the Sabbath. A little criticism can generally detect where fact ends and fiction begins.

In Joscelyn's Life of S. Patrick we are told that the natives of one place made a pitfall in his way, covered it with rushes and strewed earth over them, hoping to see Patrick fall into the hole over which he would ride. But a girl forewarned the saint, and he escaped the pitfall. Joscelyn goes on to say that in spite of the caution given to him, Patrick rode over it, and the rushes were miraculously stiffened to sustain him. Here is an obvious addition.

Some lepers clamoured to Brigid for beer, as she was a notable brewer. She jestingly replied that she had no liquor to dispose of but her bath-water. The writer of her Life could not leave the anecdote alone, and he tacked on the statement that the water in which she had bathed was miraculously converted into ale. Where the hand of the editor has been so obviously at work, we have deemed it sufficient to tell the tale, omitting his addition, but calling attention to it in a footnote. Where, however, the miraculous is so involved with the historic record as to be inseparable from it, we give the tale as presented in the original.

Certain miracles seem to be commonplaces grafted into the Lives promiscuously. Such is that of the boy carrying fire in the lap of his gabardine from a distance to the monastery, when that at the latter had become extinguished. There may well be a basis for this story. Fire was scarce, and most difficult to kindle from dry sticks. If that on a hearth went out, live coals would be borrowed from the nearest village, and a lad from the abbey would be sent for it. The so-called incense pots found in tumuli of the bronze age were probably nothing else but vessels for the conveyance of live coals, and with such every household would be provided. A boy might well convey fire in such a vessel in the lap of his habit. It would be too hot for him to carry in his hand.

Nor are we disposed entirely to relegate to the region of fiction the tales of dragons that recur with wearisome iteration in the Lives of the Saints. In some cases the dragon is a symbol. When Meven and Samson overcome dragons, this is a figurative way of saying that they obtained the overthrow and destruction of Conmore, Regent of Domnonia. In other cases it may have had a different origin. It may possibly refer to the saint having abolished a pagan human sacrifice by burning victims in wicker-work figures representing monsters. In the legend of SS. Derien and Neventer, we read that the saints found a man drowning himself because the lot had fallen on his only son to be offered to a dragon. He was pulled out of the water, the boy was rescued, and the dragon abolished.

Such sacrifices, we have reason to believe, were annually offered by the non-Aryan natives for the sake of securing a harvest, the ashes being carried off and sprinkled over their fields. Cæsar speaks of human victims enclosed in wicker-work figures and consumed by fire, and there are indications, as Mr. Fraser has shown in The Golden Bough, that this was practised throughout Europe and the East. It has left its traces to this day in Brittany. Wicker-work figures are represented on a cross-shaft at Checkley, Staffordshire. That the form assumed by these cages of woven osiers were that of a mythical monster is not improbable. Cæsar indeed says that in Gaul the shape given to them was that of a man, but this need not have been so invariably.

Or take the story that recurs in so many of the legends of the saints, of the Saint Corentine, or Neot, or Indract, that he had for his supply a fish out of a well, that was miraculously restored to life daily, to serve him as an inexhaustible provision. There were two sources whence this fable sprang, we may suppose. Possibly enough, on the tombstone of the saint was cut the early symbol of the fish. Possibly, also, there may have been cut on it an inscription like that of Abercius of Hierapolis: "Faith led me everywhere, and everywhere she furnished me as nourishment with a fish of the spring, very large, very pure, fished by a holy virgin. She gave it without cessation to be eaten by the friends (i.e. the Brethren). She possesses a delicious wine which she gives along with the bread." This is allegorical. The Fish is the 'Ix0ùs, the symbol of Christ. The Virgin is the Catholic Church, though some have supposed the reference to the Blessed Virgin Mother.

The epitaph of Pectorius of Autun is even more obscure, but it turns on the same theme. "Celestial race of the Divine Fish, fortify thy heart, since thou hast received, amidst mortals, the immortal. source of Divine Water. Friend, rejoice thy soul with the everflowing water of wisdom, which gives treasures. Receive this food, sweet as honey, of the Saviour of saints, eat with delight, holding in thy hand. the Fish." The reference is to the Eucharist, through which Christ, the Divine Fish, communicates Himself to His faithful, born of water to Him. In the case of Abercius we possess his legend, drawn up probably in the sixth century, and it is significant that it is based on the inscription which it misinterprets and has converted into an extravagant and fabulous narrative.

4 Numerous treatises have appeared on the monument of Abercius, of which Mr. Ramsay discovered two fragments. The whole matter is summed up in an article in Cabrol (F.), Dict. d'Archéologie Chrétienne, Paris, 1903, i, pp.16–87.

In a very similar manner may an inscription, or merely the symbol of the Fish, have furnished material for the myth of the fish in the well that recurs in so many saintly legends.

But there was another source. In Irish mythology, and it was doubtless the same in the myths of other Celtic races, the Eo Feasa, or

Salmon of Knowledge," that lived in the "Fountain of Connla," played a part. Over this well grew some hazel trees which dropped their nuts into the well, where they were consumed by the salmon, and the fish became endowed with all the wisdom and knowledge contained in the nuts. In a poem by Tadhig O'Kelly we have this passage:

.

"I am not able to describe their shields

Unless I had eaten the Salmon of Knowledge

I never could have accomplished it."

Aengus Finn, as late as 1400, employs the same expression and applies it to the Virgin Mary, "She is the Salmon of Knowledge, through whom God became Man." 5 Consequently, in Celtic myth, the eating of the mystic fish signified the acquisition of superhuman knowledge.

