Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  Anxious that de Clare’s success did not lead to the establishment of a rival kingdom, Henry arrived to impose his authority. This he did by granting Leinster to de Clare and County Meath to one of his own commanders, Hugh de Lacy, while at the same time forcing the remaining Irish kings into various forms of submission, including the obligation of giving forty days’ military service and requiring Henry’s permission to marry. From then until 6 December 1921, when three of the four provinces broke away from British rule to become the Irish Free State, Ireland’s history and its fortunes were tied to England’s. The name changed to Eire in 1937 and, finally, became the fully independent Republic of Ireland in 1948.

  The occupation of Ireland by the English between these dates was never entirely convincing and oscillated between periods of calm indifference and others of turmoil and ruthless exploitation. The exclusion of Ulster from the Irish Free State was the visible residue of the Protestant Ascendancy which followed the defeat by William of Orange of James II at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. This well-remembered and, in Ulster, celebrated victory was the culmination of centuries of rebellions and uprisings within Ireland against the influence of England. In Ireland, not only the Gaelic lords but also the descendants of the Anglo-Normans frequently found their lands confiscated as, from the time of Elizabeth I, they were granted as plantations to favourites and adventurers. The policy was continued by Elizabeth’s successor James I of England (James VI of Scotland), who encouraged the large-scale settlement of Ulster by lowland Scots. From the genetic point of view, what distinguishes this episode from what had gone before is that, instead of estates merely changing hands from one member of the aristocracy to another with little effect on the majority of the population, the plantation of Ulster imported tenant farmers and labourers from Scotland to work the land. The earlier Anglo-Normans had not as a rule imported their labour force, so we would not expect any genetic influence to be felt especially strongly. However, in Ulster we need to be aware of the possible effects of the plantations on the genetic patterns.

  Before we leave the turbulent centuries of Irish history, there is one more episode that we must not forget. So far we have only mentioned immigration into Ireland, by Anglo-Normans at first and then through the plantations. But these are numerically dwarfed by the departures. Religious intolerance and persecution from the sixteenth century onwards, closely coupled to land seizure, drove many Catholic landowners abroad, mainly to France and Spain. Though doubtless traumatic for them, these exiles did not really affect ordinary Irish agricultural workers, for whom life continued much as before, though the land was under new ownership. However, in the nineteenth century, Irish emigration on a large scale began in earnest.

  In the first decades of the century, agricultural prices fell, estate rentals declined, investment in the land was reduced to a trickle, and the rural population grew. Whatever the ultimate causes of this cycle of economic decline, the effects on the rural poor were catastrophic. Reduced to almost complete dependence on the potato as the staple crop, the countryside was decimated when the crop was infested with the potato blight and rotted in the ground. During the Great Famine of the mid 1840s, thousands died of starvation or of the infectious diseases which swept through the malnourished population. Though many thousands died, thousands also made their escape. Ireland’s mid-nineteenth-century population of 8 million began a steady decline that has only very recently stabilized at 4.1 million in the Republic and 1.7 million in Ulster. The desparate diaspora of the Irish saw massive immigration both to Britain and to the New World, especially the United States. Today, there are far more ‘Irish’ genes abroad than there are in Ireland itself.

  Though Ireland is not yet united into a single political state, the poverty and suffering which suffuse all accounts of the history of the last centuries cannot be equated with Ireland today. The economy is transformed. The bars and cafés of Dublin are as lively and as sophisticated as anywhere in Europe. There is a tangible feeling of optimism in the air wherever you go. Though we will have to wait to see how much of the turmoil of past centuries is remembered by the genes, I suspect the main effect will be of emigration and the dispersal of Irish genes around the globe. Now that the future of Ireland as an independent country is looking so good, this is the time to move the sad centuries to one side and examine Ireland before the day when Henry II arrived to begin the English occupation. That is where we must seek to interpret the patterns of the genes. What do we know of these earlier times?

  The appeal that Dermot MacMurrough made to Richard de Clare to come to his aid, the appeal de Clare used as an excuse to invade, is a clear indication of the state of affairs in medieval Ireland–the struggle for dominance of one minor king against another. It is so very typical of the middle stage of evolution of any modern society and one that is only too visible in other parts of the world. Except that in those places, like Afghanistan or unstable African countries, these men are not dignified with the title ‘king’ but denigrated as ‘warlords’. In Ireland during the first millennium AD there was a constant struggle for dominance between different minor kings. According to one source, there may have been 150 of them at any one time, lending some credibility to the common Irish boast that they are all descended from lines of Irish kings. This may be something we can test as it could be visible in the Y-chromosome gene pool by what has come to be known as the ‘Genghis Khan effect’.

