ABSTRACT
For several years Patrick gave lectures on the Celtic neighbours of the AngloSaxons – splendidly informative and stimulating, and also crucial in ensuring that ‘The History of the British Isles’ at Oxford was not just a history of an England only occasionally disturbed by the neighbours. His time in Glasgow did much to direct his interests westwards and northwards, but his Celtic interests also arose out of lectures on Bede when he was still at All Souls. One of the fruits of his desire to understand these western and northern neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons was his paper ‘Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship: some further thoughts’, originally an O’Donnell Lecture at Edinburgh given when he was at Glasgow. The title was, as he stated, ‘my own small tribute to Daniel Binchy’s famous O’Donnell Lectures at Oxford in 1968, that first aroused my interest in this subject’.1 And, even more than Binchy’s O’Donnell, Patrick’s concentrated on Ireland. At the end of a paragraph summarizing Binchy’s picture of early Irish kingship, Patrick concluded: ‘Thus, an early Irish king was a priestly vegetable; he tells us more of the distant past than of the historical development of European monarchy.’ Patrick’s lovely phrase ‘priestly vegetable’ was intended to bring out particular aspects of early Irish kingship as portrayed by Binchy: a sacrality that appeared to have been inherited with remarkably little change from the pre-Christian period; the lack of a significant role for the king as lawgiver or in the administration of justice; and the limitation of the apparatus of government to just one court official. In peace, the Irish king, on this view, presided over his people but did not rule; and, even in war, his powers were severely limited.
