A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  Patrick was not yet sixteen when he was seized by Irish pirates from Bannaventum Taburniae, a Romanised town somewhere in western Britain. Once in Ireland, he was sold as a slave and taken 200,000 paces—that is, 200 miles—westwards, probably to Tirawley in north Co. Mayo. There he herded sheep and cattle for six years. In his extreme loneliness he turned to God for comfort:

  The love of God and the fear of Him came to me more and more, and my faith increased, and my spirit was stirred, so that in one day I used to say up to a hundred prayers and at night as many, and I stayed in the forests and on the mountains, and before daylight I used to be roused to prayer in snow and frost and rain.

  One night, Patrick tells us, he heard a voice bidding him to return to his fatherland. A ship was waiting for him, he was told. Not doubting that this was God speaking to him, Patrick obeyed and fled his master. For two hundred miles he trudged alone along the cattle tracks until he came to the Irish Sea, where, indeed, a ship was making ready to sail. After much persuasion, the captain agreed to take him. Once across the sea, Patrick walked with the ship’s crew through dense, uninhabited forests. Angry and disappointed at not finding anyone to trade with or to rob, the captain turned to Patrick:

  You say your God is great and all powerful, so why can’t you pray for us, for we are in danger from hunger, so that it is going to be hard for us to see any other man again.

  Patrick replied:

  Turn from your own faith with your whole heart to my Lord God, for nothing is impossible to him, so that today he will send you food on your journey until you are satisfied.

  Shortly afterwards a herd of wild pigs appeared and some were killed by the sailors—just in time for many of them had collapsed from hunger.

  Somehow Patrick found his home again. His parents joyfully embraced their long-lost son and pleaded with him not to leave them again. But Patrick could not forget the land which had enslaved him. One night in a dream Patrick tells us that he saw a man coming from Ireland with many letters. One he handed to Patrick entitled Vox Hiberniae, the Voice of the Irish. As he began to read he seemed to hear the people he had known in Ireland calling with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk among us once again.’ Many years later Patrick could still recall: ‘It completely broke my heart, and I could read no more and woke up.’ Patrick had no doubt now what he should do: he must return to Ireland and preach the Gospel there.

  Episode 12

  THE EARLY IRISH CHURCH

  Assailed though they were by heathens from all sides, the Romanised Britons managed for long to maintain a vigorously evangelical church. And it was this church that clearly gave Patrick full support for his determination to bring Christianity to the Irish. He returned to his studies, somewhat embarrassed at the poor quality of his Latin as he sat as a mature student in classes with much younger boys—‘I have not studied like the others,’ he wrote, admitting that his Latin was always simple and cumbersome. He took holy orders, was appointed Bishop of the Irish by the British church, and returned to Ireland.

  Patrick’s very humility frustrates the inquiry of historians: his writings give no clues about the location of his British home, or when he came back to Ireland, or where he preached. It is quite clear that he preached to Irish people who knew nothing of Christianity. It is likely that he carried out his work mainly in the northern half of Ireland, for it is there that places traditionally associated with him are located, including Armagh, Templepatrick, Saul, Downpatrick, Lough Derg and Croagh Patrick. The new religion was particularly successful among the ruling class, and early churches tended to be located close to royal sites—Armagh, for example, was within sight of the capital of the kingdom of Ulster, Emain Macha. Of course, conversion was not instantaneous, and old beliefs and traditions survived for centuries after Patrick’s time. Patrick expressed delight at the success of his mission: ‘I cannot be silent about the great benefits and the great grace which the Lord has deigned to bestow upon me in the land of captivity.’

  Though there were later stories told about Patrick’s contests with druids, there is no record of anyone being martyred for acceptance of Christianity, except when a British prince made an assault on an Irish Christian community. In his ‘Letter against Coroticus’ Patrick expressed his anger and grief that British Christians could slay his Irish converts. They were

  newly baptised, in their white clothing—the oil still shining on their heads—cruelly butchered and slaughtered by the sword.... Greedy wolves, they have glutted themselves with the congregation of the Lord, which indeed was increasing splendidly in Ireland, with the closest care, and made up of the sons of Irish raiders and the daughters of kings who had become monks and virgins of Christ—I cannot say how many! So may the wrong done not please you! And even into Hell may it give you no pleasure!

