A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  20. Petrie ‘crown’, second century AD

  The Vikings did not wear horned helmets. The Iron Age Irish did wear head-dresses with what look like horns on them. There are two outstanding examples, the ‘Cork horns’ (at Cork Public Museum) and the Petrie ‘crown’, so called because it came from the collection of the nineteenth-century antiquarian, George Petrie. Petrie either did not know or did not record where the object was originally found.

  The ‘crown’ consists of a sheet of bronze with a pair of highly decorated discs attached to its front. The design on the discs is a highly stylised representation of a solar boat: the sun being carried across the heavens in a boat with a bird’s head prow and stern. Its presence on the Petrie ‘crown’ offers a rare insight into prehistoric religious beliefs, reflecting a complex solar cosmology that Ireland’s early inhabitants apparently shared with their European neighbours. Each disc supported a conical horn, only one of which survives. This complex bronze arrangement was then sewn on to a leather or textile band to form a head-dress. The very high quality of the decoration and riveting suggests that this was worn by a particularly powerful figure.

  This power may have derived from links to Roman Britain. The horned head-dresses are a new phenomenon, utilising new casting technologies and showing off the high-end design of the European Iron Age culture known as La Tène. The Roman general Agricola remarked that Ireland could be taken with ‘one legion and a moderate number of auxiliaries’. It is possible that some kind of invasion was attempted. The Roman poet Juvenal records that ‘we have taken our arms beyond the shores of Ireland’. If this did happen, the invasion was either beaten back or the Romans decided that Ireland was not worth the effort of conquest.

  They did, however, trade with Ireland. The historian Tacitus notes of the island in the first century that ‘the interior parts are little known, but through commercial intercourse and the merchants, there is better knowledge of the harbours and approaches’. The Irish imported goods from the Roman world, as we have seen from the presence of the Egyptian necklace in the Broighter hoard. There are Roman objects from the royal site at Tara, and there is even the skull of a Barbary ape from Navan Fort, in Co. Armagh. The trade went both ways, however; Roman Britain, with its cities and standing army, offered a thriving marketplace.

  ‘The development of urban centres’, says Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland, ‘means there was demand for cattle on the hoof. The Roman army consumed large amounts of leather. They were importing hide, and they were probably importing butter as well. Those who can exploit these trade connections come from the rich grazing lands, and they will go on to form the core of Ireland’s mediaeval dynasties’.

  21. Cunorix stone, AD 460–75

  It is a broken gravestone, with a crude inscription: cvnorix macvsma [q]vico[l]i[n]e. The slab, found in 1967, had probably been re-used from someone else’s burial. Yet it is resonant of the way Irish invaders and raiders took advantage of the collapse of Roman Britain.

  The slab was found in Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury in the western English county of Shropshire. This village was once Viroconium, the fourth-largest city in Roman Britain, a thriving hub of 5,000 people—about the same size as Pompeii. After the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain, in 410, even places as far inland as Viroconium became vulnerable to attack from Irish raiders. The significance of this gravestone is that the inscription is in a partly Latinised version of the Irish language. It means ‘Hound-king, son of the tribe of Holly’. Cunorix was Irish, and the existence of the stone suggests that he had become a powerful figure in this part of England.

  From the fourth century ad the Romans were building forts on the west coast of Britain (at Holyhead and Cardiff) to defend against the Irish raiders they called ‘Scotti’ (the name survives as Scotland). We know from the Roman writer Ammianus that diplomatic relations had been established with the Scotti but that in ad 360 the breaking of a treaty led to devastating raids from both Ireland and Scotland. The ability to mount major seaborne raids suggests a resurgence of wealth in Ireland, connected to the expansion of agriculture and the building of huge numbers of stone ring-forts. As Roman power collapsed entirely, Irish raiders were followed to Britain by Irish settlers. The most important colony was at Dyfed in southwest Wales, but Argyll in western Scotland, the Isle of Man and parts of southwest England were also colonised.

