Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  THE HILL OF USNAGH, CO. WESTMEATH

  Before rejoining the Christians, Caoilte went on to have further adventures on his own, including a sojourn in the Otherworld and a chariot ride through certain sites of the Ulster Cycle, echoing briefly the itinerary of Táin Bó Cuailnge, the Cattle-Raid of Cooley, without drawing on its content. It was a flourish added by the author just because he could. Afterwards, Caoilte travelled south to meet Patrick on the Hill of Usnagh, the navel of Ireland, in Co. Westmeath. The ritual hilltop, 181 metres high and just west of Lough Ennell, was said to mark the place where all five provinces came together in a poetic concept that defies geography.

  On the summit of Usnagh, Caoilte felt socially exposed. He was surrounded by great kings and bishops. No one of lesser rank was allowed to enter. ‘I am not entitled to sit beside a king,’ he said. ‘For I am the son of a humble warrior.’ A touching democracy broke out for once upon the Hill of Usnagh, and the ancient hero was prevailed upon to take a place of honour beside the King of Ireland.

  It was not long before he was telling yarns again. He described how Ireland had once been divided between two kings – the partition agreed on that same Hill of Usnagh. One king, he said, got all the treasure and the wealth, the houses, the cattle and the feasts. The other got nothing but the woods and wilds, the hunting and fishing of hills and rivers. The kings and bishops listening were horrified by this unfair division. Caoilte stood his ground.

  ‘The share that you condemn,’ he said, ‘is the one that we preferred.’

  Perhaps he should have walked away on that exalted note and kept on walking. But he was to travel many roads with Patrick yet. The end of the journey, wherever it was to be, is missing from the manuscripts. Those pages are gone. It may be that Caoilte is still wandering the country, invisible to our domestic eyes, stirring up the wind and the weather, rousing strange waves in his wake, travelling that wild share of the land that no longer exists for those of us who took the houses.

  Notes

  1. Further north, the myth of Cuchulainn shows a similar organic development, as different groups build up a composite hero to symbolise their story.

  2. The exaggerated prowess of Caoilte and his comrades contains a core of truth. Small groups of professional warriors, well-equipped, could always hammer large numbers of unskilled soldiers.

  3. That the saint left his mark on Cruachain is also claimed by Tírechán, who described him carrying out baptisms at the Well of Clébach, known today as the popular Patrician shrine of Ogulla.

  4. In the Early Christian era, most churches were built, not of stone, but of wood and thatch. Masonry was dry stone, severely limited in height. The Romans were using cement in Europe, but the Irish were not impressed. The round tower would not be possible, however, until they accepted mortar.

  7 TOWARDS THE ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS

  The Travels of Michael O’Clery (1626–36)

  Until very recently there were old men in Ireland who went to sleep at night repeating the names of the Four Masters. My own father did. It was a kind of cultural mantra after the normal pieties were done. Mícheál Ó Cléirigh agus Cúchoigcríche Ó Cléirigh, Fearfeasa Ó Maolchonaire agus Cúchoigcríche Ó Duibhgheanáinn.

  Recollecting them on the verge of oblivion was an acknowledgement of what the Four Master themselves had achieved. They were thought to have gathered up Ireland’s ancient learning and to have formed it into an ark which they floated on the darkness, just as the seventeenth century eclipsed the country, and memory seemed on the threshold of amnesia. Gaelic culture was not actually on that dark threshold then – it still isn’t – but the perception that it was lasted hundreds of years

  The Four Masters were the historians who compiled Annála Ríoghachta na hÉireann, the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland. They were two O’Clerys from Donegal, one of the Roscommon Conrys, and a Duignan from Leitrim. The work came to be known as the Annals of the Four Masters. Their names are not commonly known, which added urgency to my father’s gesture of remembrance. We don’t hear suburban mothers calling Cúchoigcríche (hound of foreign parts) in for his tea and his history homework, and it is unlikely that we will. The name is translated as Peregrine, which adds no glamour although it catches the sense of pilgrimage in the original. And Fearfeasa (man of knowledge) is still a little dodgy for a boy, even in an age when presumption seems a natural right.

