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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Old Irish World, by Alice Stopford Green.
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53159 ***</div>
<div class="limit">
<div class="chapter">
<div class="transnote p4">
<p class="pc large">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
<p class="ptn">—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.</p>
<p class="ptn">—The transcriber of this project created the book cover
image using the title page of the original book. The image
is placed in the public domain.</p>
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<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="pc4 xlarge">THE OLD IRISH WORLD</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a></span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</a></span></p>
<hr class="chap" />
<h1 class="p4">THE OLD IRISH WORLD</h1>
<p class="pc4">BY</p>
<p class="pc elarge">ALICE STOPFORD GREEN</p>
<p class="pc reduct"><i>Author of “The Making of Ireland and its Undoing”<br />
“Irish Nationality,” &c.</i></p>
<p class="pc4 mid">DUBLIN</p>
<p class="pc large">M. H. GILL & SON, <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
<p class="pc mid">LONDON</p>
<p class="pc large">MACMILLAN & CO., <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
<p class="pc mid">1912</p>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">PREFACE</h2>
<p class="pn p2"><span class="smcap">Some</span> Irish friends have asked me to print certain
lectures concerning Ireland to which they had listened
with indulgence; and to reprint also former papers
in a manner more convenient for country readers.
This volume is the answer to their request. It will
be seen that I have not attempted to alter the lectures
from their first purpose and form.</p>
<p>The various studies, thus accidentally united, have
a connecting link in such evidences as they may
contain of civilisation in the old Irish world. A
hundred years ago, in 1821, Dr. Petrie noted that
while the historians of ancient native origin were
unable in their poverty and degradation to pursue
the laborious study of antiquities, there were others
of a different class and origin who had taken up the
subject to bring it into contempt; and these indeed
succeeded in the cause for which they, unworthily,
laboured. Forty years later he recognised the same
influences at work. It would appear, he said in a
letter written to Lord Dunraven shortly before his
death in 1865, to be considered derogatory to the
feeling of superiority in the English mind to accept<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>
the belief that Celts of Ireland or Scotland could have
been equal, not to say superior in civilisation to their
more potent conquerors, or that they could have
known the arts of civilised life till these were taught
them by the Anglo-Normans. After the lapse of
half a century we can still trace the same spirit—so
powerful have been the hindrances to serious and
impartial enquiry—so slow has been the decline of
racial prejudice and political complacency. But in
these latter days a great change has silently passed over
the peoples. The difficulties of historical research
and instruction do indeed remain as great as ever;
but in the new society which we see shaping itself in
Ireland on natural and no longer on purely artificial
lines, there is no reason to fear truth as dangerous
or to neglect it as unnecessary. There is now a public
ready to be interested not only in Danish and Norman
civilisation in Ireland, but also in the Gaelic culture
which embraced these and made them its own.</p>
<p>I cannot adequately thank Professor Eoin MacNeill
for generously allowing me to embody in my first
chapter some of his researches on the history of the
Scot wanderings between Scotland and Ireland;
it is earnestly to be hoped that he will publish before
long the results of his original work.</p>
<p>I owe my warm thanks also to Mr. F. J. Bigger for
his unstinted help in references and suggestions out of
the stores of his topographical knowledge. I may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span>
mention as an instance the grave-stone in Kilclief
churchyard carved with a Celtic cross, which he discovered
while these pages were going through the
press, so that I have been able to note it for the first
time among Lecale antiquities.</p>
<p>Mr. R. I. Best has rendered me more services than
I can here tell, however gratefully I acknowledge them.</p>
<p>The account of Ardglass has been re-printed
with additions, by the kind permission of the Editor
of the <i>Nation</i>. I have to thank the Editor of the
<i>Nineteenth Century</i> for leave to add the article on
Tradition in History, which is inserted at the request
of readers in Ireland.</p>
<p>To prevent mistake I may add a word of explanation
that the map, or rather diagram, which is entitled
Scandinavian Trade Routes, contains not only those
lines of sea-commerce, but also an indication of the
ways across Europe which were used by Irish travellers
from earlier times. The difference between these
routes is clearly indicated in the text.</p>
<p class="pr2">ALICE STOPFORD GREEN.</p>
<p><i>April 25, 1912.</i></p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span></p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p class="pc4 lmid">IN MEMORY OF<br />
THE IRISH DEAD</p>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">CONTENTS</h2>
<table id="toc" summary="cont">
<tr>
<td colspan="2"> </td>
<td class="tdr"><span class="small">Page</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">I.</td>
<td class="tdl1"><span class="smcap">The Way of History in Ireland</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">II.</td>
<td class="tdl1"><span class="smcap">The Trade Routes of Ireland</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">III.</td>
<td class="tdl1"><span class="smcap">A Great Irish Lady</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">IV.</td>
<td class="tdl1"><span class="smcap">A Castle at Ardglass</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdr">V.</td>
<td class="tdl1"><span class="smcap">Tradition in Irish History</span></td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="pc4 xlarge">THE OLD IRISH WORLD</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="pc4">CHAPTER I</h2>
<p class="pch">THE WAY OF HISTORY IN IRELAND</p>
<p class="drop-cap04">IN all the countries of Europe the study of history
for a citizen of the State is taken for granted,
as the study of tides and currents might be
held necessary for a mariner, or of the winds for
an air-man, or that of the map for a merchant.
It is only a dozen years ago, however, that its
study was made compulsory in elementary schools
in England, and in that country men are still discussing,
by way of lectures and so forth, “What
is the Use of History.” The historical instinct
among the English people has indeed never been
very keen, so that, as learned men tell us, it would
be more difficult to form a folk-museum in
England than in any other country, so few are
the objects of a distinctly national character that
have survived. The past is rapidly overlaid
among men who live intensely in the present
and the immediate future. A great gulf separates
them from a race like the Irish, to whom the far
past and the far future are part of the eternal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
present, the very condition of thought, the furniture
without which the mind is bare.</p>
<p>The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort
been brought under authority to the English
mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland now
lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough
of the wave, rocked by the old commonplaces of
the early Victorian age. The hope that our
people may win out of that trough lies to a great
extent in the new sails set by the National
University, if they may at last catch the fresh
breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open
sea of free knowledge and candid thinking. In
Ireland, as in England, history has been made
compulsory in a sense—a sense, we might
irreverently say, of the “United Kingdom.” It
has been made a department of English Grammar,
and has further been portioned out to Irishmen
as a fragment of English history, strictly confined
within dates fixed for that history in the schools
of England. The Irish story is thus shut up as
it were like criminals of old in the Tower prison of
Little Ease—a narrow place where no man could
stand or lie at length. And Irishmen are still
driven to discuss in belated fashion the question
that all Europe settled long ago—Why should
we make the History of our country our serious
study?</p>
<p>The reason of Nature for this study is indeed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
as profound as the being of man. There is no
other creature on this planet that can create a
history of its kind. To man alone belongs the
faculty of looking “before and after,” and considering
the story of his race from the first human
being that walked the earth. Our first forefather
brought with him something new—the power to
store up and to celebrate memories of the great
dead. His elemental pieties have become part
of the whole tradition of our humanity; and that
history which he began, and to which we add
day by day, is our witness to the separateness of
man from the other creatures of this world. When
we cherish this study we are proclaiming our
pre-eminence among all the living beings that we
know. When we let this history fall from us we
are sinking to the level of the dumb beasts. As
living men, therefore, “let us enjoy, whenever
we have an opportunity, the delight of admiration,
and perform the duties of reverence.”</p>
<p>There is a practical reason, too, for the knowledge
of history. The individual man left to
himself is helpless to stand against the powers of
the world. Alone he can do nothing. His
strength lies in the generations and associations
of man behind him, linked by an endless tradition,
who have made for him his art, religion, science,
politics, social laws. It is only in communion
with that company of workers that he can take a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
step forward. The soul of a country is bound up
with the heroes who still</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">“... people the steep rocks and river banks,<br />
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul,<br />
Of independence and stern liberty.”</p>
<p class="pn1">Rulers and commanders have known this well.
When they have wanted to exalt peoples or
armies under them, they have opened out to them
the glories of their history, and called on them
to admit into their souls the spirit of their fathers.</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">“Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed<br />
From dead men to their kind.”</p>
<p class="pn1">When they have wished to depress and subjugate
a race they have slammed the doors of their history
on them, and left them alone, spiritless and
forlorn, passed by and forgotten by the Ages,
despised of themselves and of their neighbours.</p>
<p>Whether therefore as men of a reasonable
nature, or as members of a nation, we are bound
to make History our all-important study. There
is no question about this in any self-respecting
nation in Europe. How does the case stand with
us in Ireland?</p>
<p>When I first began the study of Irish History,
I was dissuaded from it by a man of exceedingly
acute mind and wide reading. His argument,
I imagine, is a common one, and shows the kind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
of scruples that are set to bar our way to Irish
history—as some primeval race once planted the
slope of Cahir Mor on Aran with a forest of jagged
standing-stones, to forbid all entrance to the
fortress uplifted there above the expanse of the
Ocean in its freedom. Why, said my typical
objector, should we turn away from the great
highways of the world’s progress, with their sweeping
procession of Empires and great Dominions,
to lose ourselves in the maze where humble and
unsuccessful nationalities walk obscurely. Stimulate
the spirit of young men by giving them the
examples of heroes whose fame has sounded
through the earth, and societies that have been
adorned by triumph. Let the men of local fame,
the guardians of smaller nationalities, rest in darkness,
and let us follow the sun in its strength.</p>
<p>We may remember one of the snares laid by
the Prince of Evil for the Son of Man, when he
set Him on a high place above the kingdoms of
the world, to bend His soul before their ostentatious
glory. From the mountain Satan displayed
the emblems of their pride, palaces and
towers and treasuries, “knowing that it was by
those alone that he himself could have been so
utterly lost to rectitude and beatitude. Our
Saviour spurned the temptation, and the greatest
of His miracles was accomplished.” England was
just at the outset of her imperial career when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
Milton, in his “Paradise Regained,” pictured
that tremendous scene, the passing of the empires
in their state before the judgment of the Divine
Reason. The prodigious procession was marshalled
from the very dawn of history, powers and
dominions sweeping over the earth, and disappearing
with the suddenness with which they rose.
Not one has survived. In the shifting scene
forms of states move and stir dimly like the fallen
angels from “Paradise Lost” as they lay prone,
extended on the flood of ruin and combustion.
One scheme of government after another is lifted
up to be cast down—tyranny, oligarchy, slavery,
commercialism, communism, parliaments, theocracies.
The great warriors and the great statesmen
are alike entombed in the ruins of their empires.
“Head and crown drop together, and are overlooked.”
On the other hand, when empires have
fallen, the nationalities have not always perished.
They die only with the utter extermination of
the people. So long as the old stock lingers on
the soil, there is a spirit that can outlive all
empires, form the scourge of conquerors, and set
the last barrier to pride of dominion. We know
how peoples enclosed within small states, fed from
deep sources of heritage and tradition, have given
the impress of their local passion to their art.
Out of the intensity of national life have come
those high inspirations that have given to us all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
that is best of literature, poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, and however deeply the artist
has felt the influence of the world outside, his
ultimate power lies in the spirit which has entered
into him from his native state and the race of which
he sprang. The generous influences of local
patriotism were recognised by the greatest political
thinker that modern Ireland has sent out: “To
be attached,” said Burke, “to the sub-division,
to love the little platoon we belong to in society,
is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public
affections.”</p>
<p>Perhaps, we might also suggest to our objector,
the lesser nationalities are even now, in these days
of triumphant Imperialism, beginning to have their
revenge. The study of small societies seems to
become fashionable among the new reformers.
Do we not hear from all sides of the education,
discipline, and public spirit of countries compassed
within bounds suited to man’s apprehension?
With what respect do not Unionists extol the
industrial success of States such as Holland and
Denmark, for example. Even now do we not
hear English Imperialists crying out that perhaps
Switzerland has got the secret of the democratic
mind, or Norway, or New South Wales, or
Arizona; might not England take a lesson from
some little self-contained and thrifty community
on the use of the referendum? It would seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
that the influence of small commonwealths is not
yet extinct among us.</p>
<p>It is very certain that Ireland of all countries,
if left to itself, would never of its own will allow
history to lie in a backwater among the flotsam
of the current. History was the early study of
the Irish, the inspiration of their poets and writers.
Every tribesman of old knew, not only the great
deeds and the famous places of his own clan, but
of the whole of Ireland. In the lowliest cabin
the songs of Irish poets lived on for hundreds of
years, and dying fathers left to sons as their chief
inheritance the story of their race. When war,
poverty, the oppression of the stranger, hindered
the printing of Irish records, there was not a
territory in all Ireland that did not give men to
make copies of them, hundreds of thousands of
pages, over and over again, finely written after the
manner of their fathers. Through centuries of
suffering down to within living memory the long
procession of scribes was never broken, men tilling
small farms, labouring in the fields, working at
a blacksmith’s forge. And this among a people of
whom Burke records that in two hundred thousand
houses for their exceeding poverty a candle, on
which a tax lay, was never lighted. As we follow
the lines and count the pages of such manuscripts,
we see the miracle of the passion in these men’s
hearts. No relics in Ireland are more touching<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
than these volumes, and none should be more
reverently collected and preserved. They form
a singular treasure such as no country in all Europe
possesses.</p>
<p>But now, in spite of this tradition, history is
more backward in Ireland than in any other country.
Here alone there is a public opinion which resents
its being freely written, and there is an opinion,
public or official, I scarcely know which to call it,
which prevents its being freely taught. And
between the two, history has a hard fight for life.</p>
<p>Take the question of writing. History may
conceivably be treated as a science. Or it may be
interpreted as a majestic natural drama or poem.
Either way has much to be said for it. Both
ways have been nobly attempted in other
countries. But neither of these courses is thought
of in Ireland. Here history has a peculiar doom.
It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale—the
good man (English) who prospered, and the bad
man (Irish) who came to a shocking end—the
kind of ethical formula which, for all our tutors
and teachers could do, never deceived the generosity
of childhood. The good man in the moral tale
of Ireland is not even a fiction of Philosophy or
of History. He is, oddly enough, the offspring
of Grammar alone, and carries the traces of his
dry and uninspired pedigree. He owes his being,
in fact, to the English dislike for a foreign language.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
The Gael, as we know, ever faithful to the
tradition of his race, while he sang and recited
and wrote and copied his story with an undying
passion, did these things in his own speech. The
Norman or “Frank” settlers, true “citizens
of the world,” adopted his tongue, his poetry,
and his patriotic enthusiasm. When the English
arrived, however, they according to their constant
insular tradition refused to learn a strange
language, so that the only history of Ireland they
could discern was that part of it which was written
in English—that is, the history of the English
colonists told by themselves. On this contracted
record they have worked with industry and self-congratulation.
They have laid down the lines
of a story in which the historian’s view is constantly
fixed on England. All that the Irish had
to tell of themselves remained obscured in an
unknown tongue. The story of the whole Irish
population thus came to be looked on as merely
a murky prelude to the civilizing work of
England—a preface savage, transitory, and of
no permanent interest, to be rapidly passed over
till we come to the English pages of the book.
Thus two separate stories went on side by side.
The Irish did not know the language which held
the legend of English virtue and consequent
wealth. The English could not translate the
subterranean legend of Irish poetry, passion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
fidelity. Religion added new distinctions. Virtues
were Protestant, the sins of the prodigal were
Catholic. Finally, class feeling had its word.
The upper class went to their university, and
their manners and caste instincts entitled them
as of course to the entire credence of their own
social world; the lower class were alleged to be
men whose manners were common and their
prejudices vulgar.</p>
<p>In this way there grew up an orthodox history
based on sources in the English tongue alone.
The Colonists laid down by authority its dogmas
and axioms. All that agreed with this conventional
history was reputed serious and scholarly:
whatever diverged from it was partial, partizan,
or prejudiced. “Impartiality” and “loyalty”
became technical terms, with a special meaning for
Ireland. The two words were held also to be
interchangeable. A strictly “impartial” writer
must not let his “loyal” eye swerve from the
fixed point, England. As a judicious Englishman
said of his compatriots, they only think a man
impartial when he has gone over to the opposite
side.</p>
<p>The results of this system are conspicuous. A
Frenchman may unreproved write with affection
and ardour of France, and an Englishman of
England. An Irishman, however, is in another
case. He must have no patriotic fire for his own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
people. He must not acclaim their victories
nor mourn their defeats. Take an illustration
of this temper. A clergyman has lately written
to the <i>Church of Ireland Gazette</i> to condemn
history readers “written from an anti-English
and anti-Church point of view”; he complains
that the writer describes the battle of the Blackwater
in 1598, where the English were routed,
as “a glorious victory for the O’Neill.” Such
a phrase as this cannot be allowed to Irishmen.
Or as a writer to the <i>Irish Times</i> puts a similar
argument: “If the Nationalists want for ever
to live in the glories of the past and to harp upon
them, why do they not go far enough back ...
to the time when they ate their grandmothers
... and indulged in all sorts of hellish rites.”</p>
<p>In fact, as we trudge along the dull beaten
road of the orthodox history we never escape,
not for a moment, from the monotonous running
commentary which sounds continually at our
side. “Nomadic,” “primitive,” “wigwam,”
“aboriginal,” “savage,” “barbarous,” “lawless”—the
words are always at hand. In the
moral tale the accustomed stream of precept
and delation never runs dry. It follows us
through all the strictly “impartial” writers.
The Irishman was a “kerne.” The Irish word
cethern (kerne) meaning a troop or company
of soldiers, probably foot soldiers, is as old as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
Latin <i>caterva</i> with which it is cognate, or the
Umbrian <i>kateramu</i>, and so is of quite respectable
lineage; but being a foreign word to the Englishman,
he used it as a natural term of contempt,
as though a Chinese should cry “sailor” or
“merchant” when he meant to say “English
devil.” More than that, the Irishman was a
“nomad,” apparently because he sent his cattle
to graze on the hills in summer—a custom which
in modern Switzerland is held to be quite respectable
by admirers of Federalism. This “nomad”
idea is familiarly handed about from one writer
to another. One of the most esteemed historians
in Dublin was Mr. Litton Falkiner, who has
added some notable pages to later Anglo-Irish
history. Yet he was satisfied to dismiss the Irish
population of mediæval times in one terse phrase:
“the pastoral, and in great measure nomadic
Celts, who stood for the Irish people before the
12th century”—in other words, before the
Norman invasion. This absurd sentence seems
to pass current; no objection has been made to it.
What would educated Englishmen think of a
leading historian who dismissed the pre-Norman
population of that island as “boorish Low-Dutch,
hut-dwellers round a common field cut into strips
after their barbarous manner, <i>who stood for the
English people before the Norman Conquest</i>?”
Trivialities and ignorances of this sort are not in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
fashion in English history, and it is time that
they were out of fashion in Ireland.</p>
<p>Irishmen of the north still preserved, Mr.
Falkiner told us, even to the end of the 17th
century, “all the primitive characteristics of the
scarcely more than nomadic civilisation of Ulster.”
With summary contempt he pretended to dispose
of what he fancifully termed “the lawless banditti
who commonly formed the body-guard of an
Irish chief”; and in the orthodox manner confronts
“Irish law” and “Irish lawlessness” under
what he called “the English ownership of
Ireland.” The great Hugh of Tyrone is described
as looking “on the onward march of English institutions
with feelings not very different from those
with which the aborigines of the American continent
beheld the advance of the stranger from the
east.” In the same spirit he informed Englishmen
that Ireland was sadly deficient in the wealth
of historical and literary associations which form
the romantic charm of England. “Cathedral
cities, in the sense in which the term is understood
in England, Ireland may be almost said to be
without. A few of the towns,” he generously
admitted, “contain, indeed, the remains of
ecclesiastical and monastic buildings. But even
where these exist they are, with one or two exceptions,
sadly deficient in human interest.” It
is a cheap method, even if it is one out of date<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
elsewhere, to deny human interest to a subject
which one has learned to ignore, and may desire
to see forgotten. Can no human interest touch
the heart in Dromahair or Donegal or Glendalough?
There is a remote and little-known road
in the plains of Mayo where a singular sight may
be seen. Near it stand the ruins of a majestic
abbey founded over seven hundred years ago
(1189-1190), by Cathal O’Connor (whose foster-father’s
tomb has lately been found at Knockmoy
with its Irish inscription). Nave and transepts
were laid bare and open from their immense
gable ends, and the tower flung from the four
splendid arches that supported it, but the old
vaulted roof of the choir still remains; and here,
it is said, in this remoteness, is the only ancient
church of the Irish where, amid the universal
destruction and confiscation, they have been able
to carry on their old worship from the old days
till now. In this land of the banished—“to hell
or Connacht”—mass was without ceasing celebrated
in the choir; and from the hearts of the
worshippers kneeling in the nave and transepts
under the open sky a prophecy arose that when
the church was roofed once more Ireland would be
freed. Songs still sung among Connacht peasants
tell of such services amid ruins of their holy places,
the priests wet with the rain, the women’s clothes
bedraggled, the men carrying small stone flags<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
so as to have a dry spot for their knees. Not in
any way was such a place like an English cathedral,
but if brave men’s vows and prayers and tears
for seven centuries can confer human interest
the stones of Ballintober are precious.</p>
<p>The problem remains, however (for insoluble
problems beset every false position) that according
to Mr. Falkiner’s theory the history of towns
and cathedrals only began with “the English
ownership.” How was it that these Englishmen
left none of their “romantic charm” there?
What strange history lies hidden behind this
saying?</p>
<p>Another historian takes up the same taunt—a
true scholar and worker who has added to our
knowledge of the close of Stuart rule in Ireland.
“The Irish,” says Dr. Murray, “are indeed a
strange race.... No monument marks the site
where the Irish hero and the Irish thinker repose....
The graves of a patriot like Owen Roe
O’Neill, and of a statesman like Archbishop King
... are unknown. The thrill that an Englishman
feels in Westminster Abbey when he enters the
presence of the mighty dead is denied an Irishman,
for he has not taken care of the dust of his
immortals.” A memorial by the defeated Irish
to Archbishop King of Dublin, ardent supporter
of the Dutch conqueror, passionate worker
for the Protestant succession, four times Lord<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
Justice for the government of Ireland under
William in those days of agony and despair—this
is a lofty counsel of perfection, such as we give
to others. The Irish raised no monument to
Owen Roe O’Neill—no monument, with Cromwell’s
soldiers abroad in the land, to the general proclaimed
by the English Government “traitor,
rebel, disturber of the common peace”—is that
the charge? Alas! I wonder from that day to
this what welcome would have been given in a
Protestant churchyard, guarded by the conquerors,
to an Irish memorial over the grave of Owen
Roe O’Neill. The dust of the Irish immortals
lies indeed far scattered. Has Dr. Murray ever
stood in the solitary burial places of Rath Croghan,
of Iniscaltra, of Clonmacnois? Has he counted
the stones in Athenry or those heaped up in Burris?
Has he seen the bones of the martyrs strewn from
sea to sea? Surely he himself has told us that
“the Irish custom of burying their dead in an
old ruined church or monastery was forbidden,”
and that not by the Irish, but by the Church of
the English. From the Reformation until eighty-two
years ago every Irish Catholic was needs
carried at death to a Protestant cemetery, and it
is only within the life-time of men now living
that, when Catholic prayers at the grave were
denied, the Irish people at last secured in 1829 a
burying place of their own.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span></p>
<p>This fiction of a “strange race” has become a
kind of special philosophy which is dragged in
to interpret the most ordinary actions of the Irish.
For example, “the march of the soldiery upset
the balance of the excitable Irish farmer, and
he neglected his land”—a fact which in any other
country would need no “race” explanation.
Through the story of that war, whose end was
to transfer the soil of Ireland, five-sixths of it,
to lords of another race and religion, the old
inhabitants of two thousand years’ possession are
made to appear as “the Irish factions”; their
vice is patent, while English crimes are accidental,
inadvertent, or high-spirited. If we want to know
why the Irish people lost faith in the Stuarts
who had betrayed and outraged them at every
turn, we are referred to the simple habits of a
strange and childish race. “The Celt wants to
see a sovereign regularly in order to adore him”:
“A principle must be set forth by a person, and
the more attractive the person the stronger the
hold of the principle.” As we watch the strong
ceaseless current of Irish life such theories are swept
beyond our sight. The Irish poet told his people
another tale:</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">“It is the coming of King James that took Ireland from us,<br />
With his one shoe English and his one shoe Irish<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>He would neither strike a blow nor would he come to terms,<br />
And that has left, so long as they shall exist, misfortune upon the Gaels.”</p>
<p class="p1">In his laborious work on the Norman settlement,
Mr. Orpen deals with the Irish in the usual
conventional manner:—“The members of this
family were always killing one another.” “The
chieftain ... had no higher conception of duty
than to increase the power of his clan; with
this object in view, he was stayed by no scruples”;
as for the clansman, “the sentiment for ‘country’
in any sense more extended than that of his own
tribal territory, was alike to him and to his chief
unknown.” This description, like the terms
“tribal” and “nomad,” has long been habitual,
and accepted with as little enquiry as those words.
Mr. Orpen’s clients, the “Normans,” we may
assume to have been nobly free from any such
barbarous notions of individual aggrandisement,
regardless of “their country’s” claims.</p>
<p>Mr. Bagwell, the leading historian of the English
occupation under Tudors and Stuarts, throws
his searchlight on the Irish:—“They were barbarous,
but they could appreciate virtue.” “The
Irish were subtle, fond of license, and ready for
anything as long as it was not for their good.”
May we remember the saying of the Irish themselves
in those days:—“Ask for nothing that you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
would not deem a benefit to you, and before all
praise God.” Again, according to Mr. Bagwell,
“the people had no other idea of trade than to
extort exorbitant prices.” This quality scarcely
seems to need a racial explanation; it has been
found elsewhere in time of war. But under all
circumstances the “primeval” theory of Irishmen
must be maintained. The character of the
“natives”—using this word with its “savage”
implication—plays a great part in our history.
Thus, when a boat load of treasure from the
Armada was washed on shore Mr. Bagwell notes
that “such unaccustomed wares as velvet and
cloth of gold, fell into the hands of the natives.”
Cloth of gold and velvet had for centuries been
known to the wealthy Irish; even in England
they were not the clothing of the “natives,” if
such a term could be applied to Englishmen.
Again we are told that “the Irish, by being held
always at arm’s length, had become more Irish
and less civilised than ever”; <i>held at arm’s
length</i> is an ingenious phrase for evicting a people
from their homes, and throwing them out on
bogs and mountains. The hardships of hunted
famine-stricken outlaws hanging round their old
homes, is represented in this kind of history as
the life which would be naturally chosen by wild
Irish “nomads.” “True children of the mist,
they [the O’Tooles] either bivouacked in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
open or crept into wretched huts to which Englishmen
hesitated to give the name of houses. They
cultivated no land.” “Thus one by one did
the chiefs of tribal Ireland devour each other.”
As for “the men of free blood, whose business had
always been fighting, and who would never work
... when the chiefs were gone they had nothing
to do but to plunder, or to live at the expense
of their more industrious, but less noble, neighbours.”
“The island was poor and the people
barbarous, and no revenue could be expected.”
It is true, indeed, that the wealth did not go the
way of the Crown; officials had other uses for it.</p>
<p>In the same way Mr. Chart, in his study of Irish
life during the dark years after the Union—years
of acute suffering, hunger, disillusionment and
despair—discovers “a sullen discontent which,
as usually happens in Ireland, broke out occasionally
into acts of lawlessness and barbarity,” as if
some special form of iniquity had its home in
Ireland. At a time when the whole people in
England were in a turmoil of revolt, on the verge
of revolution, he mourns “the fatal Irish
tendency to rush into extremes,” and that
magistrates and police had to accustom “a hot-headed
and violent-tempered race to curb itself
within legal limits”—as if this was an unusual
fact, peculiar to this one race of the world, predestinate
to evil. It would seem that in Ireland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
alone it is not safe to give any man “full and
unconstrained control over his personal and
political enemies,” and therefore “Ireland is
no country for a volunteer police.”</p>
<p>I suppose there is not another history in the
world in which this free slinging of blame and
advice is continuously kept up at so fine a pitch.
If a problem in Irish life lifts its head, some puzzling
fact or tendency that demands explanation,
a stone is ready in the orthodox historian’s sling:
the dilemma is ended by one of the useful words—“primitive,”
“tribal,” “kerne,” “nomad,”
“barbarous,” “Celtic.” By constant reiteration
I fancy writer and reader now scarcely notice
them, so much have they become the symbols
of Irish history, and so deeply have they sunk
into the public mind.</p>
<p>Thus the stream of calumny still flows on.
The latest voice from Trinity College, that of
Professor Mahaffy, in his Introduction to the
third volume of the “Georgian Society,” is of
the old familiar type. It should be, he explains,
“the interest and duty” of historians to maintain
certain desirable opinions—this, according to Dr.
Mahaffy, adds to their credibility. Once more,
therefore, we have from him “the elements of
primeval savagery which still existed in the Irish
people, and which they had in common with
almost all primitive races and societies” (and this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
by the way, in the 18th century, after six hundred
years of English compulsion). How well we know
the old battered and time-exhausted phrase! Of
course we have again our old friend, the story
of O’Cahan sitting with the naked women, served
up as the ever-repeated type of all the generations
of Irish in their habitual squalor. For, we are
told, “since the earliest times the greater part
of the Irish ... have not found any discomfort
in squalor.” But for English law this singular
people would apparently never put on clothes at
all, winter or summer, good or bad weather, in
any northern gale from the Arctic ice. Ulstermen
now-a-days are certainly a degenerate race in
physical endurance.</p>
<p>It is interesting to follow this story of O’Cahan.</p>
<p>The story begins with a Bohemian baron, name
unknown, whom Foynes Moryson, an Englishman,
saw on one occasion. Here is the exact tale:—“The
foresaid Bohemian baron, coming out of
Scotland to us by the north parts of the wild
Irish, told me in great earnestness (when I
attended him at the Lord Deputy’s command),
that he coming to the house of the O’Cane, a
great lord among them, was met at the door with
sixteen women, all naked, excepting their loose
mantles; whereof eight or ten were very fair,
and two seemed very nymphs; with which strange
sight his eyes being dazzled, they led him into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
the house, and there sitting down by the fire with
crossed legs like tailors, and so low as could not
but offend chaste eyes, desired him to sit down
with them. Soon after O’Kane, the lord of the
country, came in all naked excepting a loose
mantle and shoes, which he put off as soon as he
came in, and entertaining the baron after his
best manner in the Latin tongue, desired him
to put off his apparel, which he thought to be
a burden to him, and to sit naked by the fire with
his naked company.”</p>
<p>Now on this tale let me make two or three
remarks.</p>
<p>We may ask, in the first place, why this one
story is repeated on every occasion by historians
of what I might call the “savage” type; why,
omitting all other accounts, it is singled out as
the typical instance of daily life in Ireland. Is
this one of the views which, according to Dr.
Mahaffy, it should be “the interest and duty” of
impartial and loyal historians to maintain?</p>
<p>The story originated with a “Bohemian baron,”
of whom we know nothing; it was reported by the
English secretary of Mountjoy, whom he praises
for the number of “rebels” he had “brought
to their last home”; to both of them the Irish
were nothing more than savages of a low type.