  This expansionary drive had huge consequences in Ireland. The Romans had done deals with, and helped to keep in place, the old kingships in Ireland. The new money that both funded and resulted from attacks on Britain, however, allowed the formation of numerous small tribal units, or túatha. ‘There were’, says Conor Newman of NUI Galway, ‘new kids on the block in these centuries. Before the fourth or fifth centuries you have five great royal sites. It is not coincidental that Roman material has turned up at all of those sites. Afterwards, the country is fragmented into 150 smaller túatha. Something pretty radical has happened. I think it is the impact of the collapse of the Roman Empire on Ireland. Britain becomes an open cash register for Irish raiders. Things are being robbed—and so are people. The status quo is undermined’.

  For the existing British population, much of this was deeply unpleasant, but the colonisations did result in much closer ties between the two islands and a stronger British influence on Irish culture. Ironically, one long-term result was the spread from Britain to Ireland of what had become the official Roman religion.

  22. St. Patrick’s Confessio, c. AD 460–90

  Ego Patricius, peccator rusticissimus et minimus omnium fidelium et contemptibilis sum apud plurimos… ‘My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many…’

  These artfully humble words mark three immense moments in the development of Irish culture. First, along with Patrick’s Letter to Coroticus, it is the oldest surviving piece of prose writing done in Ireland, and so signals one immense change: the arrival of literacy. Second, Patrick is the first person in Ireland who can, through these texts, be positively identified as an individual with a known life story. This, in other words, is the moment when prehistory ends and Irish history begins. Third, of course, Patrick’s ‘Confession’ speaks to us of one of the most paradoxical but profound developments in that Irish history. On the one hand, it is a dramatic narrative of the collapse of the Roman Empire. As he relates it, Patrick, son of a noble Romano-British family, is kidnapped at the age of sixteen and enslaved as a herdsman by Irish raiders who no longer fear the might of Rome. On the other, just as Roman power is vanishing, Patrick brings it to Ireland in another form: Christianity.

  Patrick was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland. Palladius, probably from Auxerre, in France, was sent in 431 as the first bishop to ‘the Irish believing in Christ’—a pre-existing Irish Christian community. Some of these early Irish Christians may have been, like Patrick himself, slaves captured in Britain.

  Patrick, however, as he says in the Confessio, preached the Gospel ‘unto those parts beyond which there lives nobody’. Tradition places the hub of his mission in Armagh. Patrick claims that in Ireland, where they never had any knowledge of God but, always, until now, cherished idols and unclean things, they are lately become a people of the Lord, and are called children of God; the sons of the Irish and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and virgins of Christ.

  This overstates the speed of the movement from the old religion to the new, but it reflects the reality that Patrick played a key role in the spread of Irish Christianity.

  Pictured is the earliest surviving manuscript copy, made around 807 by the scribe Ferdomnach in Armagh. (Its opening words appear on folio 22r of the Book of Armagh, which is displayed with the Book of Kells at Trinity College Dublin.) It leaves out those parts of the ‘confession’ in which Patrick mentions his own failures and weaknesses: for the later monks who were involved in establishing his cult, it was important to show him as a powerful
worker of wonders. Most probably, while he was alive, it was his humility and simplicity that made Patrick so attractive and persuasive.

  23. Mullaghmast stone, AD 500–600

  When a castle at the Hill of Mullaghmast in south Kildare was being demolished, this limestone boulder was found being re-used as a lintel. The spiral carvings, which are close in style to those found on metal dress-pins and brooches of the period, date it to the sixth century ad, after the mission of St Patrick. What is intriguing, however, is that its symbolism reminds us that in Ireland the arrival of Christianity did not mark a sudden break with the past. Instead, the stone speaks of a remarkable continuity of one of the so-called Celtic rituals that resonates even today: the sword in the stone.

