Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  Great … were the hardship and the ruin, the bad food and bad bedding (droch chuid ocus do drochlebaid) inflicted on him in the wild huts of the wilderness, on the hard knotty wet roots of his own native country.

  Brian is said to have adopted the battleaxe of the Vikings over a clumsier Irish model. He may also have favoured the longer and heavier sword they used. Any such change would not be an individual choice, however. It had more to do with an improvement in the techniques of Irish blacksmiths who imitated the sophisticated Viking weapons. The Irish sword was a short stabbing-tool, for intimate use. It could be wielded in either fist; a busy warrior could handle two. But the longer Viking weapon could have kept an Irish swordsman at bay. The Irish were also partial to a light spear or javelin with a line attached. There are differences of opinion as to whether the line was for retrieval, or was wrapped around the shaft to give a spinning action. It may have served both purposes, although the latter seems a bit esoteric for close combat.

  In terms of strategy, Brian Boru’s main innovation was the use of a fleet to intimidate the provincial Irish kings, by delivering troops to the back door. This was nothing new. For a century and more, the Vikings had taken large fleets, heavily manned, up the major rivers, including the Shannon, the Liffey, the Boyne and the Erne, plundering the inland monasteries with devastating ease. Brian constructed a fleet of longships based on the Viking model. The boats, built of overlapping timbers, had a shallow draft for river use, and were unstable, but they were capable of sailing easily inland. The fleet was augmented by traditional hide-covered boats and the all-purpose dugout canoe. In one raid, Brian is reported to have mustered three hundred boats on Lough Ree, a lake on the River Shannon.

  Attempts to block his passage with barriers of stone across the river were futile. Máel Sechnaill and the King of Connacht built barricades at Athlone and Lanesborough, each working out from his own bank.

  As his brother grew in strength to become a challenger for the Munster title, Brian became his lieutenant and put his military skill to good use. This is clear from the defeat of the Limerick Vikings, a victory the brothers pulled off between them. Brian’s capacity to remain on the move was clearly demonstrated.

  SHOWDOWN

  The rout took place in 968, at Solohead, a little north of the present Tipperary town and a long day’s march from Limerick. Not only were the Vikings thrashed in a battle that lasted from sunrise till noon, but Brian and his men continued the slaughter on the run, and then pulled off an all-night march to take Limerick by surprise at dawn. Every male of military potential in the city, including boys, was put to death on Singland Hill.

  Slave Trade

  After the Singland massacre, said to have been orchestrated by the twenty-seven-year-old Brian, a chilling event is described in Cogadh Gaedhel:

  …a great line of the women of the foreigners was placed on the hill of Singland in a circle, and they were stooped with their hands on the ground, and marshalled by the horseboys of the army behind them, for the good of the souls of the foreigners who were killed in the battle.

  The author is anxious to emphasise Brian’s Christian credentials after the savage slaughter. But horseboys were not church stewards. They were famously an uncouth rabble. While the image seems to represent an organised scene of mourning, it carries stronger echoes or intimations of rape, always a weapon of war.

  Certainly these women, many of them slaves already, would be taken and traded as forced labour by the army of Mathgamhain and Brian Boru. The use of prisoners of war as slaves was a normal feature of medieval Ireland, with a major trade at home and abroad. The female cumhal, so familiar in the ancient texts and translated by nineteenth-century academics as a ‘bondmaid’ instead of a slave, represented a measure of currency, the equivalent of cattle or ounces of silver. Female slaves did heavy domestic work, especially milling duties with grinding stones.

  It was to be a proud boast of Brian’s reign that:

  …no son of a soldier, or of an officer of the Gaedhel stooped to put his hand to a flail, or any other labour on earth; nor did a woman deign to put her hand to the grinding of corn, or to knead a cake, or to wash her clothes, but had a foreign man or a foreign woman to work for them.

  HEAD TO HEAD

  Due to the paralysis of his rivals and the strength of Dál Cais, Mathgamhain became King of Munster in 970. Violent death was inevitable. He survived a surprising six years, before he was fatally stabbed. Brian, at the age of thirty-five, unchallenged, took the hurdles in his stride. In 976, as King of Thomond, he smashed the Eoghanacht. A couple of years later, he took the crown of Munster.