We may remember that this is the only story
of the kind cited from Ulster. A Spanish captain,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
escaped from the Armada, travelled through
Connacht and Ulster and the O’Cahan country
for several months of hiding from English soldiers;
he too talked Latin in the many Irish houses
which gave him shelter, but in the book of his
wanderings there is no such incident as this.</p>
<p>There would seem to be need of some strictness
of enquiry—some caution in discussing the tale.
At the best the outlines of the baron’s story are
vague. What decorations he himself may have
introduced into it, and what further ornaments
Fynes Moryson may have added, we do not know.
We may, perhaps, judge by the embellishments
which later writers have introduced. It is possible
that the baron and the secretary, not inferior
to their successors in contempt of the Irish, may
have equalled them also in literary skill and the
gift of embroidering a narrative. Let us see,
therefore, some of these decorations.</p>
<p>Froude takes up the tale:—“If Fynes Moryson
may be believed, the daughters of distinguished
Ulster chiefs squatted on the pavement round the
hall fires of their father’s castles, in the presence
of strangers, as bare of clothing as if Adam had
never sinned.” Here we see the “women,” who,
for all the original story has to tell us, might be
servants, dependants, or refugees gathered in from
the war and pillage by which O’Cahan’s country
was then ravaged, are transformed into “daughters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
of chiefs,” the “house” turns into “pavements”
by the “hall-fires of castles,” and the incident
has become a universal custom.</p>
<p>Then Professor Mahaffy arrives with a series
of versions. “O’Cahan, though living in a hovel,
could speak Latin.” More particularly, it was a
shantie of mud and wattles, without rafters, and
the cattle and swine occupied the same room
as the masters; so he explains in a lecture on
“Elizabethan Ireland.” A more circumstantial
account appears in “An Epoch in Irish History.”
In this the traveller is received by the “ladies
of the chieftain’s household.” “They brought
him into the thatched cabin which was their
residence,” and throwing off their mantles invited
him to do likewise before the chief came in—an
invitation which the unknown “women” of the
baron’s tale did not give. The baron’s “house”
has already changed into castles with pavements,
then into a hovel, and a thatched cabin, but the
picture of savagery is not yet lurid enough, and
there is a further transformation which, possibly
from its supposed importance, is dragged into
a description of society in the Dublin Georgian
houses of the 18th century. “The O’Cahan
in his wigwam, surrounded by his stark naked
wives (why not squaws?) and daughters, addressed
the astonished foreign visitor in fluent Latin.”
The “wigwam” and the “wives” show the unimpaired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
fertility of Professor Mahaffy’s imagination.
His pronouncements, the <i>Irish Times</i>
assures us of this essay, “carry historical value
of the highest degree.” It will be interesting
to watch his further adornments of his favourite
tale. It will also be interesting to see how long
professors of Trinity College will still invite Irish
students to enter there by offering this curious
bait of conventional insults to their race and
country, and new varieties of old slanders.</p>
<p>We might remember the scene in Galway a
few years later, where high-born ladies, plundered
of all their property by the rapacious soldiers,
sinking with shame before the gaze of the public
in their ragged clothes, covered themselves with
embroidered table-covers, or a strip of tapestry
taken from the walls, or lappets cut from the bed-curtains,
or with blankets, sheets, or table-cloths.
“You would have taken your oath,” says the
contemporary writer, “that all Galway was a
masquerade, the unrivalled home of scenic
buffoons, so irresistibly ludicrous were the varied
dresses of the poor women.” Why do not the
Colonial historians give this scene as showing
the habitual taste and pleasure of the Galway
ladies?</p>
<p>Dr. Mahaffy has some other lights to throw
on Irish history. “The contempt for traders
as such ... is,” he says, “like all such prejudice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
in Ireland, the survival of the contempt which
the meanest members of any Irish clan felt for
any profession save that of arms, and the preying
on the churl.” The despisers of trade whom
he is describing in this passage are the English
landowners of the Williamite settlement, who had
finally ousted the Irish from their lands, and taken
them over as Protestant Englishmen, men of
“a better race.” This conquering class naturally
felt a contempt for their victims, the evicted
Catholic Irish, who were allowed for the benefit
of their lords and rulers to plough and to trade,
while deprived of civil and social rights. But
I do not know how those lordly squires would
like to have heard that they represented the
prejudices of “the meanest member of an Irish
clan,” accustomed to prey on “the churl,” whoever
he was. As for the Irish clansman who is
supposed to look on traders as outcasts, he appears
to be a fiction of the essayist’s fancy. Where
in Irish records will proofs be found of contempt
for a trader? Their story seems to be quite
the other way. It may be convenient, however,
for the defaming of the Irish to despise and ignore
those records. Moreover, since Irish abbeys and
cathedrals have been pronounced by Mr. Litton
Falkiner not to be like the English ones, why
need an Irish writer stoop into their ruins to seek
out the story written there? No, it is easier to keep<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
the slander running, to swell its volume, and to
increase its violence. Yet in those ruins any man
who will may look upon the countless tombs of
Irishmen who (so long as the conqueror’s law
allowed their desolate companies to enter the
ancient shrines) were borne by their friends to
rest in the roofless nave or before the high altar
under great slabs with the signs of their trade,
the tailor’s instruments, the carpenter’s tools,
and the mason’s, the labourer’s plough, and the
trader’s ship, deeply graven beside their names—no
emblems of shame in those last sanctuaries of
the Irish people.</p>
<p>Social life in Ireland, through all the ages,
Dr. Mahaffy describes as especially immoral. The
young girls, he says, were generally accessible to
the squire and his sons all through Irish history,
and suffered no disgrace, but married all the better
for such an adventure. “All through Irish
history” is a liberal and characteristic phrase
to use of English squires and their sons. The
tradition of absolute landlord power still lives
in the Irish country-side, when girls were told
the price at which they might save their family
from being driven out of the home held by their
ancestors for hundreds of years, and left to die
on the roadside of hunger, or in the coffin-ship
of plague. With security of tenure for the Irish
poor such ordeals have passed into history. As<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
for reports of English tourists, they resemble the
travellers’ tales which everywhere and at all times
various countries have heard on the manners of
their neighbours. It is well to remember Gibbon’s
reflection on general charges of this sort. Manuel,
Emperor of the East, visited England in 1400,
and coming from Constantinople was shocked at
English conduct:—“The most singular circumstance
of their manners,” he reported, “is their
disregard of conjugal honour and of female chastity.
In their mutual visits, as the first act of hospitality,
the guest is welcomed in the embraces of their
wives and daughters; among friends they are
lent and borrowed without shame; nor are the
islanders offended at this strange commerce.”
“We may smile at the credulity, or resent the
injustice of the Greek,” Gibbon reflects, “but
his credulity and injustice may teach an important
lesson; to distrust the accounts of foreign and
remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every
tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the
character of man.”</p>
<p>English writers have forgotten a grave disadvantage
to themselves in the moral tale of the
good and bad man (besides its incredibility and
its dullness). In this version of Irish history the
Englishman’s triumph remains a poor thing,
destitute of interest or value, where the fame of
the victor is abased and confounded by the worthlessness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
of his foe. The Irish warriors are mostly
described as drunkards, cowards, and barbarians.
Dr. Mahaffy likens Shane O’Neill to a Moor or a
Zulu. Hugh of Tyrone “was a polished courtier
on the surface, with a barbarous core.” Here is
Mr. Bagwell’s portrait of Shane, whose organisation
and defence of Ulster cost Elizabeth over
£147,000 of English money (in modern money
probably over £1,500,000) without counting the
enormous cesses laid on the country, and three
thousand five hundred of her soldiers slain. “He
is said to have been a glutton, and was certainly
a drunkard.” The story of drunkenness seems
to have originated in his mud-baths, such as are
now commonly ordered for rheumatism. Once
started, the fable was persistent. “That drunken
brain was, nevertheless, clear enough to baffle
Elizabeth for a long time.” His conduct of a
war which cost Elizabeth so much is described:—“Shane,
who had been indulging as usual in wine
or whisky, came up at the moment.” “Shane,
who was never remarkable for dashing courage,
retired into the wood.” “Shane, whose reputation
for courage is not high, slipped out at the
back of his tent.” So, I believe, did de Wet,
instead of waiting to be killed. At the last, “the
love of liquor probably caused his death”; here
indeed Mr. Bagwell contradicts the Lord Deputy
Sidney himself, who boasts that Shane was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
tricked and murdered by a Scotsman in Sidney’s
pay, the last of a series of attempts at assassination.
From the point of view that “barbarians”
are usually childish, Mr. Bagwell tells how
the important chiefs, MacWilliam Burke and
MacGillapatrick, were given titles and robes of
Earl and Baron, “in the belief that titles and
little acts of civility would weigh more with these
rude men than a display of force.” He complains
that the best-laid English military plans of occupation
of this country, instead of proceeding without
interruption from the natives, might be “frustrated
by one of those unexpected acts of treachery
in which Irish history abounds.” However, even
in treachery the Irish were incompetent. “Irish
plots are commonly woven in sand.” “In this,
as in so many other Irish insurrections, there
was no want of double traitors; of men who had
neither the constancy to remain loyal, nor the
courage to persevere in rebellion.”</p>
<p>With such a rabble we can only wonder that there
was any need of an English army at all; or how
the conflict could last a year (not to say a few
hundreds of them); or why England should have
sent over her very best generals, her stoutest
governors, and a prodigious deal of her gold.
It was the bogs, apparently, that swallowed up
those inconceivable hosts and coins.</p>
<p>Under the “savage” theory military matters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
lose all interest; but they are given to us with
pitiless detail. Expeditions of soldiers against
famine-stricken peasants without arms, raids of
mere slaughter, the chasing of outlaws from a
lake island, are described with the minuteness
of a genuine campaign. These things, no doubt,
are in the books. There are plenty of reports
from officials, very humanly anxious to justify
themselves or to magnify their feats. But history
after all claims some revising power, and we need
another standard of proportion than the vanity
of a lieutenant. It is impossible to give vitality
to a story in which highly armed and civilised
Englishmen are represented as wiping out with
cannon and gunpowder a savage and unarmed
crowd of peasants—in which honour, courage,
and progress are supposed to be eternally confronted
with chicanery, barbarity, and treachery.
No one wants to hear that tale. Such a history
turns to inconceivable tediousness, of no use to
any living soul.</p>
<p>Meanwhile vast tracts of history have been
set aside as apparently not worth exploring. Where,
for example, shall we find a serious account, with
the guidance of modern scholarship, of the hundred
and fifty years between the battle of Clontarf
and the landing of the Norman barons. The
people were no longer in the tribal state. The
change to a kind of feudalism had come. What<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
was the form of that feudalism? How did it
differ from the system that had grown out of other
conditions elsewhere? There is not so much as
a chapter in any book, or a pamphlet, occupied
with the land system of the earlier middle ages,
what changes the Norman settlement brought,
or what forms of social life did actually exist.
The campaign of Edward Bruce is usually said
to be a central turning point in Irish history,
but who will guide us to any adequate study of
it? There are no monographs on Desmonds,
O’Neills, O’Donnells, Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Clanrickards,
and so on. No annals of the provinces
or kingdoms have been compiled, nor chronologies.
The work of the two great Earls of Kildare is
one of the most critical periods of Irish history:
it still awaits a historian. Who has examined
the history of the schools and education? Who
has worked out the industrial development?
How can we learn what were the negotiations by
which Henry <span class="smcap">viii.</span> carried the claim to be King
of Ireland? Here are fields too long deserted
waiting for workers. Here are a few of the immense
voids, into which our writers fling, like bundles
of dried straw, their vain words—“savage,”
“primeval,” “lawless,” “brutish,” and the rest.
In the history of Ireland nothing has been completed.
That which is unknown disturbs, and
may overturn the vulgar conclusions from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
fragments known. We are for ever walking through
a country unmapped. To be sure it is full of
sign-posts put up at hazard—“To English Civilisation.”
Where every road is marked to lead to
the same inn, why should travellers discuss,
debate, and ask questions? What reason can there
be to loiter by the way? The English fingerpost
is always there.</p>
<p>Some day perhaps the Irish race in this island
will no longer seem to lie beyond the need, and
below the honour, of the historical method.
Ireland will have a history like other nations.
It is possible to conceive that out of its peoples,
English or Irish, there may arise some great thinker
or poet who will set before us the two civilizations
that have met here; in other words, the
efforts by which two highly endowed races
endeavoured to solve the problem that has perplexed
every people that has ever yet appeared
in this world—how to shape a community where
men may live in safety, freedom, and happiness.
The Celts had waged the fight for their civilization
to the walls of Rome itself. They had left
the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine and
the plains of Gaul red with their blood. Now,
on the outermost border of the world their last
conflict awaited them. Within the mountain
rim of Ireland, with silent Nature to keep the
lists, two peoples met to fight out the last issues<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
on that fatal soil. Here, imprisoned by the
Ocean, the antagonists stood for centuries to
their battle: every passion exalted, the splendours
of courage, the majesty of despair, all skill of
surprises, all glory of chivalry, triumph and sorrow,
Christian pieties, and the surging up amid the
upheaval of human nature of the mysterious
superstitions of elemental man, and of his
ferocities. What affections of race lay behind
such a struggle? What was its meaning? What
of beauty, of happiness, or of virtue did each
civilization in fact offer to man? What was
gained, what was lost? Here would have been
a history of fire and flame, a new outlook on the
fate of commonwealths, a theme worthy of an
English or an Irish patriot.</p>
<p>In the long task of giving its true balance to
the history of Ireland, by the discovery of all
the facts, and the adjudging of their place, controversy
will be lively. Every Irishman for certain
will be ready for a battle of wits. But let us
keep our intelligence perfectly clear on one point.
We shall hear a great deal of “impartiality” and
a “judicial mind.” Here we must make no
mistake. Impartiality of intellect need not mean
insensibility of heart. Let us suppose that the
intellect should have no pre-possession at all, not
even in favour of English civilization, nor of the
idol of the market-place, “the Wealth of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
Nations”—its delicate balance should drop now
on this side, now on that, without a shadow of
prejudice or a hint of obstinacy, abhorrent of
convention, with never a predilection. But
impartiality of the heart—that is another matter.
Who will pretend to comprehend human life
who has no great affection of the soul? The
generous heart knows no balancing hesitation
between the man who deserts his country and the
man who defends it; he alone can interpret the
hero in whose soul some answering passion flames;
and I suppose that the understanding of a
commonwealth will best come to him who is most
responsive to a variety of human emotions. I
think we could do with a change of partialities
in Ireland—fewer orthodox predilections of the
head, if it might be so, and some illumination
from the heart.</p>
<p>A new examination of Irish history is indeed
of the utmost importance to our people. The
leading reviews, text-books, and histories in
England with one accord have presented Ireland
to the English people under the “savage” aspect,
and their statements have been too frequently
accepted. Hear the common opinion as Tennyson
put it: “Kelts are all made furious fools....
They live in a horrible island, and have no history
of their own worth the least notice. Could not
anyone blow up that horrible island with dynamite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
and carry it off in pieces—a long way off?” The
same gloomy picture is still spread before England.
Mr. Fletcher, a Fellow of All Souls, records that
“it was quite common to bleed a cow for a refreshing
drink of blood,” and that “there were no
exports save the said cow-skins,” though with
these the Irish apparently managed to buy “red
seas of claret.” Shane O’Neill was killed “by
his own people whom he was plundering!”
Degradation was universal, as we learn from a
sentence absolutely amazing in its colossal and
unscrupulous ignorance—“though his name had
once been FitzNigel or de Burgh, it gradually
became O’Neill or O’Bourke!” Mr. Rudyard
Kipling joins Mr. Fletcher in declaring that
Irish history “was all broken heads and stolen
cows, as it had been for a thousand years,” and
that Irishmen had no interest or care for their
religion till they discovered a use for it as a warcry
against England. Accounts of Ireland equally
contrary to fact and common sense serve in
political controversy. English politicians assert
on platforms that Irishmen of themselves had
never any national life or duty at all, that the
first gleam of true patriotism was taught them
by England since the Union, that Ireland had no
conception of a Parliament till England gave it
to her people, when the boon was so misused
and misunderstood by an incompetent race (the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
English in Ireland, be it remembered) that in the
higher interests of man it had to be withdrawn.
As for the desire of self-government, “some
people said it was a matter of historical sentiment.
The humour of it was that there never was a real
Irish kingdom at all. The Parliament which
it was sought to restore to Ireland was given to it
by England. The historical sentiment and loyalty
which Mr. John Redmond was talking was the
greatest humbug that was ever preached.” There
are others who argue, Dr. Mahaffy among them,
that practically there is not any more a Celtic
race in Ireland, but one so mixed in blood that
it no longer, if it ever did, contains the materials
of a nation. The Celtic people, to their honour,
have never denied a national brotherhood to
Danes, Normans, English, or Palatines, who
loyally entered into the Irish commonwealth.
But as to political theories of the vanishing of the
race, we have only to examine them by known
facts, and turn to the Report of the Registrar-General
in 1909 for proof that in the mingling
of peoples the Celtic is still the predominant
element over all the rest; and if this proof is
conclusive, even in the register of merely Irish
names, how enormous would be its increased
weight if we could reckon in Celtic families the
change from Irish names which has gone on ceaselessly
since the thirteenth century, and is still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
constantly occurring at this moment—a change
which, however lamentable, cannot alter the blood
and the inheritance.</p>
<p>Irishmen are often warned to waste no time
in looking back at the past. But if England
draws the moral from her interpretation of history,
we must learn our lesson too—only it must be a
lesson more serious, exact, and worthy of an
educated people. We have had experience of
how profound and vicious may be the practical
effect of a history unscientific, irresponsible,
prejudiced, and incomplete. Out of ignorance
of the past, what sound policy can grow for the
future? I suppose that in civilized Europe,
among the speeches on State affairs of prominent
statesmen, we could find no parallel to historical
verdicts so crude and unsubstantial as those which
are given to us by a certain group of political
leaders and writers in England, concerning the
Irish portion of the “Empire” of which they
make their boast. How many are the ignorances
and negligences which still do service unreproved
among those who claim to be the chief upholders
of a “United Kingdom,” and exponents of the
“Imperial” faith.</p>
<p>In Ireland we have still indeed a heavy road
to travel. When history has been written, what
about the teaching of it, or the learning, in this
country? Who will make the way free for that?</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p>
<p>Let me put this matter before you by way of
contrast. You have heard the fame of Sparta,
the land of heroes who won at the Thermopylæ
a far-shining glory that will ever stir the hearts
of men. Montaigne reminds us that in the
matchless policy of Sparta to build up a noble
State, it is worthy of great consideration that the
education of the children was the first and principal
charge. “And, therefore, was it not strange,”
he says, “if Antipater requiring fifty of their
children for hostages, they answered clean
contrary to what we would do, ‘that they would
rather deliver him twice so many men’; so much
did they value and esteem the loss of their country’s
education.” Now in this training up of men
to be citizens of the finest quality, the only one
book-study absolutely enforced in Sparta was
History—to the mockery and contempt of neighbouring
Doctors of letters and literature of the
time. “Idiots and foolish people,” scoffed the
high-class Athenian professor, adept in polite
languages and fine phrasing and the elegancies of
culture, and not neglectful of the profits to be
got by professing them; “idiots and foolish
people, who only amuse themselves to know the
succession of kings, and establishing and declination
of estates, and such-like trash of flim-flam
tales.” Socrates, you may be sure, did not join
in these sarcasms. Sparta had shown the honour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
and manhood that history can teach, and how it
can make of men champions of their country,
keepers of their forefathers’ fame, and rivals of
their own ancient heroes.</p>
<p>Side by side with this ancient instance we may
put one of our own day. There is a country
which has suddenly risen to great eminence in war
and organisation, as it had long been famous in
the arts, with which England hastened to make
alliance. That country is Japan. In Japan, when
the eldest son comes of age, it is the custom for his
father to take him a tour on foot round the country,
visiting every place of fame in its history, so that
the youth may enter on man’s estate as a worthy
citizen of the State that bred him. These honourable
pilgrims can be met on every road. They
have known, like the men of Sparta, the power of
history to fortify the mind and expand the soul.
Every Japanese man of character will tell you that
in any serious enterprise he is in the presence,
in the company of the great Dead of his people.
That by them his purpose is ennobled, his courage
uplifted, his solitude changed into a great communion.
We have seen how that spirit has exalted
a people.</p>
<p>With such instances in our minds we may ask
what we are doing in Ireland. What kind of
citizens are we building up for our own
land?</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
<p>As in England, so in Ireland, history has in the
last dozen years been made compulsory in the
schools. But there is a difference. For Ireland
history is not a subject in itself. In our primary
and intermediate education Irish history is now
a department of English language and literature.
At the age when impressions made on a youth’s
mind are certain to become the all-compelling
habits of his later life, it is suggested to him that
the history of his country is less important than the
rules of English grammar, and that the achievements
of his father may at the best rank with the
model sentences in which English essayists write
of Friendship and Gardens and Christmas. The
student for honours under the Intermediate system
may, at his own will, prefer a continental language
to history. A pass-student might choose to gain
all the necessary marks in English grammar and
composition alone; if he has drunk in all that the
amiable and unimportant Alexander Smith can
tell him “Of the Importance of a Man to Himself,”
he may omit all that the world can tell him
“Of the Importance of a Man to his Country,”
or of his Country to him. Such knowledge may
be left to the “idiots and foolish people, who
only amuse themselves to know the succession of
kings, and establishing and declination of estates,
and such-like trash of flim-flam tales.”</p>
<p>Nor is this the worst of the matter. Suppose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
that an Irish boy has been stirred by what he has seen
in his country home. There was, perhaps, beside
it a Danes’ Fort, a Giants’ Ring, one of the
two thousand mounds piled up in Ireland by
human hands, a Rathcroghan, or a mighty Ailech
of the kings where legendary monarchs sleep on
their horses waiting for the day that shall call them
to ride out. He may have lived by a solemn
burial place of great chiefs, by a round tower, by a
high cross deeply carved, by some island of saints
rich in ruins and sculptured slabs. He may have
been taken to the Irish Academy and seen the
Psalter of Columcille; or to Trinity College to
look on the book of Kells; or to the National
Museum to be turned loose among the carved
rocks, the copper cauldrons, the golden diadems
and torques, the mighty horns of bronze, the
heavy Danish swords, the weights for commerce,
the marvels in metal and enamel work, the Tara
brooch, the Ardagh chalice, the Cross of Cong,
the long array of crosiers and bells and shrines and
book-covers. He may learn by chance that his
country is the wonder of Europe for the wealth
and beauty of its relics of the past. Desire may
come on him to know the story of a land so astonishing
in the visible records left by his ancestors.
Descended from a race who had history in their very
blood and the glorious tradition of their fathers,
he may feel that old hereditary passion burn in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
heart. He will add history to his study of the English
language and the essays of Smith.</p>
<p>But even in that case, once entered on the course
of education provided for him by the Intermediate
Board, he will find through the whole of his pass
work or of his honour work not one word to tell him
who made the marvels he has seen. For in Anglicised
Ireland it is ordered that history shall begin in
1066. The Irish annals record a comet in that year.
But it is not for the comet the year is chosen, but
because the date of the Norman Conquest of England
is to mark the beginning of history for Ireland. From
the first the student is caught by the pleasant fiction
which is now proclaimed on every Unionist platform
that Ireland “under the English ownership,” has
no life save that which England gives. Irish history
is not to be the story of Ireland, but of the “United
Kingdom.” It is to travel with the fortunes of
England step by step. An exact care conducts the
student through the centuries. All dates are ruled
by English text-books, never by periods of change
in Ireland. According to the step by step theory,
if the Irish student must begin his story of Ireland
with William’s Conquest of England, he must pause
at the end of the English Wars of the Roses. What
matter if that close of a period in England happens
in Ireland to be in full midway of a very extraordinary
racial and constitutional movement full of vital energy?
The teacher must by order cut his story in half, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
start again to pull up his next course sharply at the
death of Elizabeth, a merely nominal date in Ireland,
which ended or began nothing. There the next
period opens by order, and ended this present year
at a date (1784) when it would be absolutely
impossible for an Irish teacher to call a halt except
by stopping in the middle of a sentence; and for
the coming year is to close at 1760, before the first
movement for the emancipation of the Irish Parliament.
Not a word will the Irish youth hear of the
Irish kingdoms and schools and craftsmen and
merchants, nor of the Danes and their fleets, nor of
the Irish culture spread over Europe. He would
know nothing of Columcille and the work of Iona,
nor of Columbanus and the work of St. Gall and of
Bobio. Nothing will be told of St. Brendan and his
sailing to the west; nor of learned Fergil the
Geometer, who in spite of the orthodox theories
of an impassable equator, alone maintained that
there were living men at the antipodes; nor of the
Irish goldsmiths and builders. Cormac’s chapel
must go. The very name of Brian Boru is expunged.
There can be no mention of the five hundred years
of Irishmen’s fame in Europe as classical scholars,
philosophers, saints, merchants, or travellers. The
centuries of Ireland’s history as a free and independent
country are blotted out, and he may catch no glimpse
of his people save in the various phases of their material
subjugation. During his entire course he can turn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
no wandering eye on an Ireland that had any art,
literature, or industry of its own—a place where
anything may have happened on its own account,
or where any interest may lie detached from an
English book of chronology.</p>
<p>This disastrous conception of the “Union” as
a kind of amalgamation of countries in which all
national limits are submerged and lost follows the
Irishman at home and abroad. He can scarcely set
foot in Europe save in the track of Irish wanderers
of every age whose fame should be his glory. But
the shadow of this distorted notion hangs round him—the
shadow of the predominant sharer of all the effort
and fortune of his people. In the published Catalogue
of the MSS. in the Royal Library at Brussels, he
must look for the Irish Annals and historical documents
under the one heading <i>Angleterre</i>, without
even a sub-heading <i>Irlande</i>. In Switzerland, surrounded
by relics of the six hundred and thirteen
dependent houses of St. Gall, whence Irish monks
restored civilization to that land, he will be told
at S. Beatenberg by the guide-books that S. Beatus
was <i>British</i>, and by local tradition that he was Scotch.
At the shrine of San Pellegrino in the Apennines,
he will hear praises of a <i>Scotch</i> king’s son. In Rome
he will learn that <i>England</i> was “the Isle of Saints.”
Against these ignorances his training in Ireland gives
him no protection. Similar fallacies pursue him
across the Atlantic. Let him go to America, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
Washington Irving will tell him of the mariner whose
story was one of the moving causes that led Columbus
to enquire of the land beyond the Ocean, and will
inform him that this famous St. Brendan was a
<i>Scotch</i> monk. Many others he will find ignorant
of history, and above all anxious not to identify
Ireland with any of her children that have done
great things. Mr. Whitelaw Reid will explain to him
that the emigrants from Ulster to America, the
Ulster-born leaders who fought for American
independence in counsel, in convention, and in the
field; the “Sons of St. Patrick” who poured out
their money and their blood for Washington—that
all these were <i>Scotchmen</i>, of no Irish kin or race, whose
followers and descendants have manfully rejected
the term “Scotch-Irish” because it “confused the
race with the accident of birth,” and called themselves
“Ulster Scots” to show they had no part
or lot with the Irish by blood (<i>Celtic Review</i>, Jan.,
1912). He apparently sees in the Presbyterian religion
of the “Ulster Scot” some subtle evidence of a
nobler and more distinguished origin than the
“Scotch Irish,” some guarantee of Low-German or
English stock.</p>
<p>The new school of American Irish, who under
the influence of the “Anglo-Saxon” enthusiasm,
or with a desire to be on the winning side, lay claim
to a “Scotch” descent, ignore the historical meaning
of the word “Scot,” or the origin of the name<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
“Scotland.” In vain for them authentic history
may tell of the ceaseless wanderings of the Gaelic
people across the narrow seas. From Ireland the
Scots in early times spread over the Hebrides and
western Highlands, and carried their settlements
and speech over the Lowlands of the Picts and Britons
to the very borders of the little English colony of
the Lothians, leaving the western and middle Lowlands
the most Celtic region in Scotland. Irish
folk settled freely in Scotland until the confiscation
of Ulster; as for example when the Monroes and
Currys crossed the sea, about 1300, with a number
of other noble families who obtained grants of land.
Inter-marriage was very frequent at all times. Back
to Ireland again came streams of immigrants from
the “Scot” or Irish settlements across the water.
The mingled race of Celts and Norse from the
Hebrides and the Highlands, all alike talking Irish
and claiming Irish descent, poured colonies into
Ireland without ceasing from 1250 to 1600, forefathers
of hundreds of thousands to-day of Irish family.
The western and middle Lowlands (along with the
Highlands) sent from 1600 the main body of settlers
of the Ulster Plantation, chiefly of Picto-Celtic
stock; most of the first settlers must have been
bi-lingual, speaking not only “Broad Scots” but
their native Gaelic, which in 1589 was still the chief
language of Galloway. Scots and Irish were the same
to Henry VIII., whose servant Alen protested in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
1549 against any “liberty” for the Irish, which, he
said, was “the only thing that Scots and wild Irish
constantly contended for.” The Scots of the Isles were
known to Elizabeth as “those Yrishe people,” “the
Yrishes”; the “English Scots” whom she employed
in her Irish wars were so called from their political
faction and Protestant religion, not from any difference
of blood from their brethren. In 1630 the scholar
Bedell included Irish and Scots in one single group;
“and surely it was a work agreeable to the mind
of God that the poor Irish, being a very numerous
nation, besides the greater half of Scotland, and all
those islands called Hebrides, that lie in the Irish
Sea, and many of the Orcades also that speak Irish,
should be enabled to search the Scriptures.” The
old Irish of Ulster in 1641 excepted the Scots from
their hostile measures as being of their own race,
and this only a generation after the Plantation, when
most of the evicted Irish must have been still alive.
Jeremy Taylor in 1667 describes the Scots and
Irish of north-east Ulster as “<i>populus unius labii</i>
and unmingled with others.” Over whole districts,
where half the population at least were Presbyterian
descendants of Scottish immigrants, the speech of
the people even in the eighteenth century was Gaelic.
For some fourteen centuries indeed common schools
of learning, a common literature, common national
festivals, maintained the unbroken tradition of unity
of race; it was from Ireland, in an Irish translation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
that the Bible reached the Highlands. The kings
of Scotland long kept the remembrance of their
connexion with the remote generations of the race
of Gaedhel Glas. Dr. Norman Moore in his
“Medicine in the British Isles,” (149) has preserved
a Highland tradition told him by Field-Marshal
Sir Patrick Grant whose memory was full of the old
Gaelic stories and verses; that at the Scottish coronation
of Charles I. ancient Gaelic phrases of installation
were used for the last time.</p>
<p>Among the men whom Mr. Whitelaw Reid selects
to give glory to the “Scotch” race as distinguished
from the Irish, we may take at chance three examples.
