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

  1339:

  The cattle and winter grass of Ireland suffered much from frost and snow.

  1358:

  A heavy shower fell in Carbury in the summer, each hail-stone thereof fully as big as a crab-apple.

  1363:

  A great wind this year, which wrecked churches and houses and sank many ships and boats.

  The thirteenth century had been a time of population growth and rising prosperity. Prospects seemed good for the many English attracted over by the opportunity to get land in Ireland, celebrated in an anonymous poem of the time;

  I am of Ireland

  And of the holy land

  Of Ireland.

  Good sir, pray I thee

  For of saint charité

  Come dance with me

  In Ireland.

  The ensuing century was, in contrast, a very different one for inhabitants of the Irish lordship.

  By the beginning of the fourteenth century only mountainous, boggy and generally infertile areas had not been colonised. These included: the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains; the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the Bog of Allen in the midlands; wilder parts of west Cork and Kerry; and Connemara in Co. Galway. Though Hugh de Lacy and Richard de Burgo had extended their earldom along the north coast to Inishowen, by far the most extensive region remaining under Gaelic rule was central and western Ulster; officials in Dublin referred to this part of the north outside their control as the ‘Great Irishry’.

  Acute food shortages made it very tempting for the Gaelic Irish to burst out of their impoverished lands to plunder and seek to recover the fertile plains their forebears had lost to the Normans. Their attacks became ever more successful after the colony had been ravaged by the Black Death.

  Episode 38

  THE BLACK DEATH

  The Black Death arrived in western Europe in the year 1347. This fearful bacillus appeared in three main forms of plague—bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic. Some forms were transmitted by fleas carried principally by black rats, and, when the rats were killed by this disease, the fleas sought other hosts including human beings. People infected by the commonest form suffered painful swellings or buboes in the groin, armpits and the neck. Symptoms included sudden chills, hallucination and delirium. Between fifty and eighty per cent of victims died within a week.

  The Black Death made its first appearance in Ireland in the prosperous Co. Dublin port of Howth in late July 1348. Soon the Black Death was raging in Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk, and during the autumn it spread inland to the manors of Louth, Meath and Co. Dublin. Waterford was hit next, and traders took the disease up the River Nore to Kilkenny. Here Friar Clyn was keeping a chronicle, and he recorded the arrival of the plague:

  More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard of since the beginning of time.... The pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick and the dead was immediately infected and died, so that penitent and confessor were carried to the grave.... That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities, so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein.

  Friar Clyn tells us that the arrival of the Black Death prompted a pilgrimage to Teach Moling, the house of St Moling, on the River Barrow in Co. Carlow:

  1348: In this year particularly in the months of September and October there came together from diverse parts of Ireland, bishops and prelates, churchmen and religious, lords and others to the pilgrimage at Teach Moling, in troops and multitudes....

  Some came from feelings of devotion, but others, and they the majority, from dread of the plague, which then grew very rife.

  By Christmas Day 1348 fifty per cent of all the Franciscan friars of Drogheda had died of the plague. In the following months the Black Death reaped a terrible harvest in Kilkenny. Friar Clyn continued:

  Many died of boils and abscesses and pustules which erupted on their shins or under their armpits; others died frantic with pain in their head and others spitting blood.... This plague was at its height in Kilkenny during Lent; for on the sixth day of March eight of the Friars Preachers died. There was hardly a house in which only one had died, but as a rule man and wife with their children and all the family went the common way of death.

  The striking feature of the Black Death in Ireland is that it raged principally in the ports and towns. In short, the English colony was much more severely affected than the Gaelic Irish living in the countryside. The Irish annals, never slow to mention disasters, made only very brief references to the Black Death. The Annals of Ulster has only one reference, specifically mentioning one area in Roscommon:

  1349: The great plague of the general disease that was throughout Ireland prevailed in Moylurg this year so that great destruction of people was inflicted therein. Matthew, son of Cathal O’Rourke, died thereof.

  Meanwhile Friar Clyn knew his end was near:

  I, Brother Clyn of the Friars Minor of Kilkenny, have written in this book the notable events which befell in my time.... So that notable deeds shall not be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing many ills, waiting for death till it come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard; and lest the writing perish with the writer, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have begun.

  Then, beneath a blot of ink, is written in another hand:

  Here, it seems, the author died.

  On Christmas Eve 1350 one young man wrote this prayer:

  The second year after the coming of the plague into Ireland. And I am Hugh, son of Conor Mac Aodhagáin; under the safeguard of the King of Heaven and earth who is here tonight I place myself and may He put this great Plague past me and past my friends and may we be once more in joy and happiness. Amen. Pater Noster.

  He survived, but on most of the manors of the lordship of Ireland many did not. We do not know how many victims there were, except for Colemanstown in the royal manor of Newcastle Lyons, Co. Dublin, where 84 per cent of the tenants were, it was reported, ‘cut off by the late pestilence’. Certainly there were many manors with vacant farms. This weakened colony in Ireland was therefore less able to defend itself against the native Irish, now employing mercenaries from the Western Isles of Scotland.

