The Story of Ireland

Introduction

Winston Churchill once wrote The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.  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 book 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, who 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 Boyne. And I read that wonderful book by Thomas Flanagan called ‘The Year of the French’, and have even seen the film. My Mayo ancestors may well have been involved in that French backed uprising in 1798. And I have played golf near Killala Bay where the French landed, and fished for trout in the nearby streams. But my actual knowledge of Irish history was minimal before starting this book. So I embarked upon a period of research, looking up the things in which I was interested, and which therefore I hope my readers will also find interesting.

The internet has revolutionized the accessibility of knowledge. A week’s worth of library study or travel can now be condensed into an hour from your desk. It’s a boon for people like me. My research has been based on hundreds of hours of internet browsing, a few ‘source’ document of ‘on-line’ reproductions can be so called, and a number of real, old fashioned books. All these are listed under the ‘Sources’ page at the end of the book.

Geography, Names and dress.

If you’re Irish and live there, skip this bit because you will know it all. If not, you might like to look at the map on the previous page. That’s Ireland today. Note that the most northerly part of Ireland is actually in the (political) south, County Donegal; and that ‘Ulster’ is not the same thing as ‘Northern Ireland’ because part of it, Counties Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, are in the ‘South’, the Republic of Ireland. That will be relevant to understanding the later chapters in this book. The River Shannon, too, is important because it’s quite a wide river by European standards, and forms an effective boundary between the wealthier eastern side of Ireland and the poorer west. Thomond, where this story starts, was on the banks of the Shannon near its mouth, roughly encompassing County Limerick and the contiguous regions of Counties Clare and Tipperary. The name survives today as that of a bridge across the Shannon in Limerick. And, just as importantly you may feel, in Thomond Park, one of the two homes of the Munster Rugby Football Club! The Shannon, at 175 miles long, is the longest river in the British Isles / Ireland. And Cashel, which also comes into the first chapter, is in the middle of Tipperary.

Irish names. Until travel became cheap and easy in the 20th century, most people were born, lived and died in the same area. So it is possible to identify certain names with certain places, and the map on page 14 below shows the distribution in the 14th century. However they were IRISH names at the time. Written in Irish. Gaelic. There is a trend in Ireland today to revert to an approximation of the old Gaelic forms as an expression of national identity, but – and this is a personal view – to most people who are not actually long term residents in Ireland, the use of these Gaelic forms is confusing.  For ease of understanding by non-Irish speakers, never mind writing, I have generally stuck to the Anglicised versions of names – both people and places – in this book. So Brian Boru for example, was Brian Boru, not Brian Bóruma or Brian Boraime or even Brian mac Cennétig. Finally, you may not know that the prefixes ‘Mac’ and ‘O’ in Irish family names translate, respectively, into ‘son of...’ and ‘grandson of...’ .

Normans. The concept of ‘Norman’ in the 12th century needs a word of explanation. Originally from the area now called Normandy in north west France, they were descended from the marriage of ‘Norsemen’ or Vikings with the local Gallo Roman residents of that region in the early 10th century, and inherited their appetite for fighting. Over the next three hundred years they conquered or ruled Sicily and Southern Italy, parts of the Byzantine Empire and Armenia, and even reached Syria. They also held large parts of Western France, and of course England and parts of Wales. They were famous for their architecture, their music, and their knights on their armoured ‘destriers’, or large war horses. They spoke a language, Norman, which is recognizable as early French, and had a strong Latin base from their Gallo Roman forbears. They continued to speak it everywhere, from Antioch to Dublin, and modern English is in part descended from that early Norman. In fact most things in English have two words relating to them, one of Norman French and one of Saxon origin. For example ‘horse’ (Saxon) and ‘equine’ (Norman); ‘house’ (Saxon) and ‘residence’ (Norman) and so on.