President MacKinlay came of the Hebridean race
of Gaelic Scots with a strong infusion of Norse blood,
who, Norsemen and Scots alike, boasted of Irish
descent; they settled in Ireland about 1400 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>,
nor did the Antrim MacKinlays in later days ever
speak of themselves save as Irish. President Monroe
belonged to an Irish Gaelic family which had crossed
to Scotland with a number of other noble families
about 1300, and obtained grants of land among their
kin there. Patrick Henry, whether he was of old
Ulster race or of the Scottish lowlands, unless clear
proof to the contrary can be given by a detailed
pedigree, must be counted as a Celt or a Picto-Celt:
one group of Henrys in Ulster is descended from
the MacHenry sept of the O’Neills who lived on
the Bann-side at the time of the Plantation; another<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
family, more ancient and probably more numerous,
O h-Inneirghe, whose surname is now written Henry,
was the ruling sept of a district in the south of Derry
country. No one, unless he proves his case by direct
evidence, could truthfully and with knowledge assert
that Patrick Henry, or President Monroe, or President
MacKinlay, were other than representative Celts by race.</p>
<p>It would have been a strange doctrine to the Irish
emigrants themselves to tell them that they were
Scotch. From 1720 they swarmed over to people
Pennsylvania, as if, men said at the time, Ireland was
sending out all its inhabitants—in one year alone
(1729) no less than 5,655 Irish, to 267 English and
Welsh, and 43 Scotch. There was a Scotch Society
of St. Andrew’s in Philadelphia (1749); but the
emigrants from Ireland, Catholic and Presbyterian
alike, looked on themselves as plain Irishmen, not
Scotch; they gave to their settlements Irish names;
the wealthier men among them established in 1765
an “Irish Club”; out of this they formed in 1771
the leading Irish organisation before and during
the Revolution—the famous Society of the “Friendly
Sons of St. Patrick.” There were at first but three
Catholics in the Society, but the Irish Presbyterians
and Episcopalians of that day chose for their patron
the Saint of Ireland, not of Scotland, and for their
President a Catholic, Moylan, certainly not a Scotchman;
they met on St. Patrick’s Day; their medal
bore figures of <i>Hibernia</i> with a harp, and <i>St. Patrick</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
carrying a cross and trampling on a snake. The
heroic services of that devoted Society of Irishmen
cannot be told here. After the war it founded and
became merged in the <i>Hibernian</i> Society of “the
natives of Ireland or descendants of Irishmen” (so little
did they fear the name), for the relief of emigrants
from Ireland. These Irishmen had not yet learned to
despise their race and country, and to invent for themselves
a new nation without any root in history.</p>
<p>In English history, where certain general lines of
knowledge have been laid down as the common
property of educated men, serious lapses are held
a reproach: in Irish history an ambassador from the
United States to Great Britain and Ireland can
allow himself to tell us that an “Ulster Scot” is no
more an Irishman than a man would be a horse if
born in a stable.</p>
<p>The imaginations of a mock “Imperial history,” by
which all treasure found is thrown “impartially”
into the common stock of the United Kingdom,
in other words of Great Britain, leaving Ireland bare,
belong not to science but to politics. By such a
perverted history the honourable pride of a people
may be transformed into humiliation and self-distrust.
They are made to stand before Europe with the
appearance of defeat, ruin, and rebuke; a race
without the dignity of ever having had a true
civilization, incapable of development in the land
they wasted. What vigour or self-respect can grow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
out of a maimed history such as this? Or can any
promise of material advancement serve as the
substitute for a good reputation, or consolation for
spiritual impoverishment?</p>
<p>We may take one notable instance of how since
the Union ignorance of Irish history has been officially
fostered. In 1828 a lofty enterprise was opened by
Sir Thomas Larcom, director of the central office
of the newly-appointed Irish Ordnance Survey. The
Survey maps were to be constructed on such a scale as to
be of use in correcting the unequal pressure of taxation,
and to serve as guides for local improvement. Enquiry
indeed was needed into the resources and conditions
of a country which Petrie describes—“the habitations
of the people miserable and comfortless, and the
people themselves the most wretched in the world.
Joy will never brighten the prospect, misery never
disappear.” To carry out these orders Larcom
planned a scheme on noble lines. He held it necessary
to complete the maps by making a study in each
parish of the state in which Nature had placed it,
the condition to which it had been brought by art,
and the uses now made by the people of their combination;
in other words, there must be an exact
knowledge of the natural products of the country,
its history and antiquities, and its economic state
and social condition. In this scheme of elevated
science an enquiry into past history was considered
necessary as a prelude to the proper understanding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
of the present state—an enquiry which was to include
all monuments of the past, Pagan and Christian, all
the traditions and accounts of them that remained,
the state of society in which they arose, the earliest
history of the people whose descendants might still
inhabit the district, and the changes which led to
the present establishments for government.</p>
<p>The opportunity for carrying out this work was
as surprising as its conception. The great scholar
Petrie, who was at the time founding the museum
of the Royal Irish Academy and in great measure
founding too its library, was in 1833 set at the head of
the historical department of the Survey, and charged
with the task of collecting the true names of baronies,
townlands, and parishes, and the investigation of
ancient monuments. He gathered round him a
staff of Irish scholars—men of the soil, heirs of the
Irish tradition—John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry,
J. O’Connor, P. O’Keefe, along with Clarence Mangan,
Du Noyer, Wakeman, and others, all filled with the
same spirit, and fired with the desire of producing a
perfect work. Never perhaps had there been such
a combination of talent directed to the one end of
restoring Irish knowledge. For the first time during
centuries of exclusion, Irish students were brought
into close and constant communication in their own
country with men of trained intelligence, and encouraged
to use their skill for the benefit of their
country. Once more Ireland had such a school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
as those which in the periods of her great revivals in
the twelfth and fifteenth centuries gathered up and
left to us all the relics of Irish history that we possess.
Once more a kind of peripatetic University was set
up, in the very spirit of the older Irish life.</p>
<p>The astonishing enthusiasm of these zealots is
shown by the almost incredible record of their work
in half a dozen years. It is such things as these that
reveal to us the soul of Irish Nationality and the might
of its repression. We can but stand astonished before
the unstinted labour, before the miraculous accomplishment,
of that company of workers. The work
was new, travel was slow, and hardship frequent:
but every difficulty vanished before their consuming
ardour. Petrie’s band has left, besides maps, sketches,
and documents of a general nature, not less than four
hundred and sixty-eight large volumes of documents
relating to Irish topography, language, history, and
antiquities. A collection was made of over sixty
thousand names, of their mutations, their various
spellings, their meanings, and translations in English;
when this work was completed a skilled Irish scholar
was sent to every district to learn there from Irish
speakers the vernacular name, and to collect traditions
and legends, and note any antiquities that had been
omitted. The traditions of Ireland at that time
had not been wholly broken. In Petrie’s writings
we can still see the Irish multitudes who in the depth
of their poverty preserved the memories of their race<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
and their holy places, and the national pilgrims
gathering round their old shrines “with the utmost
fervency of devotion, and in all their movements
an abstracted intensity of feeling that carries the mind
back to remote times.” In spite of much destruction,
in spite of the lamentable absence in the new landlords
of Ireland of proper pride and national feeling, there
still remained a mass of ancient monuments preserved
by the pious memories of the people, crosses, graveyards,
old paths, and names and histories; which have
been since swept away in the horrors of famine and
emigration and the devastating land commercialism
let loose by the Encumbered Estates Act.</p>
<p>The first memoir published by the Ordnance
Survey in 1837, the account of Derry, was hailed with
universal enthusiasm. “Irishmen of all sects and
parties felt that in such work as this they would have
for the first time the materials for a true history of
their country.” But the Government interfered. The
Topographical Survey was closed, the staff discharged,
and the vast mass of material, comprising among
other things upwards of four hundred quarto volumes
of letters and documents relating to the topography,
language, history, antiquities, productions, and social
state of almost every county in Ireland, were ordered
to be kept, idle and useless, in the Survey Office at
Mountjoy barracks. The reason given was the cost.
At this time England was drawing from Ireland to
her own use some three millions a year above her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
expenditure there. It was shown that the sale of
the memoir was such as would probably defray the
whole expense. The Government objected to treating
history and political economy as subjects which
might re-open questions of Irish party divisions:
it was answered that the events of history could not be
buried in oblivion, since they had occurred and their
effects continue, and it was well for the public to
have a plain impartial record of bare facts, since on
neither side were the facts yet known.</p>
<p>In answer to the vehement protests of all Ireland,
a Commission was appointed under a new Government
in 1843. It advised that the work should be
continued, and urged the importance of the time,
for monuments and language were alike disappearing:
it recommended that the vast mass of collected
material now lying waste should be published, since
“no enquirer until the officers of the Survey commenced
their labours, has ever brought an equal
amount of local knowledge, sound criticism, and
accurate acquaintance with the Irish language to
bear upon it.” The Government took no notice. It
was believed by the best-informed that some strong
concealed influence urged on ministers that it was
dangerous to open up to the people the memory of
their fathers and their old society, or remind them
of the boundaries of their clans and families. In
vain the best Irishmen of the day, of every race and
religion, pleaded for a braver view of truth and statesmanship.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
Political influences, the fears of absentee
landlords or of a Protestant ascendancy, prevailed
in London. English rulers dreaded the knowledge
of the Irish more than they dreaded their ignorance;
and the door was shut on history, science, and truth,
with the results that we have seen in succeeding
generations.</p>
<p>By this act much knowledge was finally obliterated:
no such opportunity can ever occur again. Much
more was set back for a hundred years, and ignorance
still left enthroned. We may still hear men professing,
as though time had stood still, the doctrines
Petrie reported in vogue a century ago: “The
history and antiquities of Ireland previous to the
English Invasion, are wholly unworthy of notice,
or, at best, involved in obscurity and darkness such as
no sane mind would venture to penetrate.” Irish
history, buried by two Governments, was supposed
to have no resurrection: instead of the serious enquiry
inaugurated by the old Survey, modern statesmen
will assure us through Mr. Balfour that for talk of
Irish ideas and institutions, “there is no historic
basis whatever.”</p>
<p>The Royal Irish Academy applied for the custody
of a part of the Survey records, which were given to its
keeping in 1860; and have there been consulted for
local or county histories. Meanwhile the Survey
was continued in an innocuous form without the
historic virus. Directed from Southampton, English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
“division officers” in Dublin, Belfast and Cork
conduct the Irish Survey. Their maps may serve
practical purposes of buying and selling land, and
even present accurately all modern features, police
barracks and the like. But they offer doubtful help
to the curious historian on the road of scientific
enquiry. The spirit and purpose of the older research
has been banished. Irish antiquities are no longer
objects of interest or of skilled observation; Irish
names are treated in many cases as an insurmountable
difficulty; any ordered attempt at their right spelling
is abandoned. The ancient fort of Lisnalinchy in
Antrim has been allotted the happy name of <i>Silentia</i>,
as if to give to a deep-buried Irish history the respectability
of a mock Roman tombstone. Port-na-veadog,
the port of the plover, appears as Dog’s Bay.
Professor Macalister, examining the ancient ruins
on the Carrowkeel mountain in Co. Sligo, has reported
there the remarkable site of one of the oldest village
settlements in northern Europe, with remains of over
forty-seven structures; and hard by an ancient
cemetery with fourteen carns left by the old builders.
The Survey has been there, and has marked the height
of the beacon it erected on one of the finest of the
carns, but has left on the map no record of this
conspicuous and striking carn as an ancient monument.
The most important of the structures, eighty-seven
feet in diameter and twenty-five in height, is marked
by an indefinite symbol, and not as having any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
character of antiquity. While nearly all the chief
carns were omitted, by some chance or curious scruple
of conscience one or two of the smaller examples
have been noted. Of twenty-three place names
in the square mile of country only nine are recorded.
Names here and elsewhere are set down in an
Anglicised and phonetic spelling, often atrocious in
form. As Professor Macalister observes, nothing could
more clearly prove than this characteristic effort of
the Ordnance Survey in Ireland the absolute necessity
of a thorough re-survey, under expert superintendence,
of the archæology and place names of the country.
All historians, all Irishmen alike, must ardently join
in such an entreaty, for the honour of their land.
Is it too much to hope that this national work may
not be for ever left to indifferent hands, but that
Irish scholars may yet be given the patriotic task of
saving what yet remains on Irish soil of the inheritance
of her people.</p>
<p>Of one thing, however, we may be sure. The
reform of Irish history must begin in our own country,
among our own people. Since it is public opinion
that at the last decides what our people shall learn of
their father-land, we ourselves must be the keepers
of our fame and the makers of our history. Let us in
Ireland therefore remember that we have an ancestry
on which there is no need for us to cry shame.
Chivalry, learning, patriotism, poetry, have been
found there, even “in huts to which an Englishman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
would have hesitated to give the name of a house.”
No people have ever surpassed them in exaltation
or intensity of spiritual life. The sun has risen and
set in that land on lives of courage, honour, and
beauty. The seasons have watched the undying
effort to make Ireland the honoured home of a united
people. Not a field that has not drunk in the blood
of men and women poured out for the homes of
their fathers. Why should not we, the sons and
daughters of Ireland, take our rich inheritance?
“Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity,
the delight of admiration, and perform the duties
of reverence.” So long as the Spirit of life is over
us, I do not know, and I hope you do not know,
why we in this country should not be worthy of
our dead.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-062.jpg" width="600" height="508"
alt=""
title="" />
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER II</h2>
<p class="pch">THE TRADE ROUTES OF IRELAND.</p>
<p class="drop-cap08">A DISCUSSION of the Trade Routes of
Ireland may seem to some a superfluous and
barren task. It has long been a fashion to
look on the country as an island, “remote, unfriended,
melancholy, slow.” Writers have pictured it as
lying through the centuries in primitive barbarism,
an outlying desolation of poverty and disorder. The
blame of this desolation is sometimes laid on the
savagery of the people, sometimes on the position
of the island, at the very “ends of the earth.” No
doubt there has been a certain political convenience
in the very usual argument that the geographical
position of Ireland, lying so near to Great Britain,
makes it immediately dependent on that country
alone, so that it could by nature have no real converse
with Europe, and no door of civilisation save through
England. An island beyond an island—such is
reputed the forlorn position of Ireland. We all
naturally believe that which we constantly hear or
frequently repeat: and it is well from time to time
to ask ourselves what reason may lie behind common
tradition—in this special case to enquire what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
geography and history may have to tell us of the
natural trade routes of Ireland and of England in
former times.</p>
<p>From the map it is plain that the two islands have
a very different outlook. Michelet has pictured
Europe with all her main rivers and harbours opening
to the west, and the island of Great Britain alone
lying as a mighty ship poised on the ocean with her
prow fronting the orient. The Thames opens its
harbour to the east, the capital looks to the east,
and the early trading centres, the Cinque Ports,
turn to the sunrising. Thus the natural way of trade
and travel from England to the Continent has always
been by the narrow seas—across the Channel or
the North Sea to the convenient river-mouths and
harbours of the north European plain. Ireland was
in a different case. If the opposite British coast,
for the most part inhospitable mountain and forest,
offered to her in early times a slender trade and a
harsh welcome, she on her side did not turn to it
her best natural ports. Those on the east coast
from Waterford to Belfast are few; Dublin, left
to itself, is a poor harbour; and from thence to
Belfast there is only one small port, Ardglass, where
the entrance is safe at low tide. The chief harbours
of Ireland in fact were those that swelled with the
waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Her outlook was across
its stormy waters, and her earliest traffic through
the perils of the Gaulish sea. The English were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
concerned with the north and east of Europe, the
Irish with the south and west, and their paths did
not cross.</p>
<p>For Ireland, therefore, the road to Europe did
not lie across Great Britain. As far back as we can
see into the primitive darkness the inhabitants of the
island were all in turn out on the great seas. An
old myth or legend tells of the ancient Manannan
Mac Lir, “Son of the Sea,” who was the best pilot
that was in the west of Europe, and the greatest
reader of the sky and weather: or who in another
tale appears a sea-god triumphant over the ocean
as his boat raced under him on the immensity of
the waters like a chariot on the summer fields, while
he sang in his joy—“That is to me a happy plain
with a profusion of flowers, looking from the chariot
of two wheels.” Ireland, in times beyond the reach
of history, lay on the high-road of an ancient trade
between the countries we know as Scandinavia and
Gaul. Even in the Stone age its people cut some
of their flint arrows after the fashion of Portugal,
or carried them from that peninsula across the Bay
of Biscay; and fragments of stone cups have been
found in Ireland, as in Britain, which are said to
have come from the Mediterranean by the Gaulish
sea. As for the northern traffic, we have traces
of it more than a thousand years before the Christian
era in burial mounds of the Bronze age, where there
are stones carved with a form of ornament which in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
western Europe is only found in Scandinavia and
Ireland.</p>
<p>It was during the Bronze age that the first Gaelic
or Goidelic invaders entered Ireland, coming not
through Britain but over-sea from Spain and Gaul,
from the openings of the Garonne and the Loire,
or from the ports of Brittany. And by that open
highway sailed also later settlers from southern and
northern Gaul. Some relics of these conquering
tribes, fine rivetted trumpets of bronze made after
the fashion of the continent, of the same pattern
as those used in central France about the Loire,
show that they kept up intercourse with their people
abroad. For centuries, in fact, this intercourse can
be traced. An invasion of the Gauls in the third
century <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> left to Leinster its old name of Laigen,
from the broad-headed lances which they carried;
and five hundred years later, in the second century
<span class="smcap">a.d.</span>, Irish princes used to send to Gaul for soldiers
to serve in their wars.</p>
<p>In the time of the Roman Empire therefore
Irish trade with Europe was already well established.
Tacitus (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 98) tells that its ports and harbours
were well known to merchants; and in the second
century the geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria gave
a list, very surprising for the time, of the river-mouths,
mountains, and port towns of Ireland, and its sea-coast
tribes—a knowledge he may have gained from
Marinus of Tyre, or the Syrian traders who conducted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
the traffic from Asia Minor to the Rhone, and thence
across the Gaulish Sea. Italy exported her wine
in the second century <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>; and in the second
century <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>, four hundred years later, when wine
was grown on the hill sides of Provence it may have
reached Irish ports, transported by merchants of
Marseilles to the Garonne, or by the valleys of the
Rhone and the Loire, and thence across the sea.
They travelled in ships built to confront Atlantic
gales, with high poops standing out of the water
like castles, and great leathern sails—stout hulls
that were steered and worked by the born sailors
of the Breton coast. From Brittany the passage
to Ireland could be made in three days. From the
Loire it was two days longer, as we may see from
a later Irish story of the sixth century which tells
how a ship-load of strangers, five decades of them,
came sailing from the lands of Latium on pilgrimage
to Ireland. Each decade of pilgrims took with them
an Irish saint to guide and protect the vessel, every
one in his turn for a day and a night, which gives
a voyage of five days and nights. As they neared
the Irish coast a fierce storm arose, and St. Senan,
who was that day guardian of the company, rose from
dinner with a thigh-bone in his hand, and blessing the
air with the bone brought the pilgrims safe into Cork
harbour. The saint was a practical sailor and pilot, and
he had been allotted the best joint, the portion which
by Irish law was given to the king or the high poet.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
<p>But while traders of the Empire sailed to Ireland,
the armies of Rome never crossed the Irish Sea.
Ireland therefore lay outside the Roman Empire,
while it lay within the circle of imperial civilisation
and commerce. Christianity first came from across
the Gaulish Sea, and the art of writing, and new
forms of ornament. From Gaul the Irish learned
to divide tribe-land into private property marked
by boundary stones. Roman-Hellenistic learning,
which spread from northern Italy to Marseilles,
crossed the Irish seas with the merchants of Aquitaine
carrying the wine of Bordeaux; or it was
brought home by Irish scholars of the fourth century
who went to seek learning in Narbonne, where Greek
was spoken as a living tongue. The Irish Pelagius,
who went to Italy in 400, was able to carry on a discussion
in Jerusalem in 415 with Orosius the Spaniard,
in which he spoke Greek while Orosius needed an
interpreter: if he had not learned Greek in Ireland,
Zimmer reminds us, he would not have been able
to learn it in Rome. Nearly two hundred years
later, in 595, the Irish saint Columbanus and his
companions knew Greek, but Gregory the Great
did not know it, though he had twice been Papal
nuncio in Constantinople. Ovid and Vergil were
known and read in Ireland, where scholars seem to
have taken all that Rome had to give of classical
culture and philosophy.</p>
<p>It is often assumed that to share in the benefits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
of an empire it is necessary to be a subject country,
lying within its police control, and that the Irish
suffered by never having been forced under the
authority of Rome. Perhaps, however, we might
learn here another lesson—that in matters of civilisation
what is really needed is not subjection to force,
but free human converse and the willing intercourse
of men. We have the spectacle of an island beyond
the military rule, the police control, the law, of the
Roman empire, willingly adopting all the spiritual
good which Rome could give it, and the culture that
the intelligence of its people found to suit them.
Free to keep her own customs, Ireland could gain
this new learning without losing her own civilization
and her pride of language, history, and law. It
was in seas of blood that such national pride was
wiped out by Roman conquerors from the plains
of Gaul. But for the Irish at that time there was
no violent breach with the traditions of their race,
nor any humiliation or bondage to darken their high
spirit; and in the joyful and brilliant activity of the
succeeding centuries they illustrated the free and
peaceful union of two civilizations.</p>
<p>Ireland had another advantage from her place of
freedom on the open highways of the sea. For
lying outside the Empire she was saved from the
economic ruin that fell on all the Roman dominions
when, by the fatal policy of the Empire, enterprise
and wealth were sucked to the centre and capital,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
draining the provinces bare; so that, for example,
witnesses of that time describe the once wealthy
port of Cadiz as a town of great empty warehouses,
silent and deserted, save for a few poor old men and
women creeping about its melancholy streets. Her
position saved her too when the barbarians swept
over the Empire. As she had been unconquered
by the Romans so she remained unconquered by
Teuton or English. Her learning did not perish
before invaders; and if on the mainland every old
line of communication was closed or broken, her way
of the ocean was still free. It is true that the wars
of the English invaders of Britain for some hundred
and fifty years (449-597) barred all passage through
it to the Continent. But that route had never been
of any real consequence. A way to Europe across
Britain was no doubt known to the Irish in Roman
times, and some pilgrims journeyed by that way
across the Empire. But this was not the main route
for travellers from Ireland, and it was never the line
of their continental trade. There seems to have been
little communication on the whole with Britain.
Settlers went over from Ireland to Scotland, to Wales,
to the Cornish peninsula, and founded Irish colonies.
But in the main the Irish troubled themselves very
little about Britain at all. In fact from the third
century onwards they were accustomed to give to
all strangers the name of “Galls,” from Gallos, the
people of Gaul, the chief visitors they knew.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
<p>To the Irish the important thing therefore was
that the way of the sea was still open. Traders
from Gaul sailed along the western coast, and up the
Shannon to Roscommon and Loch Cé, and on the
eastern side their ships passed by the Irish Sea to
what is now Down and Antrim, to Iona, and Cantyre.
They still as of old carried the wine of Provence
in great wooden tuns, in one of which three men
could stand upright; there still came men speaking
Greek, and scholars of the east, and artists of Gaul.
At this time indeed the Irish were no recluse people,
living in a backwater or severed from the great
world. An Old Irish poem tells of the traditions of
Leinster under its ancient kings—“The sweet strain
heard there at every hour; its wine-barque upon
the purple flood; its shower of silver of great
splendour; its torques of gold from the lands of the
Gaul.” The metropolis of Columcille’s church
organization at Iona, the established centre of Irish
learning at Bangor in Down, both alike lay in the
track of the sailing ships, and in frequent communication
with Europe. News of the destruction
by earthquake of Citta Nuova in Istria was brought
to Columcille that same year by Gaulish mariners.
Columbanus and his companions could take ship
from Bangor to Nantes on their mission to Europe
(589). Northwards Irishmen sailed to the Hebrides,
the Orkneys, the Shetlands. They seem to have
traded and married with Scandinavians a century<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
before the invasion of Ireland by the Wikings. Moreover
Irishmen had travelled as far as Iceland in 795,
where Nadoddr the Norseman heard of them some
sixty years later.</p>
<p>Thus the old civilization, rudely interrupted elsewhere,
was carried on unbroken in Ireland. Now
was the time (500-1000) when the island began to
give back to Europe the treasures of learning which
she had stored up in the time of the Roman Empire,
and had kept safely through the barbarian wars.
Missionaries and scholars from Iona and Ireland
carried letters and Christian teaching to every part
of England, while ship-loads of Englishmen went
to Ireland for instruction. Other Irishmen sailed
to Brittany, and journeyed east over northern France
beyond the Rhine. A greater number travelled
by Nantes, Angers, Tours, past the monastery of
Columbanus at Lisieux, and thence over middle
Europe, or by St. Gall southward through Italy
as far as Tarentum, and to the Holy Land. Occasionally
pilgrims and missionaries took the road to Europe
through Britain, when with the settlement of the
English kingdoms and the coming of Augustine (597)
a new intercourse had opened between the English
and the continental peoples. That is, some few
travellers went this way, but merchants still kept
to the old sea route, and the greater number of Irish
pilgrims and scholars. It was by that way, for
example, according to the old story by a monk of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
St. Gall, that two Scots from Ireland sailed to Gaul
in the early days of Charles the Great, and in the
market-place, where the merchants trafficked with
the crowds, raised their cry of an Irish trade:—“If
anyone is desirous of wisdom, let him come to
us and receive it, for we have it to sell.” At last
they were brought to Charles himself, who asked
what payment they would need; nothing more,
they answered, than convenient situations, ingenious
minds, and as living in a foreign country to be
supplied with food and raiment; and the king formed
a school for one of them in France, and set the other
at the head of the great school at Pavia. Irish monasteries,
one after another in rapid order, rose along
the main highways of travel, among the ruined heaps
of Roman towns where wild beasts alone found shelter,
in forest and desert and mountain. Every school
had Irish teachers and Irish manuscripts, relics of
which still remain in continental libraries. Ireland
became the source of culture to all Germanic
nations: indeed wherever in the seventh and following
centuries education or knowledge is found it may
be traced directly or indirectly to Irish influence.
It has been justly said that at the time of Charles
the Bald every one who spoke Greek on the
Continent was almost certainly an Irishman, or taught
by an Irishman. By degrees Irish monasteries, built
and supported by Irish money, spread over Europe
from Holland to Tarentum, from Gaul to Bulgaria.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
<p>The Continent was therefore well known to
Ireland when about 800 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> a new revolution passed
over Europe.</p>
<p>Continental trade, as we have seen, had perished
with the Roman Empire. Commerce had fallen
to its lowest point. There was scarcely any money,
nor in any country, neither England, nor France,
nor Germany, a native class of merchants; wandering
Jews and Greeks and Syrians, and later Italians,
carried on what little buying and selling still survived.
On the shores of the North Sea, however, the Frisians
had made their town of Duurstede, near the mouth
of the Rhine, a centre for traffic carried down the
river; and in their stout, flat-bottomed, high-boarded
sailing ships traded across the North Sea and the
Baltic. Duurstede became for a time the chief port
of western Europe. There Charles the Great coined
money, and the lines along which the Frisian traders
carried their wares may still be traced by the finding
of the Duurstede coins. But even in the time of the
Emperor Charles came the change which was to
sweep away the Frisian traders. This was the rise
of the new lords of the sea—the Scandinavians—who
were to wrest commerce from Frisians and Gauls,
and open a new trade for northern Europe.</p>
<p>The Scandinavians got their training in a hard
school. They had a thousand miles of stormy shores
to practice seamanship, fishing along their mountain
coasts, and sailing against Arctic tempests round the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
North Cape. They had to build better ships than
anyone else, and to sail them better. They invented
a new kind of vessel where both oars and sails were
used. And in a short time the Frisians were outdone
both in seamanship and in trade.</p>
<p>East and west the Scandinavians sailed. As early
as the eight century colonies of Swedes were
passing by the Baltic and the gulf of Finland to settle
on the opposite coast about Novgorod and along the
Dnieper—the East way, as they called it. They left
Scandinavian names along the rapids of the river
as their travellers pushed forward, till in 839 they
came in contact with the Greeks, and Swedes who had
journeyed by the Dnieper were introduced by the
Emperor of the East to the Western Emperor Louis
the Pious. Their ships were soon the terror of the
Black Sea shores—laden with warriors tall like palm
trees, ruddy, fairhaired, who were in turn traders
and plunderers, conquerors and slave-dealers. In
865 two hundred of their vessels appeared before
Constantinople; in 880 they had reached the Sea
of Azof, the Don and the Volga; in 913 they had
five hundred ships, each carrying a hundred men,
in the Caspian. Novgorod was the mart of their
vast eastern commerce. There have been found in
Sweden nearly twenty thousand Arabian coins, dating
from 698 to 1002 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>, carried across the Baltic by
home-going merchants. Gothland became the general
centre of exchange for the Eastway trade, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
Danes sailed from their settlements on the Mecklenburg
coast and the mouth of the Oder, to buy Russian
furs, Greek and Arabian silks, and Indian spices,
and here have been discovered thirteen thousand
coins of the tenth and eleventh centuries—Byzantine,
Arabian, and from central Asia.</p>
<p>Other adventurers from Norway and Denmark
turned towards the Atlantic Ocean, trading and
plundering in every harbour of the west, as far as
Seville and the Spanish coasts. Northward they
peopled Iceland and the Orkneys, and in time rounded
the North Cape. They fished the Ocean for whales,
and opened a trade in whale-meat and in the furs
and cod of the White Sea with Normandy and
England. The English liked better to buy than to
catch whales. “Can you take a whale?” we read
in an old West-Saxon dialogue. “Many,” says the
home-loving Englishman, “take whales without
danger, and then they get a great price, but I dare
not from the fearfulness of my mind.”</p>
<p>Besides opening out this world-wide trade, the
Scandinavians made a revolution also in the manner
of trading. Up to this time buying and selling had
been carried on by travelling dealers, Syrian and
Italian. Now however Norsemen and Danes, who
had no towns in their own lands, planted themselves
in their new countries in fortified cities; and, for
example, showed their enterprise by forming in the
Five Danish Burghs in England the earliest federation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
of towns known outside Italy. In the new
towns a settled class of merchants was established,
who learned to group themselves according to the
English system of guilds. The Scandinavians learned
also to strike coins after the manner of the Frisians.
In all these ways, by their new ships, their new trade
routes, their money, their guilds, and their settled
merchants in towns, the Scandinavians won a pre-eminence
on the sea, which they were to hold in their
own hands for some two hundred years.</p>
<p>What was the effect in Ireland of this new peril,
an attack on Europe from the sea? In the first
place the highways of the sea, never before closed,
were barred by the Scandinavian free-booters. A
few Irish travellers (even from Leinster) did even in
800 and 850 take the old accustomed journey to the
Loire and so across France to Germany; but the
passage was now dangerous. The terrors of the sea
journey drove travellers to the land route, and the way
across England to the Continent became so important
that clerics of the tenth century could not imagine
that any other way had ever been possible. The
new sea-kings, moreover, were not the people to
forget the ancient and profitable trade routes of
the wine commerce, or the Irish harbours into which
trading ships from north and south had sailed for
the last two thousand years, or the gold that had
been dug from Irish mines in old days. They seized
every harbour, sent their boats up every creek and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
river, plundered the monasteries and wealthy houses,
broke into every burial mound for treasure, and put
a poll-tax on the men. Scholars and Christian monks
fled from the heathen barbarians, carrying to Europe
their treasures and manuscripts. The time of mere
destruction, however, was not long. The Scandinavians
were practical men of affairs, and Norsemen
and Danes had settled in Ireland for business. The
“Great Island,” as they called it, was a natural centre
of their new world-wide commerce; lying within
the trade circle formed by the ships that swept from
the Orkneys and Hebrides round the Atlantic coast
to the Loire and the Garonne, or that traversed
the Irish Sea from Cantyre to Devonshire and
Brittany. It was the shelter of voyaging ships, the
recruiting ground of raiders, the winter-quarters
of fleets; its commerce fell in naturally with the
traffic of the western world. Danes and Irish were
presently to the full as busy in trading as in fighting.
