A New Civilisation How the Celts Saved Britain

The British have traditionally regarded Ireland as a place apart.

A wild, unruly, uncivilised land in need of modernisation and pacification.

But what this British view of history conveniently forgets

is that around 1,500 years ago,

during a period that we used to refer to as The Dark Ages,

the Irish played a very different role.

Back then, it was the Irish that brought civilisation to Britain.

It's an epic story of decline and renewal.

Of how civilisation seemed lost forever.

And of how the most unlikely of places - primitive, backward Ireland,

provided the setting for one of the most profound social and cultural revolutions

that Europe and Britain had ever seen.

At the beginning of the 5th century, the Roman Empire seemed to be at its height.

With its military power and vast wealth,

it had spread culture and learning across the known world.

From the Red Sea to the Atlantic,

from the Middle East to the far reaches of North West Europe, a thousand miles away.

I'm on what is now the English side of the Severn Estuary.

Over there, of course, is Wales.

But 1,600 years ago, when my journey begins,

there was no England, and no Wales.

Instead, all these lands were part of a province of the Roman Empire - Britannia.

More than three centuries of Roman occupation had transformed Britain

from an Iron Age society into a place of roads, towns and technology.

The remains of this Roman villa in Gloucestershire are just a few miles from the Severn Estuary.

It speaks of the comfort and luxury that Rome had brought to Britain.

And with that prosperity came literacy, and law,

and a sophisticated new religion...

Christianity.

Above all, the Roman Army protected Britannia from her hostile neighbours.

In the North, the war-like Picts,

kept at bay by Hadrian's Wall.

And across the sea in the West, the Irish.

Never conquered by the Empire, they were, to the Romans, the quintessential Barbarians.

Wild and uncivilised, inhabiting a country without books,

without towns, without roads.

But suddenly in 406, the Empire was plunged into crisis

when Germanic invaders attacked the Roman heartland.

Britannia's legions were called home, leaving Britain vulnerable, and alone.

Across the sea, and up the wide Severn Estuary, her enemies came.

In the early 400s AD this place, it seems, was the scene of a terrible event.

Thousands of men, women and children were abducted by pirates

who specialised in people trafficking.

It was the kind of raid that was happening more and more frequently in these troubled times.

But one thing would make this raid different.

One of the survivors would write an account of it.

He was only 16 years old at the time, but he was destined to change Britain and Ireland forever.

His name was Patrick.

He and his fellow captives were bound for Ireland,

where they were to be sold as slaves.

As I follow in their wake, across the Irish Sea, it's easy to imagine their despair.

In their Roman minds, they were crossing a gulf.

Leaving behind the light of civilisation,

and entering the darkness of a Barbarian land.

The only country in Western Europe untouched by Rome, Ireland was still in the Iron Age.

Petty and High Kings ruled over a tribal island of many kingdoms.

It was a pagan land of subsistence farming, where wealth was measured in cattle.

Small wonder that the Romans called it "Hibernia" -

the land of winter.

For Patrick it must have been extraordinarily difficult,

because he was at the very, very bottom, he was a slave.

I think he would have regarded the Irish as a bunch of savages.

Coming from a wealthy, civilised background,

finding himself in Ireland,

not knowing the language, not knowing the customs,

living in rather different circumstances,

in fairly straightened circumstances, he must have been very resentful.

How would Ireland have been different from Roman Britain?

Ireland was just totally different.

It would have been completely unfamiliar to Patrick.

Ireland had no towns. Of course, it had a different language.

It didn't have a network of roads like the Roman world.

It didn't have the same commercial and production sector as the Roman world had.

It didn't have grand villas and it wouldn't have had the same type of agricultural practices.

So everything about Ireland was completely different.

What would life have been like for the mass of humanity living in Ireland?

I think nasty, brutish and short is the simple reply to that.

People wouldn't have had a great life expectation.

I think people, for the most part, would have died relatively young, possibly violently.