  Now he was an upstart threat to the kingdoms further east – to Leinster, to Meath, and to the Uí Néill over-kings of Ireland. Waterford shook its fist. Brian lashed out. A long, forced march, and all of a sudden he had hammered the Waterford Irish and the local Danes, and he had their ally, the King of Leinster, by the throat. He imposed a savagely contemptuous tax on the province. Three years after becoming the backwoods king of minor Thomond, he was nominal ruler of the southern half of Ireland.

  At that same moment, as if fate conspired towards a great all-Ireland final, Máel Sechnaill, ruler of Meath, became the Uí Néill King of Ireland. He controlled, in effect, the northern half.

  It was dog-eat-dog for awhile. Máel Sechnaill marched all the way cross-country from Meath to Thomond and urinated on Brian’s royal mound at Magh Adhair. In fact, he uprooted the ceremonial tree, but it was the same gesture. Then Máel Sechnaill attempted to take control both of Leinster and of Viking Dublin. In a move owing something to chess, he married the exotic Gormfhlaith, mother of Sitric, King of Dublin. To add to her charms, her brother was soon to be King of Leinster. As a strategy, it was a tempting alternative to Brian’s forced marches and punitive taxes, and Brian was to learn from it. He too would marry Gormfhlaith and gain control of Dublin.

  In the meantime, Brian showed a trick he had learned from the Vikings. He put a fleet of ships on the Shannon and sailed upriver, taking the surrounding country under his control. In passing, he ravaged the kingdom of Meath, effectively pissing on Máel Sechnaill’s tree.

  Various options were open to this pair of well-matched kings. They could leap into immediate conflict, annihilating one and leaving the other fatally weakened. That was standard Irish practice. Alternatively, they could hold off and build up strength – before resorting to the first option. Brian sailed up the Shannon again, put three hundred boats on Lough Ree and defeated Connacht. Máel Sechnaill took Dublin under his control. They had stopped urinating on each other’s trees, and now they were massing pieces at opposite ends of the board. Meanwhile, Leinster and Dublin, hostile to them both, were gagging for a chance to revolt.

  QUEEN OF INTRIGUE

  There was a third option open to the kings. They could form an alliance against common enemies and achieve a balance of power. In the year 997, in good time for the millennium, they did precisely that; Máel Sechnaill in good faith, Brian with a stone up his sleeve. Together they smashed the eastern alliance of Dublin and Leinster. Had the two kings been even more imaginative, they might have left their armies aside and marched against Gormfhlaith, the queen of intrigue. Sensing that Brian was the coming man, she had turned her son and her brother against Máel Sechnaill. He repudiated her and Brian moved up in the queue.

  The harmony of the kings was short-lived. Brian seized the upper hand when the spoils of Dublin were divided out. Then he married Gormfhlaith – not because he needed a wife, but to tighten his grip on Dublin and Leinster. It is unlikely that Máel Sechnaill attended the wedding. Or that a Connacht lady called Dubhchobhlaigh was among the guests. Brian was still married to her, his third wife, and she would remain his queen until her death in 1008.

  Gormfhlaith was fifteen years Brian’s junior. There is a tendency to think that she was beautiful, but she didn’t have to be. It was all about connections. Even if she had once been attractive, she was in her mid-forties then, not
a medieval lady’s finest decade. These marital alliances were as much part and parcel of medieval kingship as celebrity weddings are part of show business today. They were a strategic alternative to giving battle. War in medieval Ireland was expensive, destructive, seasonal and undermanned. It was seldom the sports tournament of popular imagination.

  Having married Gormfhlaith (he was her third husband), Brian made it a belt-and-braces job by marrying his daughter to her son, Sitric, King of Dublin. He had a reserve of daughters for such functions. With Leinster and Dublin defeated, Brian and Máel Sechnaill could have settled into ruling the country in two halves. Ireland was divided conveniently by a ridge of gravel running straight through the midlands from Dublin to Galway. This feature, the Eiscir Riada, had been deposited with political accuracy by the last receding glaciers. Tides of bog washed up against it on both sides. It had always provided a high and dry route across the country, fording the Shannon south of Clonmacnoise.

