Shamrock

The shamrock’s first Irish connection has nothing to do with St Patrick. The Edward Worth Library in Dublin, which holds the early books, points out that writers of 1571 describe it as food. Edmund Campion, who finished a history of Ireland in Drogheda in June 1571, listed “Shamrotes, Watercresses, Roots, and other hearbes” among what the Irish lived on, and the Flemish botanist Matthias L’Obel, relying on gentlemen back from Elizabeth I’s army in Ireland, wrote in the same year that the Irish made their bread from meadow clover. Campion mentions St Patrick on the same page, and says nothing about the Trinity.

The story of Patrick and the shamrock comes about a century later. The library, following the botanist Charles Nelson’s study of 1991, gives its first known mention as the manuscript journal of Thomas Dineley in 1681, and its first appearance in print as Threlkeld’s Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum, published in Dublin in 1726 and reissued in 1727. Threlkeld wrote that the plant was worn in hats “upon the 17. Day of March yearly, (which is called St. Patrick’s Day.) It being a Current Tradition, that by this Three Leafed Grass, he emblematically set forth to them” the mystery of the Holy Trinity. He was a clergyman and disapproved of how the day was kept: when they wetted their shamrock, he complained, they often drank to excess. Nelson, the library writes, has shown convincingly that the story is a myth, which seems to have begun no earlier than the mid to late 17th century.