  BROTHER MICHAEL

  The Franciscan lay brother, Michael O’Clery, who was to be chief among the Four Masters, travelled exhaustively throughout Ireland in the years leading up to the compilation. He was engaged in continuous research. Travel at the time was difficult and dangerous, although the opening years of the reign of Charles I (1625–41) were not quite as grim in Ireland as often depicted. With the dislocation of the Gaelic system of nobility and patronage since the Nine Years’ War and the Flight of the Earls, libraries and manuscripts were increasingly rare.

  Annals of the Four Masters

  The annals (AFM) are a compilation of Irish legend and history from the Year of the Deluge, or Noah’s Flood, to AD 1616. The Four Masters were chroniclers rather than historians in the modern sense. Their material consists of dated entries laid out in chronological order, providing a diary of major events from the coming of Ceasair to Ireland forty days before the Flood with fifty girls and three men. Early entries are terse or cryptic:

  Lughaidh Sriabh nDearg, after having been twenty-six years in the sovereignty of Ireland, died of grief.

  That was shortly before the birth of Christ. On the other hand, AD 1014 has an eloquent account of the Battle of Clontarf, while the Battle of Kinsale reads like the eyewitness account that it probably was.

  The Annals of the Four Masters recorded the major events of an elite culture and its ancient civilisation, its victories and defeats, the comings and goings of its kings, chieftains, abbots and bards. The natural calamities and disasters are there:

  AD 684 – A mortality upon all animals in general throughout the world, for the space of three years, so that there escaped not one out of the thousand of any kind of animals.

  And in the same year, not unconnected:

  A great frost this year, so that the lakes and rivers of Ireland were frozen; and the sea between Ireland and Scotland was frozen, so that there was a communication between them on the ice.

  Benign windfalls, much rarer than calamities, are recorded too – such as great seasons of milk and crops of beech-mast that fattened all the pigs of Ireland. Much of the early material is legend parading as fact. In more recent times, the work is naturally partisan, recording Viking, Norman and English invasions from a perspective of increasingly battered Gaelic pride. When it came to ordinary people, Irish historians were as elitist as their counterparts elsewhere, and the lower classes were faithfully ignored. The only place they make an impact is on the battlefield, where the casualties are almost always exaggerated. In death, the peasants are much larger than life.

  Kept by the hereditary historians of ambitious families, annals were often customised vehicles for propaganda. But it should be remembered that they formed just another strand in the knowledge of the past, augmented by genealogy and Dinnseanchas, the lore of place, as well as bardic poetry in which events were ornately recorded.

  Compiled during the period 1632–6, manuscript sets of the Annals were circulated for centuries. An edition published 1848–51 in six massive volumes (plus a seventh as an index) runs to well over four thousand pages. This is still the classic version. Edited by the Gaelic scholar John O’Donovan, it contains text and translation on facing pages, and his detailed commentaries as footnotes. These go a long way towards providing the informed background against which the Four Masters worked. O’Donovan has often been referred to as the Fifth Master.

  O’Clery was an hereditary historian, trained in the tradition in Ireland. His family served the O’Donnells, chieftains of Donegal, in that role. He called himself explicitly ‘a chronicler by descent and educa
tion’, dar duthchas agus darb foghlaim croinic.

  Born in 1590, in Donegal, O’Clery passed his childhood and youth during an intense period of rise and collapse in the fortunes of Gaelic Ireland, including the Nine Years’ War, the Battle of Kinsale, and the Flight of the Earls.