  Early native tradition firmly establishes Patrick as Ireland’s apostle. The Annals of Ulster state that Patrick died on 17 March 492 in the 120th year of his age. This need not be taken seriously, and, indeed, his mission cannot be confidently dated: it was probably some time in the middle or late fifth century.

  Patrick seems to have established a church along the lines of that which prevailed in the western Roman Empire in his final years. In other words, there were churches with parishes grouped together in dioceses ruled by bishops and with boundaries similar to those of Irish kingdoms of the time. Ireland, however, had no towns to form the centre of parishes and no cities capable of being capitals of dioceses. Fairly soon after Patrick’s death monasteries became the favoured type of Christian community in Ireland. Much of the inspiration came from the flourishing Coptic Christian monasteries which flourished in north Africa. Here men like St Anthony cut themselves off from the temptations of the cities and settled in desert valleys and barren mountains.

  The earliest monastic foundations in Ireland were established by Finian at Clonard and Ciarán at Clonmacnoise in the early sixth century, though most members of both these communities were wiped out by plague in 548 and 549. Local kings vied with one another to be patrons of monasteries, and their founders became revered for centuries to come. Their forebears had cast precious objects into sacred pools; now they made grants of land to monasteries. Some monasteries soon became the nearest equivalent Ireland had to towns, with substantial populations, thriving markets, schools and even prisons. The management of them usually passed to hereditary lay abbots, and some became so worldly that they even went to war with one another—two hundred were killed in 760 in a battle between the monasteries of Birr and Clonmacnoise.

  The best-known Irish monasteries, however, became celebrated for their strict discipline and asceticism. These included those set up by the Céli Dé (the ‘Vassals of God’), who strictly observed canonical hours, with two monks remaining in church all night between the offices keeping up a round of prayer. They were advised to ‘bestow no friendship or confidence on womankind’, and no travel, work or food preparation was permitted on the Sabbath.

  Whether they were worldly or ascetic, Irish monasteries became famous centres of scholarship. Even though Ireland had never been a Roman province and Latin was for everyone there a foreign language, Irish monasteries played a pivotal role in preserving and celebrating the civilisation of the classical world now overwhelmed by Germanic conquerors from the north.

  Episode 13

  A LAND OF MANY KINGS

  Many Irish people claim to be descended from kings. It is not altogether preposterous. From the beginning of the Christian era to the coming of the Normans in the twelfth century there were probably no fewer than 150 kings in Ireland at any given date—a remarkably high number when the population was probably no more than half a million.

  Each king ruled over a tribal kingdom, a population group which formed a distinct political entity known as a tuath, which literally means a people. According to the law tracts, there were three grades of kings: rí tuaithe, king of a tuath; ruirí, king over several petty kingdoms; and rí ruirech, king o
f a province.

  Irish people were intensely conscious of status, and family trees were carefully memorised and recorded. The family group containing those who were rígdamnaí, literally ‘king-material’, was limited to the derbfine, which means ‘certain family’; even so, this was a very large group which included first cousins and extended over four generations. Succession was further complicated by the fact that Irish kings usually had more than one wife, and right into the late sixteenth century they often practised what could be described as serial monogamy—sending one wife back to her father after a few years and taking on another. The last High-King of Ireland, Rory O’Connor, had six wives, and Hugh O’Neill, the last Earl of Tyrone, had five. Even with high levels of infant mortality, this meant that, on the death of a king, fierce succession disputes could ensue. As a result, many ruling families attempted to reduce the possibility of such disputes by appointing a tánaiste, a word meaning ‘second’ or ‘expected heir’. An eighth-century tract asks: ‘Tánaiste of a king, why is he so called? Because the whole tuath looks to him for kingship without strife.’

