Erc of Slane

Saint Erc of Slane, known in Irish as Erc mac Dego, was an early Irish bishop of the late fifth and early sixth centuries and a prominent companion of Saint Patrick. According to the hagiographical tradition preserved in the Lives of Patrick, including the Tripartite Life, Erc originally served as a brehon, or professional judge, at the court of Lóegaire mac Néill, the king associated with Tara. The best-known episode of his conversion is set at the Hill of Slane. When Patrick kindled a Paschal fire there in violation of a royal ordinance that no fire should be lit before the king's own fire at Tara, the druids and courtiers were alarmed. Erc alone is said to have risen in respect toward Patrick and to have declared that the fire which Patrick had lit would never be put out. Patrick thereafter baptized him and, in due course, consecrated him bishop, making him the first bishop of Slane in the kingdom of Brega, in what is now County Meath.

As bishop, Erc was closely identified with the ecclesiastical foundation at Slane, a site of strategic and symbolic importance because of its nearness to Tara and its role in the Patrick legend. The Annals of the Four Masters style him bishop of Lilcach as well as of Slane, indicating that his pastoral charge or his monastic connections may have extended to more than one church. Early Irish tradition further credits him with baptizing the infant who would become Saint Brendan of Clonfert, the celebrated voyager-abbot, an association that later writers used to link the Patrician generation with the great monastic founders of the sixth century. A proverb attributed to Patrick himself praised Erc's rectitude as a judge and as an ordaining bishop, stating that whatever Erc judged was just and that those whom he ordained were worthy. Such sayings, whether or not they preserve authentic fifth-century speech, reflect the reputation he enjoyed in the medieval Irish Church as a model of equity.

The Irish annals place Erc's death in the early sixth century. The Annals of the Four Masters record that he died on the second of November in the year 512; other annalistic compilations give dates in the immediately neighbouring years, around 513. He is associated in death as in life with Slane. On the north bank of the River Boyne, within the later demesne of Slane Castle, stands a site long known as St. Erc's Hermitage. The surviving fabric of the hermitage is medieval rather than fifth-century, but the dedication preserves the local memory of the bishop who was believed to have lived and died in that landscape. Beyond these notices, contemporary documentation of his career is lacking, as is typical for Irish ecclesiastics of the conversion period, whose lives were written down generations later in a hagiographical rather than a strictly historical mode.

Erc was venerated as a saint in Ireland from an early date, in the manner of the pre-congregational cults of the early medieval Church, without a recorded papal act of canonization. His feast is kept on 2 November. In Britain he has sometimes been identified with Saint Erth, or Erc, of Cornwall, the figure who gives his name to the parish of St Erth; that identification, however, is traditional rather than demonstrable and is treated with caution by modern historians. No reliable source records his parentage in detail, his place of birth, or any spouse or children. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that he belongs to the first generation of Irish bishops associated with Patrick's mission, that he was remembered as a just judge turned Christian prelate, and that Slane remained the centre of his cult.