  A few years ago, researchers from Oxford found a Y-chromosome that was very widespread throughout Asia, more or less within the geographical limits of the Mongol Empire. Finding a particular Y-chromosome with a specific fingerprint across such a wide area is highly unusual. Y-chromosomes are generally much more localized. The explanation, which I think is the correct one, is that this is the Y-chromosome of the first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not only is the Y-chromosome fingerprint geographically dispersed, it is also very common. In Mongolia, for example, 8 per cent of men have inherited the Genghis chromosome. If you compute the number of men who carry this Y-chromosome throughout Asia, and occasionally on other continents, then it comes to a staggering 16 million. Even a cursory glance at Genghis Khan’s methods in warfare is enough to understand the genetic mechanism. On conquering an enemy’s territory he would kill all the men, then systematically inseminate all the good-looking women–he left his commanders strict instructions on that point. When he died, the custom of patrilineal inheritance ensured that his empire was distributed among his sons, and their sons. Thus his Y-chromosome increased with each generation of male descendants, who inherited not only a portion of his wealth but also, presumably, his attitude to women. Though we have no historical records of men with quite such sexual predominance in the Isles, the confusion of minor kings is just the sort of condition where one might expect to discover the Genghis effect.

  It was not all chaos in Ireland. Some kings managed to exert sufficient authority to stake a claim to the title of High King and to be installed at the sacred site of Tara, about 20 miles north of Dublin. Though none of the High Kings ever managed complete dominance over the whole island, some had a very good try and this may well be reflected in an Irish Genghis Khan effect. While such behaviour may rearrange the genes of Ireland, or anywhere else in the Isles for that matter, it is however only a rearrangement. While the Genghis effect will mean that one, or a few, Y-chromosomes may prosper at the expense of others, no amount of Khan-like behaviour can actually create new Y-chromosomes. And it has no effect whatsoever on the maternal lineages, traced by mitochondrial DNA. These will persist whatever the kings get up to.

  Peering further back into the Irish past, what can we see that needs to be taken into account? Though it was Ireland’s misfortune to be occupied by the English for so long, it entirely avoided being conquered by the Romans, which large swathes of Britain did not. Ireland was very lucky to escape. The Roman historian Tacitus, in his account of the campaigns of his father-in-law Agricola
, tells how the great general seriously contemplated an invasion. In his fifth year of campaigning in Britain, in AD 88, Agricola brought his army and his ships to Galloway in south-east Scotland, only 20 miles across the sea from Ireland. Such were the inaccuracies in the geography of the day that Agricola believed that Ireland was midway between Britain and the Roman province of Spain. So he could see the tactical advantages of including Ireland within the Empire. He had received favourable reports about the character and way of life of the inhabitants and of the soil and climate. To a Roman they did not differ much from the British, whom he had successfully subdued during the previous five years. Tacitus wrote that he often heard Agricola say that Ireland could be conquered, and held, with a single legion supported by a modest force of auxiliaries. Agricola even took the precaution of befriending a minor Irish king who had been exiled in case the opportunity to use him should arise. In the end he decided against an invasion. Tacitus does not say why and we can only guess. But that he had serious intent is certain.

  One negative consequence of this lucky escape was that there are no written histories of Ireland from the Roman period. Not until the arrival of early Christians in the fifth century AD, and of St Patrick in particular, did written accounts, however unreliable, begin to appear. St Patrick himself is credited with the authorship of the earliest documents in Irish history, written in Latin: the Confessions, which defines and defends his mission, and one other, a short letter excommunicating the soldiers of a British chieftain who had murdered some of Patrick’s converts. Neither account throws much light on life in Ireland at the time–nor was that the intention. None the less, the beatification of St Patrick and his emergence as the supreme cult figure, which in many ways he remains to this day, did lead to further accounts of his life and his Christian mission by later authors. The early ninth-century Book of Armagh is the culmination of these and it established the primacy of the See of Armagh in the Irish Church.

  The three centuries following St Patrick’s death in AD 493 are rightly regarded as a golden age in which Ireland became one of the most important religious centres in the whole of Europe. It was from Ireland that missionaries set out to convert the pagan tribes of northern Britain, establishing Columba’s monastery on Iona in AD 563 as a stepping stone. From Iona the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, continued the mission to the eastern side of Britain. Irish missions to continental Europe were equally successful and St Columban, not to be confused with Columba, founded monasteries at Luxeuil in the Vosges mountains of eastern France and at Bobbio in the hills of the northern Apennines in Italy in the late 600s. Other Irish monks sought the opposite–a life of austere contemplation–and their search for solitude took them to increasingly remote destinations. They found what they were looking for on rocky islands off the west coast of Ireland, in the Western Isles of Scotland and even as far north as Iceland. Their journeys across the wild seas are all the more remarkable for having been undertaken not in well-constructed galleys but in curraghs–light boats with only shallow drafts and made from wooden spars covered in tarred animal hide.

  But still, despite the intensity of religious devotion and scholarship, the written accounts are more or less completely bare of historical content. Even so, it is fairly clear that the reputation of these early saints was linked to the fortunes of the political dynasties to which they became attached. An association with the cult figure of St Patrick himself was the ultimate claim to authority and influence, and the opportunity was not overlooked by the first of the invading Anglo-Normans. In 1185 one of these barons, John de Courcey, arranged for the ‘discovery’ of St Patrick’s remains at Downpatrick and their removal to Armagh. This is very reminiscent of the fabricated discovery and ceremonial reburial of King Arthur’s bones by Edward I at Glastonbury a century later. Clearly, in the medieval period, any association with long-dead cult figures could be used as a claim for historical legitimacy.