  However, Brian was not satisfied with half of Ireland. The stage was set for the battle of the big kings.

  Shortly after taking control of Dublin with Máel Sechnaill’s assistance, Brian turned on his royal ally and led an army into Meath, his provincial kingdom. In this attack on the established King of Ireland, Brian Boru was assisted by a troop of Viking cavalry. Folk history has conveniently forgotten this. It must have given great satisfaction to Máel Sechnaill to cut the legs from under this impertinent attack and to watch Brian Boru retreat.

  However, it was no more than a setback, and Máel Sechnaill was being undercut in every direction. Typical, though, of Brian that when he was defeated, it was a troop of expendable Vikings he sacrificed.

  POWER SHIFT

  In 1001, Brian made a military move into the northern half of the country, marching to Dundalk where an extraordinary standoff with the armies of the northern Uí Néill occurred. He did not attempt to break their blockade. Neither did they attack. It was as if Brian’s campaign carried the force of change, and the Uí Néill were blunted by centuries of presumption. Riddled with internal feuds, they underestimated the threat to their entire dynasty. A year later, when Brian demanded the abdication of the King of Ireland, Máel Sechnaill’s kinsmen did not back their man. Unbalanced from within, the Uí Néill had begun to topple.

  Máel Sechnaill was left with nothing but a kind of piercing dignity which exposed all the more clearly the baseness of his kin. He stepped aside, and it is as if a gap was suddenly created that allows us to look back at the squabbles of the Uí Néill at the very moment when they sank from supremacy after centuries of power.

  A body of myth has grown up around Brian’s response, arising mainly out of Cogadh Gaedhel. The two kings face each other on the plains of Meath, the proud Máel Sechnaill pared back to a petty king through no fault of his own. Noble in his loss, he hands over the crown of Ireland. To the amazement of the multitude, Brian Boru hands it back and offers him another year to recover his support and to defend his throne. It is no more than propagandist fiction from the twelfth century, designed to reflect well on Brian Boru and to clear him of the charge of usurpation.

  Brian Boru did not hesitate to become King of Ireland in Máel Sechnaill’s place – almost King of Ireland. No one would ever dominate the entire island. Or, to put it another way, the entire island would never unite under a single authority. Squabbling kings and lords would remain the norm.

  BRAWLING KINGS

  Ruling from Cashel in Munster, Brian was limited in what he could do with the north; he launched a series of journeys so frequent as to create an illusion of constant presence. He would never fully subdue the brawling kings and, in reality, he was a long way from being the sovereign ruler of an island united in peace and Christianity, as hagiography would have it.

  Brian involved himself throughout Ireland in Church affairs, funding construction and resolving disputes. Frequent tours called on the hospitality of monasteries, and a visit must have been money in the bank. An older brother, Marcán, had accelerated through the clerical ranks with Brian’s support to become a high-ranking abbot. He was a useful filter when it came to moral judgements on his brother’s actions.

  Road-building

  Leaving aside the claims for Brian as a builder of monasteries and churches, he has a serious reputation for road construction. So too has Cormac Mac Airt, a mythical king of early Ireland, reputed to have been responsible, in the second century AD for the Five Great Roads. Legend has a simple filing system, and the virtues of one great king were automatically ascribed to another. Great kings built roads. Or kings who built roads were great.

  Brian’s road-building was not philanthropic; it was a function of his military journeys. He had an efficient engineering corps, an advance troop skilled in clearing obstacles on the rough tracks that formed a network throughout Ireland. The old law tracts make great work of the Irish roads, defining them in detail according to status, function, and width. The reality is likely to have been a miserable mess. There was the slighe or main road, of which five radiated out from Tara. However, as with Tara itself, this was a notional rather than a national institution, referring to general routes heading in the main directions. It does not mean a star-shaped set of paved roads slicing into the provinces.

