For the monasteries were still producing great works of art. He might have been less enamoured at the political maneuvering. The status of clergy could have much to do with their alliances and family ties with the local aristocracy. Indeed, from the earliest times, monasteries could be the launching pads for earthly ambitions.

The Abbot here of Ardmore in county Waterford came from a powerful local family. Declan was set to have been a contemporary of Saint Patrick. The story goes that together they went to a banquet of local nobility, and together chose the new king of the region. Was this story true? Well, we’ve simply no way of knowing. But it does underline a significant truth--churchmen were becoming increasingly powerful political players. And this foreshadows an enduring theme of the Irish story that embrace between spiritual and temporal power, Christ and Caesar together. So the Abbot of monastery is much more than a spiritual man. He becomes a major political player.

He controls a vast number of people and enormous resources. And if you think that the Abbot was getting up in the morning to say a five-o’clock Mass, he was not. he was much more like a Medici prince. Because the Church is rich, the Church gets involved in political violence. There’s one famous one in which there was a battle between Cork and Clonfert in which the annals said there was innumerable slaughter of the ecclesiastical men and superiors of Cork.

It sounds an extraordinary idea that you have religious men, spiritual figures going to war with each other. I mean it doesn’t fit the notion we have of this island of saints and scholars.

It doesn’t fit the notion, but it is the reality. The Abbot of Armagh or the Bishop of Clonmacnoise had a social status equal to that of a king.

But a new power was to loom out of the northern seas.