  The idea of the true king being the one who can pull a sword from a stone is central to the British legends of King Arthur. Conor Newman of NUI Galway has noted that many sacred stones that functioned as ‘icons of tribal and cultural identity’ have straight, narrow grooves on their surfaces. These marks have generally been dismissed as results of vandalism or ploughing. But Newman has pointed out that they occur far too often and are far too regular for this to be the case.

  The Mullaghmast Stone is one such stone. It almost certainly stood at where the Uí Dúnlainge kings of Leinster were initiated. In itself, it is notable that such an important ritual object has no Christian symbolism. ‘There is little doubt that this is the inaugural stone of the Uí Dúnlainge’, says Newman, ‘and there’s nothing in the ornamentation that you could describe as Christian’. This does not necessarily mean that those who first used the stone were clinging to the old religion, but it does show that in Ireland, Christianity was often another layer on top of older traditions that survived and thrived. Rituals of kingship in particular retained their broad shape for another thousand years after the emergence of Christianity; the idea of the ‘sword in the stone’ seems to have lasted at least from the fifth or sixth centuries to the twelfth.

  The Mullaghmast Stone has four blade marks on the left-hand side and two very deep ones on the top. The new king, it seems, would have struck or sharpened his sword against the stone as a key part of the inauguration ritual. The persistence of such rituals may be rooted in the paradox that emerging local chieftains, with new wealth gained from the exploitation of the collapse of Roman Britain, needed to disguise the novelty of their power. These arrivistes, says Newman, ‘still have to legitimate their power. If you are an arriviste, the first thing you do is buy a house and fill it with antiques. There is a very keen awareness of the rituals surrounding that moment of taking your place in history’. These rituals may have been self-consciously archaic, used by upstarts to claim the authority of antiquity.

  24. St Patrick’s bell, c. seventh century

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the last member of a branch of the Mulholland family, a schoolteacher about to die without heir, sent for his former pupil, the Belfast merchant Adam McLean. Having been instructed to dig at a certain spot in Mulholland’s garden, McLean found this bell enclosed in the magnificently ornate shrine that was made for it in Armagh around 1100. The Mulholland family had been ‘keepers of the bell’ since mediaeval times.

  Unlike so many of the objects featured in this book, the bell owes its power not to its finesse or opulence but to its simplicity. Small (less than seven inches high) and plain, it is made of two pieces of thick sheet-iron, coated in bronze, closely riveted together, with a little looped handle at the top. The tongue of the bell appears to be a later addition. It is it simplicity that made credible the belief that the bell belonged to St Patrick, even though it is probably of later origin. The Annals of Ulster, for 553, written many centuries after the event, record the opening of the tomb of St Patrick 60 years after his death and the recovery from it of his goblet, the ‘Angel’s Gospel’ and the ‘Bell of the Testament’. An angel allegedly directed St Colmcille (Columba) to send the cup to Down and the bell to Armagh, and to keep the Gospel himself.

  The bell was certainly an object of great veneration in the Middle Ages, and was woven into the legends of Patrick’s miraculous deeds. (He was said to have rung a bell at the conclusion of his apocalyptic battle against the forces of evil, disguised as birds, on Croagh Patrick.) Aside from its religious and legendary power, though, the bell had great political significance. Along with the Book of Armagh and the ‘staff of Jesus’ (destroyed in Dublin in the sixteenth century), the bell was crucial to Armagh’s claim to be the centre of Patrick’s legacy, and thus the superior seat of Irish Christianity.

  The church was a new source of power and prestige in Ireland, and claims to primacy in church affairs were never going to be uncontested. As Patrick began to be accepted as the sole father of Irish Christianity, it was important to be able to prove a direct connection to his authority. Armagh, Downpatrick and Saul all claimed to be the site of his burial. Other centres disputed Armagh’s primacy—the early partisan of Armagh’s claims, Tírechán, complains of those who ‘hate Patrick’s territorial jurisdiction’ and attack Armagh’s status. Thus, however touching it may be as a plain expression of simple piety, the bell was also a mighty weapon in a struggle for power. From the earliest days, the spiritual message of the new religion could not be entirely disentangled from old-fashioned political struggles for pre-eminence.