Normans, Anglo Normans, Norman Irish, Anglo Irish, Irish, English. All these appellations come into the narrative. Basically I have used the word Norman to describe people who thought of themselves as Norman, from Normandy. This persisted into the mid 13th century, but after a generation of intermarriage with the Irish they became Norman Irish. They then diverged into two different categories, those who became so Gaelicised that they were virtually indistinguishable from the Celtic Irish, and those gentry or nobles or those with pretensions to gentility who tended to speak English, ‘ride after the English fashion’, dress likewise, and after Henry VIII, became Protestant – these are the Anglo Irish. The Irish in the first half of the book are the Celtic Irish who speak Irish. Towards the end, of course, ‘Irish’ encompasses the entire population of Ireland. ‘English’ refers generally to people born in England of English parents whose loyalty is or was to England. My thanks and acknowledgments to D Walsh, whose site http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlkik/ihm/index.htm is an excellent resource web site, and which will be of interest if you want to dig further into the roots of a family or name.

I found interesting the continual references in early English sponsored legislation to ‘those who ride after the Irish fashion’. Dress and behaviour were clearly important distinctions in the Medieval world, and indeed people seem to have exaggerated their mode of dress and behaviour as an expression of national or tribal identity. The difference in riding refers primarily to the use of a saddle and stirrups. The Anglo Normans and English used both, the country Irish folk up to the 16th century, by and large, used neither. They did not ride into battle, merely to the battle. They would then dismount, and fight on foot. Occasionally, too, they fought from a light two wheeled chariot.

As for dress, there is some detail in the Chapter 2 entitled ‘A Day in the Life of Brehon Aidan’.

Chapter 1. The Beginning

The story of Ireland of course starts much earlier than Brian Boru, but increasingly as one goes back in time, more of it comes from myths and legends and less from recorded history. Archaeologists’ reports vary, but there seems to be a general consensus that there was little or no human habitation before the Neolithic period. There are Neolithic remains at Tara on the east coast, north of Dublin. They include a Neolithic passage tomb under a huge mound, around 3 metres high and 24 metres across, which probably date to around 5000 BC. The Céide Fields near Ballycastle on the north Mayo coast in the west of Ireland are small fields separated by dry-stone walls. They are one of the oldest known field systems in the world, and date to around 3000 BC. The people who made them grew barley and wheat. There are numbers of long barrow tombs known as ‘court tombs’ because of a semi-circular chamber (or court) before the tomb chamber. These are mostly in the northern half of the island, and evidence of rectangular timber houses associated with them have been found in Tyrone and Mayo. Who built them, who farmed there, is a matter for speculation, and probably always will be.

They seem to have lived in and around their ‘ringforts’, large earth or stone walled enclosures with wooden palisades surrounding the tops of suitable hills. Some 45,000 of these ringforts have been identified in Ireland, and the probability is that the Celts lived in them as well as the earlier peoples. Many of these ringforts had tunnels to underground places of refuge, named by archaeologists ‘souterrains’ from the French word for basement. They also built artificial islands in the middle of lakes, the crannógs, which were very common and of course easily defensible.

The Celts, an Indo European group of people originally from central Europe in the region of present day Serbia, started arriving from around 500 BC and went on arriving until about 100 AD. The earliest known identifiable Celtic inhabitants of Ireland who have been traced archeologically lived in what is now Armagh, probably around the second or third century BC. There are folk tales from the period, but no written history. No writing at all really, in the modern sense of the word, although there was a script of disputed origins in perhaps the 4th century AD called Ogham, used chiefly to write names on what may be boundary markers. There are stories of Cuchulain (a fearsome warrior) and Queen Maeve (a Goddess Queen), and it has been suggested that the name Armagh is a corruption of Ard Mhacha, or Maeve’s Mount.

They founded groups of ‘kingdoms’ or Tuatha. One of them known to us as Dalriada was based on the north east coast and extended over the narrow strip of sea separating Ireland from Scotland, and included the west of Scotland. The Romans called the Ireland Irish the ‘Scoti’, and wrote about them chiefly as raiders along the west coast of Britannia from the 3rd century AD. They raided and many settled, particularly in Wales and Scotland. Eventually in Scotland they overcame the resident Picts around 800 AD, and the country gradually became known as Scotland.

