Inishbofin and Mayo of the Saxons

Bede closes the story of Colmán with a coda set in Ireland (HE IV.4): the bishop who had withdrawn from Lindisfarne founded a monastery on the island of Inishbofin off the coast of Connacht for both his Irish and his English monks; but a quarrel arose — in summer the Irish would go off wandering and leave the English to bring in the harvest — so Colmán founded a separate mainland house for the English at Mag Éo, “Mayo of the Saxons,” which Bede says had in his own day become a large and well-ordered monastery of English monks living by the labour of their own hands and keeping the catholic Easter. This file tells the story as Bede gives it, with its slightly comic ethnographic edge, and flags the disputed details.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)

The Foundation on Inishbofin

When Colmán reached Ireland with his mixed company of Irish and English monks, he sought a place to plant a monastery and found it on a small island off the western coast. Bede records that “he came to a certain small island which is called Inisboufinde in the Irish tongue, that is, the island of the white heifer,” and there built a monastery and settled his monks (Bede, HE IV.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The island is Inishbofin (Irish Inis Bó Finne, “island of the white cow/heifer”), lying off the coast of Connacht near the boundary of what would later be Galway and Mayo; Bede’s gloss on the name shows that the etymology was carried to him with the story (Bede, HE IV.4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318). Here, around the later 660s, Colmán established the community of both nations that he had brought out of Northumbria, the Irish brethren and the some-thirty English monks together (Bede, HE IV.4; on the company, see Departure to Iona and Ireland).

The date of the Inishbofin foundation, like the rest of Colmán’s Irish chronology, is not fixed precisely by Bede, who gives the episode as a retrospective notice rather than under a year. It is placed in the years soon after the withdrawal on the strength of the Irish annals, which notice Colmán and his foundations in this period [Disputed: Bede (*HE* IV.4) supplies no date for the Inishbofin foundation; it is assigned to c. 667–668 from the *Annals of Ulster*, which record the foundation of Mayo and notices of Colmán under the years 667/668 and his death under 675/676 (Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill 1983; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318), so the island foundation is dated by inference from the annalistic record rather than from Bede]. What Bede establishes is the character of the place: a single community of Irish and English monks, gathered under the bishop who had given up Lindisfarne rather than abandon the observance they shared, now keeping that observance together on an Irish island (Bede, HE IV.4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318).

That the two nations were settled together is the premise on which the rest of the story turns, and it is worth dwelling on. The English monks at Inishbofin were not casual companions but men who had followed their teacher into a foreign country rather than conform; the Irish monks were Colmán’s own people, returned home. The experiment of housing both under one rule, on one small island, is what produces the quarrel Bede goes on to relate — and the quarrel, in turn, is what gives rise to the foundation for which Colmán is best remembered in Ireland (Bede, HE IV.4; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318).

The Quarrel Over the Harvest

Bede’s account of what went wrong has a frankness and a faint comedy that mark it off from the rest of his solemn narrative. The two nations, he says, could not live peaceably together, “because the Irish, in the summer season when the harvest had to be gathered in, left the monastery and wandered about, scattering into various places with which they were familiar; then, when winter came, they returned and expected to have a share in the things which the English had provided” (Bede, HE IV.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The grievance is plain and practical: the Irish monks, in the season of work, dispersed to roam the country they knew, leaving the English to do the labour of the harvest; and then in winter the Irish came back and looked to share equally in the stores the English had laid up by their own toil. The English thought this unjust, and the community could not hold (Bede, HE IV.4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318).

The anecdote carries an unmistakable ethnographic edge, and it should be received with that in mind. Bede is an English monk writing for an English audience, and the picture he paints — industrious, settled English brethren over against Irish monks who wander off in summer and return to claim a share of the winter’s stores — flatters his own nation at the expense of the other in a way that fits the broader habit of his History (Bede, HE IV.4; Stancliffe 2014, 53–63; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113). Whether the quarrel happened as Bede describes it, or in just this shape, cannot be confirmed from any independent source, and the harvest-anecdote has the look of an etiological tale told to explain why there came to be two houses rather than one [Disputed: the harvest-quarrel between the Irish and English monks is reported only by Bede (*HE* IV.4) and serves, in his narrative, to explain the foundation of a separate English house; no Irish source corroborates the anecdote, and its ethnographic colouring — settled English against wandering Irish — reflects Bede's English standpoint, so its historicity in detail is uncertain even if the fact of a split between the two communities is accepted (cf. Stancliffe 2014, 53–63; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318)]. The kernel that the scholarship is willing to grant is the division itself: that the mixed community on Inishbofin did not endure, and that the Irish and English came to be housed apart (Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113).

It is also fair to Bede to note that he reports the quarrel without venom, as a difference of custom and temperament rather than of virtue, and that he goes on to record the English monastery that resulted with evident admiration. The story is told at the expense of neither sanctity nor charity; it explains a parting, and the parting is amicable in Bede’s telling — Colmán’s own solution, not a rupture forced on him (Bede, HE IV.4; Stancliffe 2014, 53–63).

Mayo of the Saxons

Colmán’s response to the quarrel was not to expel either party but to found a second house. Bede records that Colmán, “seeking a remedy for this dissension, travelled about far and near and found a place suitable for building a monastery on the mainland,” where he bought land and established a monastery for the English monks, leaving the Irish on Inishbofin (Bede, HE IV.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The mainland house was on the plain of Mayo: its name, Bede tells us, is Mag Éo — preserved in Irish as the place-name from which the modern county takes its name — and it became known as Mayo of the Saxons, “Mayo of the English,” the monastery of the English monks in Ireland (Bede, HE IV.4; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318; on the Irish-language form, see The Irish Record). The foundation gave the English brethren who had followed Colmán out of Northumbria a permanent home of their own, on Irish soil, where they could keep their common life without the friction that had broken the island community.

