Join me today to meet the robber bishop of the Isle of Man.
Name: Maughold, Mac Cuill, Macaldus, many other versions
Life: died c. 518 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: April 27
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As everyone knows, the land that is today the Isle of Man was once upon a time an unremarkable chunk in the middle of modern Ireland. And there it would probably have remained, had not an unfriendly giant come to Ireland. This naturally angered Finn McCool, the giant who already lived on the island. So Finn McCool did what giants do, and drove off his rival by scooping up chunks of land and hurling them at him. McCool threw one particular mass of stone and pasture so hard it sailed out toward the island of Britain, plopping into the sea East of Ireland and West of Britain to become the Isle of Man. And even if this story got a few details wrong, the important part was that the Celtic Irish and Manx long felt themselves to be separated brothers, or perhaps cousins.
And so when the great saint, Patrick, came to Ireland bearing the good news of the Gospel, about four hundred years after the death of Christ, it seemed only right that he should do something for the Manx as well. Some stories would spring up about a visit that Saint Patrick made to the island. But an older story suggests that Saint Patrick did not go himself, and the help that he sent to the Isle of Man was more indirect. It is a story involving a robber prince, a miracle, and an act of radical faith.
To tell the story of how Saint Patrick helped the Isle of Man it helps to start with the story of Patrick himself. He had grown up in England. Centuries before, his people had been conquered by Rome, and as a result of that conquest had been drawn into the civilization of the ancient Mediterranean. The English were a Christian people, a civilized people, not like the Irish who still worshipped the old gods and exulted in raiding and enslaving their enemies. The English lived in fear of their raids, and indeed, when Patrick was 16 years old, Irish raiders had come to his village. They took Patrick and many others back to Ireland as slaves.
Patrick was a slave for six years. The experience left him with a sense of his own inadequacy that remained with him for the rest of his life. When other boys his age were finishing their education in Latin and other subjects, Patrick missed out. In his loneliness, Patrick turned to constant prayer. One day he started hearing the voice of God answering. God told Patrick that his time as a slave was coming to an end. There was a ship now setting out from England that would bring him home. Filled with hope, Patrick escaped from his master and headed for the coast. The ship was there, as described. The crew were strangers and pagans, and yet for some reason that no one could quite understand, they welcomed Patrick on board and brought him back to England.
Patrick had finally escaped. It was time to regain what he thought had been taken from him. But as he grew in holiness and took priestly orders and then asked God to show him what he was being called to do, he received a shocking vocation. It came again and again, in dreams and visions. Patrick was being called back to the one place he did not want to go: to Ireland.
It was a strange vocation. Even much later, Patrick often felt obliged to explain it. A surviving letter begins this way:
I am a bishop, appointed by God, in Ireland. Most surely I deem that from God I have received what I am. And so I dwell in the midst of barbarians, a stranger and an exile for the love of God. (Newport J. D. White translation)
Still, Patrick’s second coming to Ireland would be very different from the first. Patrick would arrive quite certain that God was leading him. He faced death threats and assassination attempts. He was arrested but soon set free again. He would meet with kings and nobles. He faced down the druids, so legend had it, on the eve of Beltane, a night of power when the boundaries between the world of mortals and the world of the fae were at their weakest. In the story, the druids conjured snow and frost while Patrick’s prayers brought the warmth of Spring. The druids had called down darkness and Patrick had brought the light. Patrick had emerged victorious, and many more believed. As he traveled the island, thousands heard and believed and were baptized.
Bishop Patrick wandered through this barbarian land, preaching and healing. He came to love the people who had enslaved him. He even came to love their culture, with a soft spot for the songs of the old heroes. And it was as he was passing along the roads in the East of Ireland, near the river Boyne, that Bishop Patrick came into the lands of the robber prince Maughold.
Our sources are unclear about whether Maughold was a prince who devoted his time to raiding, or a raider who was so successful that he had gathered the power of a prince. Whatever the truth of the matter, after a bloody career that had made him rich and powerful, Maughold had a problem. He was losing men. He was losing them to the new religion spreading through the island. And when Maughold looked into who was at the centre of this new faith, he kept hearing one name: Patrick.
Then Maughold heard that Patrick was passing through his territory. Maughold began to make preparations. Plan A was simply to kill Patrick. But the more Maughold thought about it, the more he realized that killing the bishop would not be enough. Before killing Patrick, Maughold wanted to discredit him, to show that his supposed powers were nothing but rumour and the new religion could not help anyone. And so it was that Maughold came up with a two-step plan.
Bishop Patrick came along the road to discover a carefully staged scene. A group of men were standing around a man who was stretched out on the ground, under a sheet. The men called to Patrick and asked him to pray for their dead friend. They said that their friend had recently died, but would Patrick pray for his soul? Or - said another man - could Patrick’s God perhaps even raise their friend from the dead?
Patrick was usually an approachable bishop. Now though he answered that he would not pray for the dead man, and went on down the road.
Of course it had been a trick. There was no dead man. Maughold had told one of his men to lie very still under the sheet and pretend to be dead. If Patrick had prayed to raise him up, the man would have sat up and they all would have laughed at the credulous bishop. Even so, it was a win for Maughold. Bishop Patrick had accepted Maughold’s framing which was that the man under the sheet was dead. Surely a true holy man would have known that he was being tricked. Now that Patrick had been revealed as a fraud, Maughold could go on to the second step of his plan, to hunt down the bishop and kill him.
