A Solid World of Light ~ Holy Ireland

by Thomas Cahill

Patrick devoted the last thirty years of his life–from, roughly, his late forties to his late seventies–to his warrior children, that they might "seize the everlasting kingdoms" with all the energy and intensity they had lately devoted to killing and enslaving one another and seizing one another's kingdoms. When he used that phrase in his open letter to the British Christians, he was echoing the mysterious saying of Jesus, which seems almost to have been uttered with the Irish in mind: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away." - In the Gospel story, the passionate, the outsized, the out-of-control have a better shot at seizing heaven than the contained, the calculating, and those of whom this world approves. Patrick, indeed, seems to have been attracted to the same kinds of oddball, off-center personalities that attracted Jesus, and this attraction alone makes him unusual in the history of churchmen. This thirty-year span of Patrick's mission in the middle of the fifth century encompasses a period of change so rapid and extreme that Europe will never see its like again. By 461, the likely year of Patrick's death, the Roman Empire is careening in chaos, barely fifteen away from the death of the last western emperor. The accelerated change is, at this point, so dramatic we should not be surprised that the eyes of historians have been riveted on it or that they have failed to notice a transformation just as dramatic–and even more abrupt–taking place at the empire's periphery. For as the Roman lands went from peace to chaos, the land of Ireland was rushing even more rapidly from chaos to peace.

How did Patrick do it? We have noted already his earthiness and warmth. But these are qualities that make for a lowering of hostility and suspicion; of themselves they do not gain converts among the strong-willed. We can also be sure that the Irish found Patrick admirable according to their own highest standards: his courage–his refusal to be afraid of the ~ would have impressed them immediately; and, as his mission lengthened into years and came to be seen clearly as a lifetime commitment, his steadfast loyalty and supernatural generosity must have moved them deeply. For he had transmuted their pagan virtues of loyalty, courage, and generosity into the Christian equivalents of faith, hope, and charity. But, though this singular display of virtue would have made friends, it would not necessarily have won converts–at least, not among a people as stubborn as the Irish.

Throughout the Roman world, Christianity had accompanied Romanization. Its spread through the empire cannot be understood apart from Romanization. Just as the subject peoples had wanted to be Roman, they came quickly to understand that they wanted to be Christian, too. From the fourth century on, instruction in Christianity could even serve as a shortcut to Romanization, as joining the Episcopalians was til1 recently a shortcut to respectability in America. Once the emperor had conferred on Christianity its position of privilege, most Romans had little difficulty in reading this sign of the times for what it was and grasping that their own best interest lay in church membership. Though it would be cynical and a historical to conclude that conversions to Christianity in late antiquity were made only for the sake of political advancement or social convenience, it would be naive to imagine that Christianity swept the empire only because of its evident spiritual superiority. Certainly, the Christians of the first three centuries, whose adherence to Christianity could easily prove their death warrant, were devout and extraordinary. But from the time of Constantine, the vast majority of Christian converts were fairly superficial people. Despite Augustine's enormous influence on subsequent history, the bland, detached, calculating Ausonius was a far more typical Christian of the late empire than was the earnest bishop of Hippo.

Patrick, unable to offer worldly improvement to prospective converts, had to find a way of connecting his message to their deepest concerns. It was a challenge no one had had to face since the days when Christianity was new and women and slaves had flocked to it as a way of life that raised their status and dignity as human beings. In order to rediscover the amazing connection that Patrick made between the Gospel story and Irish life, we need to delve deeper into the consciousness of the Irish people at this singular hinge in their history.

Their consciousness–and, maybe even more important, their subconscious. For in the dreams of a people, if we can read these aright, lie their most profound fears and their most exalted aspirations. We know something of Irish dreams, for we can piece together their mythology–their collective dreamstory–from the oral tales of the pre-Christian period (such as the Tain) that were subsequently written down and from the artifacts uncovered by archaeologists. Since neither the tales nor the artifacts can offer us a whole mythology–the complete Irish dream cycle–we must read these materials as if they were the fragments of a great papyrus.