  Born Tadhg Ó Cléirigh, he was nicknamed ‘Tadhg an tSléibhe’, Tadhg of the Mountain. He took the religious name, Brother Michael, when he joined the Franciscans. Nothing is known of his early years until he surfaced obscurely in Europe, around 1620, as Don Tadeo Cleri in a note which records a grant of two Spanish crowns monthly on account of ‘persecution and loss of estate in Ireland’. There were numerous Irish emigrés and refugees astray at the time in France, Spain, Italy, and the Spanish Lowlands where the Franciscans had established a training-college at Louvain. (This is the present-day Belgium, then under Spanish rule.) The movements of these Irish exiles were observed by English agents on the Continent.

  STOLEN SAINTS

  A major function of the college was to send help to the ‘afflicted Church in Ireland’ and to counteract the doctrine of the Protestant Reformation. Members of the community at Louvain, staff and students, were a spiritual elite-in-exile, including philosophers, priest-soldiers, bishops designate. They intended to print spiritual material in Louvain, useful to the Counter Reformation in Ireland, and to publish evidence that would glorify the history of the Irish Church. Its reputation was under serious attack at home and abroad, not only by common propagandists, but by a Scottish theologian, Thomas Dempster, who had kidnapped the entire canon of Irish saints in a semantic raid. Dempster claimed as Scottish every saint to whose name the adjective Scotus had ever been appended. The coup included figures as thoroughly green as St Brigid – for Scotus of course had traditionally meant Irish. This was a major crisis at the time. Damage to Ireland’s religious image would also erode the country’s political status in Catholic Europe.

  In Louvain, the campaign for the repatriation of the Irish saints was managed primarily by Fathers Hugh Ward and Patrick Fleming. Ward, a young Donegal man, was terminally ill, while Fleming was soon to be murdered in a forest outside Prague, at the age of thirty-two. They were engaged in an emergency attempt to compile ‘Lives’ of the saints that would lodge them convincingly in the Irish Church.

  Michael O’Clery was making a name for himself in Louvain as an historian. In summer 1626, at the instigation of Fr Fleming, he sailed to Ireland to rescue the saints, on a mission that was to last a decade, escalating into a salvage attempt on the entire identity of the Gaelic people.

  TO DONEGAL

  Sailing from Dunkirk, O’Clery may well have travelled up the North Sea, around the tip of Scotland, to reach Donegal, rather than taking the direct route through the English Channel to the south of Ireland. The Hebridean route to and from Europe was normal in times of turmoil. However, with the coronation of Charles I, the oppression of Catholics in Ireland had eased briefly. O’Clery’s journey home might be compared to the return of a Buddhist monk into Chinese-occupied Tibet today, on a spiritual mission.

  The Franciscan Abbey of Donegal, traditional home of his Order, had been destroyed for a generation or more. The impressive ruins, marred by modern development, overlook the sea on a headland outside Donegal town. The few remaining Franciscans were living in a makeshift settlement at Bundrowes, near Lough Melvin, on the border between Donegal and Leitrim. There is an attractive sculpture in memory of O’Clery and his associates on a minor road-bridge crossing the River Drowes.1

  Clerical Detective

  Brother Michael’s travels throughout seventeenth-century Ireland were traced three hundred years later by Fr Brendan Jennings OFM, in a brilliant analysis of the references, comments, locations and dates jotted on the manuscripts O’Clery produced. A linear pattern, however ghostly, emerged. Jennings’ commentary on the story expresses the fervent mentality of a 1930s Ireland which assumed itself to be a direct resumption of the country of the Four Masters. Despite its ardent piety, the research is invaluable and anyone interested in the subject will be deeply indebted to Fr Jennings. The key points of O’Clery’s journeys are identified, and sometimes even the texts he transcribed in each location. There is a sense, too, of how those books fitted into the overall pattern of the works produced by O’Clery in rapid succession.

  There are very few references by contemporary observers of O’Clery’s travels. This obscurity is part of his mystique. He was the perfect researcher, his own shadow rarely falling on the work, except as an occasional note on his transcription: – atú tuirseach gan amhrus. Ag Drobhaois, 3 Marta, 1629. I’m tired, without doubt. Drowes, 3 March 1629. In one irritable note, he blames the absurdity of a source on the diligence of his superiors who had ordered him to collect absolutely everything.