  25. Springmount wax tablets, late-sixth century

  In 1913 a man cutting turf in Springmount bog in Ballyhutherland, Co. Antrim, found this set of six yew tablets, held together by leather straps. The inner tablets are hollowed out on both sides, forming the pages of a small wooden book. These inner surfaces are filled with wax, on which someone wrote, or rather literally inscribed with a pointed stylus, a biblical text.

  This is the earliest extant Irish manuscript. Someone, a monk or a scholar at a monastic school, has written onto the wax in a beautifully precise hand parts of Psalms 30 and 31 from the Old Testament. What is fascinating is that the style of writing is already a distinctively Irish form (‘Irish majuscule’), one which survived into modern times. In a manner typical of Irish culture, it combines elements of existing scripts in a new way. Literacy may be a cultural import from the post-Roman world, but from very early on it is being rooted in the local. There are later stories of wonderful manuscripts being written by sixth-century scribes and saints, and St Columba in particular is regularly described as ‘writing in his hut’. Another saint’s ‘life’ tells of a boy being sent ‘so that he might learn the science of letters’. Not all of this early writing was religious. Linguistic evidence suggests that the task of writing down the voluminous texts of Brehon law began around this time too, but none of those manuscripts survives.

  Literacy is not the same as learning. Reading and writing belonged to the new order of the Christian monasteries, but there was also an old order of learning in Ireland. The filidh (poets, savants and keepers of tribal lore) enjoyed enormous prestige and continued to assert their professional privileges. This is what makes early Irish literature so rich: the cross-fertilisation of the new Christian literacy with the old oral traditions of mythology and satire, lyric poetry and eulogies for local kings. As Celtic scholar Proinsias Mac Cana put it, ‘By the end of the sixth century, the church (that is to say the monasteries) and the filidh had come to terms and from that time on there is evidence of an ever-increasing practical co-operation and assimilation between them’.

  The result of this fusion is Western Europe’s first non-Classical vernacular literature. Monks wrote in Irish as well as in Latin, and they wrote down old pre-Christian stories as well as religious texts. The metres of Latin hymns and the habit of rhyming crept into Irish poetry. The demands of writing made for new, more direct styles of expression, more easily understood by lay people than the often baroque and self-consciously elitist learning of the filidh. Literacy did not, however, obliterate what had gone before: to an extent that is practically unique to Ireland, it gave it a new and much longer life.

  26. Ballin
derry brooch, c. AD 600

  Found in the 1930s in a crannóg (lake dwelling) on the south side of Ballinderry Lough in Co. Offaly, this is one of the most startlingly complex objects ever discovered in Ireland. It arose from a richly sophisticated and cosmopolitan culture in which pre-Christian forms are being subtly reshaped to elaborate Christian theology. It tells us that Irish art was both absorbing very complex iconography from as far away as Palestine and enriching it with older pagan symbolism. The brooch is zoomorphic (animal-shaped) and penannular (there is a gap in the ring); this is a style developed in Roman Britain but popular in Ireland between the fifth and seventh centuries. This is the most elaborate ever found. Its maker may have been an Irish artist-craftsman of international standing, who may also have made the escutcheons of the largest hanging bowl found in one of the most famous archaeological discoveries in western Europe, the Anglo-Saxon ship burial from Sutton Hoo in East Anglia.

  The basic image is pre-Christian: the two-headed snake biting its own tail, a symbol of eternity and regeneration. This snake, here, is not a symbol of Satan. It hints, rather, at the resurrection of Christ, the analogy being with the snake’s ability to shed its skin and be ‘reborn’. The key to understanding the Christian iconography of the brooch is found on what is known as the ‘Marigold Stone’, from Carndonagh, Co. Donegal. The two objects have the same pattern of a geometrical stem rising towards a marigold flower.