  Episode 39

  GALLOWGLASSES

  The most prominent feature in the pretty town of Ballyshannon in south Donegal is a tall, ornate Victorian building which for very many decades has had the name of the proprietor prominently displayed across its frontage: Gallogley. It is an unusual surname, but it is a vivid reminder of the crucial role played by a fresh group of newcomers to Ireland in the late Middle Ages.

  The ability of Gaelic lords to win back lost territory is in part explained by their employment of gallóglaigh, which literally means ‘young foreign warriors’. Confusingly, the annalists referred both to the Vikings and the English as the Gall, the foreigners. The word gallóglaigh was anglicised by the colonists in Ireland as ‘gallowglasses’. Gallowglasses were of mixed Viking-Gaelic blood, who after the King of Scotland had broken any remaining power the King of Norway had in his land at the Battle of Largs in 1263, sought employment for their arms in Ireland. When Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, brought over reinforcements to help his brother Edward in 1316, the annals noted that he had with him a great force of gallowglasses. Thereafter more and more of these fighting-men came south to Ireland from the Western Isles.

  A high proportion of the gallowglasses were descendants of a Viking Lord of the Isles named Somerled, which means ‘summer wanderer’. These men broke up into warring clans, and it was often those who were defeated in these petty conflicts that came to Ireland to seek their fortunes. In spring they would plough their small fields, plant their seed oats, and then gather their weapons and armour to row and sail across the North Channel to Ulster, there to offer their services to the highest bidder. Previously driven into the more remote regions of the island, Gaelic lords were taking advan
tage of the growing weakness of the lordship of Ireland by campaigning to recover the lands lost by their ancestors. Many were eager to employ these warriors from the Isles. The O’Donnells, the ruling family of the lordship of Tír Conaill in what is now Co. Donegal, were among the first to engage gallowglasses; but instead of fighting the English, they used them to drive the O’Neills out of the fertile country around the Foyle. Their leading gallowglass clan, the MacSweeneys, at first were paid in kind:

  This is how the levy was made; two gallowglasses for each quarter of land, and two cows for each gallowlass deficient, that is, one cow for the man himself and one for his equipment. And Clan Sweeney say they are responsible for these as follows, that for each man equipped with a coat of mail and a breastplate, another should have a jack and a helmet: that there should be no forfeit for a helmet deficient except the gallowglass’s brain (dashed out for want of it).

  Each gallowglass had a manservant to carry his coat of mail and a boy who looked after the food and did the cooking. He fought in traditional Viking style, wielding an axe or a spar, ‘much like the axe of the Tower’ as one viceroy, Sir Anthony St Leger, described it. St Leger who faced gallowglasses in battle on many an occasion, believed that ‘These sort of men be those that do not lightly abandon the field, but bide the brunt to the death.’ Gallowglass fighting-men stiffened the ranks of native Irish foot-soldiers, or kerne, who, according to St Leger,

  fight bare naked, saving their shirts to hide their privates; and those have darts and short bows: which sort of people be both hardy and deliver to search woods and marshes, in which they be hard to be beaten.

  When the summer season of fighting was over, these Scottish warriors—provided they had survived—received their pay, mostly in the form of butter and beef, and sailed back to the Isles in time to reap, thrash and winnow their harvests. In time gallowglasses acquired land as a more secure source of income. The MacSweeneys got territory in Donegal and divided into three clans: MacSweeney na Doe (na Doe comes from na dTuath, meaning ‘of the Tribes’) in the Rosses and around Creeslough; MacSweeney Fanad on the peninsula named after them just west of Lough Swilly; and MacSweeney Banagh in the vicinity of Slieve League. A branch of the MacDonnells, settled in the lands about Ballygawley in Co. Tyrone, became a powerful arm of the O’Neills of Tír Eóghain in their struggle to become the leading Gaelic rulers of Ireland. Another cohort of MacDonnells, the lords of Kintyre and Islay, made their home in the Glens of Antrim.

  During the fourteenth century bands of gallowglasses spread out all over Gaelic Ireland to seek employment for their arms. These men from Innse Gall—the Irish name for the Hebrides—bore surnames now familiar all over the country, including MacCabe, MacRory, MacDougall, MacDowell and MacSheehy. They were to help Gaelic lords bring the English lordship of Ireland to its knees.

  Episode 40

  ‘MORE IRISH THAN THE IRISH THEMSELVES’

  Gerald of Wales and other English commentators frequently criticised the disorder which often followed after the death of an Irish king or chieftain. Gaelic succession disputes could certainly be bloody and dislocating, but the feudal law of primogeniture also had its problems. The male line ran out in several leading Norman settler families, including the de Lacys in Meath in 1243, and not one of the sons of William Marshal, Lord of Leinster, produced a male heir. Then, in 1333, William de Burgo, the young Earl of Ulster and Lord of Connacht—one of the greatest landholders in western Europe—was murdered by some of his tenants near Shankill church outside Belfast in 1333. Known as the Brown Earl, William had only a two-year-old baby girl, Elizabeth, as his heir. The de Burgo lordship rapidly disintegrated thereafter.

