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

  The greatest Irish monasteries developed into sophisticated communities served by, among others, specialist craftsmen. These men produced superlative metalwork of extraordinary refinement and delicacy. These were liturgical vessels and reliquaries, that is, containers for holy bells, bishops’ staffs and a wide range of saints’ relics. These include the Ardagh Chalice, the Cross of Cong and, found as recently as 1980, the altar service found at Derrynaflan in Co. Tipperary, including an outstandingly beautiful chalice.

  The most distinctive reminders of early Christian Ireland are the high crosses characterised by a ring of stone that connects the arms to the upright. Erected in the precincts of monasteries, they depicted not only the crucifixion but also a wide range of scenes illustrating episodes from the Old and New Testaments. The one at Kells, Co. Meath, may have been put up to give thanks for the safe transfer to that site of the monastic community of Iona, which had fallen prey to Viking attack.

  Episode 19

  ST COLUMBA, ST COLUMBANUS AND THE WANDERING IRISH

  It was from the little kingdom of Dál Riata in the extreme north-east of Ireland that the Gaelic colonisation of Scotland began towards the end of the fifth century. Argyll means ‘eastern province of the Gael’, and it was here that the first settlements were made. For more than a century territory on both sides of the Straits of Moyle—the North Channel—formed one kingdom ruled by a dynasty tracing ancestry from Fergus Mór mac Erc. By the middle of the sixth century Bruide, King of the Picts, threatened to overwhelm the Irish interlopers, and so Dál Riata turned for help to the Northern Uí Néill, the most powerful dynastic group in northern Ireland. The necessary pact was sealed at Druim Ceit at Mullagh near Derry in 575.

  The man who negotiated this alliance was an Uí Néill prince and a renowned churchman, Columcille, St Columba. Born at Gartan in Donegal, Columba studied under Finnian at Moville in Co. Down and at Clonard on the Boyne and returned to build his own monastery at Derry in 546. The high-born Columba could draw on impressive resources. In addition, the Dál Riata king, Aedán mac Gabráin, granted Columba the island of Iona off the west of Scotland for a new foundation. For the next two centuries and longer Iona was to be the most famous centre of Christian learning in the Celtic world. A poem attributed to Columba illustrates his devotion to scholarship:

  I send my little pen dripping unceasingly

  Over an assemblage of books of great beauty,

  To enrich the possessions of men of art—

  Whence my hand is weary with writing.

  It was in Iona that King Oswald, the Anglo-Saxon King of Northumbria, took refuge during a challenge to his power. Travelling from the island by currach and by foot, St Aidan converted the king, began the evangelisation of his people, and established a celebrated monastery on Lindisfarne.

  Some Irish monks simply put out to sea and let the wind take them away. This is how the Irish came to be the very first humans to set foot in Iceland. One monk there, describing the midnight sun, reported that it was so bright he could see the lice on his hair-shirt.

  As a centre of learning and Christian zeal, Bangor in north Down rivalled Iona. Its founder Comgall seems to have worked with Columba. The ‘Good Rule of Bangor’ included these words:

  Blessed family of Bangor, founded on unerring faith, adorned with salvation’s hope, perfect in charity. Ship never distressed though beaten by waves; fully prepared for nuptials, spouse for the sovereign Lord. House full of delicious things and built on a rock; and no less the true vine brought out of Egypt’s land.

  The text of the ‘Good Rule’ is not to be found in Ireland, but in Milan—evidence that the great Irish mission to the European mainland had begun.

  Towards the end of the sixth century, by the ruined Roman fort of Annegray in the Vosges mountains, Irish pilgrims halted after travelling more than nine hundred miles from Bangor. Here, under the direction of their leader, Columbanus, they built three monasteries

  In his forthright condemnation of the worldliness of the Frankish church, Columbanus aroused the hostility of Theoderic, King of Burgundy. Forced to move on, the Irish monks struck overland to the Rhine, where they made their way upstream. This inspired Columbanus to write his ‘boat song’:

  Lo, little bark on twin-horned Rhine

  From forests hewn to skim the brine.

