Saint Patrick & Names along the Antonine wall

[Nathan Ross]

Bede clearly thought there were persecutions against the Christians in Britain.

Of course he did - by his day, every self-respecting churchman needed a list of martyrs from right on his doorstep!

But Bede was living in the 8th century. The persecutions were in the early 4th century. Would Christians living at the time not have a better idea what was going on that a man living four hundred years later?

"Constantius... lest he should have seemed to dissent from the injunctions of his superiors, permitted the demolition of churches - mere walls, and capable of being built up again - but he preserved entire that true temple of God, which is the human body". (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, XV)

"[Constantius] ... took not the smallest part in the war against us [i.e. the persecutions], but preserved the pious that were under him unharmed and unabused." (Eusebius, Church History, VII.13)

"Constantius alone, following a course of conduct different from that pursued by his colleagues, entered into the friendship of the Supreme God...They polluted their provinces by the indiscriminate slaughter of godly men and woman; but he kept his soul free from the stain of this crime... and secured to his subjects the privilege of celebrating without hindrance the worship of God." (Eusebius, Vita Constantini, 13)

So no Christians in Britain were martyred, or even molested in the slightest, under the 'Great Persecution', whatever later generations might have believed.

There is no reason to imagine that any Christians were forced to flee to the distant north, or anywhere else.

Any ructions that crept in later between the churches of Britain and Rome were post-Roman developments, and would have been in their infancy at best in Patrick's youth.

your statement saying that Alt Clud is too far from Old Kilpatrick is just rubbish.

I wasn't too bothered about the distance. But your scholiast says that 'Nemthur' was Alt Clud. Alt Clud was supposedly Dumbarton. And Dumbarton, you are saying, was the RC's Subdobiadon.

If Nemthur/Alt Clud/ Subdobiadon are the same place, they cannot also be the same place as Old Kirkpatrick, aka Medio/Nemeton. So Patrick cannot have come from Old Kilpatrick... and the similarity of names is just coincidence.

But perhaps he did come from there after all. On the other hand, the connections could be faulty at any point, and just like Bede and his British martyrs the whole thing could be based on not much!


EDIT - I was just pondering this:

Saint Patrick's grandfather was a priest... So saying Pontius may have left as a result of St.Alban's martyrdom is very credible

If Patrick was 16 in 432, he must have been born in 416. So his father (giving an average generational gap of 30 years) would have been born c.386. His grandfather Potitius would therefore have been born c.356. His unnamed great-grandfather would have been born c.326, and his great-great-grandfather might have been born c.296, and could have been seven years old at the time of the Great Persecution. So Patrick's great-great-great-grandfather might have been 37 at the time of the persecution. This just goes to illustrate what a very long time we are talking about here!