Ireland became a commercial centre, a meeting place
of the peoples. There came Grett with the Greek
hat to buy captives for the Iceland market. A host
of Saxons and Britons were brought over by Olaf
and Ivar in 871. Almost every king of Norway
sailed his fleet into Irish harbours, to drive off the
rival Danish merchants, to broaden his traffic, to
spy out some new store of gold, to load up with corn,
to sweep the cattle down to the seashore for the
“strand-hewing” that was to provision his crews<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
with meat, fresh and salt, for their ocean course.
Traders bargained then just as they bargain now.
There is a harbour of Ardglass on the coast of County
Down where a castle was built many centuries ago
to protect the commerce of the port. The other
day an Irishman repaired its ruins, and for a sign
flew from it the flag of one of the Irish lords of the
country, the Red Right Hand of O’Neill. At that
very moment a light schooner sailed into the offing
and at once flew in answer the Danish flag. The
vessel was from Marsthal. Getting into port the
crew bargained for herrings, counting out a hundred
and ninety-five barrels of them by “chequers,”
while the Ardglass men checked the number on
notched sticks. Neither knew one word of the
other’s tongue. So the Danes did business and
sailed away, exactly as their forefathers had done
a thousand years ago.</p>
<p>Between plundering and trading and marriages
and alliances Norse and Irish got to know each other
well, as we may see by the story of king Olaf
Tryggwason and his dog. Olaf the Magnificent,
most glorious and far-shining of sea-kings, famed
beyond all others for the surpassing perfection of his
warships, being married to Gytha sister of Olaf
Kuaran king of Dublin, abode in England and occasionally
in Ireland. “He happened once,” says the
Saga, “to be present in Ireland with a large naval
force engaged in war. A foray to get stores being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
necessary, the men went on land and drove towards
the shore a multitude of sheep and cattle; and there
followed them a yeoman, who begged Olaf to give
him back his cows from among the flock that they
were driving off. King Olaf answered: ‘Take your
cows if you know them, and are able to separate
them from the rest without delaying our journey;
but, I think, neither you nor any other man can do
that feat among so many hundred cattle as are in
the drove.’ The yeoman had a big cattle dog with
him. So he sent the dog among the herd as they
were driven off together, and the dog ran up and
down among them all, and soon picked out and put
aside as many of the man’s cattle as in the yeoman’s
opinion were there. As these were all marked with
one and the same mark, it was evident that the dog
must have had a perfect knowledge of them. Then
the King said: ‘Wonderfully clever is your dog,
yeoman; will you give him to me?’ And the man
answered: ‘I will gladly do so.’ Then the King
straightway, in return, gave the yeoman a large gold
bracelet, and promised him his friendship therewith.
This dog, the best and most sensible of all dogs,
was named Wigi, and Olaf had him for a long time
afterwards.” There came a day later when Olaf
was entrapped by his enemies in the Baltic, sailing
with his fleet on the far-famed Long Serpent—“never
warship has been built in Northern lands
its equal for beauty and size.” “Right and proper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
is it,” said Earl Eric, “that such a noble ship should
belong to Olaf Tryggwason, for he is truly said to
surpass other kings as much as the Long Serpent
surpasses other ships.” The King, with shield and
helmet overlaid with gold, and red silken kirtle, stood
on the ship’s prow, a great dragon’s head ornamented
so that it seemed of gold, and when it gleamed far over
the sea as the sun shone upon it, fear and terror were
shot into men’s hearts. “Lay the big ship more
in front. My place in this warlike host is not at the
back of all my men,” he called. “I had the Serpent
built of greater length than other ships that she
might stretch the more boldly beyond them in the
battle.” The conflict of heroes raged long. As his
enemies poured over the deck King Olaf, blood
falling over his face and arm from under helmet
and mail-sleeve, vanished, no man knew how, in the
waters. The Long Serpent, sinking in the sea, was
of no use to its conquerors. His queen was brought
from under the deck weeping bitterly and so sore
wounded with grief that she could neither eat nor
drink, and died in nine days. Throughout the battle
the dog Wigi lay without stirring before the castle
of the Short Serpent; it carried him home along
with Einar Thambaskelf, the youth of eighteen,
hardest shooter of his time, who stood by the King
in the Long Serpent, who when his own bow was
broken stretched the King’s beyond the arrow head
and flung it away (“Too weak, too weak, the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
King’s bow”), who had sprung after the King into
the water, and for his courage was given freedom
by the victors. As they touched land Einar “before
going on shore, went to the dog as he lay there, and
said, ‘We’ve no master now, Wigi!’ At these
words the dog sprang up growling, and with a loud
yell, as if seized by anguish of heart, he ran on shore
with Einar. There he went and lay down on the
top of a mound, and would take no food from anyone,
though he drove away other dogs, beasts and birds
from what was brought to him. From his eyes,
tears coursed one another down his nose, and thus
bewailing the loss of his liege-lord, he lay till he died.”
From that day grief and sorrow lay on Einar. And
men remembered the prophecy of the blind yeoman
of Moster that in one voyage Norway should lose its
four most noble things—the king, whose like had
never been seen, the queen, best for sense and goodness
that ever came into Norway, the greatest ship
ever built in Norway, and the Irish dog, wiser and
more clever than any other dog in the land.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-083.jpg" width="500" height="596"
alt=""
title="" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
<p>In Ireland the power of the Scandinavians was
shown in the foundation of two kingdoms, along the
two main lines of sea traffic—Dublin on the eastern
sea, and Limerick on the Atlantic.
The Norwegian kingdom on the Liffey had its
centre in the mound raised by the river-side for its
Thing or Moot, near where the Dublin Parliament
House rose nine hundred years later. The kingdom
stretched over a narrow strip of shore, the memory
of which was preserved for a thousand years, till
a generation ago, in the jurisdiction of the Dublin
Corporation over a long line of coast from the river
Delvin below Drogheda to Arklow. Four fiords—Strangford
and Carlingford to the north, and Wexford
and Waterford to the south—lay outside the actual
kingdom of Dublin, but were closely connected
with it. Waterford kings were at times of the same
family as the Dublin kings, and in the ninth and
tenth centuries Waterford was sometimes independent
and sometimes united to Dublin.</p>
<p>Dublin commanded a double line of commerce—from
Scandinavia to Gaul, and by York to Novgorod
and the Eastway. The kingdom was in close connection
with the Danish kingdom of Northumbria,
with its capital at York. For Danish Northumbria,
opening on the North Sea by the Humber, formed
the common meeting ground, the link which united
the Northmen of Scandinavia and the Northmen of
Ireland. A mighty confederation grew up. Members
of the same house were kings in Dublin, in Man,
and in York. Their descendants were among the
chief settlers in Iceland. The Dublin kings married
into the chief houses of Ireland, Scotland, and the
Hebrides. The sea was the common highway which
bound the powers together, and the sea was held by
fleets of swift long-ships with from ninety to a hundred
and fifty rowers or fighting men on board. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
Irish Channel swarmed with ships of the Dublin
kingdom. It became the mart of the Scandinavian
traders, of Icelandic sailors, and men of Norway,
and merchant princes landing from their cruise
to sell their merchandise or their plunder. “You
must this summer make a trading voyage,” said Earl
Hakon to his friend Thori Clack, “as is customary
now with many, and go to Dublin in Ireland.” Far-travelled
traders carried from Dublin and York, deep
into the inland of Russia, English coins and weapons
and ornaments such as were used in Great Britain
and Ireland.</p>
<p>“Limerick of the swift ships,” looking out to the
Atlantic and the Gaulish sea, was a rival even to
Dublin. The Norwegians first fortified the town
by an earthen or wooden fence, but presently by a
wall of stone, “Limerick of the rivetted stones.”
Behind it lay a number of Norse settlements scattered
over Limerick, Kerry, and Tipperary. The first
settlers were from the Hebrides where Irishmen and
Norse and Danes mingled as one people, interchanging
names and mingling speech so that the Norse used
Gaelic words for goblets for which they drank their
wine, and the oats for their bread. The name <i>Maccus</i>,
a later form of Magnus, was in the tenth century only
used by the reigning families of Limerick, the Hebrides,
and the Isle of Man. United by kinship and by
trade, the lords of the Isles and the lords of Limerick
constantly aided one another, and made joint expeditions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
Once more the Gaulish trade was revived,
and vessels sailed out from the Shannon to fetch
wine and silks from the harbours of the Loire and
the Garonne. From every bay and river-mouth
between Waterford and Lough Foyle streams of
commerce poured into the main current of the
Atlantic trade. After a brief interruption in fact
Ireland was once more in the ninth and tenth century
in the full current of European life, and that in a
double way. The lines of merchant vessels carried
her trade, while the stream of her professors and
scholars and missionaries brought her fame to every
court in Europe.</p>
<p>King Ælfred has left his record of the three Irishmen
who came “in a boat without oars from Hibernia,
whence they had stolen away because for the love
of God they would be on pilgrimage, they recked
not where. The boat in which they fared was wrought
of three hides and a half, and they took with them
enough meat for seven nights.” On the seventh
day they drifted ashore at Cornwall, and were taken
on to Ælfred whose captives they had thus become.
Perhaps from them that great-hearted and far-sighted
English king learned to honour the Irish.
He sent gifts to monasteries in Ireland. He noted
in his Chronicle the death of Suibhne, anchorite of
Clonmacnois, “the most learned teacher among
the Scots,” said Ælfred.</p>
<p>From this story some may have supposed that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
“primitive” Irishmen had not yet got beyond the
rude fishing-boats of savage life. But we have here
in fact only an instance of the strange contrasts which
make Irish history so full of wonder, so rich in human
interest. In the midst of a world of furious trade
and war, Irish poets and mystics, obedient to the
ancient message of their masters, still went down
to the sea-brink abiding there “the revelation of
knowledge.” In the vast solitude of sea and sky
beyond which, in which, waited the revelation, the
seen and the unseen were confounded and limits of
space and time fell away in infinity. The everlasting
gates were there, the way of the soul’s escape from
imprisonment in shadows, the opening of the Eternal
Reality. Abandoning will and fear, they cast themselves
on Nature and the God immanent in Nature,
and summoned by the silent call went out in faith,
“they recked not where.”</p>
<p>Thus in Ireland old worlds were ever intermixed
with new. Pilgrims cast themselves on the sea in
curraghs, and drifted to the Faroes and to Iceland
carrying with them the power of piety and learning.
But there were also Irish traders with business minds.
They, like the French, learned from the Scandinavians
to build ships, and like the French, used Norse words
for their new sea-faring vessels, “brown-planked”
warships, and merchant ships, ships large and small,
and boats; and for the planks and sides, bottom-boards,
row-benches, taff-rail, gunwale, the creaking,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
of the row-bench, the steersman. They learned
too from the Scandinavians their method of raising
a navy by dividing the country into districts, each
of which had to equip and man so many ships which
were to assemble at the summons to arms into the
united war fleet—the levy and the fleet both called
by Norse words. Sagas of the Danish time tell
of “the fleet of the men of Munster,” of “Munster
of the swift ships,” six or seven score of them ready
to sail to Dundalk or to the Mull of Cantyre at the
call of the king of Cashel.</p>
<p>The Irish had also their fleets of merchant ships.
An old poem of about 900 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> gives a description
of the dwellers on the coast from Carn or Mizen
Head to Cork (the Irish clan of the O’Mahoneys
chief among them)—</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">“High in beauty,<br />
Whose resolve is quiet prosperity.”</p>
<p class="pn1">a description which has been generally considered
quite unsuited to the Irish and more naturally
reserved for Englishmen. The merchant princes won
for their province the name of “Munster of the great
riches.” But the signs of foreign trade, chains and
massive links of silver, and brooches of Scandinavia
and the eastern world, are found all over Ireland—Belfast,
Navan, Monaghan, Limerick, Galway, Cavan,
King’s and Queen’s Counties—the patterns wholly
unlike Irish work. There were enamelled glass beads,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
and silks and satins and stores of silver, oriental goods
from the Caspian and East Mediterranean, which
had been carried across Russia to Swedish and Danish
lands and so to Ireland.</p>
<p>“What is best for a king?” asked an Irish poet
of the tenth century.</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">
“Fish in river-mouths.<br />
Earth fruitful.<br />
Inviting barks into harbour<br />
Importing treasures from over-sea.<br />
<span class="ls1">••••••</span><br />
Silken raiment.<br />
<span class="ls1">••••••</span><br />
Abundance of wine and mead.<br />
<span class="ls1">••••••</span><br />
Let him foster every science.”</p>
<p class="p1">Thus it was that the Irish wrested some advantage
out of the Danish wars. They profited by the material
skill and knowledge of the invaders. They were willing
to absorb the foreigners, to marry with them, and
even at times to share their wars. They learned
from them to build ships, organise naval forces,
advance in trade, and live in towns; they used Scandinavian
words for the parts of a ship and the streets
of a town. The Irish gave proof of a real national
vigour. In outward and material civilization they
accepted modern Norse methods, just as in our days
the Japanese accepted modern Western inventions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
But in what the Germans call Culture—in the ordering
of society and law, of life and thought, the Irish
like the Japanese never for a moment abandoned their
national loyalty to their own country. During two centuries
of Danish wars they did not loosen hold of their old
civilization. “Concealing ancient lore, to hold any
new thing fair,” they said face to face with the new
Scandinavian system, “this is the way of folly.”
They maintained their schools, their art and literature.
They preserved their church. Writers of the ninth
century describe the duty of an Irish king: he had to
journey over the land and bring each chief under law:
“let him enslave criminals”: “let him perfect the
proper due of every man of whatever is his on sea
or land.” On their side the tribes were to have
for their protection not only “a lawful lord,” but
“a meeting of nobles”; “frequent assemblies”;
“an assembly according to rules”; “a lawful synod.”
We read of yet larger Assemblies for the whole country
“to make concord between the men of Ireland.”
If the chief places of the people were captured, they
went out into the bog-lands to elect their kings according
to their law. Thus when Cashel was held by
the Danes the seventeen tribes of Munster gathered
in a marshy glen, where the nobles sat in assembly
on a mound, and decided to choose one Cennedig
as king. But the queen, Cellachan’s mother, appeared
before them, and in a speech and a lay which she
made declared the right of Cellachan. And when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
the champions of Munster heard these great words
and the speech of the woman they rose up to make
Cellachan king, “and gave thanks to the true
magnificent God for having found him ... and put
their hands in his hand, and placed the royal diadem
round his head, and their spirits were raised at the
grand sight of him.”</p>
<p>Under the power of this national feeling the Irish
learned from the Danes not only the new trade,
but they learned also the new sea warfare, and understood
their lesson so well that they were soon able
to drive back the armies and fleets of the Danes,
and to become themselves the leaders of Danish
and Norse troops in war. It was about 950 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>
that the Irish won their first famous naval victory.
Cellachan, king of Cashel, had been taken prisoner
by the Norse, and was carried to Sitric’s ship at
Dundalk. An army was sent from Munster across
Ireland to rescue him. They demanded to have
back their king. “Give honour to Cellachan in the
presence of the men of Munster!” commanded
Sitric in his wrath. “Let him even be bound to the
mast! For he shall not be without pain in honour
of them!” “I give you my word,” said Cellachan,
as he was lifted up, “that it is a greater sorrow to
me not to be able to protect Cashel for you, than
to be in great torture.” “It is a place of watching
where I am,” he cried, high lifted above them all.
“I see what your champions do not see, since I am<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
at the mast of the ship.” “Are these your ships
that are coming now?” said he. For on the far
horizon rose the masts of his fleet of Munster sailing
into Dundalk harbour, six score of them, the full
muster of the ships gathered from every sea port
between Cork and Galway, from the regions of Bandon
and Kinsale, from the land of the O’Driscolls who
held the coast from Bandon across Clear harbour
to Crookhaven and the river of Kenmare, from the
Dingle peninsula, from “Kerry of the rushes” on
the Shannon shore, from western Clare, and from
Corcomroe and Burren. When the Irish captains
looked on their king bound and fettered to the mast,
their aspect became troubled, their colour changed,
and their lips grew pale. From his place of agony
Cellachan watched the onset of his sailors, and heard
the rattle of swords and javelins filling the air, like
the sound that arises from the seashore full of stones
trodden by herds of cattle and racing horses. He
saw the Irish fling tough ropes of hemp over the long
prows of the Norse ships to hold them fast, while the
Norsemen threw stout chains of blue iron. He saw
his people, defended only by their “strong enclosures
of linen cloth to protect bodies and necks and noble
heads,” as they dashed themselves into the Norse
ships among the mail-clad warriors; he watched
the heroic Failbe springing on the deck of Sitric’s
battle-ship, and with a high and deer-like leap mount
on the mast, his right-hand sword swinging against<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
the crowding enemy, while with the sword in his
mighty left hand he cut the ropes that bound king
Cellachan. In the moment of his king’s salvation
Failbe fell dead. As the Norsemen struck off his
head and set it upon the prow of the ship, Failbe’s
foster-brother, mad for revenge, with an eager falcon-like
leap sprang into the warship, and since no weapon
of his could pierce the armour of the Norse king,
he fixed his white hands in the bosom of Sitric’s
coat of mail and dragged him down into the water,
so that they together reached the gravel and the
sand of the sea and rested there. After six hours’
battle the remnant of the Scandinavian fleet put
out to sea, and, says the old saga, they carried neither
King nor Chieftain with them.</p>
<p>After that battle came other triumphs; the fleet
of the kings of Ailech that carried off plunder and
booty from the Hebrides: Brian Boru’s expedition
of the Norsemen of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford,
and of the men of Munster, and of almost all of the
men of Erin such of them as were fit to go to sea,
and they levied tribute from Saxons and Britons as
far as the Clyde and Argyle. The spirit of independence
rose high, and victorious warriors established
again the rule of the Irish in their own land.</p>
<p>But the Danes had no mind to let Ireland and her
harbours and her sea routes fall out of their hands.
The great conflict of the two peoples came about
sixty years after the victory of Cellachan.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></p>
<p>The Danes had now held command of the sea
for two hundred years. About 1000 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>, in the
glory of success, their kings, like later monarchs in
Europe, began to think of their “Imperial Destiny.”
It seemed time to perfect the whole business and
round off the borders of their State. So Swein
Forkbeard of Denmark proposed to create a Scandinavian
Empire which should extend from the
Slavic shores of the Baltic to the rim of the Atlantic,
with the North Sea as a lake of this wide dominion.
Swein overran England, and his son Cnut ruled from
the Baltic to the Irish Channel, lord of Denmark, Norway,
England, and the Danes of Dublin (for he minted
coins even there), with London as the chief city
of the new Danish Empire. The imperial plan
was not yet complete. Danish rule was to extend
to the outermost land on the Atlantic. But Ireland
blocked the way. The Ireland of King Brian Boru—of
men who lived (as they said) “on the ridge of the
world,” men bred in the free air of the plains and the
mountains and the sea—left the Scandinavian Empire
with a ragged edge on the line of the Atlantic
commerce. In the spring of 1014 the Danish army
gathered in the Bay of Dublin to straighten out the
boundaries of the Empire on the western Ocean.
There met a mighty host under the “Black Raven”
of the pagans, woven with heathen spells; “when
the wind blew out the banner it was as though the
Raven flapped his wings for flight.” In that Imperial<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
army there were warriors “from all the west of
Europe,” from Iceland, the Orkneys, the Baltic
Islands, from Norway a thousand men in ringed
armour, from Northumbria two thousand pagans,
“not a villain of them who had not polished armour
of iron or brass encasing their bodies from head to
foot.” On the night before the battle Woden himself,
the old god of war, rode up through the dusk
men said, on a dapple-grey horse, halbert in hand,
to take counsel with his champions.</p>
<p>But Woden’s last fight was come. The full tide
of the morning carried the pagan host over the level
sands to the landing at Clontarf. The army of King
Brian Boru lay before them. From sunrise to sunset
on Good Friday that desperate battle raged, the
hair of the warriors flying in the wind, says the old
chronicler, as thick as the sheaves floating in a field
of oats. The Scandinavian scheme of a Northern
Empire was shattered on that day, when with the
evening flood-tide the remnant of the Danish host put
out to sea. The work which had been begun by the
fleet of Cellachan in Dundalk harbour sixty-four
years before, was completed by Brian Boru where
the Liffey opens into the Bay of Dublin. For a
hundred, and fifty years to come Ireland kept its
independence. England was once again, as in the
time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental
empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome,
still lay outside the new imperial system.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
<p>Clontarf marked the passing of an old age, the
beginning of a new. We may see the advent of
the new men in the names of adventurers that landed
with the Danes on that low shore at Clontarf—the
first great drops of the coming storm. There were
lords from Normandy, Eoghan Barun or John the
Baron, and Richard, with another, perhaps Robert
of Melun. There was Goistilin Gall, a Frenchman
from Gaul. There was somewhere about that time
Walter the Englishman, a leader of mercenaries from
England. In such names we see the heralds of the
approaching change. A revolution in the fortunes of
the world had in fact opened. Scandinavian pre-eminence
on the sea was even now passing away,
as that of the Frisians had passed away two hundred
years before. New lords of commerce seized the
traffic of sea and land when the Normans, “citizens
of the world,” carried their arms and their cunning
from the Moray Firth to the Straits of Messina, from
the Seine to the Euphrates. The Teutonic peoples
that now girded the North Sea—Normans, Germans
of the Hanseatic League, English—were to supersede
Danes and Norwegians. Trade moreover had once
more spread over the high roads of Europe, as in the
days of the Roman Empire, and the peoples of the
south, Italians and Gauls, had taken up again their
ancient commerce.</p>
<p>In the new commerce as in the old Ireland was to
take her full part. The island lay in the moving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
life that stirred the great seas, washed by that whirlpool
of activity. From every shore she saw the sails
of busy traffickers bearing the commerce of the known
world, and carrying too its thought and art. The
people had not lost their wit. They shared in the
enterprise and the profit of the new commerce. The
great routes were open, from Scandinavia to Gaul,
and down the Irish Channel. The Danish traffic
across England was not forgotten, and as the trade
of the German coasts developed, busier lines of commerce
were opened from the Irish harbours of the
south eastward to the North Sea and the Baltic.</p>
<p>It is an unfinished tale I tell. But it may remind
us of one gift of Nature to Ireland—the freedom of
Europe by the sea. We have seen the dim figures
of the flint-men, the Bronze-men, the first Gaels,
reaching out hands to Scandinavia and to the
Mediterranean lands. We have seen Ireland on the
borders of the Roman Empire, free and unconquered,
busy in trade, busier still in learning, carrying across
the Gaulish Sea treasures of classical knowledge.
Again Ireland appeared when the barbarians had
spread over Europe, still unconquered, sending back
across the Ocean the learning she had stored up, the
free distributor on the Continent of the classics and
science and Christian teaching. We have seen the
island again on the fringe of the Scandinavian Empire,
even now unconquered, and still in the mid-stream
of European traffic. When a new revolution came,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
and trade swelled under the Normans, every Irish port
was full. Irishmen sailed every sea. Their fabrics
were sold in every country as far as Russia and Naples.
Through the long centuries they never lost the habit
of the sea and of Europe. In the middle ages Spanish
coin was almost the chief currency in Ireland, so
great was the Irish trade with Spain; and in the
eighteenth century the country was still full of Spanish,
Portuguese, and French money in daily use—the
moydore, the doubloon, the pistole, the Louis d’or,
the new Portuguese gold coin. So much so that
in the Peninsular war Ireland was ransacked for foreign
coins to send to the army in Spain and Portugal.</p>
<p>But that story is over. Ireland at last was swept
within the orbit of an Empire—not as a free member
of a federation, but in full subjection, with every
advantage that complete military and police control
could afford. Natural geography gave place to
political geography, and the way of the Empire ruled
out the way of the sea. “I should not presume,”
wrote Richard Cox, Esquire, Recorder of Kinsale,
in dedicating to their Majesties William and Mary
a History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof,
which he printed at St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1689.
“I should not presume to lay this treatise at your
Royal feet, but that it concerns a noble Kingdom,
which is one of the most considerable branches of
your mighty Empire.</p>
<p>“It is of great Advantage to it, that it is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
Subordinate Kingdom of the Crown of <i>England</i>;
for it is from that Royal Fountain that the Streams
of Justice, Peace, Civility, Riches and all other Improvements
have been derived to it; so that the
Irish are (as Campion says) beholding to God for
being conquered.</p>
<p>“And yet Ireland has been so blind in this Great
Point of its true Interest, that the Natives have
managed almost a continual war with the English
ever since the first Conquest thereof; so that it has
cost your Royal Predecessors an unspeakable mass
of Blood and Treasure to preserve it in true
Obedience.</p>
<p>“But no cost can be too great where the Prize
is of such value; and whoever considers the Situation,
Ports, Plenty, and other Advantages of Ireland will
confess, that it must be retained at what rate soever;
because if it should come into an Enemy’s Hands,
England would find it impossible to <i>flourish</i>; and
perhaps difficult to <i>subsist</i> without it.</p>
<p>“To demonstrate this assertion, it is enough to say
that Ireland lies in the <i>Line of Trade</i>, and that all the
English vessels that sail to the <i>East</i>, <i>West</i> and <i>South</i>,
must, as it were, run the <i>gauntlet</i> between the
Harbours of Brest and Baltimore: and I might add
that the Irish Wool, being transported, would soon
ruine the English clothing Manufacture.</p>
<p>“Hence it is that all Your Majesties Predecessors
have kept close to this Fundamental Maxim, of retaining<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
Ireland inseperably united to the Crown of
England.”</p>
<p>The house of Hanover ended what the Tudors
had begun. Ireland became an island beyond an
island. But the great deep still gives to the country
an abiding unity. In ancient days the Irish had a
noble figure by which they proclaimed the oneness of
the land within its Ocean bounds. The three waves
of Erin they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding
roar when danger threatened the island.
One wave called to Munster at an inlet of Cork; two
of them sounded in Ulster, at the mouth of the Bann
and in the bay of Dundrum. The Ocean bore the
same fate to Munster and to Ulster. And in fact
so long as the sea surrounds this island, so long all
its peoples must be linked in a common fortune. The
deep that encompasses Ireland has made this country
one, gathering together into the Irish family all
races that have entered within its circuit. By the
might of that encircling Ocean the men of Ireland
are bound together in one inheritance, unchanging
amid ceaseless change.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER III</h2>
<p class="pch">A GREAT IRISH LADY</p>
<p class="drop-cap04">WE are often told that the civilization of a people
is marked by the place of its women: a rule
by which the Irish stand high. In the
fifteenth century, as at all times, their annals record
many noble ladies “distinguished for knowledge,
hospitality, good sense and piety”; “humane and
charitable”; “a nurse to all guests and strangers,
and to all the learned men in Ireland.” Of these
Margaret, daughter of O’Carroll lord of Ely, wife
of Calvagh O’Connor Faly lord of Offaly (lands which
lie across the boundaries of the modern King’s and
Queen’s Counties and Kildare), was the most
illustrious. She came of a learned race. The
O’Carrolls, in the course of little more than a century
(1253-1373), held the See of Cashel for sixty years;
and O’Carroll had been Archbishop of Tuam; and
Margaret’s father, lord of Ely, was “the general
patron of all the learned men of Ireland.” “This
Teige was deservedly a man of greate accompt and
fame with the professors of Poetrye and Musicke
of Ireland and Scotland, for his liberality extended
towards them, and every of them in generalle.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>”
So highly was he esteemed among the chiefs that
he was forbidden by the Irish captains of east Munster
to carry out his wish of resigning his lordship of Ely
(1396). He made a pilgrimage, however, that year
to the threshold of the apostles, with his companions
O’Brien, Gerald, and Thomas Calvagh MacMurchadh
of the royal race of Leinster; and coming back
through England visited Richard <span class="smcap">ii.</span> at Westminster,
who received him graciously, and being then about
to cross to Calais for his marriage with Isabella of
France, and the conclusion of a treaty of peace with
the French king, invited O’Carroll to accompany him
in his retinue. Ten years later he was slain by the
English, the boy-prince Thomas of Lancaster, son
of Henry <span class="smcap">iv.</span>, being then Viceroy in Ireland, and under
him the Lord Deputy Scrope. The English army
fell on him unawares at Callan; for whose death
indeed the sun stood still, said their account, to light
the Deputy and the fierce Prior of Kilmainham in the
evening surprise and the six miles’ ride of slaughter,
where eight hundred, or some said three thousand,
of his people fell. Some time after the massacre
Margaret married the most successful leader in his
day of the Irish, Calvagh O’Connor Faly, son of
Murchadh, the “Lord of Offaly, of the cattle-abounding
land,” descended from Conchobar of the race of
Cathair Mór, King of Leinster. Brought up amid
the perils and sorrows of constant war, her fortunes
were now transferred to a country where the conflict<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
with the English knew no interlude. To understand
her story it is necessary to show very briefly the situation
of Offaly.</p>
<p>The land of the O’Connors adjoined that of the
O’Carrolls under the Slieve Bloom mountains. The
old Offaly, from Sliabh-Bladhma, now Slieve Bloom,
to the hill of Alenn, and from Sliabh-Cualann in
Wicklow to the Great Heath, is a plain as level as
a tranquil sea. On its western side a long low ridge
north of Slieve Bloom had given shelter to the two
St. Sinchealls; a church had risen by the holy well;
and the fair-town of Killeigh on “the field of the long
ridge,” profiting by the traffic from the Shannon
to the Liffey. There Murchadh O’Connor founded
for the Franciscans a monastery (1393) said to be the
third in size and importance of the monasteries of
Ireland, the burial place of his race. In what was
once the Abbey churchyard, tombstones of the
O’Doynes, deeply sculptured with their armorial
bearings, recall a great family of Offaly. On the
eastern side of Offaly Norman settlers had pushed
back the boundary from the Dublin hills to Rathangan,
where a strong fort and church stood at the head
of the plain through which the Barrow and the Slaney
flowed south to Waterford and Wexford; and on that
important trade route Thomas O’Connor Faly had
founded a Franciscan monastery (1302), under the
walls of Hugh de Lacy’s fort at Castledermot. To
the north lay Meath—“cemetery of the valourous
Gael”—whose colonists had incessant war with
Offaly. It was a land over which the earliest Norman
settlers had swept from de Lacy’s fort of Castledermot
to that of Durrow; a land which was again
the chief centre of struggle when the Irish attack
drove the English power back to the plains of Meath,
and which in the renewed wars of the English under
the Tudors became the scene of ferocious reprisals
and calculated obliteration of its race and name.
