St. Patrick was a native of Armoric Gaul
Colgan, when he published his “Trias Thaumaturga” in 1647, admitted that there was “A constant tradition amongst the inhabitants of that country that St. Patrick was a native of Armorican Britain, which tradition several Irishmen endorse.” (In Britannia Armorica regione Galliæ natum esse vetus est traditio incolarum istius terræ cui nonulli suffragantur Hiberni.) (Appendix 5, p. 2.)
Don Philip O’Sullivan, who published “Patriciana Decas” in 1621, strongly upheld this view.
Attempts, however, have more recently been made to prove that St. Patrick was a native of Scotland, but there undoubtedly existed a tradition in favour of the belief that St. Patrick came from Gaul to Ireland, and this view is firmly held by Keating and Lanigan, two of our ablest Irish historians.
St. Patrick narrates in his “Confession” that he was born in the suburbs of a town called Bonaven, where there was a Roman encampment, and that, when a youth in his fifteenth year, he was taken prisoner by the Irish Scots, “the nation to whom he showed tender forgiveness.”
The very year of his capture corresponds with the raid of Niall of the Nine Hostages into Armorica.
As the Irish Scots invaded that country just when St. Patrick had attained his fifteenth year, and as the Saint declared that he had been taken prisoner by men of the nation which he had converted, it is more than probable that he was taken prisoner during that raid.
As Bononia, or Boulogne-sur-Mer, was called Bonauen by the Gaulish Celts, and as the “v” and “u” are convertible in Gaelic, the Bonauen of the Gaulish Celts and the Bonaven of St. Patrick’s “Confession” may well be one and the same place. Indeed, there are arguments which seem to place their identity beyond reasonable doubt.
St. Fiacc declares that the Apostle of Ireland was born at Nemthur.
Now, Nemtor was the name given by the Gaulish Celts to Caligula’s tower in the suburbs, and close to the City of Bononia, or Boulogne.
St. Fiacc, therefore, gives the name of the district—for the district about Nemthur was named after the prominent landmark in its midst, and St. Patrick the name of the town in the suburbs of which he was born.
According to the Celtic legend, Calphurnius was a Roman officer in charge of the tower, and was slain on the occasion when his son Patrick was made prisoner by the Irish Scots.
A close examination, however, of the “Confession” and of the old Latin lives of the Saint, will, it seems to us, securely determine which of the four theories—the Scotch, the Welsh, the English, or the French—concerning St. Patrick’s native country, carried with it the greatest amount of probability.
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