Episode 4 Taisce Shean Uladh - Treasures of Ancient Ulster

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

This bell has long been venerated as being the bell of St Patrick.

Was it St Patrick's bell?

It's highly unlikely that it was the actual bell of St Patrick.

The bell, probably, I would say, dates to around the eighth century,

though it could date a little earlier than that,

maybe even as far back as the sixth century.

Of course, St Patrick is a fifth-century saint,

so we've got a problem there.

So, yes, it's a fake, but it's a venerable fake.

The bell was venerated at Armagh for a very long time before

it was enshrined, probably around... A little after the year 1100.

Armagh was hugely political,

and the politics of this period are completely interwoven

with the politics of the Church.

This is a period when you have two major rivals

for the Kingship of Ireland -

Donal McLoughlin, the King of Northern O'Neill,

and Muirchertach Ua Briain, the King of Munster.

But it is also a period when Armagh is a little worried

about its position as the main centre

of the Irish Church, as the primacy in Ireland.

For a period, Armagh sort of hedged its bets on who would it would back

in the contest for the High Kingship,

because both these guys were fairly closely matched,

and O'Brien actually gave a gift of gold and cattle to Armagh -

for which read bribe, a brown envelope.

But eventually however Armagh backed McLoughlin for the High Kingship.

McLoughlin in reply enshrines this relic of St Patrick.

It bears an inscription, and on that inscription

he is referred to as the patron who commissioned

the making of the bell.

With its association with St Patrick,

it must have been particularly important to Armagh.

Yes, that's absolutely true.

It's even got wider associations

with another very, very famous northern saint

and that's Colm Cille.

The belief is that the bell was removed from the grave

of St Patrick by St Colm Cille.

So you can see here a combination of Armagh, as the primacy,

the Monastic Federation of St Colm Cille,

who is of course of the Northern O'Neill,

tied in then with the political ambitions

of the King of Northern O'Neill to be High King of Ireland.

It would be a mistake simply to look at these objects

as devotional objects.

You know, there is a lot of politics going on in relation

to the underlying reasons why these objects have been made.

Greer, this is a diverse collection of objects.

What do they have in common?

Quite a lot of the material on display

in the Saints and Scholars gallery of the Ulster Museum

actually came from the dredging of the River Blackwater

which borders Armagh and Tyrone.

There was a particular concentration of finds

in and around the townland of Shanmullagh.

In among it, there were a number of objects that were

characteristically of Viking or Scandinavian origin.

If you look very, very closely, you will see a little twisted knot.

That's a characteristic Viking trait as to the way the goldsmiths

finished their rings, so we can be quite certain that this is

a Viking or a Scandinavian gold ring.

It's a lovely, delicate, little knot, it's lovely.

This is a really substantial silver ingot from the dredgings.

The idea really of the ingot was that it could be weighed

and it acted as a form of currency.

The thing that they obviously needed

if you're talking about weights is a set of scales,

and miraculously from the river we have the remains of a set of scales.

So this would be the beam balance,

and then at either side of the beam balance

you would have had the little scale pan of which only one survives.

Then we have a series of Viking weights.

But the really unusual thing about the Viking weights

-is if you actually look at the top of them...

-Can I pick one up?

You can pick them up. You can actually see that they have

gone to the trouble of decorating them.

Oh, yes.

This is I suppose a characteristic trait of a Viking raid,

because, what they did when they raided metalwork,

they broke it into smaller bits

and they reused it in making their own jewellery.

I suppose maybe that's what gives the Vikings a bad name,

this idea of hacking up our fine chalices and church metalwork.

This is part of a shrine that was designed to hold

the relics of a saint.

This is a beautiful, tiny church bell modelled on larger church bells,

and, as you can see, this is obviously not intact.

So they literally broke and ripped the shrines and the metalwork apart.

I suppose an obvious question is

what was the source of some of this church metalwork?

And a very obvious answer was St Patrick's cathedral city itself.

We know that Armagh was raided on numerous occasions

and the first record in amongst the early annals

is the year 832, where it actually says

Armagh was raided three times in one month.

How did these objects end up in the river?

We know that there was a Viking fleet on Lough Neagh,

so perhaps we can imagine the raid taking place

in Armagh and then making their way

along the River Blackwater into the Lough Neagh

when some disaster befell them,

maybe I like to think it's the idea of St Patrick's revenge -

this is what happens if you steal all the best church metalwork.

So is this a particularly significant collection of objects?

Well, in my opinion,

this in many ways entirely changed our view of early Christian Armagh.

Because what we had on one hand was written evidence of Viking raids,

but we had no proof.

What we are looking at now, it's the final part of the story.

We know that there were Viking raids in Armagh,

yet there were very, very few Viking objects from the city.

And here we have a range of material, unmistakable Viking in origin.

This really is an extraordinary find,

and it's one of the most significant discoveries in recent years.