Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town by William Fleming
page 46 of 77 (59%)
page 46 of 77 (59%)
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Romans, and Bonauen Armorik by the Gaulish Celts. The Scholiast,
therefore, when he directs the course of Calphurnius and his family across the Sea of Ictius, seems to be steering their ship directly to Boulogne. Nemthur cannot possibly be the name of the town near which St. Patrick was born, simply because the Saint gives the name of Bonaven, or Bononia, as the city of his birth. St. Fiacc does not name Nemthur as a town; he simply tells us that St. Patrick was born at Nemthur, which, as has been proved, was both the name of the Caligula's tower and of the district in which that tower stood in the suburbs of Bonaven. The Scholiast is the first to call Nemthur a town, and evidently puts it down as the ancient name of Alcluid, or Dumbarton. This is the obvious meaning of the scholion: "Nemthur est civitas in septentrional! Britanni nempe Alcluida." Nemthur is a city in northern Britain, namely Alcluid. The "nempe Alcluida" looks very much like an interpolation, and if an interpolation, the statement of the Scholiast that Nemthur is a city in northern Britain, without the addition "nempe Alcluida," might easily refer to Northern Britain in Gaul where, however, Nemthur was not the name of a city, but the name both of a tower and of the district of the city where St. Patrick was born. Neither the Scholiast, nor those who have adopted his views as to the Saint's birth at Dumbarton, have ever answered Lanigan's challenge, who boldly states that the name Nemthur is not to be found in Nennius's "List of British Towns," which Usher himself had illustrated, nor in any of the old "Itineraries," or in Ricardus Corinensis, or in Camden, or Horsley &c. (vol. i, b. 3, p. 91). The learned Cardinal Moran, in the March of the _Dublin Review_, 1880, |
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