¹ Saint Patrick: his origins and career. By Hanson, R. P. C.. Pp 209. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1968. £1 10s.Google Scholar

² Incidentally, sancte puer has no place in the vision, for Patrick was too humble a man to have heard himself so addressed. Macalister thought it might be a mis-extension of sancte ptr (Patrici) of a glossator. Another phrase in the passage, quae est prope mare occidentale, is also suspiciously like a gloss which has become embodied in the text, for elsewhere Patrick evinces no interest whatsoever in topography. If it is a gloss, it is evidence of a sixth or seventh century Irish copyist’s belief that the west coast was the scene of his life as a slave, for Bieler dates the source manuscript of those extant to shortly after 600.

³ Quae belefeth dicitur in Ghron. Scot, would point to its not having been understood by the later copyist. Similarly crom (stooped) is given there for cron, obviously a later failure to see the significance of the latter term.

⁴ The A.U. entry under 552 on how Golm Cille found and distributed Patrick’s relics is of course in a totally different category. It is in middle Irish (although the original must have been in early Irish); it is obviously a Columban, not an Armagh, invention and so could not date from earlier than the seventh century; but, above all, it is a hagiographical registering of an accepted state of affairs which had existed for so long that the memory of how it began had been utterly forgotten.

⁵ Mac Neill noted forty years ago that Fith = Vetus. ‘Epscop Fith is the written equivalent in the seventh century of the fifth century appellation Episcopus Vetus’ (‘The earliest lives of St Patrick’ R.S.A.I. Jn., lviii).

⁶ E.g., paragraph 22, if transposed to follow 19, goes on to tell that not only did they find food, but also fire and shelter, until they came across human beings. The moment they did so, they were taken captive (paragraph 21), as might be expected.

The eadem vero nocte of paragraph 20 cannot stand of itself. It must connect with a previous reference to that night. Such previous mention is at the end of paragraph 21, nocte illa sexagésima liberavit me Dominus de manibus eorum.

⁷ For example, the word genetiva in paragraph 42 of the Confession escaped Newport White. Bieler has shown it to mean ‘native-born’. The significance, therefore, of una benedicta Scotta genetiva nobilis pulcherrima adulta is that, to a fifth-century Briton, Scotti and Hiberionaces were not synonymous, but that the Scotti were a ruling class straddling the Irish sea. Pulcherrima and adulta would imply that the lady concerned was of marriageable age and a centre of attraction for suitors. White infers from benedicta that at the time of writing she was dead. She may thus have been one of the first converts of high rank. At any rate, Patrick rejoices at this solitary volunteer from the upper class having chosen a life of dedicated celibacy and goes on to refer to his great success in this regard among ordinary people, including bondswomen. (In the context, de genere nostro surely means christians, as Bieler shows it to mean elsewhere, and not, as it is taken here to signify, Britons).