  Heave, lads, and let the echoes ring.

  The tempests howl, the storms dismay,

  But manly strength can win the day

  Heave, lads, and let the echoes ring.

  The king of virtues vowed a prize

  For him who wins, for him who tries.

  Think, lads, of Christ and echo him.

  When they reached Lake Constance, they preached to Germans, who had not heard the Gospel before, and founded a monastery at Bregenz. The restless Columbanus was eager to travel on, but Gall, one of the Bangor monks, stayed to become the local patron saint—a church, a town and a canton in Switzerland are called St Gallen to this day. Columbanus pressed on to northern Italy to found another monastery at Bobbio, where his tomb can still be seen. He inspired a great flood of Irish pilgrims and scholars to make their way to the European mainland in the decades to come.

  Episode 20

  THE COMING OF THE VIKINGS

  For almost a thousand years, unlike almost every other part of Europe, Ireland was free from large-scale invasion. Then, in the year 795, Rathlin Island was attacked. Within the next few years a succession of undefended monasteries along the coast fell victim to Viking raids.

  There was an astonishing and awfully great oppression over all Erinn, throughout its breadth, by powerful azure Norsemen, and by fierce hard-hearted Danes, during a lengthened period, and for a long time, for the space of eight score and ten years, or, according to some authorities, two hundred years.

  So wrote the author of Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (‘Wars of the Irish with the Foreigners’) at the beginning of his long history of the impact of the Viking raids on his country. So frequent and devastating were the assaults that one monk wrote in the margin of his manuscript a poem in thanks for the storm raging outside:

  Fierce and wild is the wind tonight,

  It tosses the tresses of the sea to white;

  On such a night I take my ease;

  Fierce Northmen only course the quiet seas.

  Once the Frankish emperor Charlemagne had broken up the fleets of Frisian pirates in the North Sea, nothing formidable stood in the way of the Vikings, leaving them masters of the north Atlantic. Their longships, some over seventy feet long, were well designed to cope with the hazards of the ocean: built of seasoned overlapping oak planks, riveted with iron, and bound to the ribs with tough pine roots, their hulls could not only flex to the swell but also, with their shallow draught, negotiate treacherous mud banks at the mouths of rivers. Churches and monasteries suffered most in the early attacks, the raiders being attracted to them not only by precious liturgical vessels and reliquaries but also by their rich stores of butter and corn. Since the records were written by monks, the Northmen were viewed as black-hearted barbarians by the chroniclers:

  In a word, although there were an hundred hard-steeled iron heads on one neck, and an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting, brazen tongues on each head, and an hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could not recount, or narrate, or enumerate, or tell, what all the Gaedhil suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardship and of injury, and of oppression, in every house, from these valiant, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people.

  Ruled by a disorganised multiplicity of kings frequently in conflict with one another, the Irish were unable to put up a united resistance to the Vikings. In addition, these raiders—most of them Norse rather than Danes—were more formidably armed than the Irish, their helmets being fitted with protective nose pieces, their torsos covered in flexible coats of mail, and their weaponry comprising fearsome battle-axes and long slashing
swords edged with superbly welded hard steel. Shallows and waterfalls proved no protection—the invaders simply carried their longships past such obstructions to navigable water upstream.

  The Northmen were not always victorious. For the year 811 the Annals of Ulster have this terse entry:

  A slaughter of the heathens by the Ulaid.

  This must have been a significant achievement, because the same victory was recorded in the court of Charlemagne. A major fresh assault was launched in 821, when great numbers of women were seized at Howth and even the seemingly impregnable Skellig rock was attacked. In 837 two formidable fleets, each made up of sixty ships, penetrated the Liffey and Boyne rivers. The Book of Leinster recorded this campaigning and, in particular, the exploits of one Viking leader, Turgeis:

  There came a great royal fleet into the north of Ireland with Turgeis. This Turgeis assumed the sovereignty of the foreigners of Ireland. A fleet of them took possession of Lough Neagh. Another fleet took possession of Louth. Another on Lough Ree.