It would be understatement to assert that the Irish gods were not the friendliest of figures. Actually, there are few idols that we have retrieved from barrow or bog that would not give a child nightmares and an adult the willies. No smooth skinned, well-proportioned Apollos and Aphrodites here. Archaeological finds at Celtic sites beyond Ireland serve only to underscore the monstrousness of the Celtic pantheon, as do the few appearances of gods in the Tain. When, for instance, the warriors of Connacht bivouac on their way to Cuailuge, the druid Dubthach chants a prophecy while they eat their evening meal. The vision that he conjures up, though deliberately obscure, is of an impending battle, one that will end with "man's meat everywhere"–a phrase that can hardly have improved the digestion of the troops. As they sleep, the war goddess "Nemain assailed them. They had no peace that night, with their sleep broken by Dubthach's brute outcry. Groups of them started up, and many of the army remained troubled until Medb came and calmed them."

Medb is herself a kind of goddess. Her name is a cognate of the English word mead and may be found as a root in many Indo-European languages, meaning something like "she who intoxicates"–which was probably how she reduced the troops to slumber. Insensate drunkenness was the warrior's customary prelude to sleep.

On the night before the last battle between Connacht and Ulster, a sinister shape-changing goddess called the Morrigan spoke "in the half light between the two camps," describing in gory detail all the horrors of the morrow. That night two war goddesses, Nemain and Badb, "called out to the men of Ireland near the field at Gairech and Irgairech, and a hundred warriors died of fright. It was a bad night for them," concludes the storyteller with compact understatement.

So, an obscure prophecy could banish sleep that only excessive drink could restore, and a dim flickering in the twilight or a cry in the night could kill a hundred men. 13eneath the bravado of this warrior society, constantly brandishing its flesh destroying weapons, rumbles a quaking fear so acute that it can kill. The conscious indifference to death that is a hallmark of all the heroes ofthe Tain masks a subconscious fear of death that no public rhetoric can erase.

Patrick held out to these warrior children, in his own person, a living alternative. It is possible to be brave–to expect "every day . . . to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved–whatever may come my way"–and yet be a man of peace and at peace, a man without sword or desire to harm, a man in whom the sharp fear of death has been smoothed away. He was "not afraid of any of these things, because of the promises of heaven; for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty." Patrick's peace was no sham: it issued from his person like a fragrance. And in a damp land where people lived and slept in close proximity, everyone would have known sooner or later if Patrick's sleep was brought on by the goddess of intoxication or broken by the goddesses of fear. Patrick slept soundly and soberly.

Just as there was in the Irish psyche a cleft between conscious bravery and unconscious fear, so we can also discern other conscious-subconscious dualities that give us excellent clues to the true temper of this race of seemingly carefree warriors. In virtually all the Irish tales, for instance, we come upon the Celtic phenomenon of shape-shifting, an effect that the Irish seem to have taken for granted as we take for granted molecular structures: this was simply the way the world was. Shape-shifting was the ability of a being to turn itself into something else, and it went far beyond the metamorphosis of the warp-spasm. We have already seen a splendid example of shape-shifting in Ambairghin's foundation lyric: he is first an estuary, then a wave, then the pounding of the sea, then an ox, then a hawk, and so on. And though a contemporary reader might take all this as metaphor, the Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters. In The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living, the wizard Tuan Mac Cairill, celebrates his protean life:

A hawk to-day, a boar yesterday,

Wonderful instability! . . .

Among herds of boars I was,

Though to-day I am among bird-flocks;

I know what will come of it:

I shall still be in another shape!

But however wonderful this instability may have seemed to the conscious Irish imagination, it had its dark side as well, for it suggested subconsciously that reality had no predictable pattern, but was arbitrary and insubstantial. There is within this worldview a terrifying personal implication: that I myself have no fixed identity but am, like the rest of reality, essentially fluid –essentially inessential. Of course, the Irish had no way of expressing such ideas directly. One needs a sense of identity before one can complain of its absence. But this wonderful and terrifying instability haunts virtually every sentence of the ancient literature.

