Hi I'm The History Guy, I have a degree in history,
I love history. If you love history too, this is the channel for you.
Today is St. Patrick's Day and while St. Patrick's Day is a little bit mainstream
for a discussion on a channel that's dedicated to forgotten history, there are some forgotten
bits of history associated with Saint Patrick's Day that are really interesting.
So let's start with the man himself, St. Patrick. We really don't know that much about St. Patrick,
it's long enough ago that the record is sparse and much of what we think we know is very difficult
to actually prove. What is generally accepted is that he was a Roman British missionary in Ireland
in the 5th century AD, and that he played an important role in the conversion of Ireland
from Paganism to Catholicism. He's sometimes called the father of Christianity in Ireland
but there is some dispute about whether he was the first significant Christian missionary there,
although it's unquestionable that he played a large role in the conversion of Ireland.
Importantly, if you didn't know this, he was not himself born in Ireland, he was British. It might
also surprise you to find out that St. Patrick was never actually canonized by a Pope. For most of
the first thousand years of the Catholic Church there was no specific process for canonization,
it was a local decision who to venerate. The Pope's didn't really get involved until around
the 10th century and there was no formal process till around the 12th century, however St. Patrick
is on the Catholic list of saints and there is a feast day for St. Patrick, and that is
largely due to the advocacy of an Irish born Franciscan friar named Luke Wadding in the 1500s.
There are a few legends of St. Patrick that are really misunderstandings and one of the
most common ones is the argument that St. Patrick freed Ireland from snakes, chased all the snakes
off the island. And part of that has to do with the biological fact that there are no
native snakes in Ireland, after the last ice age it got too cold for snakes and then cut off from
the continent they never migrated back, but there were never snakes in Ireland at least not in St.
Patrick's time, rather that story which was told pretty much after his death was not meant to be
taken literally, he had not chased away snakes, it was referring to the conversion of Ireland.
St. Patrick was primarily responsible for chasing out “the snakes” being the old Pagan ways. Another
interesting piece of the St. Patrick legend is that there are several accounts of him bringing
people back from the dead, resurrection, and when we're not really here to take a stand on miracles,
quite probable that this was not really referring to literal resurrection but again referring to
the conversion of Ireland. Several people, important leaders at first resisted Patrick,
even violently, but later converted to Christianity and became his friend,
and that was seen as a resurrection of the soul. Those who were being resurrected were
really old Pagans that were being brought to the light of Christianity. Of course one of the most
persistent stories about Saint Patrick is that he used the Irish Shamrock as an analogy for the Holy
Trinity when bringing Christianity to Ireland, and while that sounds completely plausible we
have no real contemporary record to suggest that actually happened, in fact the first images that
seem to connect St. Patrick to shamrocks didn't come out until almost 1200 years after his death.
What's maybe more interesting is the way in which the Shamrock came to represent Ireland,
because it really had to do with British prejudices against the Irish. Writing in the
15 and 1600s English botanists suggested that the Irish were wild men who would literally eat clover
off the ground like cattle, and while there's no evidence that the Irish ever actually ate clover,
that particular representation stuck until the shamrock came to be the symbol of Ireland.
March 17th represents St. Patrick's death and it has been celebrated as a religious
holiday in Ireland at least since the 9th or 10th century as St. Patrick came to be seen
as the Patron Saint of Ireland, was added to the feast calendar for the Catholic Church in
the Church of Ireland in the 17th century. But in Ireland the celebration was rather
a somber religious celebration, you would go to Mass in the morning, you would celebrate a feast
in the afternoon but there were no parties, there were no parades, there were certainly no drinking
of green beer partly because the Irish as a rule don't dye their beer but as a religious holiday
the pub's wouldn't even be open. It wasn't clear until the 1960s that pubs started to be open on
St. Patrick's Day in Ireland. So how did it become the sort of wild celebration of all
things Irish that we see today? The vision of a parade driven, party driven celebration of all
things Irish really developed in the United States which has always had a large Irish
immigrant population. The first St. Patrick's Day parade in the United States was in 1766 and that
was Irish soldiers in the British Army marching in New York to demonstrate their Irish heritage,
and we've been holding parades here for Saint Patrick's Day at least since the 1770s. Today
there's more than a hundred cities in the United States that hold Saint Patrick's Day parades
and the ones in Boston and New York are among the oldest civilian parades in the world. The
St. Patrick's Day parade in New York generally includes a hundred and fifty thousand marchers
in a five hour long procession that will have more than three million people along the parade
route. The popularity of St. Patrick's Day in America has a lot to do with the sheer size of the
Irish American population. There are thirty four point five million Americans of Irish descent,
and to put that into perspective, that means that there are seven times as many Irish Americans as
there are people living in Ireland. Celebrating Saint Patrick's Day, and with a parade,
is a good way for Irish Americans to recognize each other to celebrate their history. It is
a way to fight the discrimination often came against Irish immigrants, and it is a way to show
political forces how important the Irish vote is. There has been a little bit of politics involved,
for example the wearing of green, contrary to popular belief the connection between
Saint Patrick's Day and Green has nothing to do with the colour of the hills in Ireland,
it has to do with Irish politics. The color green has represented the move for Irish
independence ever since the Irish rebellion of 1641 and increasingly emphasised the wearing of
green in the United States, and even pinching people who don't wear green, which occurred
in the middle of the 19th century, represented Irish American support for Irish independence.
Today the celebration of St. Patrick Day has gone so mainstream that the political connotations
have really disappeared, it's more of a broad celebration of Irish culture and immigrant culture
altogether. It's celebrated now worldwide, in fact it is celebrated in more countries than any other
national holiday. Ironically it has been the Irish that have been kind of late to come to the party,
only in the mid-1990s as a way to support tourism, that Ireland proclaimed the National
Saint Patrick's Day Festival, which is now five days long, as a way to attract people and help
represent Irish culture. But even in Ireland it's been approached with kind of that Irish sense
of humor, maybe best represented by the town of Dripsey in County Cork which held the shortest St.
Patrick's Day parade in 1999, 24 metres between the town's one pub and the town's other pub,
went on annually for five years until...one of the pubs closed. Today there's some criticism
of St. Patrick's Day as having become too commercialized and too focused on alcohol,
and it does drive somewhere on the order of four and a half billion dollars in business,
and there are people, especially in Ireland, calling to go back to some
of the religious roots of the holiday. I'm not going to take a stand on that,
but I am going to say that if you're celebrating today or tipping back a pint of dyed beer,
maybe you should take just a few moments to consider the rich history of this holiday.
I’m The History Guy, I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets history five to ten minutes long. If you enjoyed these five minutes,
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