Well, they would have, first of all, made their way to the local king, the local lord, or something like that, because you couldn’t just arrive off the next available flight and announce, hi, I’m your new local Christian mission. You’d end up dead. So you'd have to get some kind of physical protection. Once you had the king’s protection, on that basis, go around, spread the message. Certainly with the passage of time when monasticism is the growing trend if you like and it’s a cool thing to have a monastery on your land. It’s cool to have a member of your family, a member of a monastic community, if you can have a brother or sister who’s actually a saint, somebody who’s so high in the hierarchy, then obviously that adds a certain prestige as well. 

 

As the influence of Patrick and his successors expanded, the monasteries would emerge as the focal points of intellectual and artistic life. 

 

Patrick was born a child of the Roman Imperium, but by the time of his death in the 5th century, that empire has disintegrated. And across Europe, there was a catastrophic decline in learning. In the 6th century, the scholar Gregory of Tours wrote, that in the cities of Gaul, there could be found no scholar trained in ordered composition who could present a picture in prose or verse of the things that have befallen. Everywhere except Ireland. There a cultural revolution was underway. 

 

The Church in Ireland was untouched by the traumas afflicting Europe. And as the kings of Ireland were converted, the monks found protectors and patrons, a culture that blended the natives and the Latin flourished. At the center of this flowering were the monasteries.