Allied to their experience of reality's fluidity is their understanding that the world is full of hidden traps, as if it were a forest filled with concealed pitfalls by which hunter-gods catch small animals. In another story, The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, the hero Conaire, whose bird-man father was a shapeshifter, is warned against hunting birds by a bird who changes into a man and announces that he is "Nemglan, king of your father's birds." Nemglan tells Conaire that he must go to Tara, for he is to be high king, but that during his reign birds shall be privileged, and this shall be your observance always: you shall not pass Tara on your right hand and Bregia on your left; you shall not hunt the crooked beasts of Cerna; and you shall not stay abroad from Tara for nine nights; and you shall not spend the night in a house from which firelight is visible outside after sunset and into which one can see from outside; and three red-haired men shall not go before you into a red-haired man's house; and plunder shall not be taken during your reign; the visit of one woman shall not come into your house after sunset; and you shall not settle a quarrel between two of your subjects.

In short, Conaire's reign is doomed, for there is no way he can successfully respect all these taboos. Indeed, hostile powers trigger the violation of each taboo in turn, thus precipitating Conaire's inevitable downfall.

There is not a hero in ancient Irish literature who does not fall prey to some taboo or another–geis, the Irish called it (gessa in the plural), a word that may perhaps be translated as "observance." We are familiar with such Iron Age observances from the land mines and booby traps of the Greek myths: Achilles's heel, his one bit of vulnerability, is what proves fatal to him; Oedipus's prophesied fate–that he will murder his father and sleep with his mother–turns out to be inescapable, though he
does everything he can to avoid it. But in the Irish stories the traps seem to lie hidden at every crossroads, and trickster-gods lurk behind each tree. In such a world, where no one can hope to avoid disaster for long, the boy Cuchulainn's choice of a short life and eternal fame makes perfect sense. Once more, the cold-eyed truth in the face of the Dying Gaul appears before us.

Patrick could put himself–imaginatively–in the position of the Irish. To him, no less than to them, the world is full of magic. One can invoke the elements–the lights of heaven, the waves of the sea, the birds and the animals–and these will come to one's aid, as in the incantation of the "Breastplate." The difference between Patrick's magic and the magic of the druids is that in Patrick's world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success. And though that success is of an ultimate kind– and, therefore, does not preclude suffering–all nature, indeed the whole of the created universe, conspires to mankind's good, teaching, succoring, and saving.

Patrick could speak convincingly of these things. He could assure you that all suffering, however dull and desperate, would come to its conclusion and would show itself to have been worthwhile. He could insist that, in the end, you too would hear the words "Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home. Look, your ship is ready." He could speak believably of the superabundance of a God who in response to humble prayer feeds his lost and wandering people with heavenly manna–and a crew of lost and starving sailors with a herd of very earthly pigs. For Patrick, as for the nineteenth-century mystical poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also deeply influenced by Celtic sensibility,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil--.

Just as do the cunning little birds and charmingly complicated animals of Celtic metalwork.

The key to Patrick's confidence–and it is the sort of ringing, rock-solid confidence on which a civilization may be built, an unmuffled confidence not heard since the Golden Ages of Greece and Rome–is in his reliance on "the Creator of Creation," the phrase with which the "Breastplate" opens and closes. Our Father in heaven, having created all things, even things that have since become bent or gone bad, will deliver us, his children, from all evil. But our Father is not only in faraway heaven, but lives among us. For he created everything by his Word, which was with him in the beginning, which became flesh in the human Jesus, and flames out in all his creatures:

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

His body gleams amid eternal snows,

His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice–and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words

All pathways by his feet are worn,

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,

His cross is every tree.

This magical world, though full of adventure and surprise, is no longer full of dread. Rather, Christ has trodden all pathways before us, and at every crossroads and by every tree the Word of God speaks out. We have only to be quiet and listen, as Patrick learned to do during the silence of his "novitiate" as a shepherd on the slopes of Sliabh Mis.