  There were varying degrees of lesser road, with the bóthar or cow track being of the lowest order. It was meant to be wide enough by law to allow for the passing of cows without injuring each others’ calves. This was defined as the width of two cows – one lengthways, the other at a right angle. It was further ordained by Brehon Law that those dwelling alongside them should keep roads in good order. It is hard to imagine that such notions could have been enforced. Roads in medieval Ireland were glorified tracks. While hospitality was a legal obligation, it was not in anyone’s interest to make it easy for an enemy to arrive on the doorstep. At the same time, kings and overlords made annual rounds of their subjects and were accommodated and entertained. This process would be known as ‘coshering’ by the time it reached the sixteenth century as a lavish vice and a crushing burden. It is safe to guess that tenants of all kinds scrambled to clear the tracks when such visits were due.

  Brian knew that the Church, unlike a kingship, could not be taken by force. Whether or not it could be bought was a very different question. He concentrated on the princes of the Church, particularly in the north where they were under the patronage of the Uí Néill. He confirmed the primacy of Armagh, a major monastic force in Ulster, rather than switching that power to the south. The weight of his influence might be measured against the twenty ounces of gold Brian left on the main altar at Armagh during one of his journeys through the north. Such skilful devotion did not impede his cause. Good relations with the clergy eased his dealings with regional warlords, who were often their kin. He would shortly see himself inscribed in the Book of Armagh as Imperator Scottorum, ‘Emperor of the Irish’, a breathtaking pretension. On his death, his body would be conveyed in solemn pomp to Armagh and buried there.

  CIRCUIT OF IRELAND

  Brian tramped north in 1005, 1006, 1007 and 1010, to secure his hold on a defiant Ulster. The removal of the Donegal king to Kincora in 1011 might be interpreted as a kind of rescue mission, a strategic kidnap. Not only would it give Brian control of that territory, but it might also be in the king’s own interest, safeguarding him from internecine strife. Challengers to his throne would hear the echoes of Brian’s recent presence and sense the threat of his return. It would be difficult for any faction in Donegal to seize power, as Brian’s own people, Dál Cais, had done in Munster. It was not difficult for Brian Boru to anticipate his enemies – he himself had been that enemy.

  Brian Boru’s Tour of the North in 1006, or his Circuit of Ireland, as it came to be called, was his most elaborate journey. His army gathered at Athlone, and he travelled up the Shannon from Kincora to meet them there. The hosting (an assembly for a military campaign) was composed of detachments of soldiers called in from allies throughout the so
uthern half of Ireland. The numbers were swollen by levies of part-time soldiers available between the spring sowing and the harvest. They marched north through the Roscommon plain, Magh nAí. Aí refers to sheep, and so the common epithet, ‘Roscommon sheep-stealers’ probably goes back a long way.

  Brian Boru whipped on northwards, crossing into Sligo, the lands of Connacht tribes Uí Ailella and Cairbre. The ancient pass of the Curlew Mountains, between Connacht and Ulster, makes no impression in the modern landscape, traversed as it is by an EU-funded strip of tarmac. Only a rusting horse and a Gaelic Apache mounted above the roadway mark an important junction with the past.

  BED AND BREAKFAST

  It is not hard to visualise the army of Brian Boru as being on a kind of holiday as it approached the mountains and the beaches of the Sligo coast, taking in the sights, collecting guests along the way. That these were hostages does not mean that they were all ripped from their homes and dragged along in chains. It is more apt to think of them (young princes perhaps of the petty kingdoms) as pledges of loyalty whose experience of Brian’s court and hospitality would reinforce the alliances of their fathers.

  There were no brawls along the way to disrupt the holiday atmosphere. Although Brian could be chillingly lethal, he was also a man of discipline and order. The army passed Drumcliff where there was a church of Colmcille. Brian would, of course, make donations along the route, taking monasteries and churches under his protection. By that simple and perhaps sincere device, he could establish a circuit of moral approval to match the political network he was extending. Monasteries were required by law to offer Bed & Breakfast. This is often seen as a quality of Gaelic character – our traditional generosity – but it was a practical means of ensuring accommodation for travellers, usually the aes dána, the intelligentsia and the craftsmen who moved freely around the country. Brian Boru, though, would have camped with his army wherever possible. It is a common trait of warrior-kings and successful generals that they are most comfortable with their troops and that this closeness breeds a loyalty, which is fundamental to their success.