But as is so often the case with battles of the Dark Ages, we know almost nothing about it; just that it took place in the túath (principality) of Cairbre Drom Cliabh, that it claimed the lives of around 3,000 men, and that it was a decisive victory for the Uí Néills and a crushing defeat for King Diarmait. We also know that the king was not among the dead strewn across the battlefield; though in hindsight he may have wished he had been.
King Diarmait would go on to lose the next battle he fought against the king of Tethbae and was ultimately murdered in 565 at the hands of yet another Irish king, Áed Dub mac Suibni. As for Finian, we know more about the success of his abbey than we do about the man himself. Finian’s copy of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible—the source of so much bloodshed—continued to attract hundreds of clerics and scholars to Movilla.
Both as a center of religious learning and, as recent archaeology has shown, of bronze and glass production, the abbey flourished until 823 when it was sacked by marauding Vikings. Though it recovered some of its former glory as an Augustinian abbey in the twelfth century, it would never again command the respect and prestige it once had. Molvilla Abbey’s functional history came to an end when, along with thousands of others, it was shut down by Henry VIII in 1542.
As for Columba, he went into exile shortly after the Battle of the Book. The story goes that a Synod of clerics, who blamed Columba solely for the bloodshed, debated between exile or execution. They were eventually persuaded to the former, on the condition that while in exile he would convert 3,000 people to Christianity; as many as had been slain upon the battlefield. He left Ireland in 563, boarding a leather-clad wicker coracle along with twelve others. Mercifully they weren’t lost at sea or dashed upon the rocks during their short voyage, instead washing up on the shores of the Scottish island of Iona in 563.
While his youth may have been marked by violence, Columba seems to have passed his later years living a life of quiet, albeit austere, serenity. His mission of converting Scotland to Christianity was underpinned by a simple, monastic daily routine; he consumed nothing but barley or oats, drank only water and slept on a cold, bare slab of rock. Once he was too weak to venture too far he spent his final years plying the craft he’d learned under Finian, diligently copying manuscripts.
On the eve of death, he was copying a Psalter, but stopped abruptly at the end of a sentence, announcing that Baithin, his cousin and successor, would have to complete the work. He then made his way to the church’s altar, where the monks found him the next morning. Hanging onto the altar and on the verge of death, Columba managed to summon just enough strength to give them his blessings before passing away.