Note 23 — Chapter XVI

Patrick, Columcille, and Berchan of Clonsast, are the others. Even the English settlers had heard of their fame. Baron Finglas, writing in Henry VIII.'s reign, says, "The four saints, St. Patrick, St. Columb, St. Braghane [i.e., Berchan], and St. Moling, which many hundred years agone made prophecy that Englishmen should have conquered Ireland, and said that the said Englishmen should keep their owne laws, and as soon as they should leave, and fall to Irish order, then they should decay, the experience whereof is proved true." (From Ryan's "History and Antiquities of the co. Carlow," p. 93.) A still more curious allusion to the four Irish prophets is one in the Book of Howth, a small vellum folio of the sixteenth century, written in thirteen different hands, published in the Calendar of State Papers. "Men say," recounts the anonymous writer, "that the Irishmen had four prophets in their time, Patrick, Marten [sic], Brahen [i.e., Berchan], and Collumkill. Whosoever hath books in Irish written every of them speak of the fight of this conquest, and saith that long strife and oft fighting shall be for this land, and the land shall be harried and stained with great slaughter of men, but the Englishmen fully shall have the mastery a little before doomsday, and that land shall be from sea to sea i-castled and fully won, but the Englishmen shall be after that well feeble in the land and disdained; so Barcan [Berchan] saith: that through a king shall come out of the wild mountains of St. Patrick's, that much people shall slew and afterwards break a castle in the wooden of Affayle, with that the Englishmen of Ireland shall be destroyed by that." The prophecy that the Englishmen fully shall have the mastery a little before Doomsday is amusingly equivocal!