Women were in low repute; they were required to go into battle and fight along with the men, and it was only on the urgency of Adamnan in the synod of Drumceatt, in 574, that they were exempted. A man could sell his daughter—it was so with Dubtach and Bridget. In the life of S. Illtyt, a Welsh Knight, it is told how one stormy morning, when he wanted to have his strayed horses collected, he pushed his wife out of her bed and sent her without any clothes on to drive the horses together. There is no doubt but the Irish husbands were quite as brutal. There is a very curious story in the life of S. Patrick. He was desirous of revisiting his old master Miliuc with whom he had been a slave as a lad, and from whom he had run away. His hope was to convert Miliuc, and to propitiate him with a double ransom. But the old heathen, frightened at his approach, and unwilling to receive him and listen to his Gospel, burned himself alive in his house with all his substance. This seems to point to the Indian _Dharna_ having been customary in Ireland. When S. Patrick converted the Irish he dealt very gently with such of their customs as were harmless. The wells they so reverenced he converted into baptisteries, and the pillar-stones they venerated he rendered less objectionable by cutting crosses on them. The Druids wore white raiment, and had their heads tonsured; he made his clergy adopt both the white habit and the tonsure. The oak was an object of reverence, and S. Bridget set up her cell under an ancient oak. She did not cut it down, and when people came on pilgrimage to it, taught them of Christ, from under its leafy boughs. There was another relic of paganism that was not ruthlessly rejected. The ancient Irish venerated fire. Now, in Ireland, where the atmosphere is so charged with moisture, it is not easy to procure fire by rubbing sticks together, as it would be in Italy or Africa. Consequently it was a matter of extreme importance that fires should not be allowed to be extinguished. It was the custom among the early Latins that there should be in every village a circular hut in which the fire was kept ever burning, and the unmarried girls were expected and obliged to attend to it; and if by the fault of any it became extinguished, then her life was forfeit. As the Romans became more civilised, the central hut was called the Temple of Vesta, or Hestia,—the Hearth-fire; and a certain number of virgins was chosen, and invested with great privileges, whose duty it was never to allow it to die out. Now, it was much the same in Ireland, and it was more important there to keep fire always burning, than it was in the drier air of Italy. S. Bridget undertook that she and her nuns should keep the sacred fire from extinction, and Kildare became the centre from which fire could always be procured. The fire was twice extinguished, once by the Normans and again at the Reformation, finally.