Pleased at having made his point, Maughold told the man lying under the sheet to get up, the joke was over. But the man remained lying where he was. Someone pulled the sheet off him. Someone tried to shake him awake. Maughold and his men realized to their horror that the man who had been lying under the sheet was dead.
It’s worth pausing a moment here. This story is a trope in the lives of the saints. It has many versions, but the basic structure is that a group of people try to make a fool of a saint. One person pretends to be dead and another one asks for help. The saint seems to fall into the trap, only for it to be revealed that pretence has become reality, and the man who was pretending to be dead has truly died. It is a negative miracle, a warning of the danger of mocking God and the men He sends.
Many of the miracles that occur in the lives of saints are tropes like this. Another trope is the story of abundance. Saints like Saint John the Harvester feed many from a small amount of food. It is a trope that saints foreknow the time of their own deaths. My favourite version of this trope is Saint Columba whose death was deferred, much to his chagrin, and his monks saw the old saint sprinting to the chapel when he knew the time had finally arrived. Another trope is incorruptibility, when a saint’s body does not decay. The widely-acclaimed Sister Wilhemina seems to be incorrupt as of an examination last year.
What should we make of these recurring patterns in the lives of the saints? Secular historians often treat tropes as evidence that a story is made up. The idea is that the repeating patterns show one hagiographer is borrowing a tale from another. The repetition becomes evidence that the story isn’t true. It’s a strange way to think about patterns. In natural science, when a scientist performs an experiment and gets a result, and then a colleague repeats the same experiment and gets the same result, we do not conclude that the second scientist is merely borrowing the conclusions of the first one. If you think that miracles are a perfectly reasonable explanation of how things sometimes happen, these tropes are worth a second look. Perhaps they are the regularities that could form some systematized study of miracles, some science of the saints.
Even so, I have always found the trope of the attempted fooling of a saint leading to the death of one of the would-be foolers difficult to understand. What is the point of it? What are people supposed to learn? That is what makes the story of Maughold so interesting, because for Maughold, the failed attempt to fool Saint Patrick is not the end of Maughold’s story, but only the beginning.
Perhaps the robber prince Maughold had not even allowed himself to consider a scenario where his test failed. But when Maughold realized that the man who was supposed to pretend to be dead was really dead, he saw that his understanding of the situation was completely wrong. Maughold hurried after Bishop Patrick on the road. He admitted what had happened. Now again he asked Patrick, this time sincerely, to come and help the man on the ground. And Patrick turned, and prayed over the dead man, who sat up, alive again.
Bishop Patrick seems to have noticed the change taking place in Maughold, the robber prince. Maybe it was because Maughold would soon face a test of faith not unlike the one that had brought Patrick back to Ireland. Maughold made a long confession, describing the evil he had done and ending with his intention to murder Bishop Patrick on the road. Patrick absolved him and explained to him that there was a path to holiness for him, but it was frightening and unusal. Patrick began to tell the robber prince what would happen next.
Following the instructions of the saint, Maughold told his men that he was leaving. He gave away his possessions and titles, and went to the river where he found a small coracle, a boat made of skins stretched over a wooden frame. Before getting into the coracle, his hands were tied together, or in some versions of the story locked in iron shackles. Maughold tossed the key into the water. The shackles would prevent him from even trying to paddle the coracle. But more importantly they were a symbol of his abandonment of self to the will of God. Saint Patrick’s instructions were simple: pray without ceasing. And that was what Maughold did as the wind took the coracle down the river and out into the open sea.
Soon Ireland was only a distant shoreline to the West. The coracle bobbed along the surface as day turned to night and day came again. In the morning, land was visible to the South. It seemed that the coracle would pass by it. But then the wind changed, and the waves tossed the coracle up on the shore on the far side of what turned out to be the Isle of Man. Today, the place is named after the tied man who was swept to shore there: Maughold.
Maughold’s arrival was witnessed by two Christians who had been trying to evangelize the Isle of Man. We know them by their Latin names, Conindrius and Romulus. They had been asking for help, and in time they realized that the shackled man in the boat had been sent to them for this purpose. In some versions of the story they released Maughold from his shackles immediately. But another version has it that Maughold said his penance would come to an end when the time was right. And when he had grown in holiness, and Conindrius and Romulus were celebrating Maughold’s taking of holy orders to become a priest with a nice fresh fish, the key to the shackles was discovered in the fish’s stomach.
Just as Saint Patrick had won over the strangers of Ireland, so the robber prince Maughold gradually won over the Manx people. In time, Conindrius and Romulus died. By then it was clear that Maughold would lead the Church after them. Sometime around 498, Maughold became the bishop of the Isle of Man.
He would be bishop for the next two decades. Maughold was an energetic leader. Although Maughold was not the first leader of the Manx church, he was often remembered as the first great bishop. Under his leadership the Church would grow so much that he had to divide it into parishes. He would leave his mark with the holy well that still bears the name Maughold’s Well. And long after his crimes had been forgotten, the robber prince who had tried to kill Saint Patrick and been deflected to set off on a strange journey of faith would be remembered by his adopted people as one of the great saints of the Isle of Man.
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