This sense of the world as holy, as the Book of God–as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages–could never have risen out of Greco-Roman civilization, threaded with the profound pessimism of the ancients and their Platonic suspicion of the body as unholy and the world as devoid of meaning. Even Augustine, whose synthesis of pagan and Christian attitudes is the most remarkable philosophical creation of Christianity's first five centuries, can come nowhere near Patrick's originality. True, Augustine's theories on sin will haunt the Middle Ages, and cast their shadows still. But from the celebratory spirit of the "Breastplate" will spring the characteristic art and poetry of the western world–the immense symbolic power of the medieval liturgy, the smiling angels of Gothic art, the laughable demons, the sweetness of poets like Francis of Assisi (whose "Canticle of the Sun" could almost be mistaken for a Celtic poem), Dante (who spoke of "the love that moves the sun and the other stars"), and Chaucer (whose "Creatour of every creature" is almost a line from the "Breastplate"). Nor did this spirit die at the close of the Middle Ages. For it remains a continuing tradition in British and Irish poetry that takes us down to the present–from the gentle visions of George Herbert and Thomas Traherne to the excited ecstasies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the mysticism of Joseph Plunkett–who wrote "I See His Blood upon the Rose" not in the fifth century but in the twentieth2~_to the Christian druidism of Seamus Heaney, who to this day is carving out poems that might stop even Derdriu in her tracks.

In this tradition, there is a trust in the objects of sensory perception, which are seen as signposts from God. But there is also a sensuous reveling in the splendors of the created world, which would have made Roman Christians exceedingly uncomfortable. I think it likely that, had Augustine ever read the "Breastplate," he would have sniffed heresy. Even in Patrick's Confession and Letter, which no one disputes came from his pen, there are emphases and omissions that Augustine would have found unnerving. Where, in Patrick's own story, is there any negative treatment of the temptations of the flesh? Aside from the ambiguous incident in which the sailors offer their nipples to be sucked, the only passages that come anywhere near the subject of sex are Patrick's notice of the "most beautiful" Irish princess, whom he baptizes, and his horror that his female converts have been made into sex slaves by the soldiers of Coroticus. Patrick is as silent about sex as are the Gospels.

It may simply be that Patrick, in his zeal to baptize–to wash clean– Irish imagination, was not as sex obsessed as his continental brethren and felt little need to stress these matters. Before his mission, Irish sexual arrangements were relatively improvisational. Trial "marriages" of one year, multiple partners, and homosexual relations among warriors on campaign were all more or less the order of the day. Despite Patrick's great success in changing the warrior mores of the Irish tribes, their sexual mores altered little. Even the monasteries he established were not especially notable for their rigid devotion to the rule of chastity; and as late as the end of the twelfth century Geraldus Cambrensis reports that the kings of Clan Conaill continue to be inaugurated in the high style of their ancestors–by public copulation with a white mare.

None of this should be surprising if we assume that there were characteristic aspects of Irish culture that Patrick had taken to heart and on which he chose to build his new Christianity. These aspects would have included Irish courage, which he admired greatly, but even more would he have been impressed by the natural mysticism of the Irish, which already told them that the world was holy–al] the world, not just parts of it. It was on this sturdy insight that Patrick choreographed the sacred dance of Irish sacramental life, a sacramentality not limited to the symbolic actions of the church's liturgy but open to the whole created universe. All the world was holy, and so vas all the body.

Patrick's adventures in the Irish dreamworld must have reached their crucial moment when he faced the phenomenon of human sacrifice. All early peoples sacrificed human beings. One has only to remember Agamemnon's sacrifice to angry Artemis of the most beautiful thing he possessed, his daughter Iphigenia. But this was a story of the Greek Iron Age, no more present to the Romanized world into which Patrick was born than public executions are to ours. For us, it is a strain to find any surviving elements of sacrifice–cut flowers, Christmas trees, vigil lights, and the Mass may be the last vestiges–but in the Roman world animal sacrifices were still offered. These were scarcely different from the animal sacrifices we read of in the Jewish scriptures, sacrifices that were still being offered in the temple as Jesus was led to Calvary and the blood of newborn lambs darkened the river that flowed through Jerusalem.