  One of the additional reasons for the collapse of the vast de Burgo lordship was that descendants of the first Norman conquerors were going native or were becoming, in the often-quoted phrase, ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. Increasingly isolated from the heart of the English lordship in Dublin Castle, these families adopted the Irish language and dress, married into native Gaelic ruling families, engaged Irish harpers and poets, and gained the confidence to throw off their feudal allegiance to the English crown.

  Junior branches of the de Burgo family changed their name to Burcach, which later became familiar in its anglicised form, ‘Burke’. They usurped the lands of the rightful Lord of Connacht, Lionel of Clarence, and when he died in 1368 an inquisition recorded that manors which used to be worth £200 a year were now worth nothing ‘because they are occupied by Edmund de Burgo knight and other rebels of the king, both English and Irish, nor has any minister of the king dared go thither to execute his office’.

  Two major branches of gaelicised de Burgos adopted the surname ‘MacWilliam’. An army had to be sent in 1320 to Munster against ‘rebels John fitz Maurice and David de Barry and their followers, namely of the name of Burke and Barry’. Members of the de la Rochefort family simply adopted the name Roche, and a branch of the once powerful de Berminghams became known as Mac Pheorais, ‘son of Piers’, after one of their number. The family of le Sauvage (which is Norman-French for ‘countryman’) in the Ards peninsula simply became ‘Savage’. Those described by the Dublin government as ‘degenerate English’ were in effect becoming independent warlords with their own private armies, known as ‘routs’, and waged war on each other, often in alliance with the Gaelic Irish, in defiance of central government.

  Many of the descendants of Norman barons who remained loyal to the crown increasingly spent their time out of Ireland. In 1297 the Irish parliament attempted to do something about this by passing the following decree:

  Magnates and others who remain outside this land, and who cause the profit of their land to be sent to them from this land, sending nothing here to protect their tenants, shall henceforth allow a sufficient portion at least to remain in the hands of bailiffs, by which their own lands may be sufficiently protected and defended, if it should happen that war or disturbance of peace is stirred up there by anyone.

  There is little evidence that this parliamentary order was obeyed.

  The Irish parliament was an institution almost as ancient as the English one. The first recorded parliament was in 1264, and thereafter, at irregular intervals, the ‘justiciar’ or royal governor would call leading peers, knights and burgesses to meet in Dublin, Drogheda, Kilkenny or other convenient places in the lordship. These were representatives of the English colony, and it was only later that Gaelic lords, in favour with the crown, were invited to attend. Both Lords and Commons took the opportunity during parliamentary sessions to petition the crown. They sought help to enable them to combat both the Irish and the rebel gaelicised Norman barons. A parliament meeting at Kilkenny in 1341 complained to Edward III about men ‘who are sent out of England to govern them, who themselves have little knowledge of your land of Ireland’—a complaint to be repeated by generations of loyalists in ensuing centuries about badly briefed ministers being sent over by London governments to take charge of the administration of Ireland. The petition continued:

  Likewise, sire, although there is in every march of your land of Ireland enough and more of the Irish enemies to trouble your English people who have no power to stop them, save the grace of God which maintains them, sire, still more do the extortions and oppressions of your ministers trouble them than does war with the Irish.

  Twenty years were to pass before the king felt able to respond to this appeal by sending over his son Lionel with a large English army.

  Episode 41

  THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY

  The wasting Hundred Years’ War in France hastened the steady erosion of the lordship of Ireland to the benefit of both Gaelic lords and independent gaelicised warlords. English monarchs simply lacked the funds to respond to the frantic appeals for help. Then a brief respite in the French wars gave Edward III the opportunity to do something. A great council of his liege subjects had met in Kilkenny in 1360 and made a report on

  the mischiefs, perils and estate of your land of Ire
land, which is on the point of being lost.... The Irish, your enemies, of one assent and covenant, commence to levy war throughout all your land, burning, destroying and preying daily on your lieges of those parts.... As a work of charity, [send] a good sufficient chieftain, stocked and strengthened with men and treasure ... as a noble and gracious prince is bound to do for his lieges.

  The king was moved to respond with this message:

  Because Ireland is now subject to such devastation and destruction ... that it will be soon plunged into total ruin, we have for the salvation of the said land ordained that our dear son Lionel shall proceed thither with all dispatch and with a great army.

  Lionel, whom the king now appointed his ‘lieutenant’, or governor of Ireland, and who was soon to be created Duke of Clarence, was Edward’s second son, and because he had married the daughter of the murdered William de Burgo, he was also nominally Earl of Ulster. The great lords who held estates in Ireland but lived in England, numbering sixty-four in all, were summoned to join him or face the confiscation of their Irish lands. A great expedition was organised and equipped in 1361. Lionel personally supervised the fitting out of his flagship, with a blue carpet for his cabin, coloured worsteds as hangings, four sconces, ten round lanterns, and an image of St Christopher to ensure a safe voyage. Nine hundred men at arms and mounted archers under the command of the veteran Earl of Stafford accompanied him.