Because warfare seems to have been endemic,

mainly centred around cattle raids

and the theft of one's neighbour's property.

It must have been a pretty hard and pretty brutal existence.

Rome's weakness had cost the young Patrick dear.

Traditionally it was thought he went to Slemish Mountain in the northern part of Ireland.

But modern scholars think that he may have ended his journey

here in the hills of County Mayo on the west coast.

He was put to work as a shepherd, which was normal for slave boys of his age.

Faced with this alien surrounding and an unremittingly harsh life,

the 16 year old Patrick seems to have turned to God.

The God he was praying to was a Christian one, a Roman one,

the God of his priest grandfather or his deacon father.

Patrick's confessions tell us he didn't take Christianity

that seriously before ending up as a slave here in Ireland.

But once he did, it must have been a comfort, something to connect him with his lost life back home.

After six years in captivity, his prayers were answered.

He escaped from Ireland, and eventually made his way back to Britain.

But if he thought he was leaving barbarism behind

and returning to civilisation, he would soon have to think again.

In the years since the Legions had pulled out of Britannia,

order had given way to anarchy.

Hadrian's Wall,

built to keep out the Barbarian Picts,

had once stood as an emblem of the power and security of Roman Britain.

Now, it symbolised its disintegration.

The Britons were left on their own to guard this wall and in fact the entire province.

Bede, who's the father of English history, and one of its

first great chroniclers, tells us what happened next.

He wrote that a timorous guard were placed

on this wall and they spent their days and nights in the utmost fear.

And then they were attacked by the Picts from over there, they came

with long hooked weapons and dragged the defenders off the wall and dashed them to the ground.

It's a terrifying description of this period, of order turning into chaos.

Vindolanda Fort, just a few miles from the wall,

offers a vivid snap shot of the post Apocalyptic world that the British found themselves plunged into.

The fort was one of the largest on the wall, with a population of well over 2000, some of them soldiers,

others civilians living in the town outside.

Andrew, I always think of Vindolanda as a classic high Roman site.

I mean, what evidence is there here around us for what happens when the Romans leave?

Well, the first thing that happens is that towns outside of walls,

forts like this, and in particular Vindolanda, are suddenly abandoned.

-Now why's that?

-Well, probably the main reason

is just a huge sense of insecurity and people are very, very nervous.

They're anxious about their life and what's going to happen.

They're fearful that the end of Roman Britain's coming and that the

Barbarians and other people are gonna cause them grief and bodily harm.

And as the Roman army slowly pulls out, this feeling of anxiety can only increase massively.

So people hole up inside fort walls, they protect themselves as best they

can, and they really sort of pull in their reins and their world view.

This happens right across Britain and people retreat to more fortified positions.

So what's the purpose of this raised platform on the wall, then?

Here, they've put an artillery placement in

to add a bit of offensive capability on the south side of this fort here.

Most of the threat, as we rightly realise, came from the North, that's

the reason for Hadrian's Wall is to sort of block that gap.

But in post Roman Britain, you're not sure where your enemies are, and the rest of the province,

what you'd normally regard as the rest of settled Roman Britain behind you,

nasty things can happen down there too and you've got to be ready.

That's very telling, isn't it?

I mean I suppose during Roman Britain, the threat was

up there towards Hadrian's Wall, the Picts coming down from Pictland?

Now, enemies could be lurking anywhere.

Absolutely anywhere in the territory around you. And you've got to narrow the gates and block

bits of fort wall, rearm yourself and be prepared from any quarter.

And so it's a sort of sense of coming inside and sort of bottling up all your energy in one place.

And that's what's happened at Vindolanda here.

This reaction to the perceived threat or danger coming from an area which should be perfectly safe.

Things are really getting desperate.

They're no longer quarrying fresh stone, so to repair fort walls like this,

is that they go into things like big monumental buildings outside,

where the Vicus used to be, they are tearing them down.

And also the graveyards themselves haven't been immune.