From Calvagh’s first battle all his fighting was on the
plains of Meath. Once he made a raid in the land
of the O’Mores; and when his sons grew up they
had disputes with Irish neighbours. But the only
war of Calvagh from 1385 to 1458 was a war against
the English.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-102.jpg" width="400" height="268"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc"><span class="smcap">Lady Chapel opening from North Side of the<br />Franciscan Abbey, Castledermot.</span></p>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
<p>The family were bitter Irreconcilables; since the
days of an older Calvagh, the “Great Rebel,” who
a hundred years before (1307), had been invited
with thirty of the Offaly chiefs to dine at Castle-Carberry
on Trinity Sunday with “the treacherous
baron,” Sir Pierce Bermingham, the “Hunter of
the Irish”; and were deceitfully murdered, the
Great Rebel and all, as they rose from table. This
new Calvagh fought the invaders for over sixty years,
from youth to old age, with scarcely a pause—a man
of humour as well as courage. Once when the English
troops with their Irish followers had ridden to the
very borders of Killeigh (1406)—the religious and
business centre of Offaly—Calvagh with half a dozen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
horsemen came upon a body of plundering kerns,
one carrying off on his back a great cauldron which
Calvagh had lent his friend MacMaoilcorra for
brewing beer. “There is your caldron with the
kerns,” cried MacMaoilcorra helplessly, “take it
and discharge me of my loan.” “I accept of it
where it is,” mocked Calvagh, and flung “the shot
of a stone” which hit the cauldron straight, at the
great noise and report whereof the plunderers cast
away their spoil and fled in consternation. In the
great rout of the English that day the Irish won
back from them the chiefest relic of Connacht, the
cap or mitre of S. Patrick stolen from Elphin.</p>
<p>In Calvagh’s days the Irish revival had pushed
back the rule of Dublin Castle to a strip of coast land
some twenty miles by thirty. There flew a tale
of panic (1385) that the Irish “were confederate
with Spain,” and that “at this next season, as is
likely, there will be made a conquest of the greater
part of the land.” Revenue was falling, English
colonists were flying across the water, and prayers
for help were sent over to the English king. The
king’s favourite De Vere, appointed Marquis of
Dublin and Duke of Ireland (1386), got no farther
than Wales, and English pretentions over the island
under a confused series of shifting rulers became
the mock of Europe. Stung by the taunt that he
who desired to be made head of the Holy Roman
Empire could not even subdue Ireland, Richard <span class="smcap">ii.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></span>
made his fantastic journey across the Irish Channel
(1394), carrying a wardrobe of untold cost in which
one jewelled coat alone was worth thirty thousand
marks, and with a following of four thousand squires
and thirty thousand archers, a greater army, some
said, than Edward <span class="smcap">iii.</span> commanded at Crecy. Thus
Calvagh had the rare opportunity of seeing the arrival
in Ireland of the only king of England who landed
there in the five hundred years between the coming
of Henry <span class="smcap">ii.</span> and John (1171 and 1210), and that of
James <span class="smcap">ii.</span> (1689)—all four driven over by personal
necessities, not by any concern whatever for the
Irish people or their well-being. The English troops
were flung back from the O’Connor land and from
Ely of the O’Carrolls, with many men slain and many
horses captured, and fresh supplies were sent for
from England. But Richard, unlike any other king
that visited Ireland, was moved by the spirit of the
country. The temper he had shown thirteen years
before in the Peasant Revolt—“I am your King
and Lord, good people; what will ye?”—manifested
itself again amid the troubles of his Irish lordship.
To the Irish people he showed the first signs of
sympathy and respect. Laying aside the hostile
banners of England, he substituted the golden cross
and silver birds of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor—the
only King of England reported to have
any connection with an Irish house, if as some
historians say (on what evidence I do not know) his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
Queen’s sister Driella was wife of O’Brien, king of
Munster. “To Us and our Council,” he wrote to
England, “it appears that the Irish rebels have
rebelled in consequence of the injustice and grievances
practised towards them, for which they have been
afforded no redress.” Peace was made with “his
rebel MacMorrough”; and treaties signed with
the chiefs, seventy-five of them, were sent to England
in two hampers, while Richard returned to Westminster
leaving Roger Mortimer, heir to the throne,
as Viceroy. The next year, as we have seen, he
received O’Carroll of Ely at his palace with especial
honour.</p>
<p>With his disappearance the policy of peace and
reform came to an end. The meaning of Mortimer’s
rule was clear to the Irish. He claimed by inheritance
of Lionel Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III.,
to be Earl of Ulster, Lord of Connacht, Trim, Leix,
and Ossory, thus threatening the Ulster chiefs with
a war of conquest, and the lord of Offaly and the
middle Irish with the complete encircling of their
lands, their isolation and destruction. Edmund
Mortimer, son-in-law of Clarence, had already
appeared as Viceroy (1380-1381), carrying with him
the sword adorned with gold “which had belonged
to the good king Edward” the Confessor, and his
great bed of black satin embroidered with the arms
of de Mortimer and Ulster: he sent much spoil
and cattle to England, and died in the midst of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
warfare. His son Roger was appointed Viceroy
(1382-1383) a boy of ten; and orders were sent to
arrest all those who by land or water should send or
sell horses, salt, armour, iron, gold, silver, corn, or
other provisions, to any of the Irish. Once more
this same Roger Mortimer was Viceroy in 1395, riding
to war for his inheritance in the dress and arms of an
Irish chief. Calvagh captured the earl of Kildare
who was held to ransom by his father; and the Carlow
men routed and slew the young Mortimer himself
(1398). On which Richard sent over his half-brother,
the Duke of Surrey (1398), and already forgetful
of his Irish compacts of three years before, granted
his favourite lands which by treaty belonged to
MacMurchadh. When war naturally followed the
king proposed to subdue the Irish by a new visit
(1399), this time forsaking the tradition of the Confessor
for that of Henry <span class="smcap">ii.</span>, and bearing the royal
regalia of England and the miraculous consecrated
oil of St. Thomas of Canterbury used at coronations.
Chanting a last collect with the canons of St. George
he set sail for Waterford, bringing with him the
Duke of Lancaster (afterwards Henry <span class="smcap">v.</span>) a boy of
twelve years, to take his first lesson in war. The
army was set to fell MacMurchadh’s woods; a space
was cleared, villages and houses set on fire, and in
that scene Richard made the young Henry knight,
even while the Duke of Lancaster was landing in
Yorkshire to seize the English crown. Before July<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
closed the betrayed king had hurried back to England,
there to meet his death of horror.</p>
<p>So ended the royal dream of chivalry in Ireland,
as it had closed before in England. Whatever
imaginative feeling for the Irish, whatever memories
of their old tradition or visions of a reconciliation
of the two civilizations, had stirred Richard <span class="smcap">ii.</span>, these
disappeared under the Lancastrian kings. Stern
conquest was their creed, as soon as their wars in
England, Wales, Scotland, and France would allow it.</p>
<p>The comings and goings of English governors in
Ireland during the French wars read like the wanderings
of the Wiking raiders, now on the Irish side
of the sea, now on the French, as the chances of
campaign might open the best prospects of adventure,
plunder and ransom. Viceroys, deputies, lords
justices, of a summer or two, each with his twelve
months’ policy of extortion, slaughter, and vain
treaties, headed brief marches and skirmishes, campaigned
on the plan that there was never a battle
to be opened on a Monday or after noonday, hunted
or purchased prisoners not for their defeat but for
their ransom, and in succession sailed away for the
better ventures of the French war. “The most
cause of destruction,” the English colonists declared
to the king in 1435, arose because “during thirty
years past the Lieutenants and other Governors
did not come here but for a sudden journey or a
hosting.” As their power shrank their salaries and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
armies were increased. Governors no longer pretended
to control the war, but returning to the
lawless practice of the first adventurers, ordered
any man who could to go out and fight however
and wherever he pleased; and the lords about Dublin,
freed from all restraints of law, kept troops of horse
and foot against “Irish enemies,” “English rebels,”
and their own personal foes.</p>
<p>The Lieutenant sent by Henry <span class="smcap">iv.</span> to rule Ireland
(1401) was his son Thomas of Lancaster twelve years
old; and the first in a series of changing deputies
Sir Stephen Scrope, an old soldier trained in French
and Flemish wars, and as ready to serve Henry as
Richard. He it was who slew O’Carroll, Richard’s
friend; and against him Murchadh and Calvagh
O’Connor warred victoriously in Meath (1406, 1408).
The prior of Kilmainham being deputy (who had
also been on that ride of death when the sun stood
still), the O’Connors captured the sheriff of Meath
(1411) and took a great price for his ransom. The
three months’ rule of Sir John Stanley (1413) first
governor of Henry V. was ended by his death after
the curse of the chief bard Niall O’Higgin whom he
had plundered at Usnach—“the second poetical
miracle” of this famous bard. In vain his successor
Archbishop Cranley, whose eighty years alone held
him back from battle, gathered his clergy at Castledermot
to pray for English victory: O’Connor and
MacGeoghagan routed the English, and held to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
ransom prisoners for two thousand six hundred marks
besides other fines (1414). Sir John Talbot Lord
Furnival followed (1414), hovering between Ireland,
England, and France—to the English “an ancient
fox and politique captain,” to the French “a very
scourge and daily terror,” to the Irish “a son of
curses for his venom and a devil for his evil.” He
called out the troops to active war, slew many rebels,
and gave protection to neither saint nor sanctuary;
it was his policy to “oblige one Irish enemy to serve
upon the other,” by forcing defeated chiefs to swear
that they would fight under him against their countrymen.
Still the O’Connors raided Meath for arms,
horses, and prisoners (1417). Calvagh was once
treacherously captured by a Meath lord, from whom
Talbot in hope of a ransom purchased him; but
the prisoner escaped that same night. To Talbot
succeeded (1420) James the White Earl of Ormond,
back from the French wars. Precepts drawn up to
guide his conduct declared that as “the Irish are
false by kind, it were expedient and a charity to
execute upon them wilful and malicious transgressors
the king’s laws somewhat sharply.” He too had been
at the death of O’Carroll, and once again, it was said,
the sun miraculously stood still for three hours, and
no pit or bog annoyed horse or man on his part,
while he slaughtered the Irish on “the red moor
of Athy.” Twice every week the clergy of Dublin
went in solemn procession praying for his good success<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
against those disordered persons which now in every
quarter of Ireland had degenerated to their old trade
of life, and repined at the English. The colonists
petitioned Henry <span class="smcap">v.</span> that he would induce the Pope
to proclaim a holy crusade against the Irish, “in
perpetual destruction of those enemies.” It was
in the bitterness of this exasperated conflict that
Murchadh O’Connor Faly won a last victory (1421),
before he laid down arms and entered his monastery
of Killeigh to die—“Murchadh of the defeats.”</p>
<p>For thirty-seven years Calvagh now led his people’s
fight against “the English manner of government,”
in other words, the destruction of the Irish. He
seized more lords and officers, won more wealth,
and recovered more Irish territory than any lord in
Leinster. At this time the Desmonds, out of favour
under Lancastrian kings, had withdrawn to Munster
to build up their dominion in the south, while the
Ormonds and their cousins and rivals the Talbots
fought for power. Passing strangers appeared in
Dublin Castle; but with occasional interruptions
the actual authority swung back, now to Ormond
and his half-brother the prior of Kilmainham, now
to Talbot and his brother the Archbishop of Dublin,
till each family had held the chief control many
times. The Talbots stood for pure English rule,
and excelled in severity alike towards colonists and
natives. They used for their wars and their rewards
Irish taxes, coyn and livery; but at Westminster<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
they represented Ormond’s iniquity in levying the
like taxes, and his faint and wavering sympathies for
his countrymen, as treason of the darkest hue; his
favouring his Irish friends, keeping Irish soldiers
for his following, letting lands slip into Irish hands,
making Irishmen knights of the shire; with a few
additions thrown in of his sloth, violence, and corruption—“courses
ruinous and destructive” to the
English. In the midst of this discord Calvagh seems
to have leaned to Ormond. His wife, apparently
by a friendly arrangement, was given tribute from
an Ormond lordship in Kildare. He himself held
Talbot’s cousin Thomas to ransom in his prison at
Killeigh: he took “blackrent” or tribute from the
English of Meath.</p>
<p>Meanwhile both Ulster and Offaly were set aflame
by the coming of a new Mortimer Viceroy (1423)
Edmund, son of Roger of the Irish dress. When he
landed with an English army O’Neill and O’Donnell
had already marched over Louth and Meath (1423),
compelling the English to give hostages and guarantees
for their pledge that they would be under tribute
for ever. Edmund called O’Neill and some of the
leaders to his Trim Castle, and made arrangements
with him; but they had scarcely left when he died
of plague (1424), and Talbot, then Lord Chief Justice,
pursued the chiefs and carried them prisoners to
Dublin, demanding hostages and ransom. Calvagh
on his side raided Meath, where he seized the Marshal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
of the English army, the Seneschal of the Viceroy’s
manor, and other squires. But it was now the turn
of Ormond, who had lately come to Ireland bringing
a host of Saxons, and adding great strength to the
English wars; and Talbot made terms with Calvagh
before the appointment of the new viceroy. But
the peace was brief. Calvagh entered into alliance
with the princes of Ulster. He married his daughter
Finola to O’Donnell, “harrasser and destroyer of
the English.” And when O’Neill with O’Donnell
marched a great army to Mullingar (1431), and on the
Moat where O’Melaghlin had in old times ruled
and judged Leinster, gathered the chiefs to take
his wages and acknowledge him leader for the war,
Calvagh joined his host in the ravaging of Westmeath
till the English paid a heavy price for the sparing
of their country. Later, when his son-in-law
O’Donnell was captured and imprisoned in Dublin
Castle (1434), then sent to England (1435), and finally
to the Isle of Man (1439) to die there in prison,
Calvagh marched, year after year, through Meath
to avenge his captivity. The Justiciary or Deputy
himself was taken prisoner by Calvagh’s son, and
kept some time till the English of Dublin ransomed
him. In the feuds of the barons he found allies.
The son of MacFheorais, chief of the Berminghams
and heir of “the treacherous baron,” suffered “an
abuse” in the great court of Trim, the Governor’s
castle. For as he entered the court (1443) under the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
safeguard of Ormond, the son of Barnewell, Treasurer
of Meath, beat a <i>Caimin</i>—namely, a stroke of his finger
on the nose of Bermingham’s son. On which he
stole out of the town, and went towards O’Connor
Faly, and they joined together, and it is hard to know
that ever was such abuse better revenged than the
said Caimin. They burned and preyed Meath and
obtained their full demands—that Calvagh should have
his duties from the English during his life as Lord
of his territory, and that the Clan-Feorais should have
all their hostages freely restored; and not only that
but they obtained in this “war of Caimin” all conditions
such as they demanded for holding peaceable
quiet with the English. Ever more formidable,
Calvagh now led his kerns to Moyclare beyond
Maynooth and to Tara itself (1446). Talbot, made
Earl of Shrewsbury, was called back from the French
wars. He re-built Castle Carberry, the castle of the
old massacre, to defend Meath against Berminghams
and O’Connors, caused Calvagh to make peace, to
ransom his son taken in the wars, and deliver many
beeves for the royal kitchen; and made a statute
(1447) that English and Irish should no more be
confounded together by their dress, but that every
Englishman who did not shave in the English manner
once at least in two weeks, should be treated as an
Irish enemy—a statute which survived till the reign
of Charles I. His last characteristic outrage was the
treacherous capture of Felim O’Reilly who had gone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
to Trim at his own invitation, and the like deceitful
seizing of the Savadges. Talbot seems to have been
distinguished for his violated pledges among the
crowd of English officials whose broken faith became
a byword. “Thy safe-guarding,” said the poet, “I
confide to God; to Mary’s sweet and only Son; that He
may shelter thee from Anglo-word of Englishmen, and
from the gentiles’ act of violence.” The prisoners
all died in Trim Castle, disappointing the Viceroy
of his ransom. After which Talbot disappeared
for the last time to France (1447), followed by the
curses of the Irish—“the learned say there came not
from the time of Herod anyone so wicked in evil
deeds.” In his stead came Richard Plantagenet,
Duke of York, heir to the English crown, and to all
the earldoms and lordships of the Mortimers.</p>
<p>No doubt the race of O’Connor Faly was a family
of irreconcilables; men fighting honourably to defend
their land and people, each leader of them in his turn
strong to obtain “great rewards from the English for
making peace with them, as had been usual with his predecessors.”
They were the sort of people for whom
Dublin Castle for a hundred years past, and many
hundred years to come, had but one name, “the
Irish enemy,” ever bitterly complaining of the “mere
Irish, men that are truly beastly and ignorant,”
living under “the wicked and damnable law called
Brehon Law,” “which by reason ought not to be
named a law, but an evil custom.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p>
<p>There was a good deal however that Dublin
Castle did not know or care to know. In the midst
of this desolating war the story of Margaret, wife of
O’Connor, gives us a glimpse into the life of the Irish
clans behind the fastnesses that screened them from
English view. It might seem that amid centuries
of conflict, ever-present danger, preyings and raidings,
statutes to shut them out from learning, trade,
or advancement in their church, and torrents of
slander to defile their name, the Irish might in truth
have fallen into the nomad barbarism and the beastly
ignorance of which they were accused by the English
from that time to this. In fact however the people,
endowed with an immense vitality, were busily
occupied with commerce and with learning. Irish
princes were lively competitors with the English
merchants of the Pale. In all their territories the
places of fairs were thronged with dealers, English
and Irish, who did business together in peace and
amity, while profits poured into Irish coffers. English
statutes forbade any Englishman to deal in an Irish
market: English merchants therefore put on Irish
dress, rode on Irish saddles, talked Irish, and went
on trading as before. Towns and monasteries of the
colonists forced from the government charters allowing
them to traffic with Irish dealers. The O’Connors
lay at the meeting point of natural trade-routes,
with their fair-town at Killeigh, and their establishments
at Rathangan and Castledermot; and
Margaret was a patron of commerce, as she was of
learning and religion. “She was the only woman,” the
Annals tell us, “that has made the most of repairing
the highways and erecting bridges, churches, and
Mass books, and of all manner of things profitable
to serve God and her soul, and while the world stands
her many gifts to the Irish and Scottish nations shall
never be numbered.”</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-116.jpg" width="400" height="265"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc"><span class="smcap">Window of Lady Chapel, Franciscan Abbey, Castledermot.</span><br />
(From “Grose’s Antiquities,” 1792; destroyed 1799.)</p>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span></p>
<p>She was a patron too of
the schools of the learned, which under the Irish
revival had sprung into new and vigorous life,
training students in every corner of Ireland, and sending
out scholars to all the universities of Europe.
“The company that read all books, they of the church
and of the poets both: such of these as shall be perfect
in knowledge, forsake not thou their intimacy ever”—this,
according to an Irish poet, was the high duty of
chiefs, of the noble and wealthy; and Margaret
was faithful to the tradition of her people. Her
friendship for the learned, the royal magnificence
of her bounty was long remembered in Ireland.
The year 1433 was a year of trouble. Ormond
ravaged the land of Ely and destroyed the fortresses of
the O’Carrolls. Margaret’s daughter Finola—“the
most beautiful and stately, the most renowned and
illustrious woman of her time, her own mother only
excepted,” blessed with “the blessing of guests and
strangers, of poets and philosophers”—only saved
Tirconail from the enemies of O’Neill and of
MacDonnell and his Scots by herself going, after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
the fashion of the strong-hearted and independent
women of Ireland, to meet them at Inishowen, and
there “made peace without leave from O’Donnell.”
It was a year terribly named in Irish tradition, “‘the
summer of slight acquaintance,’ because no one
used to recognise friend or relative,” for the greatness
of the famine that lay on the land. Such was the
time of Margaret’s great benevolence. “It is she
that twice in one year proclaimed to and commonly
invited (<i>i.e.</i>, in the dark days of the year, to wit, on the
feast day of Da Sinchell [26 March] in Killachy),
all persons, both Irish and Scottish, or rather
Albaines, to two general feasts of bestowing both
meat and moneys, with all manner of gifts, whereunto
gathered to receive gifts the matter of two
thousand and seven hundred persons, besides
gamesters and poor men, as it was recorded in a Roll
to that purpose, and that accompt was made thus,
<i>ut vidimus</i>—viz., the chief <i>kins</i> of each family of the
learned Irish was by Gilla-na-naemh MacÆgan’s
hand, the chief Judge to O’Connor, written in the
Roll, and his adherents and kinsmen, so that the
aforesaid number of 2,700 was listed in that Roll
with the Arts of <i>Dan</i>, or poetry, Music, and
Antiquity. And Maelin O’Maelconry, one of the
chief learned of Connacht, was the first written
in that Roll, and first paid and dieted, or set to supper,
and those of his name after him, and so forth every
one as he was paid he was written in that Roll, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
fear of mistake, and set down to eat afterwards. And
Margaret on the garrots of the great church of
Da Sinchell clad in cloth of gold, her dearest friends
about her, her clergy and Judges too. Calvagh
himself on horseback by the church’s outward side,
to the end that all things might be done orderly,
and each one served successively. And first of all
she gave two chalices of gold as offerings that day
on the Altar to God Almighty, and she also caused
to nurse or foster too [two] young orphans. But
so it was, we never saw nor heard neither the like of
that day nor comparable to its glory and solace.
And she gave the second inviting proclamation (to
every one that came not that day) on the feast day
of the Assumption of our Blessed Lady Mary in
harvest, at or in the Rath-Imayn, and so we have
been informed that that second day in Rath-Imayn
was nothing inferior to the first day.”</p>
<p>We know something of the manner of these national
festivals, for the Irish were long practised in the
organizing of general conventions, and their poets
have left us some curious details. One tells of a
company of the Tyrone poets gathered in 1577 at
O’Neill’s house, where the poets sat ranged along a
hall hung with red on either side of the chief, and
standing up beside the host pledged him in ale quaffed
from golden goblets and beakers of horn; and having
told their song or story for a price, took their gifts
of honour. Another describes a greater company,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
such an assembly as that of Margaret, invited in 1351
to the castle of William O’Kelly.</p>
<p>“The chroniclers of comely Ireland, it is a gathering
of a mighty host, the company is in the town; where
is the street of the chroniclers?</p>
<p>“The fair, generous-hearted host have another
spacious avenue of white houses for the bardic companies
and the jugglers.</p>
<p class="pc ls2">•••••••</p>
<p>“Such is the arrangement of them, ample roads
between them; even as letters in their lines.</p>
<p>“Each thread of road, bare, smooth, straight, firm,
is contained within two threads of smooth, conical
roofed houses.</p>
<p>“The ridge of the bright-furrowed slope is a plain
lined with houses, behind the crowded plain is a fort,
as it were a capital letter.”</p>
<p>The castle itself was worthy of one born into the
Irish inheritance, of the great lineage of their race:
far off it is recognised, the star-like mass of stone, its
outer smoothness like vellum—a castle which was the
standard of a mighty chieftain; bright is the stone
thereof, ruddy its timber.</p>
<p>“Close is the joining of its timber and its lime-washed
stone; there is no gaping where they touch;
the work is a triumph of art.</p>
<p>“There is much artistic ironwork upon the shining
timber: on the smooth part of each brown oaken
beam workmen are carving animal figures.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
<p>“On the smooth wall of the warm mansion—amazing
in its beauty—is the track of a slender, pointed
pen; light, fresh, narrow.</p>
<p>“The bardic companies of pleasant-meadowed Fóla,
and those of Scotland—a distant journey—will be
acquainted with one another after arriving in William’s
lofty castle.</p>
<p>“Herein will come the seven grades who form the
shape of genuine poesy; the seven true orders of
poets, their entrance is an omen of expenditure.</p>
<p>“Many coming to the son of Donnchadh from the
north, no less from the south, an assembly of scholars:
a billeting from west and east, a company seeking for
cattle.</p>
<p>“There will be jurists, of legal decisions; wizards,
and good poets; the authors of Ireland, those who
compose the battle rolls, will be in his dwelling.</p>
<p>“The musicians of Ireland—vast the flock—the
followers of every craft in general, the flood of companies,
side by side—the tryst of all is to one house.</p>
<p>“In preparation for those who come to the house
there has been built—it is just to boast of it—according
to the desire of the master of the place, a castle fit for
apple-treed Emain.</p>
<p>“There are sleeping booths for the company,
wrought of woven branches, on the bright surface of
the pleasant hills.</p>
<p>“The poets of the Irish land are prepared to seek
O’Kelly. A mighty company is approaching his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
house, an avenue of peaked hostels is in readiness for
them.</p>
<p>“Hard by that—pleasant is the aspect—a separate
street has been appointed by William for the musicians,
that they may be ready to perform before him.</p>
<p>“This lofty tower opposite to us is similar to the
Tower of Breoghan, from which the best of spears were
cast; from which Ireland was perceived from Spain.</p>
<p>“By which the mighty progeny of Mil of Spain—a
contentious undertaking—contested the land with
sharp spear points, so that they became men of Ireland.</p>
<p class="pc ls2">•••••••</p>
<p>“From Greece to fair Spain, from Spain to Ireland,
such the wanderings of the mighty progeny of Mil,
the host of the seasoned, finely wrought weapons.”</p>
<p class="p1">Such was the assembly, “the mound of grand
convention,” to which Margaret invited Irish scholars.
In such national festivals the passion of war was exchanged
for a nobler pride of life. The chief recognised
his place in the wide commonwealth of the
Gaelic people. Each one of the company of scholars
was reminded that whatever lord he served, Ireland
was his country and the fortunes of the race his care.
And the people themselves, sharing the festivities of
those joyous assemblies, and entertained by the best
that Ireland could give of music and literature, could
still exult through their successive generations in the
kinship of the whole race, Irish and Scots. Irishmen
to-day may remember that the scholars gathered by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
Margaret’s munificence were among those to whom
we owe all that we now know of Irish history; they
were of the men who in the Irish revival of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries spent their lives
in searching out, preserving, copying, the records,
laws, and traditions of their people. They were the
lively translators of books from abroad, the students
of the modern sciences, the band of scholars whose
powerful influence was drawing the inhabitants of
Ireland, English and Irish, into one culture. Their
spirit is shewn in many sayings of the time.</p>
<p>“If you praise one for nobility praise his father
likewise. If you praise one for his wealth, it is from
the world it comes. If you praise one for his strength,
know that sickness will render him weak, and if you
praise a person for his fairness or the beauty of his
body, know that the bloom of youth endures but a
short while, and that age will take it away. But if you
praise him for manners or learning, praise him as much
as you will ever praise anyone, for this is the thing
which comes not by heredity or through upbringing,
but God bestowed it upon him as a gift.”</p>
<p>“Wisdom is life and ignorance is death, for of God’s
gifts upon earth there is none which is higher and more
comely and pure than wisdom, for to him who possesses
it, wisdom teaches the performance of good things.”</p>
<p>Such were the people whose culture had to be
destroyed and their energies broken in the name of
civilization. Twelve years later (1445) Margaret<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
with a company of patriots—MacGeoghagans and
others—hardened by long fighting, went on pilgrimage
to St. James of Compostella, the shrine most dear to
the Irish people, in the “fair Spain” whence their
race had come. These pilgrimages are interesting, as
showing the travel of Irishmen to Europe. In the
<i>Cambridge Modern History</i> Ireland is described as “a
mere <i>terra incognita</i>,” cut off by its barbarism, and by
its position from the larger influences of Europe: “of
one Irish chieftain it was placed on record that he
had accomplished the hazardous journey to Rome and
back.” In this half century alone (1396-1452) we
read of two companies of chiefs and men of the poorer
sort journeying to Compostella (1445, 1452), and of
two companies who travelled to Rome (1396, 1444);
and apparently of yet a third company, who brought
back to Ireland tales they had heard of the French
wars “from prisoners at Rome” (1451). By land and
sea traders and scholars were crossing and re-crossing
to the Continent, not only from one part of Ireland
but from every province: “Do not repent,” men said,
“for going to acquire knowledge from a wise man, for
merchants fare over the sea to add to their wealth.”</p>
<p>Margaret returned to the distractions of a new
conflict and the treacheries of a false peace (1445).
Calvagh and the Berminghams were again making
“a great war” with the English, cutting much corn
and taking many prisoners, “and they made peace
afterwards;” on which MacGeoghagan, just home from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
his pilgrimage, went with others under protection of
the Baron of Delvin “where the English were”—that
is to the Governor’s castle at Trim. “But the
English not regarding any peace took them all
prisoners.” MacGeoghagan was after that set at
liberty, his son being given as hostage. “And
Margaret, O’Carroll’s daughter, went to Trim and gave
all the English prisoners for MacGeoghagan’s son and
the son’s son of Art, and that unadvised to Calvagh,
and she brought them home.” It was an act as free
and brave as that of her daughter Finola, who had
made peace for the O’Donnell land. Such women of
great soul stand out on the stage of Irish history,
nobly praised by the poets.</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">
“She is sufficiently distinguished from every side<br />
By her checking of plunder, her hatred of injustice,<br />
By her serene countenance, which causes the trees<br />
To bend with fruit; by her tranquil mind.”</p>
<p class="p1">The story of Margaret was closing in sorrow.
Finola, “the fairest and most famous woman in all
Ireland beside her own mother,” after the death of
O’Donnell in the fifth year of his captivity in an
English prison, married Aedh Boy O’Neill, “who
was thought to be King of Ireland,” “the most
renowned, hospitable, and valourous of the princes in
his time, and who had planted more of the lands of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
the English in despite of them than any other man of
his day;” he was wounded to death on Spy-Wednesday
(1444), “and we never heard since Christ was betrayed,
on such a day a better man.” A little later Finola,
“renouncing all worldly vanity betook herself into the
austere devout life in the monastery of Killeigh; and
the blessing of guests and strangers, and poor and rich,
of both poet-philosophers and archi-poet-philosophers
be on her in that life” (1447). The next year
Margaret’s son, Cathal, was slain by the English of
Leinster. Calvagh, leading the Irish of Leinster in a
great army, marched to Killculinn near the hill of
Alenn on the border of the old Offaly, and there, his
leg broken, his sword and helmet torn from him, the
English horsemen were about to bring him into
Castlemartin when “Cathal’s son returned courageously
and rescued him forceably.” Another son
Felim, heir to the lordship of Offaly, a man of great
fame and renown, lay dying of long decline, on the
night that Margaret herself passed away (1451).
“A gracious year this year was, though the glory and
solace of the Irish was set, but the glory of heaven
was amplified and extolled therein.” “The best
woman of her time in Ireland”—such was the Irish
record of that lofty and magnanimous soul. “God’s
blessing, the blessing of all saints, and every our blessing
from Jerusalem to Inis Gluair be on her going to
Heaven, and blessed be he that will read and hear
this for blessing her soul.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></p>
<p>Margaret left her husband to the gallant and hopeless
struggle for the saving of Irish civilization. The
next year he too made pilgrimage to Compostella
(1452). But disaster gathered round him. MacGeoghagan,
the most famous and renowned among
the captains of Ireland, was slain, and his head carried
to Trim and Dublin. Two sons of Calvagh were killed
in war. His daughter Mòr, the wife of Clanricard,
died of a fall from her horse; with her ended the
system of alliances by which Calvagh had fortified
himself west of the Shannon and in Ulster (1452).
His old enemy Ormond, the best captain of the English
in Ireland, he for whom the sun of old stood still, had
come back to the Irish wars. He had been called to
London in 1447 on a charge of treason, for trial by
battle with his chief foe the Prior of Kilmainham—Ormond
by the King’s leave staying at Smithfield
“for his breathing and more ease” while he trained
for the fight; the Prior learning “certain points of
arms” from a fishmonger paid by the King. But the
royal favour prevailed, Ormond made clear his desire
to exterminate the Irish, and without trial or battle
was declared “whole and untainted in fame.” He
returned to ravage Kildare and Meath in war with
the rival house of the FitzGeralds, earls of Kildare,
and to make a last triumphant march round the
bordering Irish tribes. Calvagh was forced to “come
into his house” and make terms of peace (1452).
