St Brigit of Kildare

Between animism and Christianity lies a spiritual and political zone of subtle liminalities inhabited by men and women whose affinities might have lain with either, or both. There has always been a suspicion that St Brigit of Kildare (c.450–526), a younger contemporary of St Patrick and a deeply revered co-founder of the Irish Church in the fifth century, is a conflation of some real but obscure holy woman and the pagan goddess of the same name whose feast day is 1 February, the spring-heralding Imbolc of the pre-Christian calendar.

As late as the tenth century, the Irish goddess Brig or Brigid was still credited with powers of healing, with skills in smithing and poetry; and in Britain her equivalent, Brigantia, was a supernatural being with similar powers whose name, like the Irish, means the ‘high one’. But there is no reason to doubt the existence of the first abbess of Kildare. It is true that her vita or ‘life’ was not written down before the end of the seventh century, and that its composition places it firmly in a tradition of propagandist rivalry with the churches of Armagh (St Patrick) and Iona (St Columba or Colm Cille). It is true, also, that many of the miracles associated with Brigit are the conventional tropes of sainthood: turning water into ale; healing the blind and the leprous, and so on. And yet she inhabits a tangible and credible Early Medieval landscape populated with realistic characters – the poor and hungry, the infertile, the sick, the ambitious, the greedy – and with people whose names are attested in other reliable sources.

Brigit is said in her vita to have been the daughter of a nobleman called Dubthach and his bondswoman, Broicsech. His legal wife, or cetmuinter, took an understandable exception to her competitor and urged her husband to sell the bondswoman while she was pregnant. A druid had foretold that the baby would be illustrious and ‘shine in the world like a sun’; nevertheless, Dubthach was reluctantly forced to sell Broicsech, and so her baby, born eventually at the court of some unnamed king and queen, was fostered by their chief druid;^π she was also baptised.

We hear much of Brigit’s striking interventions on behalf of the needy. In this tale from the Kildare hagiographer Cogitosus’s Vita, Brigit’s intervention shines a light on the otherwise obscure role of Christian women in midwifery and nursing and hints strongly at a knowledge of abortion techniques:

With a strength of faith most powerful and ineffable, she blessed a woman who, after a vow of virginity, had lapsed through weakness into youthful concupiscence, as a result of which her womb had begun to swell with pregnancy. In consequence, what had been conceived in the womb disappeared and she [Brigit] restored her to health and to penitence without childbirth or pain. And, in accordance with the saying ‘All things are possible to those who believe’, she went on working countless miracles every day without anything ever proving impossible.⁵

The political and social setting for Brigit’s miracles and achievements is striking. Often she is seen to produce food for the hungry in improbable circumstances. She is able to multiply the livestock in her care; to find a source of honey where there was none before. She turns water into ale; milks a single cow three times in one day; tames a wild boar. There is a strong sense that Brigit’s monastery was productive in a time of hardship and hunger; that she became renowned as a provider.

She received her with open arms and a warm welcome, giving thanks to the Almighty for the happy arrival of the most revered Brigit as if she were Christ. Since, on account of her straitened circumstances, she had no fuel to make a fire with or food to feed such guests, she threw into the fire as fuel the wood of the loom on which she used to do the weaving. On this pile of wood, she laid her cow’s calf which she had killed and cooked it with eagerness. When the supper in God’s honour was over, the night was passed in the customary vigils. And when they got up the morning after, our hostess, who had lost her cow’s calf, found with her cow another calf of the same kind, which she loved as much as the previous one, and she beheld the wood of the loom which had likewise been restored for her in place of the other in the same form and quantity as the previous lot had been: hence, she suffered no loss at all as a result of having welcomed and regaled St Brigit.⁶

The following story shows that such feats of productivity might bear political as well as consumable dividends:

At this time St Brigit was a guest at the monastery of St Laisre. Now one day towards evening St Patrick came with a large crowd to put up at that monastery. Thereupon the local community was worried and said to Brigit, ‘What are we going to do? We don’t have food for such a large crowd.’ But Brigit said to them, ‘How much do you have?’ They said to her, ‘All we have is twelve loaves and a little milk and one sheep which we have cooked for you and your folk.’ But Brigit said, ‘These will be enough for the whole lot of us, for the sacred scriptures will be read to us, thanks to which we shall forget about bodily food.’ Whereupon the two groups of people, namely, Patrick’s and Brigit’s, ate together and had their fill and the amount of scraps they had left over was greater than the supplies which St Laisre had offered them in the first place…⁷

So far the tale is conventional.

…St Laisre offered herself and her place to St Brigit in perpetuity.

By such means, early monastic entrepreneurs like Brigit, Patrick and Colm Cille brought smaller, more modest or vulnerable houses into their paruchiae; and the hagiographers of the late seventh and eighth centuries were acutely alert to their duty to record such gifts. Patrick, in his Confessio, writes that many wealthy noblewomen gave him lavish donations but that he always used these for the benefit of the poor and to build the ministry of his church. The many lands and precious gifts made over to Brigit, in gratitude for her patronage and for miracles of healing and generosity, also show how the saints were able to enlarge their earthly holdings, ensuring an everlasting reputation and a place at God’s side.^∆

Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh archdeacon, historian and traveller who visited Ireland in the twelfth century, observed of Kildare that in his day nineteen sisters of Brigit’s community tended an eternal flame in her memory. It burned at a shrine within a hedged enclosure that no man might enter. All that now survives of the church that she founded, and where her remains were buried, is a thirteenth-century watchtower.