It seems that at some point in the development of every culture, human sacrifice becomes unthinkable, and animals are from then on substituted for human victims. The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis may constitute symbolically just such a turning point in the history of the Jews–when Abraham's God tells him it is no longer required that he sacrifice his only son, but may substitute a ram instead. At all events, the Irish had not reached this point and were still sacrificing human beings to their gods when Patrick began his mission. They sacrificed prisoners of war to the war gods and newborns to the harvest gods. Believing that the human head was the seat of the soul, they displayed proudly the heads of their enemies in their temples and on their palisades; they even hung them from their belts as ornaments, used them as footballs in victory celebrations, and were fond of employing skull tops as ceremonial drinking bowls. They also sculpted heads–both shrunken, decapitated heads and overbearing, impassive godheads–and a favorite motif was the head of a tri-faced god, for three was their magical number, and gods and goddesses often manifested themselves as three.

Why do human beings do these things? The psychological mechanism is not far to find, since there is probably not a reader–even the most convinced atheist–who has not offered from time to time an old-fashioned quid pro quo prayer: if you let me pass this exam, I will return to church; if you make sure my wife doesn't learn of my infidelity, I will give my next bonus to charity. The theology–the view of god–that lies behind these petitions is of an arbitrary trickster, a bad parent who can be coaxed, flattered, and manipulated. If belief in such a god is strong and primitive enough, it is easy to see how it can lead to human sacrifice: Here, take him, not me! The impassive godhead demands someone's blood. Let it not 6e mine! I am not sure that some of our more inexplicable murders–the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, the small child killed by two other children in Liverpool–are not explained best by this prehistoric impulse. Certainly, the most appalling of war crimes, such as those being perpetrated in the bloody tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, are human responses to this subterranean prompting. And if we study the faces of the Celtic gods, we can have no doubt that only blood could satisfy most of them.
But we delude ourselves about the complex history of religious feeling if we think that all sacrifice human included– can be reduced to this base motive. Throughout history, different civilizations have thought very different thoughts–for example, the Greeks thought the cosmos was eternal, whereas we suspect it had a beginning; the Jewish patriarchs never thought of a soul, which was central to Greek thought. But unlike human thought, human feeling–like the human body–has not changed at all. Whatever the Irish felt, we feel. For all the terror of the Celtic cosmos and the bloodthirstiness of the Celtic gods, no human society could hold together for long if it understood sacrifice only along the lines of the savage tribe in King Kong, offering terrified beauties to the Beast.

This caricature is belied by the most direct evidence of human sacrifice that we have found to date–the prehistoric corpses of Tolland Man, Grauballe Man, and Borremose Man, dug out of Danish bogs in the 1950s, and an even more intriguing discovery recently made in a remote English bog. The Danish bodies may be Celtic; the English one–a man discovered in 1984 and dug out of the peat of Lindow Moss, an ancient bog south of Manchester–certainly is, and may even be Irish. These bodies all owe their amazing state of preservation to the chemical properties of the peat, which has leatherized the skin but left it otherwise intact, so that we can see every physical detail–even smile lines around the eyes–just as we could have in life. All the bodies were sacrificed, and all the faces are at peace. In other words, all went willingly, one might almost say happily, to their sacrificial deaths–like Isaac, trusting to the last in the goodness of the sacrificing priest and, even more important, in the goodness of the father god.

	900 Years of the Hospitallers by Victor J. Senior

Our little town of Hospital owes its foundation, name and very existence to the Knights Hospitallers who still survive in Ireland as the ()rder of Malta. They first came here as part of the Norrnan invasion over 800 years ago and today in Hospital, we live amid signs and remnants of their occupation especially the sombre ruins of their oid fortified church, as well as local names such as Castlefarm and Millfarrn, where the outline of their water-mill can still be seen.

In 1999, the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, called of Rhodes, called of Malta (commonly known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malt) celebrated its nonacentenary. It is one of the most interesting survivals of the age of the Crusades.

