Feast and Cult

Patrick’s feast falls on 17 March, the traditional day of his death, and from this dies natalis grew a cult whose institutional heart was the church of Armagh, which built its own primacy upon his name. Around that cult gathered relics, pilgrimage mountains and lakes, and a tradition of burial at Downpatrick — most of it medieval growth that must be distinguished from the fifth-century man and pinned to where it is first attested.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Celtic) / Orthodox reception

The feast: 17 March

Patrick’s feast is kept on 17 March, held by tradition to be the day of his death — his dies natalis, the “birthday” into heaven by which the Church reckons a saint’s principal commemoration. The day is securely attested in the earliest layer of the Irish liturgical record. Both of the great calendars compiled around the year 800 enter Patrick at 17 March: the prose Martyrology of Tallaght (c.800) and the metrical Félire Óengusso (the Martyrology of Óengus, c.800–830), the latter saluting Patrick at his March stanza as the apostle of the Irish (ed. Whitley Stokes, Félire Óengusso Céli Dé, London, 1905). That two independent Irish martyrologies of the same period agree on the date shows the commemoration was already fixed and old by 800; the day itself we can take as genuine tradition, even if the precise year of death (conventionally given as 461 or 493) cannot be recovered (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge, 2000). From these calendars the date passed into the wider Western liturgical books and has held its place to the present day.

Armagh: the institutional heart of the cult

The cult of Patrick was, for the whole of its early history, bound up with the ambitions of one church: Armagh (Ard Mhacha), in the north of Ireland. Armagh claimed to be Patrick’s own foundation and chief see, and on that claim it built a case to be the primatial church of all Ireland. The decisive instruments of this campaign were the seventh-century Lives — the Life by Muirchú and the memoir of Tírechán, both preserved (with associated documents) in the early-ninth-century Book of Armagh (c.807). Tírechán in particular traces Patrick on a circuit of foundations across Ireland, planting the saint’s authority — and so Armagh’s claim of succession — over churches far from Ulster (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000). The abbot-bishop who governed Armagh held the title Comarba Pátraic, the “heir” or “successor of Patrick,” and it was as Patrick’s heir that he asserted jurisdiction. The historical Patrick of the Confessio makes no such claim for Armagh, and indeed never names it; the linkage of Patrick to Armagh and of Armagh to primacy is the work of the later, propagandistic Lives, and it must be read as such rather than as a fifth-century fact (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000).

Relics

Out of this cult came a body of relics whose medieval veneration is well documented, even where their attribution to Patrick himself is traditional rather than demonstrable.

The most famous is the Bell of St Patrick, the Clog an Édachta or “Bell of the Testament,” a plain iron handbell coated in bronze, datable on its own terms to the eighth or ninth century. Around the year 1100 it was given an elaborate shrine — a trapezoidal case of bronze plates faced with silver-gilt and gold filigree in the form of a ringed cross. The shrine’s inscription names its makers and records that it was commissioned by Domnall Ua Lochlainn, king of Ireland (d. 1121), which dates the enshrining to c.1094–1121. Bell and shrine are now in the National Museum of Ireland [Attestation: the bell’s association with Patrick is traditional; the c.1100 shrine and its medieval cult are documented by the object and its inscription]. The making of so costly a shrine is itself evidence of the bell’s standing as a major relic around 1100.

The second of the great relics was the Bachall Ísu, the “Staff of Jesus” — a crozier said in legend to have been given to Patrick by Christ himself. Long kept in the north and at Ballyboughal (Co. Dublin), it was moved to Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin in the later twelfth century, where it became one of the most venerated relics of the medieval Irish church and was used in the swearing of solemn oaths. In 1538, during the Reformation, the staff was stripped of its gold and gems and publicly burned at Skinners’ Row beside Christ Church, by order of the Anglican archbishop George Browne, as an act of deliberate iconoclasm [Attestation: the staff’s attribution to Patrick — and the legend of Christ’s gift — is traditional; its medieval veneration in Dublin and its destruction in 1538 are historically recorded]. Its burning is a vivid marker of the Reformation’s assault on the old cult of saints in Ireland.

Pilgrimage

Two pilgrimage sites carried Patrick’s cult well beyond the liturgy. The first is Croagh Patrick (Cruach Phádraig, Co. Mayo), the conical mountain on whose summit, in Tírechán’s seventh-century account, Patrick kept a forty-day fast in imitation of Moses and Elijah and Christ in the wilderness. On the strength of that tradition the mountain became Ireland’s great pilgrimage peak, climbed — often barefoot — by penitents; the principal pilgrimage day, “Reek Sunday,” falls on the last Sunday of July. The biblical pattern of the forty-day fast belongs to the hagiography, but the pilgrimage it generated is a continuous and documented practice.

The second, and the one that made Patrick famous across medieval Europe, is St Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg (Co. Donegal) — a cave on an island in the lake, entered as a place of penance and purgatorial vision. Its European celebrity rests above all on the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, written c.1180–84 by an English Cistercian, H. of Saltrey, recounting the otherworld journey of the knight Owein through the cave. The Tractatus circulated very widely, was translated into many vernaculars, and drew pilgrims from across Latin Christendom; the site remains an active penitential pilgrimage today. The cave-vision and the purgatorial geography belong to the medieval literary tradition; the pilgrimage itself is one of the longest-running in Europe (Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 2000).

Burial: the Downpatrick tradition

Tradition places Patrick’s grave at Downpatrick (Dún Pádraig, Co. Down), and a stone in the cathedral churchyard there has long been shown as his tomb. To this a further claim attached itself: that the three patron saints of Ireland — Patrick, Brigid, and Columba (Colum Cille) — all lie buried together at Downpatrick. This triple-burial story is bound up with the twelfth-century re-foundation of the see under the Anglo-Norman lord John de Courcy, who reorganised Downpatrick and had an interest in promoting its relics [Disputed: the joint burial of Patrick, Brigid, and Columba at Downpatrick is a late medieval tradition, not a historically established fact; it is best read as part of the cult-promotion of Downpatrick in and after the twelfth century, and the genuine resting place of Patrick is not securely known].

Spread and place in the calendar

From Armagh and the pilgrimage centres the cult spread through dedications — churches, wells, and place-names bearing Patrick’s name across Ireland and, with Irish settlement and influence, into Britain and beyond. Within the liturgical calendar the 17 March feast secured a permanent place, fixed already by the martyrologies of c.800 and carried forward in the Western books. For the great majority of its history this was an Irish and Western cult; its reception into the Orthodox East is a modern development, treated separately in the sibling file and not duplicated here (see The Orthodox Reception).

References

The Martyrology of Tallaght, ed. R. I. Best and H. J. Lawlor (Henry Bradshaw Society, London, 1931); compiled c.800. Enters Patrick at 17 March.
Félire Óengusso Céli Dé / The Martyrology of Óengus the Culdee, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes (Henry Bradshaw Society, London, 1905); compiled c.800–830. Commemorates Patrick at 17 March.
T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) — on Armagh’s primacy claims, the seventh-century Lives, Tírechán and the Book of Armagh, and the cult.
Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, by H. (Henry) of Saltrey, c.1180–84 — the foundational text of St Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg.
National Museum of Ireland, The Bell of St Patrick and its Shrine (Dublin) — the Clog an Édachta (8th–9th c.) and its shrine of c.1100, commissioned by Domnall Ua Lochlainn (d. 1121).
On the Bachall Ísu (Staff of Jesus): its medieval veneration at Christ Church, Dublin, and its public burning in 1538 under Archbishop George Browne (standard accounts of the Reformation in Ireland and of the Christ Church relics).