The life of St Patrick of Ireland
In the Confessio he tells his own story plainly, how he was carried off as a youth into slavery in Ireland, how faith took hold of him there in a way it never had at home, how he escaped at last and returned to his own country, and how he felt himself called back to Ireland afterward as a missionary bishop; some who study the text believe he wrote it partly to answer criticism leveled against him by other churchmen. The exact years of his life resist certainty, though he is generally placed as active there through the fifth century.
Much of what popular memory now holds about Patrick, though, comes from a much later source: a Life written around 680, two centuries after his death, that modern historians treat as hagiography of limited reliability rather than sober record. The best known of these later additions, that he drove every snake out of Ireland, appears no earlier than the twelfth century and rests on nothing historical at all, since Ireland has had no native snakes since well before the last Ice Age; it is understood today as a symbol of his Christianizing labor rather than any literal event.