Associated with it, and mutually recognised by a common declaration of 1987, are four non-Catholic orders of St. John, including the Most Venerable Order of St. John in Britain and the Commonwealth which runs the St. John Ambulance. The five Orders, in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and UK, constitute a maJor international force for good, with approaching half a million volunteers at work throughout the world.

Origins

The decision to choose the nine-hundredth anniversary of the taking of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 as a date to commemorate its foundation is somewhat arguable. The Order actually originated twenty years before the Crusade in a hospital for poor Western pilgrims established around 1080 by the Benedictines. Its autonomous existence was conf~rmed by Pope Paschal II in 1113. There can be no doubt, however that the occupation of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the establishment of Western government there, the explosion of the number of pilgrims from the West reaching the city and the growing prestige of the hospital which cared for them, gives the year 1099 a particular significance. The early Hospitallers, nuns as well as brothers, were committed in a radical way to the service of the "holy poor" and in their care of the poor when they were sick they foreshadowed much of what is done today. They made no distinctions as far as the religion of their patients was concerned. Their enormous 2,000-bed hospital in Jerusalem set very high standards of nursing care. They sent out primitive ambulance teams to bring in those who were too ill to admit themselves. Their surgeons served in a mobile tented hospital that accompanied Christian field armies. They had an "outreach" programme to care for mothers too poor or unwell to look after their babies properly. They ran a major orphanage. Within fifty years of its foundation, however, it had established a military wing and although nursing remained a major task, the brother knights were dominant by the late twelfth century.

Development

The first Grand Master separated the Hospitallers into three classes, the first to consist of gentlemen who were destined to defend the faith and protect the pilgrims; the second of chaplains and priests to supply the church; and the third of serving brothers' who formed the militia of the Order. The reputation of the military brotherhood diffused itself over the then known world and they had seminaries in most of the countries of Europe. The uncompromising nature of their ideal, the benefits of their work and the reputation of their great hospital, generated massive endowments and grants of land throughout Catholic Christendom. These huge estates required an international government apparatus which evolved so early that the Order was the first body to feature all the elements that characterised a true order of the church. It therefore pioneered the structures later employed by the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits. Thus the Order developed into a well-conducted, wealthy and powerful body throughout Europe. It was especially strong in France where it had great influence. In 1066, the Normans invaded England and defeated the British. By 1140, the Order was well established there with the mother house in London and commanderies throughout England and Wales.

The Hospitallers' arrival in Ireland

In Ireland, Dermot MacMurrough was King of Leinster and in 1 166, he lost Dublin to his opponents. He appealed to King Henry II of England for help. Inevitably, the invitation became an invasion, for the Anglo-Normans had long coveted the vast uncultivated open spaces of Ireland. In 1169, the first Normans landed in Waterford.

In the following year, Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare - nicknamed Strongbow arrived with a force of 200 knights and 1,000 men. Strongbow was the Earl of Pembroke and his knights came mainly from Wales.

By l 171, the Cambro-Normans had reconquered Leinster for Dermot and Strongbow was promised the whole of Leinster on Dermot's death. Dermot died in l 171 and Strongbow established himself as Lord of Leinster. This provoked a strong reaction from King Henry II who fearing an independent Norman kingdom on his western seaboard, landed at Waterford in October 1171 at the head of a large army of 500 knights and 4,000 men, with plentiful supplies. Strongbow quickly gave in but he was made Governor of Leinster subject to the King, who reserved unto himself the city and kingdom of Dublin, and all seaports and fortresses throughout Ireland.

In 1175, in the Treaty of Windsor, Henry was recognised as Lord of Ireland by the Irish High Kings and Bishops, and he proceeded to parcel out much of the country to his knights and supporters. There ensued a period of guerilla warfare during which the Normans subdued the Irish but they did not extend their dominance to the whole country.

In all, a total of 23 preceptories (as they were called in Ireland) have been identified and it is on record that in 1212, the Order possessed no less than 129 properties throughout Ireland. With the suppression of the Knights Templar in 1312, they acquired some of their properties as well.