Some of the stones, when this was excavated, were actually

tombstones from the cemetery, which is yeah, pretty rough.

That's desperation, isn't it?

It is, I mean, the living takes precedent over the dead.

Unless they want to join the dead.

That is the sort of philosophy behind it.

But they're in such a hurry, when these

blocks were found, it was just earth slapped in between the stones here.

They are in a desperate hurry to get these defences up very quickly.

Scrambling to improve their defences.

Get them up quick, because you don't know who is going to come over the hill and assault you.

This isn't about impressing people, this is about survival.

And that is the huge difference.

Bede gives us a vivid written description which

seems to support much of what the archaeological evidence that places like Vindolanda tells us.

He said that the British turned on each other

to avoid starvation; they plundered and stole from one another.

Some semblance of political authority must have survived

for a while, because somebody wrote a letter to the Roman Emperor, begging for military assistance.

It's become known as the "Groans of the Britons".

In it, the author said, "that the Barbarians push us into the sea

and the sea pushes us back into the arms of the Barbarians.

There are two ways to die, to be drowned or to be slain."

But these groans of the Britons fell on deaf ears.

No help was coming.

When the super power, Rome, crumbled,

Britain's once vibrant economy came crashing down with it.

The old life of villas, towns and trade collapsed.

Here's a classic example of what you'll get on a Roman military site.

This lovely little coin here, this is a coin of Arcadias 393,

one of the last sort of Roman issues to come to Britain, really.

They start to get incredibly devalued, so people no longer trust money like they used to in the past.

And so, no money is being minted, they can't trust the old stuff, so what do they do?

How do you buy stuff at all?

Well, the short answer is to melt down all the old Roman coins, extract

the silver from them and the precious metals and use currency bars instead.

And what we've got here, it's a solid silver ingot that was manufactured at

Vindolanda by the people living here just at the end of Roman Britain.

If you want to buy something, you chop a bit off, hand it to the dealer

and he can trust that and can give you something for it.

So how is this diminution of goods reflecting in the mood of the people?

You can imagine an incredible nervous tension,

expectation the violence, of possible violence at least.

And very much the walls coming in all around you,

because you've retreated into a place where you've fortified up and your world view has diminished completely.

And it's not a happy or good place to be.

And that is the position that people found themselves in along the line of Hadrian's

Wall and places like Vindolanda, when the Roman garrison and the Roman economy, everything pulls out.

It pulls the rug from underneath their feet.

Roman civilisation had proved incredibly fragile.

Those that could, went abroad.

Among them, Patrick.

It's no surprise that he left Britain, shocked as he must have been by its collapse.

What is surprising is where he went -

back to Ireland.

Patrick claims that his motivation was a dream, in which a prophetic angel appeared to him, and told

him to take his new faith "to the ends of the earth"

and convert the Barbarian Irish, the people of course who'd once captured and enslaved him.

When he made landfall in the North of Ireland, he brought with him the promise of a new civilisation,

rooted in Christianity.

But he was entering a land where Paganism ran deep.

Ireland was a place of sacred trees, woods and lakes, presided over by Druids.

Combining the roles of priest, wise man and ritual executioner,

theirs was a religion of animal and human sacrifice...

..Of blood on altars, and entrails used to tell the future.

The Druid religion had once extended right across Western Europe.

The Romans were so disturbed by it that they made it illegal - on pain of death.

But Rome's authority had never extended into Ireland and here, it had continued to flourish.

How could Patrick persuade these deeply Pagan people to adopt a new religion?

He began, it seems, by going to where the old religion ran strongest.

Even today, this moody glen shows signs of its Pagan associations.

Rags are still tied to trees as divine intercessions - a

practice that doubtless goes back deep into darker times.

The old name is Alt na Diabhal, which means the Glen of the Devil, which

indicates some kind of evil spirit, I suppose, and remains of Paganism and devil worshipping and so on.

But the modern name is St Patrick's Well, St Patrick's Chair.

Because of the tradition that St Patrick came here to preach the gospel to the Pagans.

