Most of the early monastic settlements in Ireland would have been quite basic arrangements — My late friend, Cardinal Tomás O Fiaich, aka Tom Fee, said we should picture them like modern holiday camps, with rows of wooden accommodation chalets grouped around a few central activity buildings. I visited  him regularly at his official residence at Ara Coeli, Armagh during the Hunger Strikes when I helped him try to get them discontinued. We shared a deep love of Ulster and he put the Red Hand on his Cardinal’s crest. His favourite song was ” The Ould Orange Flute”, popularised by Richard Hayward.  As a result of our friendship, Tomás wrote the foreword to the second edition of my book “Bangor, Light of the World”, now in its third edition,

Indeed, Bangor was by far the most important of the monastic settlements, founded in 555 on Ulidian territory by Comgall, perhaps the most famous of all the Cruthin. The name ‘Bangor’ comes from medieval British or Cymric, which may mean ‘pointed arrangement’, possibly referring to the pointed sticks in the wattled fence which would have surrounded the settlement or simply “Blessed Place” in the older Pictish or British tongue. There have been several derivations over the years. It was Bangor which would give the largest number of great names to Irish religious history, figures such as Columbanus, Gall, Moluag (Molua), Maelrubha, Dungal and Malachy.

Comgall, it is said, was born at Magheramorne, County Antrim, in 517 of the People of the Dalaradian Cruthin  . Having shown great promise in his early years of a vocation to the Christian ministry, Comgall was educated under St Fintan at Clonenagh among the Loigis Cruthin, and is also said to have studied under Finnian at Clonard and Mobhi Clairenach at Glasnevin. Following his ordination as a deacon and priest, Comgall was imbued with a great missionary zeal and founded many cells or monasteries before finally establishing Bangor on the coast of County Down under the patronage of Cantigern, Queen of Dalaradia, whose life he had saved. To distinguish it from the other Bangors in the British Isles it became known as Bangor Mór, ‘Bangor the Great’.

The monastic settlement consisted of a large number of huts made of wattles situated around the church or oratory with its refectory, school, scriptorium and hospice. The whole establishment was surrounded by a vallum which consisted of a rampart and ditch. Life at Bangor was very severe. The food was sparse and even milk was considered an indulgence. Only one meal per day was allowed and that not until evening. Confession was held in public before the whole community and severe acts of penance were observed. There was silence at meal times and at other times conversation was restricted to the minimum. Comgall himself was extremely pious and austere and it is said that he arose in the middle of the night to recite psalms and say prayers while immersed in the nearby stream.

The strength of the community lay in its form of worship. The choral services were based on the antiphonal singing from Gaul, introduced into the West by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century. Bangor became famous for this type of choral psalmody and it spread from there throughout Europe once more. The glory of Bangor was the celebration of a perfected and refined Laus Perennis and in singing this the community of Bangor entered into a covenant of mutual love and service in the Church of Jesus Christ. Because of the great number of students and monks attached to Bangor and its outlying daughter churches, it was possible to have a continuous chorus of the Divine Praise sung by large choirs which were divided into groups, each of which took regular duty and sang with a refinement not possible when St Martin was organising the raw recruits of Gaul.

One of the most important religious works produced at Bangor was the Bangor Antiphonary, now housed in the Ambrosian Library of Milan. The creed found in this work differs in wording from all others known and is in substance the original Creed of Nicaea. For this reason alone the Bangor Antiphonary may be considered one of the most precious relics of Western civilisation. ‘Correct’ belief, the now standard orthodoxy of the Christian Church, was established chiefly at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (now Iznik in Turkey) in May 325 AD. The resultant Nicene Creed was an enlarged and explanatory version of the Apostles’ Creed in which the doctrines of Christ’s divinity and of the Holy Trinity were defined.

In the Antiphonary, there is a celebration of Bangor’s contribution to church history:

The Holy, valiant deeds
Of sacred Fathers,
Based on the matchless
Church of Bangor;
The noble deeds of abbots,
Their number, times and names,
Of never-ending lustre,
Hear, brothers; great their deserts,
Whom the Lord hath gathered
To the mansions of his heavenly kingdom.
Christ loved Comgall,
Well, too, did he the Lord.

There is also a hymn to Comgall himself:

Let us remember the shining justice of our patron, St Comgall, glorious in deed, aided by the spirit of God and, by the holy and radiant light of the sublime Trinity, directing all things under his rule…
Listen, everyone, to the deeds of this champion of God, who has been introduced to the secrets of the angels. From the first flowering of his youth his uprightness, strengthened by his faith, was nourished on the pages of the Law and was introduced to the joys of God. The virtues which he showed in his great life were abundantly in keeping with his faith…
He set himself like a barrier of iron in front of the people to rout, to uproot and destroy all evil and to build and implant good for the benefit of all, like St Hieremia set on high…

Comgall, by all accounts, was a commanding personality. “Such was his reputation for piety and learning that multitudes flocked to his school from the most distant parts; it is well established that not less than 3,000 students and teachers were under his care at one time, including many of the most honourable in the land. The evangelistic zeal of Comgall was pre-eminent — down to the landing-place at the reef of rocks he led many a band of his disciples who were to embark on their frail coracles to spread the Gospel in European countries.”

At Bangor were compiled in all probability the original Chronicles of Ireland, and the beautiful poetry The Voyage of Bran. In this region too the old traditions of Ulster were preserved and these were moulded into the Gaelic masterpiece the Táin Bó Cuailgne (Cattle Raid of Cooley). The ancient ‘Ulster Chronicle’, from which it is believed the oldest entries in the Annals of Ulster were derived, has been attributed to Sinlan Moccu Min, who is described in the lists of abbots in the Bangor Antiphonary as the “famed teacher of the world” (famosus mundi magister).

Proinsias Mac Cana has summed up the rich cultural legacy of this region of Ulster: “In Ireland the seventh century was marked by two closely related developments: the rapid extension of the use of writing in the Irish language and an extraordinary quickening of intellectual and artistic activity which was to continue far beyond the limit of the century. The immediate sources of this artistic renewal were the scriptoria of certain of the more progressive monasteries and its direct agents, those monastic literati whom the Irish metrical tracts refer to by the significant title of nualitride, ‘new men of letters’.

While there is no reason to suppose that these individuals were confined to any one part of the country, nevertheless the evidence strongly suggests that it was only in the east, or more precisely the south-east, of Ulster that their activities assumed something of the impetus and cohesiveness of a cultural movement. Here conservation and creativity went hand in hand: the relatively new skill of writing in the vernacular began to be vigorously exploited not only for the direct recording of secular oral tradition– heroic, mythological and the more strictly didactic — but also at the same time as a vehicle for the imaginative re-creation of certain segments of that tradition, so that one may with due reservations speak of this region of south-east Ulster as the cradle of written Irish literature… Bangor seems to have been the intellectual centre whence the cultural dynamic of the east Ulster region emanated.”

To be continued