The Preceptory of Hospital (known as Anye)

After the mother house at Kilmainham in Dublin, the Anye (Hospital) preceptory was the most important of the Knights Hospitallers in Ireland. The Knights of Gleann Aine (Knockainey) obtained royal privileges in 1215, so obviously the preceptory had been established before this date. Our ruined church was built about this time. Preceptories were used as recruiting and training centres and were built as fortified manor houses or castles rather than monasteries. They contained all the appurtenances necessary for the smooth running of the community, including castles, hospitals, farms, houses, villages, mills, weirs and fisheries. The establishments kept an open house, with hospitality to travellers and pilgrims.

There was a Leper Hospital in Hospital in 1467. There is evidence to show that the Hospitallers acted as rectors in local churches in the Diocese of Emly; for example, in Ballylanders; the old church was known as Spittle Church and the name is still found in the area.

The Normans were always anxious to make a profit from the exploitation of their lands and also to create an efficient marketing system for their produce. They sited their communities in areas where fertile land could be developed to its full potential, often near an existing population centre with economic possibilities, normally one of the larger ecclesiastical settlements of pre-Norman times - in the case of Hospital, near Limerick, Emly and Kilmallock. Trade was important and their agricultural system was highly developed. The port of Limerick was used for exports and imports to and from Europe.

In the ensuing years, Irelarid was relatively prosperous and the Hospitallers flourished; but the end was in sight.

The Dissolution

In 1536, Parliament met in Dublin and decreed that henceforth, King Henry VIII of England was to be the Supreme Head of the Church in Ireland and amid other provisos, authorised the Dissolution of various religious houses in Ireland; but not at this stage the preceptories of the Hosptiallers. The monasteries concerned were given the choice either to surrender their estates and possessions forthwith, in which case, they would be granted pensions for life; if not, the houses were to be forcibly taken from them. The announcement concerning the suppression of Hospitallers was delayed until 1540. In Hospital, the preceptor was Aenas O'Heffernan. He is described as an "absentee" preceptor and one of the very few Gaelic members of the Order. He surrendered the preceptory without argument on 30'h June 1541 and received a personal pension of £2811618 per year. Thus ended the presence of the Knights Hospitallers in Hospital although the name stuck. There is no reason to doubt that the existing ruin is from the original church although it was renovated in the 1 7th century. But this was not to be the end of the Order in Ireland, for as we shall see, some 400 years later, they were to return as the Order of Malta.

Around the Mediterranean

In the Mediterranean area, until the late eighteenth century, the Hospitallers were known primarily for their role as members of a military order, maintaining and garrisoning great castles in the Levant, collaborating, and sometimes quarelling with the Templars (until their suppression in 1312) and the Teutonic Knights (whose order also still survives), and later running warlike little theocracies on Rhodes and Malta; it was its government of Malta which led to its recognition as a sovereign entity. Although damaged by the Reformation in northern Europe, the Order continued to fulfil a quasi-crusading role, particularly as a naval power until Malta fell to Napoleon in 1798.

What the Turks and Arabs failed to achieve, Napoleon Bonaparte of France succeeded in doing without demur. Engaged in a campaign against Egypt, his troops occupied the island of Malta and drove out the Hospitallers. Thus, after 268 years in Malta, the knights found themselves without a home. The Order re-established itself in Rome in 1834 where the headquarters has remained to this day in a building known as Palazzo Malta - Malta Palace.

In 1998, however, the Order returned in triumph to Malta, when the Maltese government granted a 99-year lease on Fort St. Angelo, the scene of a great victory in 1565 over the Turks, which stemmed the tide of Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean. The Order exercises Sovereign rights at Fort St. Angelo which thus becomes an "autonomous territory". Over 1000 senior members of the Order in full regalia, attended a handover ceremony in December 1998 and later celebrated Mass in the 16th century cathedral of St. John.
Renaissance

After their expulsion from Malta there followed nearly a half-century of chaos and demoralisation and with crusading out-of-date, one might have expected an institution such as this to have gone into terminal decline. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, however, one of the most remarkable governments the Order ever had, renounced its military function and readopted the care of the sick as a prime activity. The provincial structure was rebuilt on a new basis and sovereignty was preserved. The Order dedicated itself to providing assistance in the hospitaller, charitable and social field in the widest possible meaning of the words.