What's Patrick's business here in a Pagan site?

I thought the whole point was to make Irish Christian?

Of course, but you see, Patrick was a man with his feet firmly

on the ground and he began where people were at, as we say nowadays.

And he did his best to reinterpret for people their basic beliefs

and the old Irish were very, very attached to places like this.

The believed very much in a spirit world.

I suppose that helped Patrick, because

Christianity is also about a spirit world, but of a different kind.

Did Patrick try and preach to them and convert them in those terms,

talking about things that they already recognised as being holy?

Absolutely. He made the simple transfer from these things which they worshipped, actually.

I mean, they worshipped the sun, for example.

The cycle of the seasons meant so much to them, that the sun was very, very powerful in their lives.

Now he, by the very simple device of changing S U N to S O N,

he changed the emphasis to Christ, who was the literally the son of God.

So it's really interesting, he's using these very traditional

gatherings and places to actually preach a new message.

Very much so, very much so.

This would have been totally, totally unchartered territory as far as Christianity was concerned.

What Patrick brought was totally new, totally different and totally unexpected.

What danger do you think he faced?

Well, he says himself that he faced danger, not just from robbers and thieves, people who were

out to take his belongings from him, but people who were hostile to what he was, to his message.

People who felt threatened, particularly these Druids.

Now they saw Patrick as a deadly enemy.

They were the established religion and here they were, this man was coming in from another place and

he was more or less preaching a different message and weaning their people from them to him.

As he started to make new converts, Patrick was also converting Paganism itself.

The sacred water of the druids became the holy water of baptism.

Pagan sanctuaries were not destroyed, but transformed into Christian altars.

Ancient festivals weren't abandoned, but co-opted and re-branded for the new religion.

Patrick, the one-time slave, took on Ireland's rigid caste system,

preaching a revolutionary message that was social as well as religious.

I can see how this would have gained him support at the grass roots.

But the elite had more to lose.

How would Patrick detach them from the old ways?

According to legend, he set his sights on the sacred heart of Irish power...

..Seat of Ireland's premier High King...

..the Hill of Tara.

Within sight of Tara, on the night of the Pagan festival of Beltaine,

Patrick is said to have lit a great fire.

This flew in the face of ancient tradition, that stated that the

High King himself should light the first fire of the night.

It was a confrontational act.

And that, it seems, was the whole idea.

For daring to light the fire, Patrick was seized and dragged back to Tara.

But he so impressed the High King with his Christian message that the King was converted.

It all sounds like a neat story.

Maybe that's all it is.

The account is written 200 years after Patrick's mission, and by that stage he was already a saint, and so

much of what was being written about him was what we call hagiography - a mixture of history and myth.

But even if it's myth, it does tell us one important thing.

It says that Patrick came here to Tara because it was

the seat of the High King and the Pagan priests that surrounded him.

By coming here, he was going to engage with political power and take on Paganism in its very heartland.

I guess what surprises me so much about Patrick is how unbelievably successful he is.

I mean, what is it about Christianity that's so attractive to these people?

Patrick obviously replaced a way of life

with another way of life, which people found much more satisfactory.

That is the simple answer to your question.

Probably, he gave people a new sense of their human dignity in a way that they had never experienced before.

For example, he was totally against slavery,

which was a very cruel

part of the social fabric in olden times.

The slave was at the very bottom of the pile,

the slave had no rights whatever and Patrick put an end to all that.

He preached very...

took a very strong line on it.

And was very, very outspoken when it came to people being attacked, his own converts in particular.

I can see why this new faith appeals to the downtrodden, but people in charge matter.

The princes, the aristocracy, what was in it for them?

Patrick could read and write and there's no evidence that there

was reading and writing in ancient Ireland.

There was an enormous heritage there that Patrick brought to Ireland.

The Latin language and all that went with it and the classics and so on.

Throughout the world everywhere, people realised that the greatest

benefit that you can convey on any group of people is education.

