Page 61 - Demo

Chapter two 61
and having efected a landing of sorts at ‘Inbhir Deagha, Hy Garrchon’ in the vicinity of present day town of Wicklow, Palladius was repulsed and sailed of in the direction of the Orkneys accompanied by Augustinus and Benedictus; it is told that Sylvester and Solinus managed to slip un-noticed into the countryside and remained in Ireland. Palladius died within the year ‘in the lands of the Britions.’
The ‘story behind the story’ suggests that sometime between 401 and 403A.D., a Roman youth of noble-birth named Magunus Succatus (brave in battle) Patricius was seized along with a number of others from a town on the west coast of Britain and brought as captives to Ireland, “to the Ultimate places of the earth,” as he later wrote, by the raiding High-King, Niall of the Nine Hostages. Tradition maintains that two of the youth’s sisters, Lupita and Darerca, were also taken in the same raid.
Whether the young captive, later consecrated and formally referred to by one of his noble Roman names, Patricius/Patrick, by Pope Celestine, was a native of Wales, Scotland, or France, is a matter of dispute, and his birthplace has long been, and still continues to this day, to be a matter of controversy.
In his Confessio, Patrick mentions Britannia as his country, but much diiculty lies in the identiication of that location, because at the time there was a tribe known as the Brittani inhabiting parts of northern France and it is often maintained that the Britons of Britain came from here-hence the claim of the citizens of Boulougne-sur-Mer that Patrick is one of theirs. While he may have been a native of Roman Britain, and son of Calpurnius, a Chris- tian Deacon, landowner and member of the Decurion (Municipal Council) of the town of Bannavem Taberniae, near the shores of the Severn estuary, and grandson of Potitus, a notable Christian Presbyter or Elder of that place, there can be no doubt however, that Patrick was intimately connected with France, because his mother, Conchessa, was either a sister or niece of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours. (It is also claimed that Abergavenny in Mon- mouthshire, or alternatively, Clannoventa, a Roman station on the coast of Cumberland, may be interpreted as his birthplace)
In any case, tradition maintains that the youth was sold into slavery and purchased by a chieftain in modern county Antrim named Miliucc/Milchu, for whom he herded swine and sheep on the slopes of a mountain named Sliabh Mis/Slemish for six years. Sliabh-Mis -‘the mountain of Mis,’ a woman’s name. Another theory would have us believe that he spent six years as a slave tending sheep in County Mayo and as noted by R.P.C. Hanson in The Life and Writings of the Historical Saint Patrick, “the people of the diocese of Killala can boast that