Bolougne-Sur-Mer St. Patrick's Native Town online

is confirmed by Probus; he narrates all the misfortune that overtook
Calphurnius and his family whilst they were quietly living in their own
native country (in patria), and in their own seaside city in Armorica.

Armorica was then included in the Province of Neustria, one of the sub-
divided kingdoms of the Franks, and it was on that account that Probus
states that St. Patrick was born in Neustria.

Ware, Usher, and Cardinal Moran, who cling to the Scotch theory of St.
Patrick's birth, all contradict the Scholiast, who asserts that St.
Patrick was born in Dumbarton; whilst those who hold fast to the
Dumbarton theory make frantic efforts to convert the Crag into a
heavenly tower.

St. Patrick, after the vision, in which he was told that he should
return to his own native country, sailed to Gaul and not to the Island
of Britain.

It had been proved on the authority of Sulpicius Severus, who was born
in the year 360, that Armorica was called Britannia, and the Armoricans
were called Britons when the Council of Ariminium was held in the year
359 - fourteen years before the birth of St. Patrick. The Saint, when
writing his "Confession" in 493, when the province had even a stronger
claim to the name, could emphatically say, if he was born in Armorica,
that he was a Briton and had relatives amongst the Britons.



THE SITE OF THE VILLULA WHERE ST. PATRICK WAS BORN.

FRENCH archeologists point out the "Hotel du Pavillion et des Bains de
Mer," facing the sea-bathing place at Boulogne, as occupying the site
from which Caligula's tower, Nemthur, once lifted its head into the
heavens and shed its light over land and sea. On the frowning cliff
which casts its shadow over the hotel there is a mass of hard brick
ruins - the last remnants of the fortifications built round Nemtor when
Boulogne was captured by the British troops in 1544.

Calphurnius's villula was evidently situated somewhere on the plateau,
called Tour d'Ordre, between the tower and the town, for St. Patrick,
in his "Confession," assured us that his father's home was near to
("prope") Bonaven, a statement which he would not make if the villula
stood on the sea-coast beyond the tower. It is, therefore, certain that
the site of the villula still exists somewhere not far inland from the
ruins alluded to.

[Picture: THE PRESENT FORTIFICATIONS AND SITE OF THE ROMAN ENCAMPMENT
AT BOULOGNE.]

Although Nemtor was undermined by the sea and fell into the waves in
1649, a picture of the tower as it once stood in all its glory is still
to be seen in the museum of Boulogne, and the curator very kindly
permitted the writer of this little history to get the drawing copied,
so that the sons of St. Patrick might be permitted to view Nemtor,
which Calphurnius lost his life in defending, and which gave a name to
the district in which St. Patrick was born.

If this brief history of St. Patrick's native town has succeeded in
identifying ancient Bononia, now Boulogne-sur-Mer, as St. Patrick's
birthplace, then the whole plateau of Tour d'Ordre, on the north-
eastern cliffs of Boulogne, where the villula of Calphurnius once
stood, will become sacred in the eyes of the spiritual sons of St.
Patrick throughout the wide world.

- -

PRINTED BY ST. VINCENT'S PRESS, 333 HARROW ROAD, LONDON, W.