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On the Ruin of Britain

St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899

11. Fragment 11 (Doubtful)

THE ROMANS SAY:¹ The tradition is that the tonsure of the British took its origin from Simon Magus, whose tonsure reached only from ear to ear, following the very excellence of the tonsure of sorcerers, by which only the fore part of the forehead was wont to be covered. But that the first originator of this tonsure in Ireland was a swine-herd² of King Loegaire mac Neill, is made evident by the word of Patrick. From him nearly all the Irish assumed this tonsure.

Notes

This Fragment may be found printed and quoted as part of Fragment X, but the introductory words, Romani dicunt, seem to demand a separate place. They, and the whole, are certainly impossible as words of Gildas; in the second edition of Wasserschleben’s Kanonensammlung they appear as Hibern. lii, 6, and are printed “Romani dicunt,” with “Gildas ait” preceding, under the general title: De tonsura Brittonum et solemnitate et missa. By “Romans” must be understood those who, in the English Church, represented the Roman contention that the native Celtic Church was deviating from “the unity of the Catholic Church,” by its persistent attachment to the frontal tonsure. While the British regarded their peculiar tonsure as derived from St. John, calling it tonsura S. Johannis, or even from St. James (tonsura S. Jacobi) the English gave it a schismatic character and origin by tracing it to Simon Magus.; in Ireland, those of the same way of thinking, found a heathen origin, by tracing it to the swine-herd of King Loegaire mac Neill (A.D. 428-463). The one fiction can be no more credible than the other, as the universality of the custom proves; traces of it were to be found even on the Continent during the sixth and seventh centuries (Vide Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, p. 509).
Subulcum: this word is regarded by some as a proper name, whereby the originator of the Irish tonsure is made to be Subulcus, a son of King Loegaire, instead of his swine-herd. Filii, however, stands here for mac=Welsh map. According to the Book of Armagh (c. 9), this heathen king, who remained a heathen, notwithstanding his formal conversion, reigned at Tara, when St. Patrick visited him and performed many wonders in his presence. In the Analecta Bollandiana (i, 555), the name is printed Loiguire nomine filius Neill.