  Rather as in England, with the loosely based fiction of Geoffrey of Monmouth, history was written for a purpose. The Irish equivalent of Geoffrey’s History was the Leabhar Gabhála, the Book of Invasions, compiled from earlier writing in the late eleventh century. Even though, just like Geoffrey’s History, it is a clear attempt to link Irish history to the familiar events of the classical world, it managed to create a compelling narrative for the origins of Ireland and of the Gaels which became extremely influential as an origin myth for the Irish. And it still is. However accurate or inaccurate it may be as a record of Irish origins, we must still bear it in mind when we sift the record of the genes. Deeply held origin myths, however richly embroidered, have a habit of being right.

  Although the Leabhar Gabhála was doubtless compiled by Christian monastic scribes, in common with the written versions of other rich mythologies in Ireland, there was no conflict or contradiction in recording the pagan myths of their native or adopted land. The phenomenal success of Irish Christianity owed a great deal to the sympathy it showed to ancient traditions and rituals and to their preservation in written form. The Irish Christian monks became the conduit of ancient knowledge, the filidh, and their success lay in their ability to create a seamless continuity between the rich mythical traditions of pagan Ireland and full-blown Christianity.

  From our point of view, the Leabhar Gabhála chronicles four mythical phases of immigration. As you can imagine, all four involve great battles and heroic struggles as each wave of new arrivals ousts the former occupants. The last of these phases was the invasion of Ireland by the Gaels, bringers of the language and the alleged ancestors of today’s Celtic population. Indeed the principal purpose of the Leabhar Gabhála is to explain the presence of the Gaels in Ireland.

  According to the Leabhar, the Gaels were descended from the sons of Mil, also variously known as Milesius and later by the, perhaps significant, epithet of Míle Easpain, or the ‘Soldier of Spain’. Mil was killed on an expedition to avenge the death of a nephew who had been killed by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the previous occupiers and masters of Ireland. It was left to Mil’s three sons, Eber, Eremon and Amairgen, to defeat the Tuatha and conquer Ireland. When the brothers could not agree on the division of the island between them, Eber was killed by Eremon, who became the first High King to reign at Tara. Mil’s wife, Scota, was also killed in the expedition and the Gaels of Ireland, considering her to be their ancestral mother, called themselves Scots for that reason. Certainly the Romans referred to them as Scotti as well as the more familiar Hibernii.

  According to legend, the ultimate ancestor was one Fennius Farsa, a Scythian king who lost his throne and fled to Egypt. Ancient Scythia was located north of the Black Sea in what is now the eastern Ukraine, between the two great rivers, the Don and the Dnieper. Once in Egypt his son, Nial, married the pharaoh’s daughter, and she had a son, Goidel. The whole family was banished from Egypt for refusing to join in the persecution of the children of Israel and wandered throughout northern Africa, finally crossing the Pillars of Hercules to settle in Spain, where they prospered.

  Many years later, from a watchtower on a cliff top, one of Goidel’s descendants, Ith, saw a land far off across the seas that he had not noticed before. ‘It is on winter evenings, when the air is pure, that man’s eyesight reaches farthest,’ explains the account of the vision in the Leabhar Gabhála. Although it is quite impossible ever to see Ireland from Spain, Ith wasn’t to know this and he set sail with ninety warriors to explore the newly sighted country. He arrived at the mouth of the River Kenmare, one of the deep indentations in the coast at the extreme south-west of Ireland. From there, Ith tracked northwards until, at last, he encountered the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the race who inhabited Ireland. The meeting went well at first until the Tuatha began to doubt Ith’s motives for sailing to Ireland and, from his fulsome descriptions of the climate and the fertility of land and sea, suspected that he intended to invade. They killed Ith, but spared his companions, who then returned to Spain with their leader’s body. Ith’s uncle Mil vowe
d to avenge his nephew’s murder and set sail with his eight sons and their wives, accompanied by thirty-six chieftains, each with a ship full of warriors. With his sons at his side he defeated the Tuatha. Mil was himself killed in the battle, but his sons survived. The defeated Tuatha Dé Danaan also chose their name from their own ancestral mother, Dana. The Tuatha were a race of gods, each with their own special attributes and each as colourful as any gods of the classical Greeks. After their defeat by the Milesians, the Tuatha Dé Danaan fled to the Underworld and established a kingdom beneath the ground–a kingdom from where they were still able to harass their conquerors by depriving them of corn and milk, eventually forcing an agreement which divided Ireland into upper and lower parts and in which the Tuatha Dé Danaan are to this day the guardians of the Underworld.

  In their own conquest of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danaan had ousted two groups of earlier occupants–the Fir Bholg and the Fomorians. After their defeat the Fir Bholg, a race of pre-Celtic humans, were banished to the Aran Islands in Galway Bay. Unfortunately, the Leabhar Gabhála does not say where the Fir Bholg had come from. The implication is that they had been there all the time. In this respect, the Fir Bholg resemble myths in other parts of the Isles about a race of aboriginal inhabitants, usually described as being short and dark, who were subsumed by later ‘waves’ of Celtic arrivals.