Page:The ancient Irish church.djvu/51

 institution of seven bishops existed. Saint Bernard informs us that up to the eleventh century there were no dioceses, bishops were multiplied and changed without order and regularity, so that almost every church had a bishop of its own.

A curious relic of the ancient system of clanship survives in the Irish Church to the present day. In most countries the churches and parishes are dedicated to a 'patron saint.' In Ireland the church was always called after the founder. It is at present easy to tell by the name whether a church has been founded before or after the Anglo-Norman invasion. If it be a church of Patrick, Columba, Kevin, or any Irish saint, it is almost certainly pre-Norman, and it is so called because the saint named founded, or is supposed to have founded, a church on the spot. But if it bear the name of St. Mary or St. Peter, or any saint not associated with Ireland itself, there need be no hesitation in deciding that its origin is to be looked for in that period when the combined influence of Rome and England was changing the old institutions. The reason is that in the ancient Irish Church every community was called the 'family' of the saint by whom it was first established, and each succeeding abbot was regarded as the successor of the founder, inheriting in the church a chieftainship which was similar in many ways to the chieftainship which the leader of the tribe inherited.

There is an old poem extant which purports to give a list of those who composed the 'family' of Saint Patrick. It is found in one of the ancient biographies of Patrick, and has also been copied into the Annals of the Four Masters. If it is in any way a fair description of what an ecclesiastical family was in the early ages, it presents us with a picture very different from anything that we have been accus-