erroneous ways and urging conformity with Gallican
and Roman usages. A synod of southern Irish clerics,
which was convened in response to the papal letter, is
described in the famous Paschal Letter of Cummian
(632–633), without doubt the most important Irish
document surviving from this period. Cummian and
his colleagues appear to have adopted the Victorian
tables (though not before a delegation sent to Rome
reported back on their findings), which provoked a
letter of response from Ségéne, abbot of Iona, accus-
ingthem of heresy. The fierceness of the language in
Cummian’s Letter indicates how heated the debate had
become in Irish circles. Not all Irish churches followed
Cummian’s party, however. In 640 a group of northern
Irish churches (headed by Armagh) wrote to Rome
seeking papal advice on how to reckon the Easter date
for 641. As it happened, both Victorius and the Irish
84-year Easter table gave Easter Sunday on April 1 of
that year, whereas the Dionysiac table gave April 1 as
luna XIV, a date on which Easter Sunday was not
allowed to fall in the Alexandrian reckoning (which
had Easter Sunday therefore on April 8 that year). The
same problem arose also in Visigothic Spain, and a
letter of Bishop Braulio of Saragossa in response to
an unknown enquirer may possibly have been
addressed to an Irish correspondent.
It is not known whether Armagh and the northern
churches changed their observances after 641, but such
evidence as exists suggests that they did not. Certainly,
the community of Iona, which from its foundation in
563 was the dominant church in Scotland, and which
from 634–635 was in control also of all the newly
established churches in the north of England, and
whose paruchia included important houses in both
Ireland and Britain, held fast to the 84-year Easter tables
of its founder, Colm Cille. This in turn led to difficul-
ties, first in the north of England and subsequently in
Scotland,which came to a head at the famous synod of
Whitby (Northumbria) in 664. The exact nature of the
conflict is unclear, but our principal source of informa-
tion, the Venerable Bede (Ecclesiastical History of the
English Nation, III 25) presents the debate as one
between Irish traditionalists, partisans of the old 84-year
tables, and Romanist “reformers” led by Wilfrid of
Hexham and York, who advocated adoption of the
Dionysiac tables. The decision of the presiding king,
Osuiu, was against the Irish, whose leader, Bishop
Colman of Lindisfarne, decided to withdraw from
Northumbria and retire back to Iona (and eventually
Ireland) along with those of his community (both Irish
and Anglo-Saxon) who wished to remain loyal to the
oldways.
Only Iona itself amongst Irish foundations appears
to have held out in the struggle. Even here, however,
after many years’ effort by the Englishman Ecgberct,
the island community finally relented and in 716 Easter
was celebrated there in accordance with the new
(Dionysiac/Alexandrian) ways. After the expulsion of
Iona monks from the Pictish kingdom in 717, the only
insular churches to resist change after that were the
British, some of whom, perhaps in the kingdom of
Strathclyde, had come into line already in 703–704
(Bede,Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
V15)while the last of them, led by Bishop Elfoddw
of Bangor, conformed in 768.
DÁIBHÍÓ CRÓINÍNReferences and Further Reading
Blackburn, Bonnie, & Leofranc Holford-Strevens. The Oxford
Companion to the Year, 791–812. (Oxford: 1999).
Edwards, T.M. Charles. Early Christian Ireland, 391–415.
Cambridge: 2000.
Jones, C. W. Bedae Opera de Temporibus. Cambridge, MA: 1943.
Ó Cróinín, D. Early Irish History and Chronology. Dublin:
2003.
Wallis, F. Bede: The Reckoning of Time, xxxiv-lxxxv. Liverpool:
1999.
Walsh, M., & Ó Cróinín, D. Cummian’s Letter ‘De Controversia
Paschali’(Toronto 1988).PATRICK
Two of Patrick’s Letters, the Epistola ad Milites
Corotici, written to soldiers of a petty king who had
killed some of his catechumens and enslaved others,
and the Confessio, written to explain and justify his
mission to converts and critics alike, tell what he
wanted us to know of his life as Apostle of the Irish.St Patrick asleep on a knoll from La Vie des Sains. © The British
Library.PASCHAL CONTROVERSY