In Ireland they divided into five ‘Fifths’, Ulster, Meath, Munster, Leinster and Connaught, the origins of the four Provinces. Niall of the Nine Hostages seems to have been a king for 30 odd years, around 400 A.D. He is said to have been an ancestor of the O’Neills of whom we shall see much more later, probably ruled from Tara and controlled the north, and has been linked with St. Patrick.

St Patrick, of course, did write. In Latin. He wrote his Confessio, an autobiographical confession, around the year 450. According to that, he was born into a Roman-British family in England which already numbered a Deacon and a Priest among its members, and may have been captured by Niall as a youngster. Certainly he was captured by Irish, and spent some years as a slave in Ireland before escaping. He returned home, entered the Church, and was later sent back to bring Christianity to Ireland around 432, and started the job in Ulster. He did not however establish Monasteries in Ireland, as some have written.

A number of historical figures come from the Church over the next three centuries – Brendan (the Navigator) for example, who may have crossed the Atlantic to America around 515 before settling down to study. And Colum Cille, an O’Neill born around 520, perhaps Ireland’s first poet, and a noted scribe who founded his own Columban Order. The Columbans did establish monasteries throughout Ireland, as well as Scotland, and St. Columba is known for the new spirit in European monasticism which he instilled. Monasteries developed and became places of learning and Ireland became a centre of learning famous throughout Europe, a shining light in the Dark Ages. In the words of Pope Pius XI,

Columban is to be reckoned among those exceptional people whom Divine Providence is wont to raise up in the most difficult periods of human history to restore causes almost lost.

These Columban monks were responsible for the amazing upsurge in the production of illuminated manuscripts in Ireland from around the 6th century. The best known are perhaps the 7th century Book of Durrow, and of course the world famous 9th  century master work, The Book of Kells. If you haven’t seen it and get the chance, take it. The Book, in four volumes, is on permanent display at Trinity College in Dublin.

By the first few centuries of the Christian Era, a really remarkable and completely home-grown civilisation was developing. Law, music, poetry, roads, all developed to surprisingly advanced states. Particularly notable was the legal system. It was close to the original Aryan law which applied among Europeans and among the Hindu in India, both Aryan peoples. In most of Europe it was eclipsed by the arrival of Romans with their legal system, but in Ireland it developed and was used everywhere until it was overturned by the English.

It is based on the concept of eineachlan, or ‘honour price’, and the Asian concept of ‘Face’ is closely related. Every free man had an honour price, which denoted his value. The King had his honour price. There were several degrees of ‘Ri’, of ‘King’, from the ‘Ard Ri’, the ‘High King’, down. And each King beneath the High King would have an honour price a little lower in value than his superior King. The Honour Price varied in amount from one cow to thirty cows or more, according to rank. So if a king were injured or if something were stolen from him, the penalty imposed upon the wrongdoer was much greater than if the victim had not been a King, but a poor man, even though the crimes were identical.

On this was based all legal sanction. This concept of personal worth was fundamental to Celtic society in those days. The kings were elected by all landed people in their kingdom, but only from among members of the ruling family. Once elected, they were forbidden to do any manual work and treated as sacred, along with poets and clerics. Beneath the landholders who elected them were non-noble Freemen with property, non-noble Freemen without property, or with some, but not sufficient to place them among the class next above, and the non-free classes who did the labouring work.

The laws were a civil rather than a criminal code, concerned with the payment of compensation for harm done and the regulation of property, inheritance and contracts. The concept of state-administered punishment for crime was foreign to Ireland's early jurists. Even the crime of murder would be punished by a fine, a hefty fine, which would be paid to the relatives of the deceased. And the ‘sept’ or immediate tribal grouping, would be responsible for ensuring that it was paid, even if they themselves had to pay it, with a consequent debt due to them by the convicted wrong-doer. If it was not paid, and only then, might the criminal be put to death, and even so the actual imposition was often by being cast adrift in a boat on a falling tide with an offshore wind, and just occasionally the miscreant might be washed ashore again alive, and so survive as an outlaw.

