in search of saint patrick

 

Saint Patrick as an historical figure floruiting circa 430 AD is quite well attested.

We have two pieces of substantial writing from his era which scholars fairly strongly affirm that he actually wrote himself, The Confessio and The Letter To Coroticus, and a third piece of writing which tradition attributes to him, a prayer hymn entitled The Lorica also known as Saint Patrick's Breastplate.

The melody of the Lorica was used by the great 1960s caterwauler Cat Stevens for Morning Has Broken. Not many etymologists know that.

Saint Patrick is known by four names. The one he uses for himself is Patricius. Ancient records show that he was also known as Succetus meaning God of War and Magonus, meaning the famous one. A further name given in the oldest chronicles for Patrick is Cothirtheachus, which is most convincingly explained in my view as a Latinate piece of old Irish for "four houses." Patrick having been a slave in four houses of Druids became known to some among the Irish by the fond epithet Four Houses.

A vogue has sprung up in recent years, particularly on internet publications, claiming without much explanation that Patrick's real name was Maewyn Succat. I doubt it.

The enduring mystery that most whets the investigators appetite today vis a vis Saint Patrick is the identity of his home town in Britain from which the Irish raiders kidnapped him while he was still a teenager.

According to Bishop Joseph Duffy in his 1972 work Patrick In His Own Words, (Veritas publications, republished 2019) Patrick names his home town in his Confessio as Bannaventa Burniae.

Various versions of the Confessio spell the name and divide up the words slightly differently. Benaven Taburniae is a not unknown version.

Scholars have been unable to agree where this might have been.

For centuries it was believed to be Dumbarton on the Clyde. About a hundred years ago, scholars began pushing other possibilities.

My leaning would be towards the older traditions that he came from Dumbarton. Old traditions exist for a reason.

The modern consensus has been that wherever his home town was, it must have been on the west coast of Britain for Irish raiders to reach it so readily.

This reasoning may not be exhaustive.

If the raiders who kidnapped the teenage Patrick from Britain were in fact a party of the High King of Ireland Niall Naoigiallach (Niall of the Nine Hostages) as some traditions maintain, then it might not have been so much a raiding party as a war party and well capable of travelling far inland or even to the eastern coast of Britain where my personal aspirations are to place the great saint.

Historians have identified an ancient town called Bennaventa in Northamptonshire but discounted it as being in the midlands and too remote for coastal attackers to reach.

Among those noting and rejecting the Northamptonshire possibility is Jonathan Rogers is his book Patrick (published by Thomas Nolan Inc 2010.) Rogers renders Patrick's spelling of the location of his home town as Bannaventa Burniae.

To be susceptible to pirates (the pirates I'm suggesting may have been a full war party) Rogers insists the place must have been on the west coast of Britain and notes the high concentration of Roman villas on elevations adjoining the Bristol channel.

Roger argues that since there are now thought to have been a higher concentration of Roman villas near the Bristol channel than anywhere else in Britain, this location as the home town for Saint Patrick is "as good a guess as any."

Certainly by the lifetime of Saint Patrick, Irish raiders had been attacking Roman outposts in Britain for 200 years non stop. We might suspect that after 200 years even at the Bristol channel location, some security measures would have made the pickings less easy to get at.

I am postulating that a full war party from Niall of the Nine Hostages was well capable of sailing a substantial extra distance to get at the rich pickings, less well defended because so inconvenient to attack, on the soft underbelly of eastern Britain.

If I'm right, all bets are off on conventional locations for Benaventa Burniae. (I have reasons for my favoured spelling of the town's name. Stick with me. I'm taking this somewhere.)

Liam De Paor in his book Saint Patrick's World (published by the Four Courts Press in 1993) advocates translating the title of the Confessio as Declaration contending that this is a better translation and captures Saint Patrick's real intent in writing the document. Mr De Paor transliterates the Saint's home town name as Banna Venta Berniae, breaking it up into three words. Opting as per usual acedmic form for the west coast he suggests: "It is probably near Carlisle."

My own disposition had been to search for clues by breaking down the name and to hope that the Benaven particle of the name might have Celtic, Gaelic or Scots Gaelic origins, with ben meaning mountain, and avon meaning river.

Ben Aven Taburniae then might might give us The Tavern Near The River And The Mountain.

Ah.

Wishful thinking.

It's extraordinary what it can do!

Incidentally the county of Avon and its river Avon adjoining the Bristol channel both historically received their name some say from the Irish word abhainn, river.

But my hopes of an Irish derivation for the name of Saint Patrick's homeplace in Britain seem far fetched enough.

Let's stick to something more coherent.

Benaventa still exists in European place names, There's a Benaventa in Portugal. The name is from the Latin. It means welcome.

We might legitimately postulate that Benaventa was in Saint Patrick's time routinely prefixed to certain place names for aesthetic reasons. This is how names develop and are bestowed.

And lo!

In the east of Britain even today, we find the ancestral homeland of my own kinsmen the Berneys in rural Norfolk.

It is a town which from time immemorial has been called simply Berney.

Nowadays the formal name is still Berney but the spelling is more often rendered Barney.

In Latin we get various forms including Burnia in the nominative case and Burniae in the genitive. Burniae would mean "of Berney."

Close to Berney is the townland of Berney Arms, which has been left to the State on the proviso that there will always be a train stop maintained there. Berney Arms thus has a train station but no road access.

I am proposing that Benaventa Burniae is the orginal name of the town of Berney and is best understood as deriving from the Latin for Welcome Of Berney or Berney's Welcome; that Niall of the Nine Hostages and co, having grown bored with attacking Bristol, Carlisle, Dumbarton and the like, and fancying a change of scenery and an easy raid on a relatively undefended outpost, sailed the extra distance all the way to the east coast of Britain and rampaged through Berney's Welcome some years before 430 AD purloining at their leisure any valuables, wenches or Saint Patrick's wandering around that weren't tied down at the time; and that this therefore is the ancestral home not only of my ancestors the Berneys but also of Saint Patrick himself.