The peace was made null by Ormond’s death a month<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
later, and Calvagh “went out into the wilderness of
Kildare” where the new deputy with his cavalry
surrounded him unawares. Teige, his son, “most
courageously worked to rescue his father from the
English horsemen; but O’Connor’s horse fell thrice
down to the ground, and Teige put him up twice,
and O’Connor himself would not give his consent
the third time to go with him, so that then O’Connor
was taken prisoner.” The same year he was released.
But his wars were practically over. In 1458 he was
buried by his father Murchadh and his wife Margaret in
Killeigh; defender of his country for sixty years, and
for thirty-seven years lord of Offaly. Last of all,
Finola, after forty-six years of the religious life (1493),
rested also in the splendid abbey of Killeigh.</p>
<p>Of the glories of that abbey, of its rich glass, its
gold and silver work, its sculptured tombs, its organs,
nothing now remains but a bare fragment of wall. In
the year that Silken Thomas and his five uncles were
hanged at Tyburn (1537), Lord Leonard Grey wasted
the land of O’Connor Faly, who had married the
sister of Earl Thomas; making him “more like a
beggar, than he that ever was a captain or ruler of a
country.” Vast quantities of corn stored up at
Killeigh were carried to the Pale; and from the
ruined Abbey Grey furnished out the buildings of
Maynooth, which had been stormed and taken from
Earl Thomas two years before; carrying off from its
sack a pair of organs and other necessary things for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
the King’s College at Maynooth, and as much glass
as was needed to glaze the windows of the College
and of His Grace’s Castle there. The tombs of the
great house of O’Connor Faly were utterly destroyed
so that no trace of them remains.</p>
<p>The destruction of the great abbey was the
symbol to the Leinster Irish of their final desolation,
the ruin which submerged the whole people of Ireland
on the fall of the House of Kildare. Then began in the
rich plains of Leinster the ruthless policy of wholesale
extirpation of the Irish old inhabitants, to “plant”
the country anew from across the sea. The fruitful
land became to Irish eyes a vast cemetery of their dead.
In their lamentation they remembered that Brian
Boru’s grave was there, and the grave of his son “that
bore the brunt of weapon-fight”: and still the graves
were multiplied. “Great are the charges that all
others have against the land of Leinster”—a poet of
the O’Byrnes sang.... “Charges against her all
Ireland’s nobles have: that beneath the salmon-abounding
Leinster country’s soil—region of shallow
rivers foamy-waved—there is many a grave of their
kings and of their heirs apparent.” “The red-handed
Leinster province” holds the bones of the long line
of O’Connor Faly, men and women who adorned their
country with courage and piety, art and learning.</p>
<p class="pp6q p1">“They shall be remembered for ever,<br />
They shall be speaking for ever,<br />
The people shall hear them for ever.”</p>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER IV</h2>
<p class="pch">A CASTLE AT ARDGLASS.</p>
<p class="drop-cap04">THE “island of Lecale,” as the Elizabethan
English called it, lies in the County of Down,
surrounded on three sides by the sea, and on
the fourth bounded by the Quoile and Blackstaff
rivers. The northern coast of the “island” almost
closes the mouth of Lough Cuan, now Strangford
Lough, leaving but a narrow strait for boats to pass.
On the south it bounds the Bay of Dundrum, across
which rises the huge granite mass of the Mourne
Mountains.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-130.jpg" width="400" height="688"
alt=""
title="" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>
<p>The fruitful plain of Lecale, defended and enriched
by the sea, drew to it inhabitants from the
first peopling of Ireland. All Irish history is reflected
there. The in-comers of prehistoric times
raised the great stone circles of Ballyno, that stupendous
monument to a great hero and a solemn worship—none
more astonishing in Ireland. On a wide slope,
completely shut off and secluded by the higher ground,
the rings of massive stones lie confronting alone the
eminence on which is lifted up against the heavens
the imposing mound of Erenagh, loftiest of the line of
earthworks that surround Dundrum Bay. From the
time of an immemorial Nature worship pilgrims
have assembled, even as they gathered down to
our own times, where the streams of Struel pour
abundantly from the rock, to seek cleansing in the
bounteous waters on Midsummer Day, and at the
festival of Lughnasadh or Lugh’s fair on the first of
August. The Red Branch of Emain sent its heroes to
hold the two main passages into the “island,” and the
inlets of the sea where trade was borne. On the
northern port, known to Ptolemy as Dunum, where
the river Quoile widens to Strangford Lough, Celtchair
of the Battles made his entrenchment of Rath
Celtchair or Dun Lethglasse, on a hill rising from
the flat ground and swamps of the river. At the
head of Dundrum Bay, where the sea narrows over a
stretch of shoals and shallows to the inner bay, another
Red Branch knight raised on a steep rock his commanding
fort, Dún Rudraidhe, and left his name also to
the ocean tide, Tonn Rudraidhe, whose waters were
lifted up into one of the Three Waves of Ireland that
sounded their warning to the land when danger
threatened, or echoed the moan in battle of a dying
hero’s shield. Here, in this place of Celtic legend,
relics of bronze and pottery and stone can still be picked
up in plenty on the sand dunes. Round the circuit
of the bay half-a-dozen ancient earthworks may
still be seen, connected with strands or harbours by
old paths.</p>
<p>With the dawn of a new age the wanderings of St.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
Patrick gave to Lecale new memories—the wells which
he blessed for the new faith; the wooden barn at Saul
where he set up his church on the slope above the
marsh along which the highway ran from Strangford
to Down, and where the angel called him to die; the
Dun of Patrick, or Downpatrick, given him for a
Christian settlement on the old rath of Celtchair,
where according to later legend he was buried, and
where a great granite boulder now marks the traditional
grave. Amid the majestic monuments of pagan heroes
the lowly pioneers of the new faith raised their little
buildings. The spit of land that separates the bay of
Tonn Rudraidhe from that of Ardglass is fringed with
low rocks black and jagged; and this point of danger
to mariners, now marked by a lighthouse, was in early
Christian times sanctified by a church. A tiny harbour
cuts through the keen-edged rocks to a little strand
where a couple of curraghs might lie: and there by
the well the little company built their church—a
small stone building twenty feet by thirteen, with the
two narrow windows, one east and one south, to throw
on the altar the light of the rising and the mid-day
sun, and the western door for the departing day and
the hour of benediction till the sun should make his
circuit to the east. The name of St. John’s Point
recalls that old dedication, and the early Irish devotion
to their special saint, the beloved disciple of the Lord.
Across the bay might be seen the austere cell of St.
Donard lifted high, near 3,000 feet, on the topmost
point of Slieve-Donard, dominating all Lecale, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
an inspired solitary transformed the ancient pagan
tradition to a new use, that as mighty men of old
were in death commemorated by carns on the high
hills, so on the mountain a Christian would shew afar
the place of his burial to the world, and the place of
his resurrection.</p>
<p>Lecale was soon filled with religious settlements and
schools. Lying at the entrance to Lough Cuan of the
hundred islands, now Lough Strangford, where a busy
population tilled the fertile slopes, and sent out
innumerable boats for the celebrated salmon-fishing,
or for traffic, Lecale was as it were the guardian of
their sanctuaries. Close to Downpatrick lies Crannach
Dún-leth-glaisse, “the wooded island of Dún-leth-glaisse,”
now known as Cranny island; there Mochuaróc
maccu Min Semon, whom the Romans called the
“doctor” of the whole world, lived early in the
seventh century, and wrote down the calculus which
his master Sinlan, Abbot of Bangor (+610), had
first among the Irish learned from a certain wise
Greek. Farther north, some twelve or fifteen miles
from Ardglass, lies Inis-Mahee, where behind the
boulder-strewn shore and the heavy seaweed thrown
up by the waters on meadows and ploughed land
over which sea-birds love to hover, past the harbour
and the rude boat-shelter cut in the rock, we enter
on a retreat where the light seems more translucent
than elsewhere, the silence more penetrating and peace
more profound, the colour as that of an everlasting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
spring—a space of wild wood, resonant with the song
of birds, where the flowers spring thicker than the grass.
There St. Mochaoi (Mahee) raised his wooden church
about 450 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span>, first abbot and bishop. Legend told
that as he was cutting wattles for his building, he heard
a bright bird, more beautiful than the birds of the
world, singing on the blackthorn near him, and asked
who it was that made such a song. “A man of the
people of my Lord,” answered the bird. “Hail,”
said Mochaoi, “and for why that, oh bird that is an
angel?” “I am come by command to encourage
you in your good work, and because of the love that
is in your heart to amuse you for a time with my sweet
singing.” “I am glad of that,” said Mochaoi. One
hundred and fifty years passed as a moment while he
listened to the heavenly song; and when the bird
vanished and he lifted up his bundle of wattles to carry
home, a stone church stood there before him, and
strange monks. They made him abbot once more;
and there at last “a sleep without decay of the body
Mochaoi slept.” The foundations of the little church
with walls over three feet thick, the remnant of the
round tower, the traces of other buildings on the
west of the island hill, the well closed in, the triple
ring of earthen entrenchments faced with stone
that encircled the slopes of the island like a cashel,
the port with its rough stone work into which “ships
from Britain” sailed—these still tell of the days when
Inis-Mahee was a school of religion and learning for all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
the district, where the famous St. Finian of Moville
came to study. From the round tower the whole
lough could be seen as far as Lecale and the passage
to the sea. There must have been then, as there was
later, much intercourse between the sea-going people
of Mahee and Ardglass. For Ardglass was the port of
the neighbouring monastery whose site we may still
trace at Dunsford. A Protestant church was planted
over it in Reformation times; but an old cross slab
may still be seen, and from the graveyard there has
been rescued an ancient stone font, and carried to the
new church of the older faith; and here too an ancient
Celtic cross from an old cemetery, of the type of
those found at Clonmacnois, has been set over the
church door.</p>
<p>Lecale was a rich land to plunder when the Danes
descended on it. Not a creek that they did not visit.
Their raids were followed by later raids of their
Norman kinsmen, when in 1177 de Courcy came
marching to the conquest of Ulster, dreaming himself
the knight foretold by Merlin, and willing “to accommodate
himself in dress, in gesture, in his shield, and
even his white horse, to the prophecies; so that he
looked more like a Merry-Andrew than a warrior.”
The seizing of Lecale and Downpatrick was his first
adventure; before a year was over (1178) he had
attached Mahee to an English monastery, peopled it
with monks from the other side of the sea, and along
with Roger, the new lord of Dunsford, endowed it with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
large tracts of land about Dunsford and in Lecale.
In spite of new wealth the spirit and fortunes of Mahee
died for ever under foreign rule.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-136.jpg" width="300" height="602"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc">CROSS SLAB AT DUNSFORD.</p>
</div></div>
<p>By de Courcy and
his followers the island of Lecale was ringed with
castles from the great keep of Dundrum (“it is one
of the strongest holds I ever saw,” said Lord Leonard
Grey) to Downpatrick at the passage of the Quoile.
The memory of one of his Norman knights is preserved
in Dunsford church, a grave-slab with a fine cross
and sword cut deeply on it, perhaps the tombstone
of “Rogerus de Dunsford.” The strong rush of
waters that poured through the narrow neck of Lough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
Cuan at every incoming or outgoing tide, once guarded
on either side by earthen entrenchments that may
still be seen, was now held by a Norman keep at
Strangford; but the towers of the coast line from
Ardglass to Down—Kilclief, Walsh’s castle, Audley
castle, Quoile castle, and the rest—each set at the
head of a little bay, were evidently planted there for
trade; and all probably on the sites of older Irish
communities. Thus at Kilclief, while Norman cross
slabs tell of de Courcy’s plantation, there is in the
churchyard a long forgotten tombstone marked with
a Celtic cross of the type of Clonmacnois. How many
were thrown out to build fences, or to be broken on
the roads! The activity of trade along the coast even
as late as the eighteenth century may be seen by the
remains at Quoile harbour near Down, the custom-house,
the great stores, the houses of merchants and
officials of the harbour.</p>
<p>In the 106 miles of coast that lie between Kingstown
mole and Belfast bay, Ardglass is the one harbour
where a ship can enter at all stages of the tide without
a local pilot. It must ever have been a chief harbour
of eastern Ulster—a port open at all times of the tide
and sheltered from every wind save one, when boats
could take refuge in the southern port of Killough,
“the haven of Ardglass,” linked with it by an old path
along the shore. A wall was thrown round the little
town of Ardglass strengthened by seven towers, four of
which may still be seen; and within these defences a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
central castle was set on the rocky edge of the port,
where boats could be pulled up to the very door.
The harbour was the outlet for the trade of the rich
agricultural and wool-producing lands of Down,
Tyrone, and Armagh, and traffic was carried on in
wines, cloth, kerseys, all kinds of fish, wool, and tallow.
There is evidence of trade with France in the beautiful
altar-vessel found at Bright, of gilt bronze and many
shaded enamel, fine Limoges work of about 1200 <span class="smcap">a.d.</span></p>
<p>With the revival of Irish life in the fourteenth century,
and the gatherings of English merchants to Irish
fairs, commerce increased and flourished. Richard <span class="smcap">ii.</span>
gave the port of Ardglass and its trade as a rich reward
to the Gascon commander, Janico d’Artois, his bravest
leader against Art MacMurchadh (1398). It is said
that a trading company with a grant from Henry <span class="smcap">iv.</span>
built the famous “New Works.” Close to the harbour
ran a range of buildings two hundred and fifty feet
long, with three square towers, walls three feet thick,
pierced on the sea-side by only narrow loop-holes, and
opening into the “bawn” with sixteen square windows,
and fifteen arched door-ways of cut stone that gave
entrance to eighteen rooms on the ground floor and
eighteen above. It is still possible to trace the line
of the New Works, the doors and windows, and the
remains of the towers. There seems to have been a
local school of art continued from the earlier centuries:
fragments of a Virgin and Child of old Dunsford made
by Irish hands of Irish stone from Scrabo at the north
end of Strangford Lough, broken and scattered for
ages, have been recovered and pieced together and set
on the wall of the new Dunsford church, where it now
stands in its old grace and dignity as the only example
in Ulster, perhaps in Ireland, of such a pre-Reformation
statue not utterly destroyed. All the churches of
Lecale, old men told a traveller about 1643, had before
the burnings of Captain Edward Cromwell been lightly
roofed, probably with fine open wood-carving, and
highly adorned with sacred statues and images.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-138.jpg" width="400" height="261"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc"><span class="smcap">The Castle of Ardglass, showing the “New Works.”</span><br />
(From Grose.)</p>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span></p>
<p>From a few fragments we can only guess what
wealth was once stored up in Lecale. Wars of Irish
and English raged round a harbour so important,
as the chiefs of Ulster pressed down against the
strangers over a land which had once at Dun Lethglasse
held a chief fort of old Ulster kings. O’Neill
burned Ardglass of the d’Artois house in 1433: in
1453 Henry O’Neill of Clannaboy was driven back
from the town by the help of a Dublin fleet. At
the close of the fifteenth century the English almost
disappeared out of Lecale. Garrett the Great, Earl
of Kildare (1477-1513), claimed Ardglass and the
lands about it as heir through his mother to d’Artois,
and gained supremacy there—a part of the far-seeing
policy by which the house of Kildare was gradually
widening its influence from sea to sea, from Ardglass
to Sligo and the lower Shannon. His son Garrett
Oge had, by grant of Henry <span class="smcap">viii.</span> (1514), the customs
of Strangford and Ardglass, to be held by service<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
of one red rose annually; and still after four centuries
heirs of the Fitzgerald house remain at the
entrance of Strangford Lough. After the revolt of
this Garrett’s son, Silken Thomas (1535), the English
marched through the country, burning Lecale. The
fall of the Kildares, allies and relatives of the O’Neills,
brought a revival of the O’Neill wars for Ardglass,
and of the English campaigns. Lord Leonard Grey
has left a description in the State Papers (III. 155)
of his expedition in 1539: “and so with the host
we set forward into the said country and took all
the castles there and delivered them to Mr. Treasurer
who hath warded the same ... the said Lecayll
is environed round about with the sea and no way
to go by land into said country but only by the castle
of Dundrome.... I assure your lordship I have
been in many places and countries in my days and
yet did I never see for so much a pleasanter plot of
ground than the said Lecayll, for the commodity
of the land and divers islands in the same environed
with the sea which were soon reclaimed and inhabited....”</p>
<p>It was in this “reclaiming” that the Deputy
ravaged the east coast, took Dundrum, and the castles
of Lecale and Ards; profaned S. Patrick’s Church at
Down, turning it into a stable and destroying the
monuments of Patrick, Brigid, and Columcille, and
“after plucked it down, and shipped the notable ring
of bells that did hang in the steeple, meaning to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
them sent to England: had not God of his justice
prevented his iniquity by sinking the vessel and
passengers.” Queen Mary restored Ardglass to the
next Earl, Gerald, son of Silken Thomas, the boy
who at his father’s capture had escaped “tenderly
wrapped” in a turf-basket, and after long perils and
sorrows and exile in Rome, Italy, and France, had
at last returned, an obedient Angliciser under the
Catholic queen (1553). Under Queen Elizabeth, who
was in Irish belief illegitimate and a usurper, Shane
O’Neill (1558-1567) cast out the English, and
“forcibly patronised himself in all Lecale.” Ardglass
seems to have come into the hands of the Irish, and
trade was busy, for in Shane’s great cellars at Dundrum
he was said to have commonly stored two hundred
tuns of wine.</p>
<p>Thirty years after Shane’s death (1597), a plan for
out-rooting the Irish and planting an English race
was drawn up by a clergyman of “the Church of
Ireland,” James Bell, Vicar of Christ Church in
Dublin, and dedicated by him to Lord Burghley.
He was the faithful representative of a political
establishment, deep-stained with the blood and sorrow
of the Irish. Here is his proposal, preserved in the
British Museum: “The Crown should divide the
land into lots of 300 acres, at £5 yearly rent, for
<i>English</i> undertakers, who should maintain 10 men
(English) and 10 women, who now live in England
by begging and naughty shifts; while single to have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
two acres, married, four acres of the 300—which
was to be circumvallated by a deep trench or fosse....
If upon Tirone’s lands 2,000 English families
be planted, her Majesty’s profit would at once be
£10,000; besides, having 4,000 soldiers at hand
without pay, for every two of the ten men should
serve in turn three months each year—the act would
be <i>motherly</i> and honourable for her Highness. To
the bishops, there should be given, in fee simple,
1,200 acres, at £20 a year, upon every 300 acres of
which the ten men and women are to be maintained,
upon the like conditions; the inferior clergy, down
to parson and curate, to have 600 acres upon proportionate
rent and service. If her Majesty’s heart
be moved by this device, there shall not be a beggar
in England; a work of great profit, great strength,
and great glory to the Queen, great love to her subjects,
and singular mercy towards her meanest subjects,
in that she giveth house and lands in Ireland to those
that, in England, have not a hole to hide their heads in.
The trench round about would barr Irish rebels
coming suddenly trotting and jumping upon the good
English subjects.” In the proposed commonwealth
no room for sustenance was left for the Irish people
of the land, fenced off from every place of food.
Loyal to her Majesty, James Bell was yet more loyal
to the material predominance of his Church. Among
farmers owning three hundred acres with ten families
of labourers, the Church of Ireland was to have a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
stately position with its inferior curates owning twice
as much as their best neighbours, and the bishops
four times as much. It was but an act of gratitude.
“I will not say as Joshua and Caleb said, if the Lord
have a favour unto us; but I will say, the Lord having
a special love unto us, God hath given Ireland to her
Majesty—a country most sweet, most wholesome, and
most fruitful to dwell in; so full of springs, so full of
rivers, so full of lakes, so full of fish, so full of cattle,
and of fowl, that there is not a country upon the face
of the earth more beneficial to the life of man.”</p>
<p>Thus plans of settlement and plantation were
abroad when Mountjoy led his army over Lecale.
The castle of Dundrum surrendered to him (1601).
“His Lordship ... rode to Downpatrick, and thence
by St. Patrick’s Well to Ardglass, being six miles, in
which town two castles yielded to the Queen, and the
warders, upon their lives saved, gave up their arms.
A third castle there had been held for the Queen
all the time of the Rebellion, by one Jordan, never
coming out of the same for three years past, till now
by his Lordship’s coming he was freed.” This was
the castle on the port, which was evidently provisioned
from the sea, the only stronghold left in Ardglass for
the English, and called Castle Jordan from its defender.
After this subjection of Ardglass, Sir Richard Morrison,
with five hundred foot and fifty horse, was left at
Downpatrick as governor of Lecale, while Mountjoy
carried on war against Tyrone.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
<p>A picture of life in a Lecale castle at this time has
been left to us by Captain Josias Bodley, of Mountjoy’s
army. From Armagh to Newry he journeyed through
a famished country where for a whole year Chichester’s
and Morrison’s troops had been employed in completely
devastating the land, so that O’Neill should
get provision neither for man nor horse; and the
poverty he saw in Newry shows their success. Thence
skirting the Mourne Mountains he stopped at the
island stronghold of Magennis in the lake at Castlewellan,
and passing through a land of ancient cromlechs
and souterrains, of earthworks ringed and conical,
and of early Norman castles, entered Lecale. The
scene of the final merry-makings, the Governor’s
Castle at Downpatrick, was probably the fort which
stood at the foot of the hill, the last remains of which,
a tall square tower, were removed a few years ago.
It was evidently not unlike the castle at Ardglass,
and life was the same in both of them. The stairs led
first to the guard-room, with its dresser laden with
dishes, and a wide fire-place where heavy pots hung
from iron crooks, and cooks were busy with interminable
cooking of the fish and fowls and game for
which Lecale was famous, pasties of marrow and
plums, Irish curds, and other dishes from France,
there designated “Quelq’ choses” (“kickshaws”),
which were reckoned “vulgar” by the English officers,
as being perhaps too little substantial. Thence the
stairs led to the large hall where in the huge fire-place<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
logs were burning, even as in Castle Shane of Ardglass
to-day, “the height of our chins, as the saying is.”
The hall was comfortable, for of a night one may
sit in the Ardglass room with the unglazed windows
in the thick walls on every side, and the door open
to the winding stairs, and no flicker of candles betrays
a draught: the wind seems carried up the turret
staircase through the roof. The company in the hall
amused themselves with smoking, cards, backgammon,
and dice. There was much drinking of healths—many
political pledges no doubt as in modern Ulster,
bitter tests to Irish companions when the English
officers might call on a newly-submitted chief such
as Magennis to join in a “loyal” toast: Bodley
had apparently taken part in some scenes of scruple
and silence on the part of honourable men, “of
all things the most shameful,” he says. For any
special entertainment the servants crowded into the
same room as the masters—the cook’s wife, the scullion,
and all; and played to amuse them a game still common
in the north. There came, too, the Irish Mummers
or Rhymers, making their Christmas rounds with
torches and drums, wearing the traditional pointed
caps, and carrying their profits in the base money,
one part of silver to three of brass, which Elizabeth
forced upon Ireland in favour of her avaricious
Treasurer there, Sir George Carey. Of this money,
such as it was, the Rhymers were “cleaned out” by
the officers in a game of dice, and sent on their long<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
walk home across Lecale two hours after the winter
midnight, “without money; out of spirits; out of
order; without even saying ‘Farewell’”—a strange
contrast to the old Irish welcome to travellers and
wandering players—a gallant hospitality at the
Christmas time of English officers, for whom no season
of mercy was sacred, and no obligation of honour,
straight dealing, or courtesy binding so far as Irishmen
were concerned. The rhymers may have sung as they
took their way the fame of the hero-warrior of their
people: “Were but the brown leaf which the wood
sheds from it gold, were but the white billows silver,
Finn would have given it all away.” They may have
recalled the lament of the old Irish poet who saw the
havoc made by “outlanders” of the ordered hospitality
of Irish society. “At the end of the final world
[there will be] a refuge to poverty and stinginess and
grudging.” They could not see in the far future the
open castle of Ardglass.</p>
<p>Cards, dice, drinking, and smoking filled up the
time of the English visitors, with strolls of curiosity
to the Wells and Chair of St. Patrick at Struel, or
the huge entrenchments of Celtchair of the Battles.
For the night there was a single sleeping-room above
the hall, a bed-chamber “arranged in the Irish
fashion” with a good and soft bed of down for the
owner, and thin pallets thrown on the floor for the
company. The dogs of Captain Constable shared
the room with the rest, after the Yorkshire manner,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
leaping on the down bed and howling at their
rejection.</p>
<p>When Morrison left Downpatrick there came
Captain Edward Cromwell—descendant of Thomas
Cromwell, minister of ill-fame to Ireland under
Henry <span class="smcap">viii.</span>—to be Governor of Lecale (1605): “this
son of earth and foul spot on the human race,” by
whose army the cathedral of Down was burned,
and in that conflagration sacred monuments and
very ancient writings; and many other churches too,
very few of which have been since then restored.
The very tombstones were used in building houses
and fences; while the people watching lamented the
devastation of what had been to them and their fathers
“the place of their resurrection,” so that they might
go in the fellowship of their saints “to the great
assembly of Doom.” To Edward Cromwell the people
gave the name “Maol-na-teampull” for his impiety,
and numbers of men born in that terrible year of ruin
reckoned their age over sixty years after from the days
of his sacrilege, as if from a national visitation. In
those days perhaps the Irish inhabitants were driven
off the fertile land to the very rim of the sea, to set
their cabins, as may still be seen, on the last refuge of
the shingle itself round the Dundrum bay, or to
cluster together on some bare crag.</p>
<p>After the wars of Mountjoy and of Cromwell and
the plantations of their officers the fortunes of Lecale,
as of all Ireland, declined. With the final ruin of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
O’Neills the clouded title of the Fitzgeralds revived,
in a dim shadow of their old pride. A branch of the
family built, in the eighteenth century, a sober mansion
over the “New Works” that had been raised when
Ireland claimed her right to trade, and around the
towers that marked ancient centuries of battle. Even
there the old Fitzgerald fires of patriotism and indignation
at inhuman wrong broke out anew. The
character of Lord Edward Fitzgerald is as little comprehended
as the spirit of his country. A Protestant
brought up in the days of penal laws and Protestant
ascendancy; a member of the great house of the
Duke of Leinster in Ireland and the Duke of Richmond
in England; trained in an army fighting for “the
Empire” against American “rebels”; his life till
twenty-seven was chiefly spent in France, America,
and England, amid military and aristocratic society—conditions
that have made many a man cosmopolitan,
denationalised, and indifferent. The liberal traditions
of his father, the first Duke of Leinster, had
practically died with him when the boy was only ten.
Ardently devoted to his family, there was not one
of them, or one of his early friends, to whom he could
speak of his national beliefs. And out of all this came
the lover of the poor and the oppressed, the friend
of all men, the intrepid martyr to the freedom of
Catholic Ireland, dying alone in prison with a prayer
for the salvation of all who died at the hangman’s
hands for the sake of Ireland. No wonder that the
people of Ardglass still show the tower chamber in
the old castle which was searched for Lord Edward,
the room in the great house where he was said to
have hidden, the rude bridge that gave him shelter
from the yeomanry, and the desolate site of Bone
castle where he slept for one night, in an ancient
possession of his family.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-148.jpg" width="400" height="267"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc"><span class="smcap">View of Ardglass from Ringfadd</span></p>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
<p>In the course of the gloomy years that followed the
old house fell into decay. Last June (1911) the whole
derelict property, long deserted by its landlords, both
land and village, was sold for the benefit of English
mortgagees and bought by local people. Nothing
more “loyal” could be imagined than the apparent
community of Ardglass—nothing more to the heart
of the party in Down and Antrim of superiority and
supremacy which claims sole right to a place in the sun.
The Imperial flag flew from a high-lifted residence, on
the site of two of the old forts. The FitzGerald house
and demesne were bought by a golf club, reputed to be
faithful above all to English interests. The old castle
was bid for by a spirit-dealer of the right persuasion,
as a suitable storage place for whiskey. Not a breath
as to the destiny of Ardglass and its fishermen disturbed
the peace of Orangemen and stalwart
Protestants of the ascendancy.</p>
<p>It occurred, however, to a good Irishman and antiquary,
a Protestant from Belfast, that there might be
a nobler use for the Castle of Ardglass. He bought
the castle. He replaced the vanished floors and ceilings<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
with beams and boards of Irish timber. A few broken
pieces of masonry were repaired. The inside walls
were left in their rough state, merely dashed with
white. At the door was laid the anvil of an Irish smith
to be held between the knees, a stone with the centre
cut out and fitted with iron. The great fire-places
were filled with logs from a local plantation. Over
the flaming fires huge pots steamed, hanging from iron
crooks. Old Ulster ironwork for kitchen use hung
round the hearth. A dresser, such as Captain Bodley
might have seen, was stocked with pewter plates and
old crockery, brought, like the ironwork, by willing
givers who possessed any relic of Ireland of former days.
Tables of Irish oak, and Irish carved benches of the old
fashion, and Irish cupboards and settles furnished the
rooms. They were lighted by Irish-made candles in
the iron taper-holders of over a hundred years ago,
by a very remarkable bronze chandelier of the
eighteenth century, and by a still more striking
floreated cross and circle of lights, made in the penal
days by some local metal-worker with the ancient
Irish tradition of ornament still with him. In the
chief room a few old prints and portraits hung on the
walls, amid new banners representing O’Neill,
O’Donnell, and the black Raven of the Danes; most
prominent of all, Shane O’Neill himself, standing
proud in his full height in regal saffron kilt and flowing
mantle, a fine design by a young Irish artist of Belfast.
A tiny round-apsed oratory opened off this chief room.
It was hung with golden Irish linen; between the
lights on the altar stood a small crucifix of the penal
times, and interlaced Irish patterns hung on the walls.