  However, the image of the faceless scholar scurrying from parchment to parchment, shuffling the dry leaves of history, is belied by the brilliance with which he builds his researches into a series of books, culminating in the massive Annals of the Four Masters, requiring the continued presence in a remote location of a team of Ireland’s leading bardic historians, supervised by him, all equipped with their ancestral books, and bristling perhaps with allegiances to variants of the past. They had to be funded, fed and accommodated in the wild, their prejudices reconciled. He seems to have prevailed on these scholars to work night and day in what can only have been practical harmony given the amounts of work achieved.

  DISCREET TRAVEL

  Brother Michael is traditionally imagined striding alone throughout Ireland on his journeys of research. The Rule of St Francis advised travel on foot, because the friars and brothers lived by alms and should not be seen to get above themselves. But it seems that Franciscans going on long journeys often rode horses for practical reasons, such as the appalling condition of the tracks that passed as roads. There were times, too, when the number of manuscripts Brother Michael carried with him would have made walking unlikely, such as his final journey, when he is thought to have been burdened with one of the bulkiest texts in the country at the time – whether or not this was actually so. Clearly, he linked together a network of religious establishments and other ‘safe houses’ on his journeys. A horse and a guide might be available for the next stage. A servant or a lay brother would make a handy porter. The family homes of Franciscans and of others in exile may have provided part of such a system, but no one was keeping a Visitors’ Book.

  It feels natural to imagine O’Clery travelling swiftly and in silence; not so much heedless of the weather as inured to it, eating sparingly and sleeping on a straw pallet in a monastic dormitory. If he were in any way striking or self-indulgent, given to carousing in alehouses at night, a hint at least would have come down to us in folklore. There is no hint of any kind – not even a tradition of cunning speech, river-leaping, or shape-changing to avoid arrest, as might have been expected of a man of half his achievements. Brother Michael was simply invisible – not just to spies, but to folklore, the most prurient eye of all. Of Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn) who was also copying manuscripts at the time, there are intricate myths; these include death at a mass rock, shot by a soldier who was a lapsed Catholic and could see through his invisibility. Of Michael O’Clery, there is hardly a whisper. His death in Louvain in his early fifties tells us, by default, a little about the hardship of his life, the weather, the hunger and the daily rigours of his travels. On the other hand, life-expectancy four hundred years ago hardly extended beyond that.

  DUBLIN

  His first local journey was from Donegal to Dublin. The Franciscans kept a house in Cook Street, just south of the river behind Merchant’s Quay, and he could move discreetly in and out of the city in 1627, engaged in religious research. Such freedom would soon come to an end.2

  O’Clery had access in Dublin to the library of the Protestant Primate, James Ussher, who owned ten thousand volumes, including rare Irish manuscripts. Ussher was the scholar who traced the Creation of the world to 23 Oct
ober 4004 BC, thus inaugurating, in the words of a modern historian, ‘the practice among Irish antiquarians of showing scant respect for time’.3

  Crackdown

  Less than three years after O’Clery’s first visit, an order would be issued for the arrest of priests and the suppression of religious houses in Dublin, where large congregations had been attending Masses. The Franciscan house in Cook Street was attacked as Mass was being said on St Stephen’s Day 1629. The raid was led by the mayor and the Protestant archbishop of Dublin (not Ussher who was archbishop of Armagh). The mayor damaged some pictures, and the archbishop attacked the pulpit. Uproar broke out. The congregation resisted the attack, and some women rescued two young Franciscan friars who had been arrested. The officials fled, pelted with stones by the crowd. Although the mayor was to become extremely unpopular as a result, the house in Cook Street was demolished. Jesuit houses in Back Lane and Bridge Street were confiscated, and many religious houses throughout the country were suppressed, and in some cases destroyed.