  Moreover, Armagh was plundered by them three times in the same month, and Turgeis himself took he abbacy of Armagh; and Forannan, Abbot of Armagh, was driven away and went to Munster, and the Shrine of Patrick with him.... After this came Turgeis upon Lough Ree, and from thence were plundered Meath and Connacht; and Clonmacnoise and Clonfert, and the churches of Lough Derg in like manner. Clonmacnoise was taken by his wife. It was on the altar of the great church she used to make prophecies.... There came great sea-belched shoals of foreigners into Munster, so that there was not a point thereof without a fleet. A fleet carried off Forannan and they broke the shrine of Patrick.

  Longford is in the very heart of Ireland, yet it is named after a defended stockade for longships brought far up the River Shannon. It seemed that no part of Ireland was safe from the Vikings. Some of these Northmen, indeed, had decided to stay and make Ireland their home.

  Episode 21

  THE WARS OF THE GAEL AND THE GALL

  In the year 837 a fleet of over sixty longships from the Orkneys and the Western Isles passed the headland of Howth and steered into the shelter of Dublin Bay. The striped woollen sails were reefed down, the helmsmen raised their deep steering oars, warriors slung out their shields over the gunwales, and, seated on heavy carved chests, they sculled in unison towards the mouth of the Liffey river.

  As the men invoked the aid of Odin and Thor, and shook great iron rattles to ward off evil spirits, the grim dragon carvings adorning the high prows struck terror into the settlements on the south bank of the estuary. For the churches clustered round the Poddle, a stream flowing into the Liffey from the south-west, there could be but poor defence against these Norse in their iron mail-shirts, wielding their battle-axes. No doubt these churches yielded a rich booty of precious vestments, reliquaries and book covers to be taken back to the lands of the far north.

  Four years later these Vikings returned; but this time they had come not to raid but to stay. By the black pool—in Irish Dubh Linn—formed where the Poddle met the Liffey, they pulled their longships ashore onto a dry bank, covered them, lashed them down, and erected a stockade around their vessels for protection. Here a ridge of well-drained ground provided an obvious place for the Norse to overwinter and build a stronghold. This is where Dublin Castle now stands. With the coming of every summer, more bands of Northmen arrived and settled there, making it the principal colony of the Vikings in Ireland.

  Just upstream from this stronghold, the Irish had made a crossing-place: hurdles of interwoven saplings, sunk with great boulders, gave a firm footing for people and cattle wading across the Liffey at low tide. This was Áth Cliath, the ‘ford of hurdles’. Áth Cliath and Dubh Linn together held a key position, for it was there that the principal routeways from Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Ulster converged. For the Norse, their stronghold was a base from which attacks could be directed not only deep into the fertile plains of Kildare but also against the neighbouring island of Britain.

  In 857 Olaf the White, the first recorded ruler of Viking Dublin, joined forces with Ivar the Boneless, son of the Danish warrior-king, Ragnar Hairy-Britches; together they harried Scotland and Northumbria. When Olaf was slain in a skirmish, Ivar won the leadership of all the Norse in Ireland and the Danes in York. Too great an interest in Britain, however, held dangers for the foreigners of Dublin. Irish kings sank their differences and threw themselves with great force upon Dublin:

  902: The expulsion of the Unbelievers from Ireland, i.e. from their ship-fortress at Dublin, by Maelfindia son of Flannacán with the men of Brega, and Cerball son of Muirecán with his Leinstermen. They left a great part of their fleet, and escaped half dead, wounded and broken.

  Dublin, however, was too valuable a base to abandon altogether. The grandsons of Ivar the Boneless, Ragnall and Sitric the Squinty, in 914 launched the most terrifying Viking invasion Ireland had yet seen:

  The whole of Munster became filled with immense floods and countless sea-vomiting of ships, boats and fleets.... There was no place in Erinn without numerous fleets of Danes and pirates; so that they made spoil-land, and sword-land, and conquered land of her.