The system depended for its efficacy on an intelligent and law-abiding public. An Elizabethan jurist, commenting on this phenomenon wrote ‘there is no nation or people under the Sunne that doth love equall and indifferent justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof although it be against themselves, so that they may have the protection and benefit of the law when upon just cause they do desire it’.

Almost as important as the King was the Bard. Originally it seems probable that one individual was skilled in poetry, music, history and law, and this was the Bard. But as time went by these topics became more specialised. First to split away as a sort of sub-species seems to have been the lawyer, the Brehon. Then the historian became separate, and was known as a Seanchai (often pronounced ‘senekie’ in English). Later the musician and the poet separated, and the poet became the file (pronounced ‘feeler’). Sometimes, but often the two skills remained combined in one person. The Bards were divided into the Saor or patrician class, and Daor or plebeians – with eight grades in each class. All these skills had been devolved onto individual professionals by the time of Brian Boru, and the term Bard seems to have been used alongside the term file. Closely followed by the lawyer and the historian – these were the most important people in any kingdom after the King.

Music was an important area for the Bards. It is very difficult to know what ancient Irish music sounded like without hearing it, but a certain amount can be deduced from the instruments they played, and during the time when our book opened, the times of Brian Boru, they had a remarkable number, broadly falling into 12 different types, according to William Henry Grattan Flood in his History of Irish Music (1927). The most important ones were the Harp and the Pipes, or Bagpipes. These 12 types were

The Cruit and Clairseach, small and large harp. The so-called ‘Brian Boru's Harp’ dates from the 13th century, and is now in Trinity College, Dublin, but there are many representations of harps in sculptures of the 9th and 10th centuries, mainly on crosses.

The Cuisleanna (bagpipes). The term covers both principal types of pipe, The Piob Mór (big pipes), and the uileann (elbow) pipes. The Piob Mór was in existence in Ireland from a very early date, for we find mention of it in the Brehon Laws. It is a common misconception, I think, that the bagpipe is a uniquely Celtic, Scottish or Irish, instrument. It appears to have been much more widely used. Galilei (again) writes,

‘The bagpipe is much used by the Irish, To its sound, this unconquered, fierce and warlike people march their armies, and encourage each other to deeds of valour. With it also they accompany their dead to the grave, making such mournful sounds as to invite, nay almost force, the bystanders to weep.’

As a war pipe, one can suppose that it found plenty of employment in old Ireland.

Timpan a small stringed instrument, having from three to eight strings. The body was a small flat drum or tympanum (whence the name) with a short neck added; the strings were stretched across the flat face and along the neck, and were tuned and regulated by pins or keys and a bridge, something like the modern guitar, or banjo, but with the neck much shorter. It was played with a bow, or with both a bow and plectrum, or with the finger-nail; and the strings were probably stopped with the fingers of the left hand, like those of a violin.

Buinne a delicate instrument of the flute genus, to which songs were often sung.

Bennbuabhal and Corn which were horns, or horn pipes. We learn from the Brehon Laws that trumpeters (and cooks!) were to have a special supply of ‘cheering mead’!

Feadan (flute or fife);

Guthbuinne (bass horn);

Stoc and Sturgan (trumpet);

Pipai (single and double pipes);

Craoibh cuil and Crann cuil (cymbalum). These did the work of drums until the 18th  century.

Cnamha (castanet); and

Fidil (fiddle). Again, this was little used in the early days, if at all, and I suspect that Flood has included it in this list in error.  At any rate I can find no corroboration for the inclusion of the ‘fidil’– it appears to have been around, as a popular instrument anyhow, only since the 17th century. 