  The reality was that in any kingdom a man might make himself king so long as he was popular enough and powerful enough to do so. Certainly dynasties were constantly rising and falling. Ruling families usually named themselves after an ancestor, real or imagined. In Connacht, for example, in the eighth century the dominant rulers were the Uí Fiachrach, ‘descendants of Fiacra’. Over time this family split into two groups fighting each other for supremacy, one based around the River Moy and the other in the south of the province. Then they were challenged by another dynasty, the Uí Briúin of Roscommon. After triumphing, the Uí Briúin split into several branches: the ancestors of the O’Flahertys of Lough Corrib and Connemara, the O’Rourkes of Bréifne in Leitrim and Cavan, and the O’Connors of Roscommon who by the twelfth century were rulers of Connacht and supplied the last high-king.

  Once a king was chosen by the high-born, he was not crowned but inaugurated in a ceremony usually held on an ancient Neolithic or Bronze Age site, such as Tara in Meath or Carnfree in Roscommon. The site had to include a special slab or flagstone (such as the Scottish Stone of Scone) and a sacred tree or doire, a grove of oak trees, which appears in many placids—for example, Derrygonnelly in Co. Fermanagh, means the ‘oak grove of the O’Connollys’ and was an inauguration site. In pre-Christian times the king was the priest of his people, and the inauguration was a kind of marriage between him and the kingdom, which was considered female. Indeed, the word feis, which now means a feast or festival, used to mean a marriage. In the twelfth century Gerald of Wales enjoyed horrifying his readers with descriptions of the barbarities of the Irish. In his Topography he gives an account of an inauguration ceremony of the O’Donnell kings in Donegal:

  A white mare is brought forward into the middle of the assembly. He who is to be inaugurated embraces the animal before all, professing himself to be a beast also. The mare is then killed immediately, cut up in pieces, and boiled in water. A bath is prepared for the man afterwards in the same water. He sits in the bath surrounded by all his people and quaffs and drinks of the water in which he is bathed dipping his mouth into it. When this unrighteous rite has been carried out, his kingship has been conferred.

  This may not have been pure invention: similar rites are recorded in other parts of the Indo-European world, and bathing in broth with miraculous results is described in ‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’. Other descriptions of inauguration ceremonies involve the handing of a hazel wand to the king by a leading chieftain, often from an ousted dynasty, the procession of clergy and nobles carrying holy relics round the king in circular motion, and the ceremonial fitting of a shoe. The climax was the recitation of a poem in praise of the new monarch composed by a revered member of society, the file, or poet.

  Episode 14

  POETS, JUDGES, NOBLES, THE FREE AND THE UNFREE

  Equal in status to the warrior nobility were the filí, the poets. These in pagan times had been druids, and, even long after the introduction of Christianity, they were credited with supernatural powers of divination. The honour of a king or nobleman could be destroyed by the satire of a poet, and this was much feared. Failure to pay him properly for a poem might produce a satire in response, and in the old Irish tales such a satire could bring the victim’s face up in blisters. The poet had to master the craft of poetry, praise his patron and be learned in history and literature. He was honoured and feared like the brahmin at the other end of the Indo-European world.

  Poets were members of a highly privileged caste known as the áes dána, the ‘men of art’, which also included judges, jurists, bards, metalworkers and genealogists. They preserved the vernacular lore and, with the introduction of writing, were able to enrich it with the new Latin learning. They surrendered their most obvious pagan functions with the arrival of Christianity, but survived remarkably well until the overthrow of the Gaelic order in the seventeenth century.