To train people, not just to give them food or to give them money,

but to actually train them to use their own wit, if you like, their own intelligence.

And to devise ways and means by which they can enhance their lives.

So it feels like he's bringing

a wave of modernity with him?

This was a huge revolution, you know, in thinking.

Something that Patrick, because of his Christianity, he brought it with him to Ireland.

I'm not a believer.

But it's clear that this mission wasn't just about faith.

Christianity was the one legacy of the Roman world that had survived the Empire's collapse.

And it was now paving the way for a new civilisation.

So this reconstruction of Patrick's first church, the site of a barn where he preached,

marks not just the arrival of a new religion, but of a social and political revolution.

The power of that revolution is symbolised by the Legend of Croagh Patrick.

This was Ireland's most sacred mountain, home to Crom Dubh - God of fertility.

It was the focus of the ancient harvest festival, Lughnasa,

when the Pagan faithful ascended the mountain to engage in rituals of fertility and renewal.

Today, it's Christian pilgrims who come here every year to mark Patrick's ascent.

Well, I'm about... going for about two hours,

and I think I'm near the top, although the weather's closed in a lot.

It's very rocky, so I'm hugely impressed that many of the thousands of pilgrims

that make this climb today, do so in bare feet to emulate Patrick.

In fact, it's been dangerous over the centuries, being a pilgrim, and many have died of exposure

as the weather's changed radically like it has done today.

But Patrick wasn't climbing this mountain to test his personal resolve.

This place had been sacred to Pagans for centuries before he got here,

and Patrick was bringing Christianity in a spectacular way -

to storm yet another Pagan stronghold.

Like Christ entering the wilderness,

Patrick is said to have clambered up here to fast for 40 days and 40 nights,

where he endured wild storms and the attacks of devils.

It's here, we're told, that he drove out the snakes of Ireland.

Science now suggests that there had never been snakes here at all.

But, like the fire on Tara, it's the symbolism that counts.

From up here on the summit, with the broad sweep of the Atlantic Ocean in front of him,

Patrick must have felt a certain sense of pride.

This was as far west in Europe as Christianity had ever come.

He really had brought his faith to the ends of the earth.

This was Patrick's crowning glory.

He had sown in Ireland the seeds of a new civilisation.

But, for hundreds of miles that way, across the Irish Sea

in the old Roman province of Britannia, things were taking a very different course.

An ominous new chapter began, when three ships of heavily armed men landed on Britain's East Coast.

Not for the last time in Britain's history,

these troublemakers were Germans, with a few Danes thrown in for good measure.

They were Saxons and Angles,

Friesians and Jutes.

Like the Irish and the Picts, these were Pagan warrior tribes never conquered by Rome.

They seem to have been invited as mercenaries,

to fight Britain's battles for her against traditional enemies like the Picts and the Irish.

This was actually not such a crazy arrangement as it sounds.

The Roman Empire itself had a tradition of using Barbarian mercenaries

to bolster its own defence.

Trouble was, the Roman Empire had money.

Britain in the 5th century, with its ruined economy, didn't.

The arrangement worked for a while but, eventually, it broke down.

Unpaid and unfed, these German mercenaries soon took matters into their own hands.

With catastrophic results.

They plundered all the cities and the country.

Spread the conflagration from sea to sea, without any opposition.

People were destroyed with fire and sword.

Even priests were slain.

In a relatively short amount of time, they cut a swathe across the south and eastern parts

of the old Roman province of Britannia, and there was nothing the inhabitants could do to stop them.

Eventually, the British lost not only their liberty, but also their native language, Brythonic.

The Saxons rebranded the conquered territory, and new place names emerged.

Wessex and Sussex.

Essex and Mercia.

Indeed the Angles would, in time,

give their name to a new nation - Aengle-land.

England.

And a new language -

English.

The conquered Britons became slaves for ever to their foes.

Unsurprisingly many of them fled, some to the west of Britain,

thousands more across the Channel to the continent.