The columbary in one of the towers, perhaps unique
in early castles, with its seventy-five triangular recesses
or resting-places for the pigeons built in the walls,
and entries to north and south—one a square opening
with sill inside and alighting slab outside, the other a
space cut below the narrow window exactly the size
through which a bird might pass—was again stocked
with pigeons given by a local admirer, and the tower
named after St. Columba. From a pole flew the flag
of O’Neill, the Red Right Hand, in memory of old
days. In three months the deserted ruin was transformed
into a dwellinghouse, where Mr. Bigger and
his helpers could sleep and cook and live. The workmen
in a fury of enthusiasm worked as if a master’s
eye was on them at every minute.</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/ill-150.jpg" width="400" height="524"
alt=""
title="" />
<div class="caption"><p class="pc"><span class="smcap">Castle Séan, Ardglass.</span></p>
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span></p>
<p>The design of the new owner was to bring the people
of Ardglass and the Lecale of Down into touch with the
Irish past, and give them some conception of the
historic background of their life. For it must be
remembered that through all conquests and plantations
the people of the soil of Lecale have still remained
of the old stock, an Irish people who have a natural
country to love. For them there need be none of the
perplexities which must confront those who in their
successive generations of life in Ireland still consent
to be designated by <i>The Times</i> as “the British Colony<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
on the other side of St. George’s Channel.” I was
present on the Saturday night when the ruin was
opened to the people. There was no moon, and a gale
was blowing down the Irish Sea—a wind from the
north. A little platform was set against the sheltered
west wall of the castle. A beacon flamed on one of
the towers, and the ceremony began with a display of
limelight pictures on the wall. I was in the middle of
an audience packed as tight as men could stand in the
castle yard and across the wide street. There had been
no public announcements and no advertisement. But
word had passed round the people of Lecale, and it
seemed as if thousands had gathered under the resplendent
stars. “I do not mean to show you,” said
Mr. Bigger, “China or Japan; I mean to show you
Ardglass.” The audience went wild with delight to
see their fishermen and women, their local celebrities,
the boats laden with fish, the piles on the pier, the
Donegal girls packing them, the barrels rolled out to
the tramp steamers. But the delight reached its
utmost height at views of the sea taken from a boat
out fishing, the dawn of day, the early flight of birds, the
swell of the great waters. The appeal of beauty
brought a rich answer from the Irish crowd.</p>
<p>Then there was Irish dancing and singing on the
little platform, with the grey wall of the castle as a
background and the waving ivy branches and tree
shadows in the limelight, a scene of marvellous light
and shade. But the great moment of all came when a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
huge Irish flag was flung out on the night wind from
the Columba tower. I have never seen so magic a
sight. Lights blazed from the castle-roof, rockets
flamed across the sky, and in the midst suddenly
appeared like a vision among the host of stars (for no
flag-staff could be seen against the night-sky) a gleaming
golden harp hanging secure in immensity, crossed
and re-crossed by balls and flames of fire, so that it
seemed to escape only by a miracle.</p>
<p>How did Ardglass and Lecale take this revival of
its older fame? That sight was not less striking than
the vision on the tower. Every cottage in the village
had candles set in its windows. The fisher-boats in
the harbour were alight; they flew flags too, and Irish
flags, as many as could get them. For hours crowds
climbed and descended the narrow winding staircase
in the castle turret, lighted by candles fixed in old
Ulster iron holders. They thronged the rooms, themselves
the guardians of all the treasures lying on the
benches and shelves and suspended on the walls.
When they drew aside the light curtain before the
oratory and entered in, they prostrated themselves,
kneeling in prayer, and came out with tears in their
eyes. Young men looked at Shane O’Neill, and looked
again, and took off their hats. As in other Irish
gatherings where I have been, sobriety and good
manners distinguished the crowd, very visible and
audible to me from my little hotel fronting the castle
where the visitors flocked for refreshment, under my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
window opening on the one street of the village.
Strangers dispersed about eleven o’clock, but men of
the village sat round the fire of the old guard-room for
hours after, singing songs of Ireland endlessly. There
was no host, and no master of the ceremonies. The
castle was left absolutely to the people. Anyone who
would came in. They sang, and sang, the sorrowful
decadent songs of modern Ireland—songs of famine,
emigration, lamentation, and woe. But still they sang
of Ireland.</p>
<p>The next day was Sunday. The parish priest,
many years among his people, shared in the joy of the
festival, in the new interest come to break the long
monotony of their life, and in the widening and lifting
of their emotion. He preached twice on the restoration
to them of their castle, and on their duty to
hold it sacred, and to act with courtesy and good
breeding when they entered it. He gave the children
freedom from Sunday School that they might see the
Irish flag flown from the tower at noon; and boys
and girls poured laughing down the street. All that
day, from morning till night, without a pause, lines
of village and country folk filed up and down the
turret stairs, holding to the rope, kept taut by its old
stone weight, that served as balustrade. Protestants
were intermingled with Catholics, as one could see by
the badges of their societies, in a common enthusiasm
for the memories of the country which was theirs.
Two admirable little girls of nine and fourteen installed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
themselves as handmaids and hostesses of the castle,
and might be seen all day carrying water to the
cauldron, making tea, giving hospitality to visitors—their
first free service to Ireland. At night, men and
women of the village came into the guard-room and
banquet-hall, and sang and sang of Ireland. They did
not even smoke. One after another sang till one
o’clock. One or two sentimental ditties turned up,
on Shannon’s shores and Killarney’s lakes, of the feeble
artificial sort favoured by so-called “National Schools,”
but these found little encouragement. Many evenings
since, the guard-room has been filled with villagers,
and singing and old-time lore abound. Many bring
presents and leave them with scarce a word; and the
old oratory has not been left without gifts and flowers.
Nowhere has a pin been disturbed, or a trifle broken
or injured. The battlements and the glorious view
are a delight to all. They examine and point out to
each other the old devices, the flint weapons and the
bronze, the Celtic emblems and memorials, and the
Elizabethan and Volunteer arms that lie about. The
people have a new pride put in them, and are learning
to be their own Conservators and Board of Works.</p>
<p>The Bishop of Ossory has lately given us all to understand
that the Church of Ireland, boasting itself to
be the highest, perhaps the sole, regenerating force
in the country, is at this crisis altogether absorbed in
anxious contemplation of the supposed danger from
the people of Ireland to its property. A material preoccupation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
at such a pitch, induces a multitude of unreasoning
timidities, fantastic safeguards, and voluntary
solitudes. It is true, indeed, that it was only
“property” in a spiritual sense which the people of
Ardglass had got that day. But in that higher sense
they had been given that which every Irishman lacks—something
of their own. No Englishman can picture
to himself that lack. He has never had it. But with
us it is an old story. If the people ask to learn Irish—“Here
is arithmetic; that will suit you better.”
They would like something of Irish history—“I
assure you that it is German grammar which you really
wish to ask for.” If the talk is of schools or fisheries—“The
English Treasury will see that you do not waste
money on school-house or steam trawler.” Their
very names are not their own. A Belfast bank the other
day refused the life-long signature on a cheque of a
well-known Irish writer because he signed, in English
letters indeed, but with his customary Irish spelling of
Padraic, and required instead the conventional English
Patrick. Who can tell the needless restrictions and
trivialities and imposed fashions that check expansion,
experiment, and freedom of mind? A dreary emptiness
has been stretched over the vivid natures of
Irishmen. What is there left for them to love? Is
it any wonder they desire something they may call
their own? It may be that “Loyalists” imagine
that a longer continuance of such destitution will end
at last in a lively passion for Englishmen and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
Empire. Or, perhaps, it is the Unionist idea that an
enforced apathy indefinitely continued will produce
the fate that comes on men doomed to imprisonment
for life in solitary confinement, when after long years
thought and speech are gone, and idiot prisoners may
mingle harmlessly together.</p>
<p>While the castle was repairing at Ardglass, an Irish
visitor watched the fishermen leaning on the sea-wall.
Every half-hour one might drop a word. They were
passing the time as only fishermen know how. As to
the castle, they looked as oblivious to it as to everything
else. After watching for some time, the Irish
visitor casually passed one of them, dropping an indifferent
remark: “What’s the meaning of all this?”
“It’s comin’,” said the fisherman. “We’re too long
held in chains”—and fell back into silence.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span></p>
<p class="pc2 mid"><i>NOTE.</i></p>
<div class="pbq">
<p class="p1">Bodley’s visit to Lecale, preserved in a Latin MSS. in
the British Museum, has been printed with a translation in
the Old Ulster Journal of Archæology II. 73. The account
is concerned with six officers of high rank and fame in the
veteran army of Elizabeth. The writer, Captain Bodley,
brother of the founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford,
was commanding officer at Armagh, commissioned to raise
fortifications or entrenchments for the army—“a very honest
fellow with a black beard,” he describes himself. His companion
Captain Toby Caulfield, who had fought at Carlingford
and Kinsale, was the first Governor in 1602 of the new fort
of Charlemont, and Governor in 1603 of the counties of
Armagh and Tyrone, where he made good use of his
opportunities, a skilful appropriator of lands, who secured
for himself grants in nine counties, and the wealth on which
the earldom of Charlemont was established. Captain John
Jephson had rescued the remnant of the British army caught
in the pass of the Curlew Mountains in 1599: he gained the
Mallow estate by marriage with the daughter of Norreys,
President of Munster. Captain Adderton, whom they picked
up on the way, had distinguished himself in the Wicklow
wars, and was now Governor of the newly-built fort of Mount-norris,
on the road from Armagh to Newry.</p>
<p>Their host at Downpatrick, Sir Richard Moryson, one
of the chief friends of Mountjoy, had fought in Leix and at
Kinsale, was now Governor of Lecale, and this same year
(1603) was promoted Governor of Waterford, and later (1607),
President of Munster. With him was Captain Ralph
Constable, who had followed all his campaigns from Kinsale
to the Blackwater.</p>
<p>Four of the six, Moryson, Bodley, Jephson, and Caulfield,
had been comrades in the campaigns of the Low Countries
a few years before, and were among the companies of soldiers
which were drafted over from the Netherlands to Ireland to
strengthen the armies of Essex and Mountjoy. They were men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
who prospered in Irish wars—keen soldiers, and as keen dividers
of lands and offices in the new country, deeply concerned in
plantations and confiscations.</p>
<p class="pc1"><i>An Account of a Journey of Captain Josias Bodley into Lecale<br />
in Ulster, in the Year 1602 (properly 1603).</i></p>
<p class="p1">Good God! what have I taken on me to do? Truly I
am an ass, otherwise I would never have undertaken so heavy
a burthen; but no matter, I shall do what I can, like
Coppinger’s female dog, who always took her own way.</p>
<p>I have taken in hand to recount what happened in a journey
which Captain Caulfield, Captain Jephson, and I made to
Lecale, to visit our friend Sir Richard Morrison, and divert
ourselves there. And I shall narrate everything in due order;
for order is a fair thing, and all love it, except the Irish men-at-arms,
who are a most vile race of men, if it be at all allowable
to call them “men,” who live upon grass, and are foxes in
their disposition and wolves in their actions. But to our
business: The aforesaid Master Morrison sent very kind
letters to us, inviting us to keep the Nativity (which the
English call “Christmas”) with him; but as Sir Arthur
Chichester, the Sergeant-Major of the whole army, had convoked
us with all our companies at that very moment to fight
with Tyrone, who was then in the woods of Glenconkein
with much cattle and few fighting men; we could not go at
that time to Lecale, but joined the said Sir Arthur, and
remained with him for sixteen or seventeen days in the field,
without doing much harm to Tyrone: for that Tyrone is the
worst rascal, and very wary and subtle, and won’t be beaten
except on good terms. However, we fought him twice in
the very woods, and made him run to his strongholds. So
after leaving about that place a well-provided garrison, we
each departed, with full permission and good will.</p>
<p>We now remembered the said invitation of Sir Richard
and, after deliberation (for, in the commencement of affairs,
deliberation should be used by those adventuring bold attempts,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
as Seneca says), we thought it good to go thither, although
it was now eight days after the Nativity: because we did not
doubt our being welcome though it had been Lent. This
was resolved on in the city of Armagh, where there is a Governor,
a very honest fellow with a black beard, who uses everyone
well according to his poor ability, and would use them much
better if he had more of the thing the English call “means.”</p>
<p>We set out from that city for the town commonly called
Newry, which was one day’s journey. There, to speak the
truth, we were not very well entertained, nor according to our
qualities; for that town produces nothing but lean beef,
and very rarely mutton; the very worst wine; nor was there
any bread, except biscuits, even in the Governor’s house.
However, we did our best to be merry and jocund with the
bad wine, putting sugar in it (as the senior lawyers are used
to do, with Canary wine)—with toasted bread, which in
English is called “a lawyer’s nightcap.” There we found
Captain Adderton, an honest fellow, and a friend of ours,
who, having nothing to do, was easily persuaded to accompany
us to Lecale.</p>
<p>So the next morning we four take horse and set out. We
had no guide except Captain Caulfield, who promised he would
lead us very well. But before we had ridden three miles
we lost our way and were compelled to go on foot, leading our
horses through bogs and marshes which were very troublesome;
and some of us were not wanting who swore silently between
our teeth, and wished our guide at a thousand devils. At
length we came to some village of obscure name, where for
two brass shillings we brought with us a countryman who
might lead us to the Island of Magennis, ten miles distant
from the town of Newry: for Master Morrison had promised
he would meet us there.</p>
<p>The weather was very cold, and it began to roar dreadfully
with a strong wind in our faces, when we were on the mountains,
where there was neither tree nor house; but there was no
remedy save patience. Captain Bodley alone had a long
cloak with a hood, into which he prudently thrust his head,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
and laughed somewhat into himself to see the others so badly
armed against the storm.</p>
<p>We now come to the Island of Magennis, where, alighting
from our horses, we met Master Morrison and Captain
Constable, with many others, whom, for the sake of brevity,
I pass by. They had tarried there at least three hours, expecting
our arrival, and, in the meantime, drank ale and usquebaugh
with the Lady Sara, the daughter of Tyrone, and wife of the
aforesaid Magennis; a truly beautiful woman: so that I
can well believe these three hours did not appear to them
more than a minute, especially to Master Constable, who is
by nature very fond, not of women only, but likewise of dogs
and horses. We also drank twice or thrice, and after we had
duly kissed her, we each prepared for our journey.</p>
<p>It was ten or twelve miles from that island to Downpatrick,
where Master Morrison dwelt; and the way seemed much
longer on account of our wish to be there. At length, as
all things have an end and a black pudding two (as the proverb
hath it) we came by little and little to the said house. And
now began that more than Lucullan entertainment, which
neither Cicero, whose style in composition I chiefly imitate,
(although Horace says, “O imitators! a slavish herd”), nor
any other of the Latin or Greek authors, could express in
suitable terms.</p>
<p>When we had approached within a stone’s throw of the
house—or rather palace—of the said Master Morrison—behold!
forthwith innumerable servants! some light us with
pine-wood lights and torches because it is dark; others, as
soon as we alight, take our horses, and lead them into a handsome
and spacious stable, where neither hay nor oats are wanting.
Master Morrison himself leads us by wide stairs into a large
hall where a fire is burning the height of our chins, as the
saying is; and afterwards into a bed chamber, prepared in the
Irish fashion.</p>
<p>Here having taken off our boots, we all sit down and converse
on various matters; Captain Caulfield about supper and food,
for he was very hungry; Captain Constable about hounds, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
which he had there some excellent ones, as he himself asserted;
and the rest about other things. Master Morrison ordered
a cup of Spanish wine to be brought, with burnt sugar, nutmeg,
and ginger, and made us all drink a good draught of it, which
was very grateful to the palate, and also good for procuring an
appetite for supper, if anyone needed such.</p>
<p>In an hour we heard some one down in the kitchen calling
with a loud voice “To the Dresser.” Forthwith we see
a long row of servants, decently dressed, each with dishes
of the most select meats, which they place on the table in the
very best style. One presents to us a silver basin with the
most limpid water; another hands us a very white towel;
others arrange chairs and seats in their proper places. “What
need of words, let us be seen in action” (as Ajax says in Ovid).
Grace having been said, we begin to fix our eyes intently
on the dishes, whilst handling our knives: and here you might
have plainly seen those Belgian feasts, where, at the beginning
is silence, in the middle the crunching of teeth, and at the
end the chattering of the people. For at first we sat as if
rapt and astounded by the variety of meats and dainties—like
a German I once saw depicted standing between two
jars, the one of white wine and the other of claret, with this
motto: “I know not which way to turn.”</p>
<p>But after a short time we fall to roundly on every dish
calling now and then for wine, now and then for attendance,
everyone according to his whim. In the midst of supper Master
Morrison ordered be given to him a glass goblet full of claret,
which measured, (as I conjecture) ten or eleven inches roundabout,
and drank to the health of all, and to our happy arrival.
We freely received it from him, thanking him, and drinking
one after the other, as much as he drank before us. He then
gave four or five healths of the chief men, and of our absent
friends, just as the most illustrious Lord, now Treasurer of
Ireland, is used to do at his dinners. And it is a very praiseworthy
thing, and has, perhaps, more in it than anyone would
believe; and there was not one amongst us who did pledge
him and each other without any scruple or gainsay, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
I was very glad to see; for it was a proof of unanimity and
assured friendship.</p>
<p>For there are many (a thing I can’t mention without great
and extreme sorrow) who won’t drink healths with others;
sitting, nevertheless, in the company of those who do drink,
and not doing as they do; which is of all things the most
shameful.... For, at table, he who does not receive
whatsoever healths may be proposed by another, does so,
either because he likes not the proposer, or he to whom they
drink, or the wine itself. Truly I would not willingly have
any dealings with him who under values either me or my
friend, or lastly wine, the most precious of all things under
heaven.</p>
<p class="pc ls1">••••••••••••</p>
<p>Let us now return to Lecale, where the supper (which, as
I have said, was most elegant) being ended, we again enter our
bedroom, in which was a large fire (for at the time it was exceedingly
cold out of doors) and benches for sitting on; and
plenty of tobacco, with nice pipes, was set before us. The
wine also had begun to operate a little on us, and everyone’s
wits had become somewhat sharper; all were gabbling at once,
and all sought a hearing at once.... Amongst other things,
we said that the time was now happily different, from when we
were before Kinsale at Christmas of last year, when we suffered
intolerable cold, dreadful labour, and a want of almost everything;
drinking the very worst. We compared events, till lately
unhoped for, with the past, and with those now hoped for.
Lastly, reasoning on everything, we conclude that the verse
of Horace (Ode 37, Book 1st) squares exceedingly well with
the present time—namely, “that now is the time for drinking,
that now is the time for thumping the floor with a loose foot.”
Therefore, after a little Captain Jephson calls for usquebaugh,
and we all immediately second him with one consent, calling out
“Usquebaugh, usquebaugh”—for we could make as free there
as in our own quarters.</p>
<p>Besides it was not without reason we drank usquebaugh;
for it was the best remedy against the cold of that night, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
good for dispersing the crude vapours of the French wine;
and pre-eminently wholesome in these regions, where the
priests themselves, who are holy men—as the Abbot of Armagh,
the Bishop of Cashel, and others; and also noble men—as
Henry Oge MacMahon, MacHenry—and men and women of
every rank—pour usquebaugh down their throats by day and
by night; and that not for hilarity only, which would be
praiseworthy, but for constant drunkenness which is detestable.</p>
<p>Therefore, after everyone had drank two or three healths
... what because of the assailing fumes of the wine which
now sought our heads ... we thought it right, as I have
said, to rest for some hours. And behold, now, the great kindness
that Master Morrison shows towards us. He gives up to us
his own good and soft bed, and throws himself upon a pallet in
the same chamber, and would not be persuaded by anything
we could say, to lie in his own bed; and the pallet was very
hard and thin, such as they are wont to have who are called
“Palatine” of great heroes.</p>
<p>I need not tell how soundly we slept till morning, for that
is easily understood, all things considered; at least if the old
syllogism be true: “He who drinks well sleeps well.” We
did not, however, pass the night altogether without annoyance:
for the Captain’s dogs, which were very badly educated
(after the Northern fashion) were always jumping on the beds,
and would not let us alone, although we beat them ever so
often, which the said Captain took in dudgeon, especially
when he heard his dogs howling; but it was all as one for that;
for it is not right that dogs, who are of the beasts, should sleep
with men who are reasoning and laughing animals, according to
the philosophers.... Before we get out of bed they bring
to us a certain aromatic of strong ale, compounded with sugar
and eggs (in English “caudle”) to comfort and strengthen
the stomach, they also bring beer (if any prefer it) with toasted
bread and nutmeg, to allay thirst, steady the head, and cool
the liver; they also bring pipes of the best tobacco to drive
away rheums and catarrhs.</p>
<p>We now all jump quickly out of bed, put on our clothes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
approach the fire, and, when all are ready, walk abroad together
to take the air, which, in that region, is most salubrious and
delightful, so that if I wished to enumerate all the advantages
of the place, not only powers (of description), but time itself
would be wanting. I shall therefore omit that, as being already
known, and revert to ourselves, who, having now had a sufficient
walk, returned to our lodging as dinner time was at hand.
But how can we tell about the sumptuous preparation
of everything? How about the dinners? How about the
dainties? For we seemed as if present (as you would suppose)
at the nuptial banquet to which some Cleopatra had invited
her Antony; so many varieties of meat were there, so many
kinds of condiments; about every one of which I would willingly
say something, only that I fear being too tedious. I shall
therefore demonstrate from a single dinner, what may be
imagined of the rest. There was a large and beautiful collar
of brawn, with its accompaniments—to wit, mustard and
Muscadel wine; there were well-stuffed geese, ... the
legs of which the Captain always laid hold of for himself; there
were pies of venison and of various kinds of game; pasties also,
some of marrow, with innumerable plums; others of it with
coagulated milk; others which they call tarts, of divers shapes,
materials and colours, made of beef, mutton and veal. I do not
mention because they are reckoned vulgar, other kinds of
dishes, wherein France much abounds, and which they
designate “Quelq’choses” [“Kickshaws”]. Neither do I
relate anything of the delicacies which accompanied the cheese,
because they would excel all belief. I may say in one word,
that all things were there supplied us most luxuriously and
most copiously. And lest anyone might think that God had
sent us the meat, but the Devil the Cook (as the proverb says),
there was a cook there so expert in his art that his equal could
scarce be found....</p>
<p>If you now inquire whether there were any other amusements,
besides those I have related, I say an infinite number,
and the very best. For if we wished to ride after dinner, you
would have seen forthwith ten or twelve handsome steeds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
with good equipments and other ornaments, ready for the road.
We quickly mount, we visit the Well and Chair of St. Patrick
[Struel], the ancient Fort [Rath-Celtair], or any other place
according to our fancy; and at length returning home, cards,
tables, and dice are set before us, and amongst other things that
Indian tobacco (of which I shall never be able to make sufficient
mention), and of which I cannot speak otherwise.</p>
<p class="pc ls1">••••••••••••</p>
<p>And now once more to our Lecale, where amongst other
things that contributed to hilarity, there came one night after
supper certain maskers belonging to the Irish gentry, four in
number (if I rightly remember). They first sent in to us a
letter marked with “the greatest haste,” and “after our hearty
commendations,” according to the old style, saying that they
were strangers, just arrived in these parts, and very desirous
of spending one or two hours with us; and leave being given,
they entered in this order: first a boy, with a lighted torch;
then two, beating drums; then the maskers, two and two;
then another torch. One of the maskers carried a dirty pocket
handkerchief, with ten pounds in it, not of bullion, but of the
new money lately coined, which has the harp on one side, and
the royal arms on the other.</p>
<p>They were dressed in shirts, with many ivy leaves sewed on
here and there over them; and had over their faces masks of
dog-skin; with holes to see out of, and noses made of paper;
their caps were high and peaked (in the Persian fashion), and
were also of paper, and ornamented with the same (ivy) leaves.</p>
<p>I may briefly say we play at dice. At one time the drums
sound on their side; at another the trumpet on ours. We
fight a long time a doubtful game; at length the maskers lose,
and are sent away cleaned out. Now whoever hath seen a dog,
struck with a stick or a stone, run out of the house with his
tail hanging between his legs, would have (so) seen these maskers
going home: without money; out of spirits; out of order;
without even saying “Farewell”; and they said that each of
them had five or six miles to go to his home, and it was then two
hours after midnight.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
<p>I shall now tell of another jest or gambol, which amongst many,
the domestics of Master Morrison exhibited for us. Two
servants sat down after the manner of women (with reverence
be it spoken) when they “hunker,” only that they (the
servants) sat upon the ground: their hands were tied together
in such a manner that their knees were clasped within them;
and a stick placed between the bend of the arms and the legs,
so that they could in no way move their arms; they held between
the thumb and forefinger of either hand a small stick, almost
a foot in length, and sharp at the farther end. Two are placed
in this way: the one opposite the other at the distance of an
ell. Being thus placed they engage; and each one tries to upset
his opponent, by attacking him with his feet; for being once
upset, he can by no means recover himself, but presents himself
to his upsetter for attack with the aforesaid small stick. Which
made us laugh so for an hour, that the tears dropped from
our eyes; and the wife of Philip the cook laughed, and the
scullion, who were both present. You would have said that
some barber-surgeon was there to whom all were showing
their teeth.</p>
<p>But enough of these matters; for there would be no end of
writing, were I to recount all our grave and merry doings in
that space of seven days.</p>
<p>I shall therefore make an end both of the journey and of
my story. For on the seventh day from our arrival we
departed, mournful and sad; and Master Morrison accompanied
us as far as Dundrum; to whom each of us bid
farewell, and again farewell, and shouting the same for a long
way, with our caps raised above our heads, we hasten to our
quarters, and there we each cogitate seriously over our own
affairs.</p></div>
<hr class="chap" />
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span></p>
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER V</h2>
<p class="pch">TRADITION IN IRISH HISTORY.</p>
<p class="pc"><i>Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century and After,
March, 1909.</i></p>
<p class="drop-cap04">IN the <i>Quarterly Review</i> of January last there
appeared an article by Mr. Robert Dunlop,
dealing in a trenchant manner with a book which
I wrote lately, <i>The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing</i>.
I regret to take part personally in a controversy where
my own credit is brought into question, and I am only
moved to do so by consideration of the grave issues
which are involved as regards the study of Irish history.</p>
<p>The appearance of my book has raised two questions
of a very different order—the important question of
whether, with the advance of modern studies, need has
arisen for an entire review of the whole materials for
Irish history and of the old conclusions, and the less
interesting problem of my own inadequacy and untrustworthiness.
Mr. Dunlop, in some fifteen pages of
discourse, has not so much as mentioned the first.
He has treated the second at considerable length. We
may here take them in order of importance.</p>
<p>The real difference between Mr. Dunlop and myself
lies deeper than the question of my merits or demerits.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
It is the old conflict between tradition and enquiry.
For the last 300 years students of medieval Irish
history have peacefully trodden a narrow track, hemmed
in by barriers on either hand. On one side they have
been for the most part bounded by complete ignorance
of the language of the country or its literature. On
the other side they have raised the wall of tradition.
Along this secluded lane writers have followed one
another, in the safety of the orthodox faith. A
history recited with complete unanimity takes on in
course of time the character of the highest truth.
There have been disputes on one or two points perhaps
where theologians are concerned, as for example the
story of St. Patrick; but on the general current of
Irish life there has been no serious discussion nor any
development in opinion. The argument from universal
assent has been sufficient. There is a similarity even of
phrase. “We prefer to think,” writes Mr. Dunlop.
“We prefer to abide by the traditional view of the
state of Ireland,” writes another critic from the same
school. Agreement has been general, individual speculation
has not disturbed the peace, and all have joined
their voices to swell the general creed. Under these
favouring conditions historians of Ireland speak with a
rare confidence and unanimity. “What are novelties
after all?” cries the sagacious historian imagined by
M. Anatole France: “mere impertinences.”</p>
<p>It has happened to me to question the received
doctrine. Universal assent of all men of all time is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
a very useful thing, and for some positive facts it may
be decisive. But in Irish history it is used to enforce
a series of negations—no human progress, no spiritual
life, no patriotism, no development, no activity save
murder, no movement but a constant falling to decay,
and a doomed lapse into barbarism of every race that
entered the charmed circle of the island. However
universal the consent, the statements of the tradition
are of so extraordinary a character, that one may fairly
desire an inspection of the evidence. I have ventured
to suggest that the time had come to study the sources
anew; to see if any had been omitted, or if in modern
research any new testimony concerning Ireland had
been brought to light; to give less weight to negative
assertions than to positive facts; and to enquire what
the whole cumulative argument might imply. Thus
the fundamental problem has been raised. If Mr.
Dunlop has not a word to say about it, it will nevertheless
not disappear. The enquiry will need many
scholars and a long time, but I am sure it will be
completed, and that Irish history will then need to be
re-written. Meanwhile, as I claim no infallible
authority, to fulminate against me does not get rid of
the essential problem. The discrediting of a doubter
of the orthodox faith is the simplest form of argument
and the least laborious. The trouble is that when it
is done the real question is no further advanced.</p>
<p>A heretic must take his risks. We have an example
of their gravity in this article, in which Mr. Dunlop<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
restores an old custom to controversy. We had
almost come to suppose that it was the privilege of
theologians to settle the respective platforms from
which disputations should be carried on. The higher
plane is reserved for the orthodox. The “querulous”
dissentient, on the other hand, is pronounced to be
making mere incursions into what is for him a comparatively
unknown region, his incapacity is obvious
and his want of candour deplorable, and he has forfeited
all claim to respect. This is all in the appropriate
manner of those who hold an Irish history handed
down by tradition.</p>
<p>The permitted belief about Ireland has been summed
up dogmatically by Mr. Dunlop in the <i>Dictionary of
National Biography</i>, the <i>Cambridge Modern History</i>,
and elsewhere. Of the inhabitants of Ireland “two-thirds
at least led a wild and half nomadic existence.
Possessing no sense of national unity beyond the
narrow limits of the several clans to which they
belonged, acknowledging no law outside the customs
of their tribe, subsisting almost entirely on the produce
of their herds and the spoils of the chase, and finding
in their large frieze mantles a sufficient protection
against the inclemency of the weather, and one relieving
them from the necessity of building houses for themselves,
they had little in their general mode of life to
distinguish them from their Celtic ancestors.” “Outside
the pale there was nothing worthy of being called
a Church. To say that the Irish had relapsed into a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
state of heathenism is perhaps going too far. The
tradition of a Christian belief still survived; but it was
a lifeless, useless thing.” The country was “cut off
by its position, but even more by the relapse of the
greater of its inhabitants into a state of semi-barbarism,
from the general currents of European development.”
Bogs and woods, the lairs of the wild-boar and the
wolf, made internal communications dangerous and
difficult, and prevented trade and intercourse with
other nations. Few words, therefore, are needed to
sum up their commerce. “French wines found their
way into the country through Cork and Waterford;
the long-established relations between Dublin and
Bristol still subsisted; Spanish traders landed their
wares on Galway quay; the fame of St. Patrick’s
purgatory attracted an occasional pilgrim from foreign
lands; and of one Irish chieftain it was placed on
record that he had accomplished the hazardous journey
to Rome and back.” Shane O’Neill, “champion of
Celtic civilisation,” could speak no language but Irish,
and could not sign his name. In the <i>Quarterly
Review</i> we have a few more details—that the main part
of the Irishmen’s dress was skins; that this people who
lived without houses when they went on their
“marauding expeditions” (excursions of the full
summer time) made to themselves tents of untanned
skins to cover them (here I could almost imagine Mr.
Dunlop, in spite of his aversion to bards, indulging on
the sly in a cloudy reminiscence of an Irish poet); that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
among the whole of them they had just a few hundred
coracles made of osiers and skins for crossing swollen
rivers, for the O’Malleys and O’Driscolls who had
long-boats represented “perhaps the Iberian element
in the <i>nation</i>,” suggests Mr. Dunlop, not to give the
Gaels any credit, while he slips by the way into the
objectionable word apparently so hard to avoid; that
they made no practical use even of their inland fisheries,
and had no industries, so that even the cloth was made
by Englishmen.</p>
<p>We would desire to ask Mr. Dunlop for the exact
proof he relies on for any one of these statements,
beginning perhaps with “no law outside the <i>customs
of the tribe</i>.” Writers who hold Ireland to be, as he
says, “a sort of scrap-heap for Europe,” and who
cannot conceive of medieval Irishmen as ordinary men
sharing the faults and virtues of other white Europeans,
are addicted to the word “native”—a word not in
common use among historians for Englishmen in
England in the Middle Ages, but affected by them to
indicate Irishmen in Ireland, with the derogatory sense
which their “tradition” requires. The vulgar view
received as it were official recognition half a century
ago from Mr. Hamilton in his preface to the <i>State
Papers</i> of 1509-73 (see also references in my book,
487-8), where he explains that the study of Irish life till
Elizabethan times will be of considerable value in the
study of <i>Universal History</i>, Ireland being so remote
from the earlier seats of civilisation that the rude way<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
of living described by Hesiod and the old poets still
lingered there till the sixteenth century; till which time
“most of the wild Irish led a nomade life, tending
cattle, sowing little corn, and rarely building houses,
but sheltered alike from heat and cold, and moist and
dry, by the Irish cloak.” The last fifty years, we see,
amid the general shaking of dry bones and the movement
of history elsewhere, have brought no stir in
Irish history. That alone stands like eternal truth
fixed and unchangeable. Hence, doubtless, Mr.