Sadly, nobody wrote the music down at this stage. In Europe, and that of course includes Ireland, the first instances of symbolic musical notation of a sort come from the Catholic Church who were writing plainchant from the 8th century. We only have available musical notation records of ‘Irish Music’ much later, in the 19th century. Musical notation, the recording of music in written form, dates back to the ancient Greeks and Arabs who in this, as in so much else, were centuries ahead of the Europeans of the time.

Music developed into formalised structures. It was part of the very fabric of the people. It was sufficiently important to be regulated by the Brehon laws. In the 3rd  century, we are told that the High King’s retinue always included a Chief Bard, and ‘a band of music’  (oirfideadh) ‘to soften his pillow and solace him in times of relaxation’. That particular High King, Cormac MacArt, was known as ‘Ceolach’, or the Musical, so maybe they weren’t all like that. Music and Poetry was very, very important to the Irish in those early days. The written laws confirm the existence of a complex ritual of music at least by the 8th century.

The whole Bardic tradition dates back to these early Celtic days. It included music and poetry. Study was central to the creation of a file, a poet. A gift was doubtless required, but training was mandatory, and lasted for up to twelve years, involving a detailed study the filidh, the composition methods needed to compose in the required elaborate metres and formal language. But once accepted as a file, a poet could rise to the top of the tree. And at the top of the tree, the official ‘court’ poet  would have a farm and perhaps 20 cows a year in exchange for his services. This was riches. And the poets would run schools such as those wherein they themselves were taught.

To be at the top of the tree, to be an ollamh file, they would know 350 kinds of verse and recite 250 principal and 100 secondary stories. At least. It was a momentous feat, and may explain why so many were blind, for blind people develop of necessity prodigious memories. It is an outer limitation that gives, them, perhaps, an inner vision. Poets and harpers, both. The person and the property of the ollamh was sacred, and not just poetry, but history and law were taught in their schools.

More than a thousand of these poets have been identified, and if you can read ancient Irish, you can read poems by Amergin, who reputedly lived long before the Christian era. Some poems are attributed to Finn macCumaill, Finn McCool, himself at least partly mythical, and to St. Patrick and St Columcille. They tend to be monologues or dialogues which develop into sagas like the Voyage of Bran in which we meet the King of the Sea and visit the Isles of the Blessed. Another introduces us to Fairy Hosts. And we have farewells, farewell to a dead lover, to a friend named Dinertach. And praise songs like one to King Niall. Or satires, which were thought to bring harm to the satired, like that of MacConglinne against the monks of Cork. Then there was religious poetry like the Lamentation of Eve, or The Hymn to St. Michael by the Ulster poet Mael Isu, or the famous Hymn of St. Patrick.

In many ways the Irish poems seem to me to be pantheistic in nature, long before the times of Wordsworth or Coleridge. We have the hermit who prays that he may live in a hut in a lonely place beside a clear spring in a wood with a little lark to sing overhead, or ‘Marban, who, rich in nuts, crab-apples, sloes, watercress, and honey, refuses to go back to the court to which the king, his brother, presses him to return’. We have descriptions of summer with blackbirds singing and the sun smiling, of the sea and the wind blowing tempestuously from the four quarters of the sky . God was seen in all these things by Irish poets long before the Pantheist romantic poets of England. But the poets were above all entertainers, and also in their way historians, for their sagas told of the past and were continuously updated.

This extraordinary legal system encompassed, as well as honour prices and music and poetry, more mundane things, notably roads which were carefully regulated. So we know that the largest road then was a slighe or main road, which had to be wide enough to allow a King’s chariot to pass a Bishop’s chariot without touching it. The next category down, a remut, leading to the castle or fort of the chief or king, had to be guarded. Next, the bother had to be  wide enough to allow two cows to walk along it side by side. The set was a track wide enough for a horse or cow to walk along. Finally there was the botharin, surviving today as a boreen, a little by-way.