Bede’s interest in Mayo, however, is not chiefly antiquarian; it is that the place had, by his own day, become something he could hold up as an exemplary monastery — and, crucially, one that kept the catholic Easter. He writes that Mayo “is still occupied by English monks. It is the monastery which, grown large from those small beginnings, is commonly called Muig éo; and as all its inhabitants have long since adopted a better rule, it contains a remarkable company of monks who have gathered there from England and who live by the labour of their own hands after the example of the venerable fathers, under a rule and a canonical abbot, in great continence and sincerity” (Bede, HE IV.4; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Three things in this notice carry Bede’s point. The monastery had grown large; it lived by the labour of its own hands under a regular rule and a properly constituted abbot; and — the phrase “a better rule” and “long since adopted” signal it — the community had abandoned the Insular observance for which Colmán had left Lindisfarne and now kept the catholic Easter (Bede, HE IV.4; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318).

There is a quiet irony in this that Bede surely intends. The English monastery Colmán planted to preserve his followers became, within a couple of generations, a house keeping the very Easter Colmán had resigned his see to refuse — so that the lasting English foundation of the man who would not conform was itself, in the end, a conforming house (Bede, HE IV.4; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113; Stancliffe 2014, 53–63). Bede records this not as a reproach to Colmán but as the vindication of the catholic order: even Colmán’s own English foundation came at last to the unity Bede prized. The detail of when and how Mayo adopted the Roman Easter Bede does not give; he says only that it had done so “long since” before his time of writing [Disputed: Bede (*HE* IV.4) reports that Mayo had adopted the "better rule" and the catholic Easter "long since" by his day (the early eighth century) but gives neither a date nor the circumstances; the transition is therefore datable only loosely to the late seventh or early eighth century, in the period when the southern Irish and then Iona itself conformed (cf. Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318, 391–415)]. What Bede affirms securely is the standing of Mayo in his own time: a flourishing English monastery in Ireland, ordered and continent, living by its own labour, in communion of observance with the wider Church.

The Death of Colmán and the Memory of Mayo

Bede does not narrate Colmán’s death, and for it we depend on the Irish record, which preserves the bishop where Bede’s English story leaves him. The Annals of Ulster enter the death of Colmán, late bishop of Lindisfarne and founder of the Irish houses, under the year 675/676 — the notice that gives us the only firm point at the close of his life [Disputed: the *Annals of Ulster* record Colmán's death under 675 (= 676 in the corrected reckoning), naming him as bishop and as the founder of his Irish monastery; the year is secure within the annalistic system but its synchronization with Bede's chronology is approximate, and the day is not preserved (Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill 1983, sub anno 675; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318)]. With that entry the man who had led the Lindisfarne mission, argued the Insular Easter at Whitby, and carried the bones of Aidan into exile passes out of the record, in Ireland, as a founder and a bishop honoured among his own people (Bede, HE IV.4; Annals of Ulster, sub anno 675; Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318; on the wider Irish testimony, see The Irish Record).

The memory of Mayo, however, outlived Colmán by centuries and is itself a witness to the importance of his foundation. “Mayo of the Saxons” continued as an English-associated monastery and later a bishopric, remembered in the Irish annals and known on the Continent — Alcuin, a century after Colmán, corresponded with the community as a house of note — so that the small mainland refuge Colmán built for thirty quarrelling English harvesters became one of the lasting institutions of the Irish church (Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318; Mayr-Harting 1991, 110–113) [Disputed: the later history of Mayo — its continuation as an English-associated house, Alcuin's eighth-century correspondence with it, and its survival as a bishopric — is attested in the Irish annals and Carolingian letters rather than in Bede, who closes his notice in his own day (*HE* IV.4); the continuity is well evidenced but its details lie beyond Bede's account and are drawn from the later record (cf. Charles-Edwards 2000, 312–318)]. This is the coda Bede meant to leave: not the defeat of Colmán but the fruitfulness of his exile — an Irish house and an English house, both planted by the bishop who would not conform, the one keeping his memory among the Irish and the other grown into a great monastery of the English in Ireland.

It bears repeating, in closing, that the whole of this episode unfolds within the single undivided Church of the seventh century, and that the “adoption of the catholic Easter” at Mayo is a matter of calendar and discipline, not of faith or communion. Colmán and his monks, the Irish on Inishbofin and the English at Mayo, the conforming and the unconforming alike, confessed one creed and held one communion; the parting of the two nations and the later conformity of Mayo are episodes within that unity, not between divided churches (Corning 2006, 1–18; Charles-Edwards 2000, 391–415; on the undivided Church, see The Pre-Schism Church). To read Mayo’s later Easter as a “submission to Rome” against an “Orthodox” Colmán would import a much later rupture into a seventh-century story; what Bede records is brethren of one Church settling, over a generation, into a common keeping of the feast (Corning 2006, 6–10; see The Paschal Question and the Orthodox Calendar).

References

Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book.chapter; the foundation on Inishbofin, the harvest-quarrel, the founding of Mayo, and the state of Mayo in Bede’s own day, all at IV.4.)
The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131). Ed. and trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983. (Cited by annal-year; the foundation of Mayo and the death of Colmán under 675/676.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Irish foundations, the form Mag Éo / Mayo of the Saxons, the chronology of Colmán’s later life, and the later history of the house, esp. 312–318, 391–415.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Colmán’s withdrawal and the Irish foundations, esp. 110–113.)
Corning, Caitlin. The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (The paschal question as a matter of computus within one undivided Church, esp. 1–18.)
Stancliffe, Clare. “Bede and the Britons.” In Bede and the Future, ed. Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, 47–67. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (Bede’s English standpoint and his handling of the Irish in the Mayo episode.)