  Much of what we know about early Christian Irish society is derived from the Brehon Laws, a name derived from the brithemain, a word meaning ‘judges’. Most of them are contained in a lawbook called Senchas Már, loosely translated as ‘the great collection of ancient tradition’. Compiled in the seventh century, these laws show that the Irish were obsessed by status. Everyone had their enech, or ‘honour-price’, which, since the Irish had no currency, was calculated in cattle. The lowest was a sét, equal to a heifer; a cumal equalled seven milch cows; and the honour-price of a king of a tuath was seven cumals—the price that would have to be paid to the family of a king if he was gravely wronged. Failure to abide by a legal judgment, for example if a debt had not been paid, could be advertised by the victim going on hunger-strike outside the wrongdoer’s door, and this disgrace might lead to the loss of an honour-price. It was laid down:

  He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all. He who disregards all things is paid neither by God nor man.

  The status of noblemen depended on the number of clients they could maintain, in addition to lands and property. They formed the warrior class, travelling to the battlefield on horseback or by chariot. Conflicts in early Christian Ireland were numerous, but most of the lower classes were exempt from them, though they might face ruin and death following cattle-raids.

  It was the custom of kings and nobles to send their children to be fostered by others, partly to promote good relations with neighbours. Girls were sent away between the ages of seven and fourteen, and boys between seven and seventeen. They called their foster-parents aite and muime, which can be exactly translated as ‘daddy’ and ‘mammy’ and which illustrates the powerful bond that existed between foster-parents and their charges.

  The advent of Christianity notwithstanding, the Brehon Laws fully recognised relationships which were strongly disapproved of by the church. Divorce could be obtained with relative ease, and elaborate laws were set out on how the property of the divorced should be divided. It was much more difficult for women to cast aside their husbands, and if they left without good cause, they lost all rights in society. It was much easier for men: the laws not only permitted regular marriage but also less formal unions and the use of concubines. Boys born of concubines made no demands on property and could become loyal servants and fighting-men. Using the Old Testament as justification, more than one wife was permitted. Wives could be passed on from one husband to the next. The famous Gormlaith was first the wife of Olaf, King of Dublin, then of Malachy, King of Meath, then of Brian Boru, and was later offered to Sigurd the Fat of the Orkneys.

  Below the nemed, the ‘sacred’ classes of kings, men of the arts and the nobility, were the sóer, the ‘free’ who were high-ranking commoners, and the dóer, the unfree, who were utterly dependent on those above them for access to land. Manual labour was despised by the aristocracy—a king could lose his honour-price if seen with an axe or a spade—and so the functioning of the economy depended heavily on farmers with many obligations.
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  Episode 15

  HOMESTEADS AND CRANNOGS

  In modern Irish baile means a town, but in earlier times this word, which has left its mark on so many of our placids, and is anglicised as ‘bally’, simply meant a settlement. In fact, until the coming of the Vikings, there were no towns in Ireland at all. The settlement pattern was entirely dispersed and rural, and the economy depended almost entirely on farming.

  Around 45,000 remains of ringforts have been identified in Ireland. Strictly speaking, these were not forts but circular enclosed homesteads of varying size. In rocky or mountainous areas, where the fort was known as a caiseal or cathair, the wall was made of unmortared stone without a surrounding ditch. The word ráth referred to a ringfort with an earthen bank—and occasionally two or three—surrounded by a ditch, and the term lios was applied to the enclosed space inside. These elements appear in placids in their tens of thousands:

  Cahersiveen: ‘little Saibh’s fort’; Caherdaniel: ‘Donal’s fort’; Cahermore: ‘big fort’; and there are places called Caher or Cahir in the counties of Tipperary, Clare and Cork.

  Cashelreagh: ‘grey fort’; Moygashel: ‘fort of the plain’; Cashelbane: ‘white fort’; Cashleen: ‘little fort’; and there dozens of places simply called Cashel, in, for example, the counties of Donegal, Tipperary, Londonderry, Down, Carlow and Laois.

  Rathdrum: ‘hill fort’; Rathfriland: ‘Fraoile’s fort’; Rathglass: ‘green fort’; Rathcoole: ‘Cumhal’s fort’; Rathlin O’Birne: ‘O’Byrne’s little fort’; and Rathmore, meaning ‘large fort’, is found in several counties including Antrim, Meath, Tyrone, Limerick, Kerry and Kildare.