Projects managed today include a maternity hospital in Bethlehem, hospitals in France, Italy and Latin America, Ambulance Corps in eight countries and clinics, orphanages and health centres around the world.

According to an official pamphlet, present day activities can be summarised as follows:

a) Organisation and management of hospitals in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America with particular attention being given to helping the victims of tropical diseases and leprosy; also to maintenance of research clinics.

b) Assistance to the wounded and injured in times of peace and war including the organisation and administration of an Ambulance Corps in eight countries including Ireland.

c) Assistance to refugees, the poor, and those in need.

d) Organisation and conducting pilgrimages to such places as the Holy Land, Lourdes, Fatima, etc.

Today

As with any true religious order, the nucleus of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta nowadays is provided by fully professed brothers. Although they are relatively few about forty- they have the support of some 10,000 lay men and women, who are made knights and dames in various categories by the Grand Master by virtue of his sovereignty.

The Order is recognised as a sovereign entity by nearly seventy countries, with whom it exchanges ambassadors. It is represented, sometimes with observer status, on many international organisations, including the United Nations. Mobilising many thousands of volunteers, it is engaged in hospitaller work on every continent and in organising large-scale pilgrimages, especially to Lourdes. Spectacular efforts have been directed towards the Balkans in recent years.

United Kingdom and the Commonwealth

In 1827, the English Langue (Branch) was restored but on an Anglican basis and this was never accepted by the Grand Master in Rome. However, it did form the St. John Ambulance Brigade and was formally recognised as an Order of Chivalry by Queen Victoria in 1~82~. Now known as the Most Venerable Order of St. John, it maintains an ophthalrnic hospital ID Jerusalem lt has 30,000 ~nembers worldwide' and the St. John Ambulance has over 200,000 volunteers in some forty countries.

In 1875, the British Association of the Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta was founded. The territory covered would have included Ireland. Today, with some 250 members - male and female, its activities include support to the great Catholic hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London, the provision of almhouses and residential homes, help with refugees, medical aid to war-stricken areas, pilgrimages to Lourdes, etc.

Ireland

In Ireland, from the time of the Dissolution, the Order ceased to exist. In the 1930's however, some knights in Ireland sought approval to establish an Irish Association. This was granted and the first meeting was held in October 1934. Since then, the Irish Association has prospered. Its great work, the Order of Malta Ambulance Corps was first mentioned in December 1937 and the first unit of the Corps was established in Galway in 1938.

The Ambulance Corps who wear the Maltese Cross on their uniform now number 4,000 personnel with l00 ambulances. This is not the Association's only charitable function. It has a workshop for the disabled, a luncheon club for the old and lonely, Meals on Wheels, day centres and the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes for 50 ill and disabled pilgrims.

The Future

The Order's survival demonstrates the importance of adaptability, it now has the potential to become one of the most modern-looking of the Catholic religious institutions, engaged in active works of charity, being run, as it always has been, by lay brothers rather than by priests, enjoying the support of thousands of lay men and women and having in its relationship with the non-Catholic orders of St. John a truly ecumenical dimension for the new millenium.

Locally, with the opening of the magnificent new school in September 1999, Hospital has become once again an important centre of learning and knowledge in the area. Tradition lives on but enormous articulated trucks and tankers thunder past the fields where once the Hospitallers grazed their horses and the old church is floodlit every night.

Bibliography

The author of this article is indebted to Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, a member of the British Association, for permission to use some of his material. Published in l 999' Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith's highly illustrated book, Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John is available from the Museum of the Order of St. John, St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, London. EClM 4DA.

Vic Sernior, Castlefarm, Hospital, Co. Limerick

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