Dunlop’s canon (<i>Quart. Rev.</i>, 1906) forbidding “<i>a
history of Ireland in more than one volume</i>.”</p>
<p>The barbarian legend has got a long start. A first
attempt to review its evidence was made in my book.
In a series of social studies I have endeavoured to
discuss, not the whole of Irish history, but definite
matters of trade, social life, and education. I have
gathered a body of facts which indicate that Ireland
had considerable manufactures; that her foreign
commerce can be traced throughout Europe; that
there was an orderly society, even a wealthy one; that
Irish travellers were known at Rome and in the Levant;
that there was an Anglo-Irish culture by no means
contemptible, in touch with Continental learning;
and that increasing intercourse of the races did not
tend to barbarism but to civilisation.</p>
<p>In this sketch I have not proposed to myself to
draw nice distinctions between what the Normans
precisely did, and what the Irish (or even, following<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
Mr. Dunlop), what Iberians were doing in the sixteenth
century in the joint work of commerce and culture,
because there is as yet no sufficient material for that
discussion; I share this lack of knowledge with many
who have pronounced themselves with no uncertain
voice. Further, I should have been glad to confine
these studies to the cheerful progress of trade and
culture; but I was confronted with two possible
objections. The suggestion that if there had been any
considerable trade it would not have vanished by a
freak, could only be answered by indicating how and
why the destruction had been wrought. And to meet
the argument that historians would not have let a
genuine story perish, I gave my opinion on how it was
that the truth dropped out of sight.</p>
<p>My conclusions conflict with the venerable traditions
over which Mr. Dunlop mounts guard. I clearly
offend also against the canon of one volume. It is
obvious that he must feel for me the sharpest disapproval;
and this censure is conveyed with no
mitigation of phrase or manner.</p>
<p>The charge he elaborates against me is briefly that
I have no judgment, and less candour, in the use of
documents, and have thus produced a mass of mischievous
fiction.</p>
<p>I may say in passing that Mr. Dunlop’s severity
with regard to authorities comes somewhat oddly
from one who has shown himself fairly easy in such
matters. In his own writings he gives no references,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
and in this same article the only authority he quotes
independently is Mr. O’Connor’s <i>Elizabethan Ireland</i>.
When I have to be silenced, “Turn we to Mr.
O’Connor!” Now Mr. O’Connor has written a
slight sketch of Irish political and social life in some
280 pages. He gives no dates, no indications of place,
and no references. But we have Mr. Dunlop’s word
for it that it is a “scholarly” work. “Mr. O’Connor”
quoted by Mr. Dunlop ends controversy. The
tradition is secure. I might envy Mr. Dunlop this
freedom from trammels of references, of date, or of
place. In such wide and impartial survey any statement
about Ireland may appear as true of every place
and of all time. Barbarism would seem to be a fixed
and unchanging state, a passive monotony, from the
time of “Lacustrine habitations” and of “Hesiod
and the old poets,” till its characteristic representative
in Shane O’Neill. The principle once assumed, any
evidence will suffice to show that the Irish had none
of the attributes of ordinary white Europeans; while
evidence that they made money, traded, built houses,
talked Latin, studied medicine and law, or otherwise
behaved like other people of the Middle Ages, is
probably rhodomontade, moonshine, or historical
profligacy.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop’s summary method with unfamiliar
sources appears in his asperity towards what he calls my
“trivial references” to Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady’s
<i>Catalogue of Manuscripts</i>.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>
<p>“We wonder (he says on p. 267) how many of
Mrs. Green’s readers are aware that of this book, from
which she has gleaned so much information—of a sort—only
one copy, so far as we know, is accessible to the
public, and that is in the MSS. Department of the
British Museum. The book, we understand, was
never published. It is still incomplete. The official
copy consists merely of the bound sheets as they were
printed off for proof.”</p>
<p>I suppose Mr. Dunlop does not mean to suggest
that the value of a book is in proportion to the number
of copies, or that an authority of which a single copy
exists should not be quoted. In any case I can reassure
him. The sheets of this <i>Catalogue</i> have been these
many years past for sale to the public at the Museum,
where I got my copy, and I hope many others did the
same. The book can be bought in a London shop
to-day. Mr. Dunlop might consult it in the London
Library. The copy placed in the National Library in
Dublin in 1895 has been in frequent use since then.
Possibly Mr. Dunlop knows the inside of the book
better than the outside, but it seems to be a new
acquaintance, suddenly introduced and viewed with
distaste. In this brilliant <i>Catalogue</i> we have the work
of a very great authority, unsurpassed in his special
learning, far beyond what O’Donovan could lay claim
to; with its “information—of a sort—” it is the most
important book that has appeared for many years with
regard to Irish history. Another critic of Mr. Dunlop’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
school, who in his remarks gives no definite sign of
any knowledge of Mr. O’Grady’s work, has reproached
me for referring to it “without further sifting.” But
it is certain that neither of these writers who reprove
me will themselves do much “further sifting” where
that admirable scholar has gone before them.</p>
<p>May I add that Mr. Dunlop does not appear to
follow too closely modern studies on Irish affairs, or
he would surely have known of Mr. Justice Madden’s
<i>Classical Learning in Ireland</i>, published last summer—a
little book which he should certainly have been
willing to include in any review of recent Irish writings?</p>
<p>To return, however, to my own lamentable want of
candour and accuracy, I now give a few of the instances
of my deficiencies, and of the admirable example which
Mr. Dunlop sets me in these respects.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop states, “to speak accurately,” that my
reference to Shane O’Neill as “done to death” (so
<i>he</i> expresses it) by the English is “absolutely without
foundation.” His own account of Shane’s death in
the <i>Dictionary of National Biography</i> tells us that
“possibly if he could have kept a civil tongue in his
head the MacDonnells might have consented to a reconciliation.”
“It is doubtful whether his assassination
was premeditated ... it is probable that when
heated with wine he may have irritated them by his
insolent behaviour beyond endurance.” In the
<i>Cambridge Modern History</i> (iii. 592), however, Mr.
Dunlop has attained conviction. “In his wine-cups,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>”
he tells us, “he began to brawl, and was literally
hacked in pieces by his enemies.” These and some
other of his suppositions do not appear to agree with
the story in <i>Holinshed</i>, <i>Campion</i>, <i>the Calendar of State
Papers</i>, or the <i>Four Masters</i>. But why does Mr.
Dunlop disagree with Lord Deputy Sidney, the main
mover in the matter? Many efforts, it is well known,
had been made to murder Shane. In 1566 Sidney
sent to Scotland his “man,” the English-Scot Douglas,
who had come to him from Leicester himself. Sidney
gives us the clue to his mission. “I pray you,” he
wrote to Leicester, “let this bringer (Douglas) receive
comfortable words of you. I have found him faithful,
<i>it was he that brought the Scots that killed O’Neill</i>.”
Douglas repeated the boast and prayed a reward from
Cecil. Years later Sidney, being maligned by powerful
enemies at Court, reminded the Queen of his old
services. “And whereas he [O’Neill] looked for
service at their [the Scots] hands against me, <i>for service
of me, they killed him</i>.... But when I came to
the Court,” he added with indignation, “it was told
me it was no war that I had made, nor worthy to be
called a war, for that Shane O’Neill was but a beggar,
an outlaw, and one of no force, and <i>that the Scots
stumbled on him by chance</i>.” Would Mr. Dunlop, as
a means of overthrowing me, join with Sidney’s
enemies to rob him of the deed he boasted of? (<i>Vide</i>
<i>Sid. Let.</i> 12, 34-5; <i>C.S.P.</i> i. 430; <i>Car.</i> ii. 338,
340-1.)</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
<p>I have pained Mr. Dunlop by referring to the hoard
of Con O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, as evidence that
Ulster was not penniless. Mr. Dunlop discovers that
Shane O’Neill “robbed his father” of this store, and
can scarcely believe that I adduce this “robbery” to
prove the wealth of Ulster, and that I use it in connection
with a passage about plunder of Ireland by
English invaders. This hoard occurs in a list of three
pages containing signs of riches in Ireland (pp. 67-69),
a mere glance at which would show the absurdity of
any contention that all the moneys I mention fell into
English hands. As to Con O’Neill’s savings, I see no
objection to an allusion to them as one proof among
others of money and plate in Ulster. I do not know
if Mr. Dunlop means not only to suggest my want of
candour, but also to prove that if Shane “robbed”
his father’s treasure, therefore no English soldiers or
officials robbed any Irish chief of his plate or wealth.</p>
<p>But though in this connection I have really nothing
to do with the ultimate fate of Con’s hoard, I may in
passing compare the Lord Chancellor Cusack’s report
at the time with Mr. Dunlop’s “robbery.” Con
O’Neill was thrown into prison in Dublin in 1552,
and said to be threatened with death. The English
were prepared with an illegitimate successor in Tyrone.
Shane claimed to be his father’s lawful heir, and fought
the English nominee. A garrison of English soldiers was
thrown into Armagh. Beyond the Blackwater Ford,
within a ride of Armagh, lay the chief fort of Tyrone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
on the great hill of Dungannon. Shane, evidently
with the support of his people, “came to Dungannon,”
and took with him “of the chief’s treasure £800 in
gold and silver besides plate and other stuff” [apparently
then not the whole of it, but so much as was
needed for the war at the moment] “and retaineth
the same as yet, whereby it appeareth that he and she
[the Earl and Countess] was content with the same;
for,” said Cusack, “it could not be perceived that they
were greatly offended for the same.” This was how
Shane O’Neill “robbed his father.”</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop quotes a sentence that “Galway ships
sailed to Orkney and to Lübeck,” and gives <i>one</i> only of
my references in the note, which states that a Scottish
ship of Orkney was freighted at Galway for Lisbon.
It is evident that by one of the accidental errors of
transcription, which every writer that ever lived has
sometimes to deplore, I transferred the words, and
<i>Orkney</i> was used where I meant to write <i>Lisbon</i>.
Lübeck is a different matter. Why did Mr. Dunlop
carefully omit the reference in the same note to the
page where I mention goods shipped from Galway to
Lübeck in 1416? Was it a generous effort to make
the error take on a more serious character? Or was
it a common inaccuracy? I may inform him that in
the <i>Hansisches Urkundenbuch</i> further references occur
to Irish cloth at Lübeck, as well as to Irish cloth and
provisions along the Elbe, and that the name he throws
doubt on appears with good reason in my text.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span></p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop also discovers a “most apparent and
painful” instance of my “distorting of evidence” in
my reference (which I did not give as a quotation) to
Limerick merchants appeached of treason for <i>trading</i>
with Irish rebels, when the deputy’s words were
<i>victualling and maintaining</i> (p. 170). Mr. Dunlop
might perhaps himself suspect some barter in the
business when it attracted eight merchants to traffic
in so dangerous an enterprise. But he conveniently
omits the rest of my story, that within a year of the
arrest of the eight merchants the Limerick corporation
prayed to have the city charter confirmed with a special
clause <i>that they might buy and sell with Irishmen at
all times</i>. They seem to have had no objection to trade
with the Irish, which was the only point I had there
to prove. I willingly alter the word that seems to
Mr. Dunlop so painful a distortion of the truth, and
my argument remains unchanged.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop twice condemns me in “the case of
Enniscorthy fair, where the documents referred to
refute the deduction drawn from them.” “We
strongly resent her concealing the fact” that Sidney,
with the Four Masters, deplored the “<i>destruction</i>
(n.b.)” of the fair by the rebellious Butlers at the
instigation of James Fitzmaurice. Why should I not
“conceal facts” I do not know to be true? I
fancy it is better than publishing them. The word
used by the Four Masters, Sidney, and a contemporary
letter given in Hore’s <i>Town of Wexford</i> (175) is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
“spoiling.” Will Mr. Dunlop give his references to
“<i>destruction</i> (n.b.),” and to “the instigation of James
Fitzmaurice”? What is the proof? This day’s raid
was not the first attack on the fair after it had been
granted to English officers charged to execute martial
law on the Wexford Irish. I have not space to tell
the significant circumstances. Mr. Dunlop blames
me for not giving the founder of the fair. “We will
overlook the omission,” he says in his lofty way of
superior erudition and fidelity to facts. This cheap
taunt is surely absolutely unworthy of a writer who
should be aware that no one as yet knows the origin
of the fair. I see no reason against mentioning its
existence, among many others which Mr. Dunlop
neglects, as evidence of trading activity in a region
where Irish law and speech prevailed.</p>
<p>I do not propose to weary the reader by multiplying
instances of this kind. The details of historical controversy
interest few readers. Its personal aspect
should interest none. The instances I have given are
true samples of all the rest. I have gone carefully
through the long indictment, and I note half a dozen
minor points in which I am glad to correct an obvious
misprint or to amend an error (not one of which, I
would say, affects the drift of my argument). But the
great bulk of these criticisms—grave inaccuracies in
themselves, or misstatements of what I say, or dogmatic
assertions which need for their discussion
evidences which there is no attempt to offer—can give<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
me little help. For an example of historical investigation
of medieval Irish history, of serious use of references
and evidences, or of customary fairness in discussion,
I must go elsewhere than to Mr. Dunlop.</p>
<p>With regard to evidence, I am charged with repudiating
the testimony of Spenser, Davies, Fynes
Moryson, Cuellar, Derrick, and official documents that
tell against me. I have drawn very largely from State
Papers and official records of all kinds, sources of information
which have proved invaluable for my
purpose. In the shaking bog of medieval testimony,
some firm standing is to be found in statutes, ordinances,
town records, cartularies, and the like. From
them we rapidly come to more perilous regions—State
Papers and letters—where every document needs to be
considered as a separate “source” to be separately
discussed. Some were written by strangers newly come
to the country—soldiers, secretaries, adventurers,
spies; others by higher officials struggling in an
intricate tangle of intrigues, or by a lower sort trying
to make their way upwards; some by governors zealous
to keep their credit amid the scandal of the Court;
others by governors desperate to recapture a lost
reputation. In the medley of partiality, prejudice,
ignorance, despair, and triumph, every one must judge
to the best of his ability as to the value of the testimony;
there can be no scientific accuracy in the measurement.
There is the same difficulty with the reports of a few
Continental travellers, Italian or Spanish. Historians<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
of Ireland have freely used the evidence of men,
English or European, who came not knowing a word of
the language, who traversed the country more or less
rapidly under official guidance, or in the midst of armies
occupied in a peculiarly ferocious warfare, or who
attempted an uneasy living on the confiscated lands
of the “native” people—men, in fact, who knew
practically nothing but destruction. From the study
of other evidence I have come to think that the view
which has generally been accepted from these gentlemen
is imperfect and often erroneous. They could
know nothing of an earlier time and had but a partial
vision of their own.</p>
<p>Some well-thumbed later authorities have been
found to give no trustworthy guidance for medieval
Ireland, and they do not appear in that customary
place of authority which had become their recognised
privilege; on the other hand, some entirely new
authorities have been called in and some have lain
unused.</p>
<p>Among the writers I am accused of neglecting is
Captain Cuellar, a Spaniard from the Armada, knowing
no Irish, flying for his life, sometimes among people
who had no good reputation with the Irish themselves,
hiding himself in the wildest and most secret haunts
of districts swept and wasted from end to end by
English soldiers—I do not know why such an experience
should be quoted as a fair record of ordinary
Irish life in the plains, in times of peace, and among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
the richer and more settled clans. Mr. Orpen, in the
<i>English Historical Review</i>, has extracted from this little
record every damaging phrase to the Irish to be found
in it and omitted every favourable one. Does he
wonder why I have not done the like? I have not
done it because I do not think it fair dealing or honest
history to state as evidence against the Irish that
Cuellar was “robbed of all he possessed, stripped naked,
beaten, and forced by a blacksmith to work”; and not
to mention that the robbing and beating was the work
of English troops and mercenaries from Scotland;
that the week he spent at the blacksmith’s forge was
the solitary unkindness he suffered from any native
Irishman in his seven months’ wandering; that the
moment an Irish chief heard of his misfortune he sent
to take him to his own house; that in that seven
months of journeyings in the wilds, from the day when
cast on a Connacht beach, he was hidden in pity by
gallow-glasses till the day when men of Ulster secured
his escape across the sea, he was continually succoured
by young and old, men and women, clerics and laymen,
who pitied him, wept at his sufferings, showed him
every hospitality and kindness, and guided him from
shelter to shelter to hide him from the English. By
what strange tradition, by what long prejudice is this
perversion of evidence fabricated and admitted?</p>
<p>Besides English and Spanish testimony we have also
some from the Irish themselves. Among Irish witnesses
the great Galway scholar Dr. Lynch, writer of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
<i>Cambrensis Eversus</i>, stands high; no student can afford
to neglect editions and translations made by Mr.
Whitley Stokes and Professor Kuno Meyer in this
country, and by Continental scholars; the translations
of Dr. Douglas Hyde; the work of Dr. Norman Moore
in the <i>Dictionary of National Biography</i> and elsewhere;
or the collection of criticisms, translations, and summaries
that make up the invaluable <i>Catalogue of
Manuscripts</i> in the British Museum by Mr. S. H.
O’Grady.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop does not like poets. “Surely she must
know that the very stock-in-trade of a poet is pure
moonshine,” he avers. However that may be, I may
say that Mr. O’Grady’s <i>Catalogue</i> contains a great deal
that is not poetry. “Must we remind her,” says Mr.
Dunlop with the loftiest severity, “that bard and
annalist were often the same individual?” The
<i>Catalogue</i> would explain to him how impossible would
be such a conception to the Irish world, where a bard
was a mere natural poet who had not studied in the
schools. Will Mr. Dunlop give one single instance of
this frequent fact? A quotation from a blind poet
peculiarly awakens his contempt, as he refers to it
twice, repeating here the criticism of another writer
of his school. Teigue Dall O’Higgin was a man of great
eminence in his day; and I see no reason to believe
that a blind man necessarily takes leave of <i>all</i> his senses.
I have no doubt that Teigue was at home in all the
gossip of Enniskillen, and that he could distinguish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
between the sounds of a smith’s shop, or of women
talking over their embroidery, and of men bringing
boats to the shore. Other references to Fermanagh
which I have given in my book, and indications in the
English wars of the importance of water carriage on the
lake, bear out the story of Teigue the Blind. He
was right about the “blue hills.”</p>
<p>If Mr. Dunlop accuses me of a “partiality for
native records” with all their “rhetorical rhodomontade,”
I frankly confess to a regard for the opinion of
people who belong to a country and speak its tongue.
I suppose that contemporary Irish witnesses, even the
<i>Four Masters</i>, may be used with the same authority
and the same limitations as English; nor do I know
why the opinion of any stray traveller or minor official
from over-sea, intent only on furthering his interests,
is to be accepted without question, while the word of a
deeply learned Anglo-Irish scholar of Galway, or of
an eminent Irish poet who had visited every province
of Ireland, is to be wholly suspect. I will give an
illustration by recalling the case of Sir John Davies and
of Dr. Lynch. To Mr. Dunlop the brief writings of
Davies represent a very high authority, while the
<i>Cambrensis Eversus</i> of Lynch is dismissed in one word
as a “political pamphlet.” He does not apparently
think Davies had any political leanings. We usually
think people impartial who hold our own opinions.</p>
<p>In my book I have given definite reasons for thinking
that Davies’ acquaintance with Irish affairs was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
inadequate—in a short residence in the country of
which he did not know the language, the law, or the
history. My own judgment is that considering his
imperfect means of knowledge, and his very strong bias
of prejudice, his statements about Ireland before his
coming there have no particular sanctity, and need to
be tested and corroborated like those of any other
writer. That he is sometimes at fault even a believer
such as Mr. Dunlop seems in a hidden way to admit.
Suggesting that my references to the cloth trade are
not so novel as unwary readers might think, “the
excellent quality of Irish wool,” says Mr. Dunlop, “is
one of the best attested facts in Irish commercial
history.” Then why has Mr. Dunlop until this
moment excluded any slightest mention of wool in his
summary of Irish trade? Was it too well known?
Or was it because of the saying of Sir John Davies—“for
wool and wool-felts were ever of little value in
this kingdom?” We are here shut into a denial of the
well-attested commerce in wool, or to a doubt of the
sufficiency of Sir John Davies as a witness; and we are
left without guidance by Mr. Dunlop. On the whole,
it seems judicious to depend on Davies’ evidence only
for the things that lay within his immediate and direct
observation. His opinion on all that he himself saw
is worthy of respect, and we may admit the sound
legal maxim that a man’s evidence can always be
accepted when it is given against himself.</p>
<p>The same distinction may surely be drawn in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
case of Dr. Lynch. Davies was a man of English and
Latin learning, Lynch a man of Irish and Latin
learning. The historical criticism of their day was
not perfect in either country, and as Davies leant to
the English side of prejudice, Lynch leant to the Irish.
But Lynch, like Davies, was I believe a just reporter
of what he had himself seen or had heard from firsthand
witnesses. And I have therefore quoted him, as
I have Davies, for what had come within the range
of his personal knowledge, not for matters of historical
research. His testimony is of extraordinary and
pathetic interest. Born in Galway in the last years
of Elizabeth, when the city still preserved its old culture
and the remnants of its old wealth, Lynch was one of
the last scholars who ever saw and knew the Anglo-Irish
civilisation. It is not any single picture that he gives
that is important; it is the host of scattered and chance
allusions, as to things well known to every Irishman in
his day, which reveal to us the society in which he had
been brought up. It is touching to remember that
he was the last to say a good word for the medieval
civilisation. After his death a darkness and silence of
hundreds of years fell over that story, and it is across
nearly three centuries that Irishmen will now have to
take hands with Lynch and carry on his justification
of the Ireland which was being gradually built up by
the work of Gaels, Danes, Normans, and English in
their common country.</p>
<p>This, however, is just what Mr. Dunlop denies. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
“begs leave to doubt” that the “native Irish” in the
fifteenth century developed the resources of the
country. By omitting all contemporary references to
timber, to leather, and to salmon, of course it can be
said there was no medieval trade in these. The plan
seems unsatisfactory, and I have not followed it. Mr.
Dunlop, for example, blames me for not quoting an
English poem (no pure moonshine here—perhaps a
farthing dip) which does not mention leather, as proof
that there was no leather trade. I have quoted the
<i>Libel</i> elsewhere, but on this point I preferred the
direct evidence of the records of the Bruges Staple;
and I have since added notices in the <i>Hansisches
Urkundenbuch</i> for leather sent in 1304, 1327, 1453 to
Bruges, Dinant, and Portugal. I would ask which is
the historical method: to close the question once for
all with the negative silence of an anonymous English
writer “whom we think,” says Mr. Dunlop, in one of
his easy moods about evidence, “had a pretty accurate
notion of what constituted Irish commerce”; or to
pursue enquiry in business records of the ports and
seek to ascertain the exact facts.</p>
<p>The art of making linen was known, according to
Mr. Dunlop, to the “native Irish, as it is to most
primitive races.” But what they made in Ireland was
“of a very coarse kind, and its use was practically
restricted to the wealthier class—viz., the merchants
of the towns.” What is his proof for all this? Was
it the town merchants that Campion describes wearing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
linen shirts for wantonness and bravery, “thirty yards
are little enough for one of them”? What about the
great linen rolls on the Irishwomen’s heads, and (is
the inference too romantic?) perhaps on their bodies
also? What about the fine linen in which the Galway
women wrapped the Spanish hanged after the Armada?
When I read of 6000 bales of linen cloth sent from
Galway to Genoa in 1492, or of 4000 linen cloths
mentioned in 1499 in another Galway merchant’s will,
or of the “sardok” of mixed woollen and linen in the
Netherland markets in 1353, or of Henry the Eighth
forbidding Galway any more to export linen, the
records of the time seem to conflict with the opinions
which Mr. Dunlop “begs leave” to hold.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop now admits for the first time some trade
in cloth, but with a stipulation of his own that it was
all made by Englishmen. He does not trouble to
consider such a clue as we find in the State Papers of
Galway merchants carrying their wine into the country
to exchange among other things for cloth. He has his
own theory; “it is pretty clear from such expressions
as Limerick cloak, Galway mantle, Waterford rug, that
the centres of the cloth industry lay within the sphere
of English influence”; the participation of the Irish
was excluded by severe guild regulations, and “it may
not be unfair to infer that the reputation acquired
abroad by Ireland in regard to its serges was not due
to the industry of its native population.” This
insinuating hypothesis is a flaming fact on the next<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
page, where it appears the “native Irish” (no inferring
here to dull the conclusion) “took no part in the
commercial development of their country, leaving it to
the stranger within their gate, and thereby earning
from the latter the reproach of idleness.” If there were,
as Mr. Dunlop “prefers to think,” some loyal Irishmen
who preferred English civilisation and the chances it
offered them of pushing their way in life to their native
customs, he states that the presence even of such loyal
Irishmen “was not always welcome to citizens of
English blood.” Thus the English of the towns must
have toiled day and night to supply the mantles which
the English Government forbade to loyal people, and
to provide cloaks and cloth for the foreign trade, since
in their incessant struggle to preserve themselves intact
from Celtic influences they refused the aid of Irish
hands to work for them. It is an idyllic picture of
high purpose and endeavour, of the way to develop a
country, and to make an empire.</p>
<p>We are not, however, shut up to this series of
hypotheses. The town records themselves and English
State Papers, as I have shown, give sufficient proof that
the “native population” were not, in fact, rejected
from the town industries. Mr. Dunlop denies this;
he thinks the towns remained pure English. He is
sure that all the Galway people shaved their upper lip
weekly. Henry the Eighth was not so sure of it when,
in 1536, he sent orders from Westminster to Galway
men to shave themselves aright. When Mr. Dunlop,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
to prove that the Galway citizens consistently desired
to keep themselves free from Irish customs, quotes
laws against Irish games and keening, he quotes them
without date. My contention is that, if it was necessary
<i>as late as 1527 and 1625</i> to enact these laws, this, with
a number of other indications that I have mentioned,
shows that the citizens’ “desire” was not very effective,
and that there was an Irish population ready to push
its way in trade, but not anxious to drop “their
native customs.” No doubt the extent to which Irish
names were changed must be conjectural; but there is
evidence that such change did take place. My suggestion
that “White” may indicate an Irish house gives
Mr. Dunlop an opportunity to parade his knowledge
of Gaelic. He informs me, on the authority of
O’Donovan, that there is no such Gaelic name as <i>Geal</i>
and imagines that settles the matter. He has never,
then, heard of the name <i>Fionn</i>, which has been
anglicised by “White” for centuries, just as a well-known
Scotch writer of our day calls himself Henry
White or Fionn indifferently.</p>
<p>As for intellectual culture, Mr. Dunlop is brevity
itself. He has scarce a page for that chimera. The
Irish were barbarous and the Anglo-Normans contaminated.
His method is summary. The evidence
of Mr. Whitley Stokes, of Dr. Norman Moore, of Mr.
S. H. O’Grady, of Dr. Kuno Meyer has too little
importance with him to be mentioned, and he can
thus more easily avoid all proof of Irish scientific skill<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
in medicine, or of the admirable quality of their
translations from the Latin. He necessarily omits all
mention of the many Irish scholars on the Continent,
for has he not himself told us only one Irish chieftain
made the perilous journey to Rome and back? He
has no reference to buildings or arts which indicate the
intercourse of Irish chiefs with the Continent. He is
silent on the schools from which Irishmen were able to
pass to foreign universities. He seems not to have
heard of evidence of Latin culture collected by Mr.
Justice Madden. And most wonderful to say, he
seems entirely unaware of the importance of the list
I have published, for the first time (by the generous
kindness of a great scholar), of Irish translations of
Continental works. Perhaps he felt himself anticipated
by the conclusive comment I saw from a dashing
newspaper critic, that “the Irish evidently satisfied
themselves with translations!” In any case, he never
hints at this list or its value as evidence. So astonishing
a neglect of the greater matters of evidence, while
every detail that could by any means discredit me is
searched out, is surely a grave abuse of the historical
method. In the matter of culture Mr. Dunlop
confines himself with a singular restraint to a single
topic—the list of Irishmen at Oxford. In this he counts
many Anglo-Norman and only seventeen Gaelic names,
and this solitary fact is enough to make him astonished
that I “did not recognise how utterly untenable is
her theory of the absorption of Anglo-Irish culture by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
the native Irish.” Those readers who will turn to the
chapters on Irish learning in my book will perhaps be
astonished not at the theory that there was culture in
Ireland, but at the travesty of that theory and the
suppression of evidence which serves as historical
criticism for Mr. Dunlop.</p>
<p>Mr. Dunlop meets with a direct negative my statement
that Sussex and Sidney carried off in their train
every notable chief’s son they could lay hands on, but
he gives no more than his own authority. My statement
is perhaps too comprehensive, but I have given
numerous instances (pp. 425-437) to show that the
method certainly used by Sussex and Sidney, so far as
they could, was steadily increased and extended in
proportion as the English power gradually spread over
one Irish region after another. The English took
over the Irish system of hostages, but they developed
it in a new way. The Catholic chief’s son was brought
up in London as a Protestant, in English law and
language and tradition, with the avowed purpose of
spiritually severing him from his people, and leaving
the clan without a natural leader or defender in the
national conflict; their chiefs, in fact, were to be made
the very instruments for dividing and subjugating
their own people. In the words I quoted, it was a
method which “not only rent asunder the bonds of
national loyalty and of natural affection, but which
forced parent and child alike to believe that in this
world and in the world to come they were divided by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
an impassable abyss.” Surely there is no likeness in
this deliberate plan to the Irish chief’s use of his
hostage; it was, indeed, practised with consummate
art by Turkey.</p>
<p>In this article Mr. Dunlop proposed to prove two
facts: first, that Celtic civilisation is largely a figment
of my imagination; and, secondly, that far from
composing one nation, the English element in Ireland
was proud of its origin, and struggled incessantly to
preserve itself intact from Celtic influence. One part
of his plan is destructive, and the second constructive.
Unfortunately the work of destruction has proved so
alluring that the constructive scheme is abandoned.
As to the value of the destructive work, I contend that
Mr. Dunlop’s criticisms are not so historically accurate,
so reasonable, or so candid, that they can serve for
correction or instruction. I contend further that even
on the generous assumption that the whole of Mr.
Dunlop’s criticisms might happen to be valid, there
would still remain untouched the main body of my
evidence and the whole current of my argument.
And I confidently believe that the history of Ireland
will be re-written on truer lines and surer foundations
than those sketched out in the <i>Cambridge Modern
History</i> and the <i>Quarterly Review</i>. But perhaps Mr.
Dunlop will go farther. It would be pleasant to hear,
in more detail, his views on “the Iberian element
in the nation.”</p>
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