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    The Ireland Series Book 1: Our Roots.
    The Ireland Series Book 1: Our Roots.
    The Ireland Series Book 1: Our Roots.
    Ebook59 pages51 minutes

    The Ireland Series Book 1: Our Roots.

    By Brian Igoe

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This is a LiteBite Book, about the equal of fifty or so pages of a Paperback or Pocket Book.

    The Story of Ireland ‒ Book One. Roots.

    This is the first in a series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. This first Book takes us from 3000 BC to 1366 AD. The series aims to tell not just Ireland’s history, but her story. Her Music and, her Poetry and Theatre, her ancient Brehon laws. How people lived in the times of Brian Boru, what they wore and what they ate and drank.. Book 1, Roots, tells us of St Patrick and the Saints, Strongbow and Dermot McMurrough, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf, the birth of the Anglo Irish and the Famine of 1316 and the Black Death and much more, culminating with the Statutes of Kilkenny which set the scene for the next two hundred years. For that, please come back to Book Two in the series shortly!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Igoe
    Release dateApr 13, 2013
    ISBN9781301177677
    The Ireland Series Book 1: Our Roots.
    Author

    Brian Igoe

    You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.

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      Book preview

      The Ireland Series Book 1 - Brian Igoe

      This is a LiteBite Book, about the equal of fifty or so pages of a Paperback or Pocket Book.

      The Story of Ireland ‒ Book One. Roots.

      This is the first in a series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. This first Book takes us from 3000 BC to 1366 AD. The series aims to tell not just Ireland’s history, but her story. Her Music and, her Poetry and Theatre, her ancient Brehon laws. How people lived in the times of Brian Boru, what they wore and what they ate and drank.. Book 1, Roots, tells us of St Patrick and the Saints, Strongbow and Dermot McMurrough, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf, the birth of the Anglo Irish and the Famine of 1316 and the Black Death and much more, culminating with the Statutes of Kilkenny which set the scene for the next two hundred years. For that, please come back to Book Two in the series shortly!

      Copyright © 2013 by Brian Igoe

      Smashwords Edition

      Contents.

      Chapter 1. The Beginning

      Chapter 2. 940 – 1014. Brian Boru.

      Chapter 3. A Day in the Life of Brehon Aidan.

      Chapter 4. 1166 – 1366. Strongbow and the Normans.

      Chapter 5. The birth of the Anglo Irish

      Sources

      Introduction

      I sometimes think the story of Ireland should be written in blood. Everyone was fighting everyone else and all were fighting the Vikings or the Normans or the English or their fellow Irish, with barely a let up until the 21st century.

      Sure, I hear you say, St Patrick was a Gentleman, he came of decent people, and it is certain that the church which he established in Ireland was a haven of learning for a thousand years. This is one of the many paradoxes of Ireland, this juxtaposition of learning and slaughter. The Earl of Kildare, while a devout practicing catholic, as were all Christian people at the time, when accused before King Henry VII of England of burning down the cathedral at Cashel, immediately confessed the fact, but as a chronicler puts it,

      "By Jesus! says he, I would never have done it, had I not been told that the Archbishop was within it."

      Now he being there present, and principal accuser, the King laughed at the plainness of the man, that he should allege that for an excuse, which was the greatest aggravation of his offence: lastly, they summed up all in this article, finally, all Ireland cannot rule this Earl.

      "No? quoth the King; then in good faith, he shall rule all Ireland," and thereupon constituted him deputy.

      Which says a lot about the English as well as the Irish!

      There are lots of histories of Ireland, some running to volumes, and this series is not one of them. Nor does it pretend to compete. Rather it seeks to offer a digestible layman’s history, the story of Ireland rather than the history – hopefully in an entertaining and readable, though serious, form. It is aimed at people, like myself, whose roots are in Ireland but who have been educated elsewhere and have spent most of their lives outside Ireland, or are descendants of emigrants from Ireland. And people who like me, before I started to research this book, know less about Ireland and its history than they would like. Or even Irish people in Ireland who may have heard of Niall of the Nine Hostages and Brian Boru, but might be puzzled to tell you about the Four Masters or Shane O’Neill or Aughrim’s Pass.

      I am not an historian. Historians, professional historians, examine every facet of what they write, before they write it, from a dozen different angles. They are generally trained in a discipline known as historical method which categorises all the source material they use, and leads them down a most complex path to a logical conclusion. And then, if they are also authors, they write. I would love to have been an historian, but in fact I studied law, which is much easier. That is not to say that I have done no research on the history of Ireland, but with minor exceptions, I have done it by reading the works of historians rather than their sources.

      My forbears on my father’s side came from County Mayo. My schooling, lost somewhere back in the mists of time, taught me about The Great Famine of 1845 and Oliver Cromwell and the Battle of the

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