It became known as The Great Exodus.

With them left the last vestiges of Roman rule - Christianity, literacy and technology.

In their place, Saxon society was warlike, Pagan and illiterate.

This reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village in Suffolk

presents a very different image from the violent killers Bede describes.

It seems to speak of an agricultural people, of settlers who merged with the local population.

For years, scholars have argued both ways.

But the latest research presents a more complex picture, and a more sinister one.

Martin, I've always found it one of the biggest mysteries in British history.

Were the Anglo-Saxons this sort of tide of Apocalyptic genocidal maniacs,

or was there a bit more continuity than that?

I think it depended very much on the area

and very much on your status.

If you were of the elite, the Anglo-Saxons

might have been seen as an Apocalyptic tide of murderers, destroying your way of life.

For the average person in the fields, life may not have changed much.

I think the thing that's fascinating about this period is,

the language goes, culture goes, town dwelling goes.

I mean, this has got to be the greatest example in British history of a retreat from progress.

To a large degree, yes, maybe pockets of survival in certain areas, but in general, yes.

The Brythonic language seems to die away, it doesn't seem to have much impact on Old English either,

very few lone words, very little obvious impacts on Old English.

But why is that? I mean, you can see why people

have postulated in the past, some sort of genocidal activity.

Why do you think it does die out?

I think it's not so much genocidal extermination as acculturation.

So native Britons adopting the language, the customs, the dress of the incoming Anglo-Saxons.

And over a number of generations, coming to think of themselves as Anglo-Saxons.

It's a curious example I suppose, nowadays everyone talks about

immigrants conforming and actually, it was the other way round.

Absolutely. It seems to be the British going native, but in reverse, if you like.

It's been suggested something like apartheid may have been operating in the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Certainly we know from later law codes that if you're a native Briton

in an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, you were in some way legally disadvantaged.

If you were killed, someone had to pay a smaller fine than if they killed an Anglo-Saxon.

So there may have been judicial advantages to going native in reverse,

and also economic advantage, if you wanted to get on in this new society,

it was best to emulate Anglo-Saxon ways.

Native British culture clung on, in Cornwall, Wales and in the North-west.

In fact, Welsh, the language of my grandmother's family,

is the direct descendant of the ancient British language, Brythonic.

But the lion's share of Britannia now belonged to the Saxons.

Britain, once bathed in the light of Christianity and civilisation,

was now plunged into the darkness of barbarity and Paganism.

The contrast with Ireland, could not have been more stark.

Christianity was transforming the once Pagan "land of winter"...

..where the Irish were embracing the new religion.

Some were drawn to the ascetic traditions of the hermits of the early church.

Men like Kevin of Glendalough, who is said who have stood for hours on end in a freezing lake...

..contemplating God.

Kevin spent years living in that tiny cave on the other side of the Lough.

He survived on berries and herbs and spent his time praying and contemplating.

He used to spend hours in the Lough to sharpen his mind, and when that

got too warm in the summer, he'd roll around in a bed of nettles.

This ostentatious devotion was the way to win followers in the early Christian world,

and eventually he quit his little cave, moved down the valley and formed a monastery.

Located in the south-east of Ireland, the monastery at Glendalough began simply,

with a few timber buildings and a handful of devoted followers.

But it grew quickly, and the clutch of buildings eventually bore the name "The Monastic City".

I'm struck by what a huge leap places like Glendalough represented,

in a country that just 50 years before had no towns, no roads, and no stone buildings.

Communities like Glendalough spread steadily across the country,

and in time, Ireland would have one of the largest concentrations of monasteries anywhere in the world.

But this place wasn't just about preaching the gospel, it was about technology as much theology.

There was a modern hospital here, there were granaries, a library.

You'd come here and find out about the latest agricultural methods.

New materials were being issued like mortar, so you could build bigger and stronger houses.

These were islands of modernity, and they were changing the world.

As the monasteries spread, they brought new advances with them.

