Page:The ancient Irish church.djvu/111

 brother of Saint Ruan of Lorrha, in the County Tipperary. The judgment was unjust, and the cause was warmly taken up by the prisoner's saintly kinsman. But reasoning and entreaty were alike in vain, and the sentence was carried out. Saint Ruan immediately repaired to Tara, and 'laid his curse upon it'; the result being that the whole place was deserted, the Feast of Tara, which was one of the national institutions, was discontinued, and it ceased from that time to be the royal residence.

It must have been this institution of the ecclesiastical curse that Giraldus Cambrensis had in his mind when he penned the curious chapter in which he sets forth how the saints of Ireland appear to be of a vindictive temper. The explanation that he gives is a remarkable one, and is perhaps worth quoting in this place. 'As the Irish people,' he says, 'possessed no castles, while the country is full of marauders who live by plunder, the people, and more especially the ecclesiastics, made it their practice to have recourse to the churches, instead of fortified places, as refuges for themselves and their property; and by Divine Providence and permission, there was frequent need that the Church should visit her enemies with the severest chastisements; this being the only mode by which evil-doers and impious men could be deterred from breaking the peace of ecclesiastical societies, and for securing even to a servile submission the reverence due to the very churches themselves from a rude and irreligious people.

Finally, it deserves to be noticed, as bearing on the influence of the Church, that it was a very usual thing for kings and other great men, after having