  After three years Sitric the Squinty, advancing north from Waterford up the Barrow river, recovered Dublin for the Vikings after fierce conflicts:

  Though numerous were the oft-victorious clans of the many-familied Erinn, yet not one of them was able to give relief, alleviation, or deliverance from that oppression, and tyranny, from the numbers and multitudes, and the cruelty and the wrath of the brutal, ferocious, untamed, implacable hordes, by whom that oppression was inflicted, because of the excellence of their polished, ample, treble, heavy, trusty, glittering corselets; and their hardy, strong valiant swords; and their well-riveted long spears; and their ready, brilliant arms of valour besides.

  Niall Glúndubh, of the Uí Néill dynasty, put together a formidable coalition, and with a great host he advanced on Dublin. There, outside the city walls in 919, he was utterly routed by the Northmen and slain, along with twelve other Irish kings. The Annals of Ulster lamented:

  Mournful today is virginal Ireland

  Without a mighty king in command of hostages;

  It is to view the heaven and not to see the sun

  To behold Niall’s plain without Niall.

  These Vikings had come to stay. They made Dublin into a great trading city, a central port of call on a great semicircular trade route extending from the Mediterranean to Norway and Iceland and beyond. In one of the Icelandic sagas this advice was given:

  Fare thou south to Dublin,

  That track is most renowned.

  Episode 22

  VIKING TOWNS AND CITIES

  It was not only in Dublin that the Vikings made permanent settlements in Ireland. All along the southern and eastern coasts they converted their temporary ship-fortresses into the island’s first towns. The ferocity of resistance from the Uí Néill and the Ulaid—who on more than one occasion actually defeated the Northmen on their own element, the sea—probably explains why they managed only to establish toe-holds in Ulster, at Larne, Ballyholme, Strangford and Carlingford. Limerick, on the Shannon estuary, and Waterford, where the Suir, Barrow and Nore rivers meet to join the sea, became great cities. Many coastal place names are of Old Norse origin and indicate where the Vikings built their towns:

  Wexford: ‘fjord of Veig’; Wicklow: ‘Viking meadow’; Arklow: ‘Arnkell’s meadow’; Carling ford: ‘the hag’s fjord’; Helvick: ‘safe inlet’; Saltee: ‘salt island’; Strang ford: ‘rough fjord’; Waterford: ‘windy fjord’; Dursey: ‘deer island’; Smerwick: ‘butter bay’.

  Dublin, however, was always pre-eminent; here the Vikings not only built a city but also settled the country around it. The Irish called it Fine Gall, ‘foreign people’, and Ireland’s most recently created county council has been named Fingal after it. Here there are numerous placids of Viking origin:

  Howth: ‘rocky headland’; Oxmantown: ‘the town of the men from the east�
�; Skerries: ‘rocks’; Dalkey: ‘dagger island’; Lambay: ‘lamb’s island’; Ireland’s Eye: ‘Ireland’s island’; Leixlip: ‘salmon leap’.

  Indeed, Ireland is the name the Vikings gave to the land of Erinn. In addition, a great many Norse words were adopted by the Irish and incorporated into Gaelic, including the words for market, anchor, helmet, boat, button, garden, banner, rudder and penny—the Vikings of Dublin were the first to mint coins in Ireland.

  There had been high-kings in Ireland since the beginning of the island’s recorded history, but none had ever governed the whole country. When the Vikings had begun their attacks at the end of the eighth century, they faced not one strong ruler but many kings. The men from the north never conquered all of Ireland—indeed, their invasions seem to have encouraged several more powerful rulers to make the high-kingship a reality.

  Limerick, on the estuary of the River Shannon, the Vikings made into one of their great cities. It was in the course of seemingly endless wars that the men of a small neighbouring kingdom, Dál Cais, sacked Limerick in the year 967. The annalistic composition entitled The Wars of the Gael with the Gall proudly recorded this Irish triumph:

  They carried off their jewels and their best property, and their saddles beautiful and foreign; their gold and their silver; their beautifully woven cloth of all colours; and their satins and silken cloth. They carried away their soft, youthful, bright, matchless girls; their blooming silk-clad young women; and their active, large and well-formed boys. The fort and the good town they reduced to a cloud of smoke and to red fire afterwards.