Nendrum, one of the oldest monasteries in Ireland, is on Strangford Lough,

where Patrick first made landfall at the start of his mission.

And in the Lough beside Nendrum, archaeologists made a recent discovery that reveals

just how radically the monks were transforming life in Ireland.

This is the remains of the oldest tidal mill in the world.

And we know it dates about 619, 621.

The technology that was involved in this is quite simple,

but it is spectacular just to think about what they did.

They clearly created a dam across here.

The dam is made of stones, clay, riveted with timbers.

The dam is probably about six metres across, runs for 110m to create the mill pond,

and they did that, and as well as that they lined the base of the mill pond with impermeable clay,

so the water would stay in, rather than seeping through the floor.

So it's quite a remarkable feat of technology.

And so you'd have the dam here with sluice gates in it.

The sluice gates let the tide in, they close the gates to create a pond

and then when the tide goes out, they use that water to drive a mill,

and basically would grind corn for the monastery.

-That's renewable energy?

-Renewable energy.

And for those times, you know, remarkable energy.

One of the interesting things about THIS mill, which as I said,

is the oldest tidal mill in the world, is that it exists in Ireland.

Ireland in those days was right at the edge of the known world,

and yet here you have the development of one of the most advanced technologies in the known world.

So quite spectacular, really.

What does this sophistication say about Ireland in that period?

I think it says something very important.

You have monasteries, very important features in the landscape,

but in a traditional view, these were holy places,

they weren't places which really interacted with the rest of the landscape in any kind of serious way.

What this kind of technology's showing us, is that monasteries were more than just holy places.

They were also places where monks developed production,

where monks got involved in worldly affairs,

and they interacted with their communities in much more serious ways than we imagined.

I've always been very sceptical about Christianity and why it's so popular,

but coming here, suddenly, it's very clear, isn't it?

This is economic dynamism, modernity, ideas, technology.

This was previously a period when people believed Ireland was a landscape that was

tribal, rural and familiar, as one scholar called it.

Basically, with monasteries as very focal points within that. This is happening earlier in Ireland,

probably 50 to maybe 100 years earlier than it's happening in England.

But it was another form of technology, one that lay at the very heart of Roman civilisation,

that was really to revolutionise Ireland.

Nowadays, books and libraries are so much part of our culture that it's impossible

to imagine a time without them.

But the 6th century was just such a time.

Of course there had been books under the Romans,

in fact there were dozens of public libraries throughout the Empire.

But after Rome fell, one chronicler wrote that "libraries, like tombs, were shut up forever."

If it hadn't been for the Irish monasteries and the monks working in them,

then culture and learning and writing could have been eradicated in Western Europe.

And central to that transmission of learning, were manuscripts.

Soon, every monastery had its own Scriptorium, where newly trained scribes copied and copied...

..Everything from the Old and New Testaments to Latin and Greek classics.

Their ancient art is almost lost, but a handful of professional scribes are still at work today.

Is this what you write on over here?

Well, this is Vellum, which is calfskin.

And so they would have had to skin the calf and prepare the Vellum,

which takes anywhere between six months to a year.

-This is exactly the same as they would have used a millennia ago?

-Close enough.

So can you give me an example on here?

Historically, what you would do is, you prick the Vellum...

..Line up the wheel on both sides...

..And then you score the Vellum.

I mean, it sounds stupid, but it is an incredibly intricate process, isn't it?

How much of this can you do in one day? How many words could you write in one day?

It depends on the script, that is the real problem.

It also depends on the humidity, you know, because the humidity will affect how the ink flows,

and it will also affect how the Vellum works, because Vellum is very temperamental.

And if it's too humid, the Vellum just curls up on you.

And once you have scored the Vellum, you would have hopefully spent the time last year

getting your oak galls and everything in order, to have your ink ready to start writing.

And hopefully you would have managed your geese enough

to have some feathers to work with as well.

Now, the iron gall ink will get darker on exposure to oxygen, to the atmosphere.

And that is getting darker, isn't it?

