From A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland 1906
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CHAPTER XXVI....concluded
10. Bishop Ultan and the Orphans.
St. Ultan, bishop of Ardbraccan in Meath, seventh-century, is commemorated in the Calendars under the 4th September, and his death is recorded in most of the Annals. In the Feilire [Failera] of Aengus, he is mentioned as "the great sinless prince in whom the little ones are flourishing: the children play greatly round Ultan of Ardbraccan." The annotation explains this in words that give us a glimpse of the havoc wrought by the Yellow Plague —which attacked adults more than children—and of the piteous scenes of human suffering witnessed during its continuance. Everywhere through the country numbers of little children, whose mothers and fathers had been carried off, were left helpless and starving. Ultan collected all the orphan babes he could find, and brought them to his monastery. He procured a great number of cows' teats, and filling them with milk, he put them into the children's mouths with his own hands, and thus contrived to feed the little creatures; so that in the words of the annotation, "the infants were playing around him." In one of the accounts, we are told that he often had as many as 150, so that his noble labour of love—even with help—must have kept his hands pretty busy. It would be difficult to find an instance where charity is presented in greater beauty and tenderness than it is in this simple record of the good bishop Ultan.
As curiously illustrative of this record, it is worthy of mention that, at the present day in Russia, it is a very general custom for those peasant women who do not suckle their own children, to feed them with a rude feeding-bottle, called by a name equivalent to the English word "hornie," namely a cow's horn hollowed out, and having a little opening at the smaller end, on which is tied a cow's teat. When the "hornie" is filled with milk, the teat is put into the infant's mouth, who in this manner feeds itself.
END OF CHAPTER XXVI.
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Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
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Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
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Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
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