It is also possible that in some poetical story of the life of the saint the fact of his daily communicating was put figuratively as of his daily partaking of the Fish from the Living Well, the Fish that never died, but was ever present to be partaken of by the faithful. This in process of time would be misunderstood, and give rise to the fable, which agreed singularly with the Celtic symbol.

It may be thought that we have dealt too liberally with the fables that are found in the Lives. But we hold that in a good many cases the fabulous matter is a parasitic growth disfiguring a genuine historic fact, and therefore we have been unwilling to reject them.

Probably, in Roman Britain, there were bishops in the principal towns, as London, Lincoln, York and Caerleon, and the Church was organized in the same manner as in Gaul, each bishop having his see, loosely delimited. The Christianity that entered Britain was almost certainly through the soldiery and the Romano-Gallic merchants and settlers in the towns. But it spread into the country, and the native British accepted the Gospel to some extent.

But when the Wall was abandoned, and there was a rush made south by the refugees to Wales, and when others came flying before the swords of the Saxons and Angles, the whole ecclesiastical frame

5 O'Curry, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, 1873, ii, pp. 143-4; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, 1888, pp. 553-4.

work went to pieces. There were no more sees. Bishops were among those who escaped into Wales or crossed the seas to Armorica and Spanish Gallicia, but they had no longer any territorial jurisdiction. In the desolation and confusion of the times, this was inevitable.

As the Church in Wales began to recover from the shock, it gravitated about new centres, monastic institutions, of which the heads might or might not be bishops. It was so in Ireland after Patrick's time, where no such a thing as a territorial organization was attempted till centuries later; there monasteries were attached to tribes and ministered to their religious requirements. Bishops were retained by the abbots, but they had no jurisdiction, they were subject to abbot or abbess, and were retained for the purpose of conferring orders, and for that alone. It began in this way in Brittany, but there the proximity to and influence of the Gallo-French Church, and the insistence of the Frank kings, rapidly brought the Celtic Church there into the approved shape. Such a tribal organization was in conformity with Celtic ideas, and followed on that which existed in Pagan times. Then there had been the Secular Tribe with its chief at its head, and alongside of it what may be called the Ecclesiastical Tribe, composed of the Bards and Druids.

With the acceptance of Christianity, the saints simply occupied the shells left vacant by the Druids who had disappeared. Among the Celts all authority was gathered into the hands of hereditary chiefs. Of these there were two kinds, the military and the ecclesiastical chief, each occupying separate lands; but the members of the ecclesiastical tribe were bound to render military service to the secular chief; and the ecclesiastical chief on his side was required to provide for the needs of the secular tribe by educating the young of both sexes, and by performing religious ceremonies. Every tenth child, tenth pig, calf, foal, went to the saint, and his tribe was thus recruited. Of S. Patrick we are told :

cum

Fecit ergo totam insulam in funiculo distributionis divisam omnibus incolis utriusque sexus decimari omneque decimum caput tam in hominibus, quam in pecoribus in partem Domini jussit sequestrari. Omnes ergo mares monachos, fæminas sanctimoniales efficiens; numerosa monasteria ædificavit, decimamque portionem terrarum, ac pecudum, eorum sustentationi assignavit. Infra brevi igitur temporis spatium nulla eremus, nullus pene terræ angulus aut locus in insula fuit tam remotus, qui perfectis monachis aut monialibus non repleretur."

In certain cases an even more liberal grant was made to the Church, as in Leinster, where, as the Colloquy of the Ancients informs us,

6 Vita S. Patricii, Acta SS. Boll. Mart., ii, c. 17.

"the province dedicated to the saint a third of their children, and a third of their wealth." 7

There was an economic reason which compelled the Celts to establish great congregations of celibates. Neither in Ireland nor in Wales was the land sufficiently fertile, and the cultivatable land sufficiently extensive to maintain the growing population.

When no new lands were available for colonization, when the three field system was the sole method of agriculture known, then the land. which would support at least three families now would then maintain but one. To keep the equipoise there were but migration, war, and compulsory celibacy as alternatives. And we must remember that multitudes of refugees were pressing into Wales from North and East, far more than that mountainous land could sustain.

A story is told in the preface to the Hymn of S. Colman that shows how serious the problem was even with the aid of the compulsory celibacy of the monasteries. In 657 the population in Ireland had so increased, that the arable land proved insufficient for the needs of the country; accordingly an assembly of clergy and laity was summoned by Diarmidh and Blaithmac, Kings of Ireland, to take counsel. It was decided that the amount of land held by any one person should be restricted from the usual allowance of nine ridges of plough land, nine of bog, nine of pasture, and nine of forest; and further the elders of the assembly directed that prayers should be offered to the Almighty to send a pestilence "to reduce the number of the lower class, that the rest might live in comfort." S. Fechin of Fore, on being consulted, approved of this extraordinary petition, and the prayer was answered by the sending of the Yellow Plague; but the vengeance of God caused the force of the pestilence to fall on the nobles and clergy, of whom multitudes, including the kings and Fechin of Fore himself, were carried off.8

On the Steppes of Tartary, where also the amount of land that can. be placed under cultivation is limited, for the purpose of keeping down the population, great Buddhist monasteries have been established, and the children are set apart from infancy, by their parents, to become Lamas.

The duties of the saint were to instruct the young of the tribe, to provide for the religious services required, and to curse the enemies of the head of the Secular Tribe. The institution of schools for the young was certainly much older than Christianity in Britain and Ireland. We know from classic authorities, as

7 Silva Gadelica, Lond. 1892, ii, p. 218.

8 O'Donovan, Annals of the Four Masters, 1851, i, p. 131.