And that gets darker and you can just see

the scored lines just underneath the text.

Can I have a quick go and see if I can do it?

I think the first problem you will encounter is writing with a quill.

It's much more difficult than writing with a metal pen.

-With a Biro.

-So be a little bit light to the touch.

So you want to try to keep the full width of the nib on the page.

I see what you mean. You've got to use your whole arm, haven't you?

But yeah, it definitely involves, obviously concentration,

but it's more physical than simply scratching something out.

-It is hugely physical.

-Do you think being a scribe would have been the soft touch in a monastery?

Conditions would have been fairly unpleasant all the time.

Because you have to deal with the cold, you have to deal with the wet.

You have to deal with your fingers getting cold.

You have problems with the light and problems with the Vellum

reacting to the sort of climatic variations, temperature, humidity, pressure, that sort of thing.

What was it like for you, the first time that you worked with Vellum and quills?

The quill will produce a line that nothing man-made can produce.

It will allow you to pull ink out of a pool of ink.

You try doing this on a piece of paper and you ruin the sheet of paper, you ruin the nib.

But what happens...

between a quill and a piece of Vellum

is magic.

This manuscript is known as the Stowe Missal and it was written in an Irish monastery in the 700s.

It's hard to believe that this beautiful book is over 1,200 years old.

It's certainly the oldest manuscript I've ever had the privilege of handling.

It's actually a Latin mass book, it was deliberately made this small so a priest could carry it around.

It could be portable during his trips around the countryside tending to his flock.

It contains the Order of Service for Communion, for Baptisms and for visiting the sick.

This book has had a colourful life.

It spent a couple of hundred years hidden inside the wall of an Irish castle to keep it safe,

and that process means that sadly it suffered a bit of damage.

But on these damaged pages back here, there's another gem.

It's one of the oldest examples of written Irish anywhere in the world.

Three ancient spells to be read out to people suffering from common ailments.

Manuscripts like this one show the power of the written word.

Not only do they transmit the knowledge of the ancient

through to the present and future, but they help the spread and practice of Christianity.

And they're fostering the development of Irish as a new written language.

This social and cultural revolution sparked by Irish monasteries soon took on an international dimension.

One of the great things about Ireland in this period is the relationship

that it enjoyed with the European mainland.

And many, many scholars coming from

the European mainland to attend and to study in Irish monasteries,

but also the other process going on with Irish monasteries going out on

a great wave of monastic foundations in Europe in the early medieval period.

And it's pretty amazing, it shows that Ireland,

that transition from being on the edge of the earth, to suddenly being this hot house for scholarship?

Yeah, absolutely. That Ireland, which was, you know, on the very edge of the Roman world, never Romanised.

But all of a sudden, because of Christianity,

because of this kind of movement of monastic communities

from North Africa along the Atlantic seaboard, into Ireland, and all of a sudden,

that which had been entirely on the edge of the world suddenly became central to

the perpetuation and the re-introduction of Christianity

into many parts of continental Europe.

Irish monks and books poured into Europe, and dozens of Irish monasteries were established.

Luxeuil became the most important and flourishing monastery in France.

Bobbio in Italy eventually boasted one of the greatest libraries of the Middle Ages.

And St Gallen in Switzerland preserves a unique document -

the only surviving architectural plan made in Europe since the fall of Rome.

A blueprint for a modern monastery, founded by the Irish.

Ireland had become the cradle of a new European civilisation.

They had not only inherited the knowledge of the classical world,

but they had transformed it into something new...

..a civilisation of monasteries that would form the foundations of a world every bit as great as Rome's.

But where the Romans had used military might,

the Irish were spreading civilisation through faith, learning and the power of ideas.

Europe was already feeling the benefits.

But Ireland's strife-torn neighbours, the future nations

of England and Scotland, remained stubbornly pagan.

Soon, Irish Christianity would face its greatest challenge yet -

to try to bring the new civilisation back to Barbarian Britain.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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