And other wonders were recorded. Men told how angels kept watch over his body and diffused, as they travelled back to heaven, sweet odours as of wine and honey.
But miracles of this kind were not the only legends which gathered round the passing of the saint whom Armagh and Ulidia were alike eager to appropriate. The old strife between the kingdom of Ulidia and the kingdom of Orior blazed up anew, in story, over Patrick's grave. The men of Orior advanced into the island-plain, and blood would have been shed on the southern banks of Lake Strangford if a Divine interposition had not stirred the waves of the bay, which by a sudden inundation dispersed the hosts and prevented a battle. This was before the burial; but after the coveted body had been entombed, the men of Orior came again, resolved to snatch it from the grave. Finding a waggon drawn by two oxen, they imagined the body was inside, and drove off, to discover, when they were near Armagh, that no body was there. They had been the victims of an illusion, designed, like the rising of the waters, to prevent the shedding of blood.
From these two myths an inference of a negative kind can be drawn with certainty. It is plain that, whatever controversy may have arisen concerning the burial of Patrick, there was no armed conflict. For the common motive of both legends is to account for the circumstance that the event did not lead to a war between the two peoples. But it would not be equally legitimate to draw the positive inference that the stories preserve the memory of a dispute, though not with arms, on the occasion of the saint's death. They point undoubtedly to a controversy and dispute, but this controversy and dispute may have arisen in subsequent years. The story of the angel's appearance reflects a conciliation between the claims of Saul and the claims of Armagh, and the two legends of the frustrated attempts of the men of Orior embody the same motive of peace and concord. Armagh had to acquiesce in the fact that Saul possessed Patrick's body; Saul acquiesced in the assertion that it was Patrick's own wish to lie at Armagh.
But this was not the only rivalry aroused by the desire of possessing the saint's mortal remains. When in later years a church was founded on the hill beside Diin Lethglasse, and overshadowed the older foundations of the neighbourhood, it was alleged that Patrick was buried in its precincts, and that the church was founded on that account. The story was invented that the angel gave him directions as to the fashion of his sepulture. " Let two untamed oxen be chosen, and left to go where they will." This was done. The oxen, drawing the body in a waggon, rested at Diin Lethglasse, and there it was buried.
It is clear that all these tales must have taken shape at a considerable time after the saint's death. If his burial had actually caused any such commotion as the legends suppose, his tomb would assuredly have been conspicuous or well known, and no doubt could have arisen as to the place where he was laid. There would have been no room for the double claim of Saul and Diin Lethglasse. But so great was the uncertainty that it suggested a resemblance with
Moses, whose grave was unknown. It is recorded, though it is not a record which we can implicitly trust, that St. Columba investigated and discovered the place of Patrick's sepulchre at Saul. These doubts and uncertainties justify us in concluding that Patrick was buried quietly in an unmarked grave, and that the pious excitement about his bones arose long after his death. And we can feel little hesitation in deciding that the obscure grave was at Saul. Of the three places which come into the story, Saul alone needs no mythical support for its claim, a claim in which Armagh itself acquiesces. Legend is called in to explain why the saint was not buried at Armagh; legend is called in to explain why he should be buried at Downpatrick ; no legend is required to account for his burial at Saul.
No visible memorial of Patrick has escaped the chances of time, with one possible exception. In the Middle Ages the church of Armagh cherished with superstitious veneration two treasures which were believed to have belonged to him, a pastoral staff and a hand-bell. The crozier was deliberately destroyed in the war of sixteenth-century zealots against mediaeval superstition, but the four-sided iron hand-bell still exists. Both relics were very ancient, but to say that the bell was certainly Patrick's would be to go beyond our evidence, which only establishes a probability that it existed at Armagh a hundred years or so after his death.
Bury, J. B. The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History, Macmillan and Co., 1905.
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